Raids

When Raiding you should strive to be efficient with your resources, namely your mana. Pacing your Chain Heals properly so you can keep healing throughout the duration of the fight is something you should actively think about. This guide will help you learn to plan your gameplay around what things will do the most overall healing in the encounter.

Where Does Your Healing Come From

Your biggest sources of healing will be Healing Wave, Chain Heal, and Stormstream Totem. With a significant portion of your healing coming from spells with no cooldown that you cast repeatedly comes a very important thing to keep in mind: You actually have to cast them as much as possible. Your short cooldowns are good and very versatile but you need to spend all the free time you have after using them casting your Healing Waves and Chain Heals as much as possible in the correct targets. Downtime is inevitable up to some point but if you find yourself not casting anything for large periods of time when there is damage to heal you are doing something very wrong and should plan when to use Spiritwalkers Grace, which lets you cast while moving, so you can keep casting.

You have several other spells in your kit but most of the value in them is in increasing the strength of your casted spells or letting you cast more of them. Riptide is important because it can let you cast more Stormstream Totems or activate Ascendance which empowers your casted heals, it also gives you more stacks of Undercurrent and more targets for Deluge so even if its not a major source of healing by itself using it directly leads to improving upon the spells that will do the majority of your healing. Similarly Unleash Life won't do a lot by itself but the healing increase it provides to your other spells is significant. You can consider these kind of like "set up" spells, they are important because they improve your other abilities that will noticeably move health bars when used.

Restoration Shaman doesn't ramp nor does it have long sequences of preparation before doing heavy burst healing, it simply presses spells as needed and healing happens. You don't need to force yourself to always be casting during the whole fight but if there is people that need healing and you aren't casting heals you should have a very good reason why.

Important Things to Know

• The vast majority of your Stormstream Totems will come from pressing Ancestral Swiftness. The random procs from Riptide are good but overall rng does not play a significant factor on Stormstream healing.
• Healing Rain is a strong tool, both from the healing it does and from having more targets that benefit form Deluge. Aim to keep it active as much as possible within a clump of players that you know won't move out of it.
• Healing Stream Totem is not amazing but its still good enough to justify casting it. Aim to use it when you have to move or before damage comes in so you can spend your time casting more impactful spells instead.
• Both Healing Wave and Chain Heal are good but serve different purposes. Chain Heal is your primary source of healing but costs more mana; Healing Wave is better for one or two target healing and is very cheap. Pick the correct tool for the situation and manage your mana.

Gameplay

Your gameplay will consist of using all your short cooldowns on cooldown as much as possible and then filling in the extra time with one of Healing Wave or Chain Heal. Your main goal is to minimize downtime and simply cast your spells every time they are available. The only proc you need to react to is Deeply Rooted Elements and during it your filler casts become much more valuable and you can focus on just casting them for the duration.

1. Use all your Stormstream Totems, most of them will come from Ancestral Swiftness but you can also get one every time you press Riptide. The buff lasts for a decently long time so you are not in a huge rush to use them and can bank up to two of them but you also don't want to hold it for too long. If there is damage to heal and you have a Stormstream you should use it.
2. Cast Riptide as much as possible and on different targets. Spreading Riptide gives you more stacks of Undercurrent and more targets for Deluge. It can also proc Deeply Rooted Elements and Stormstream Totem so there is a lot of very good things attached to Riptide.
3. Use Ancestral Swiftness on cooldown. The most important part of this is not losing Stormstream Totem procs but it also spawns an ancestor and gives you a mana-free cast which is very good. It doesn't mater a whole lot what you use the free cast on but Chain Heal is generally a better choice for it.
4. Use Unleash Life, the healing by itself is very decent and the follow up buff to other spells is very good. Your tier set improves the spell a lot and the bonus plus the ancestor it spawns makes it important to use the spell every time its available.
5. Keep Healing Rain active, on some fights you will want to drop it on the melee near the boss and others the ranged stack is a better place, it heavily depends on how the boss fight plays out. The healing it does is good and having Deluge active on many more players is very very good.
6. Use Healing Stream Totem as a bit of an instant filler spell when you have to move or you know damage is about to come in in the near future. The spell isn't amazing but its still good enough to be worth casting but ideally you want to use it so it is active during heavy damage periods but it doesn't take away important global cooldowns during them. It can be fine to drop both charges at the same time when you are a few seconds away from a big wave of damage hitting.
7. The rest of the time heal people with either Healing Wave or Chain Heal. Chain Heal does more overall healing but costs more mana and it is your highest hps choice. If the damage is focused on a single or two targets or you want to conserve mana you would instead opt to Healing Wave.

During Ascendance both Healing Wave and Chain Heal improve massively. The normal distinction of Healing Wave being better for one or two targets healing and Chain Heal doing much more overall healing still applies. Usually in a raid you will use all the time inside of Ascendance to cast as many Chain Heals as possible. You want to do a little bit of set up before going into the cooldown to make sure you get the most out of it:

1. Use all your charges of Riptide to get stacks of Tidal Waves and to not waste the cooldown.
2. Press Unleash Life to spawn an ancestor and get the healing buff from it.
3. Use Ascendance.
4. Cast two Chain Heals or Healing Waves to consume the buffs from Unleash Life
5. Use Ancestral Swiftness. If we use it before we would waste the cast time reduction from Unleash Life as both buffs would be consumed at the same time, by using Swiftness only after Unleash is gone we maximize the cast time reductions.
6. Cast your chosen spell repeatedly until Ascendance is over.

During Deeply Rooted Elements simply try to cast as many Chain Heals or Healing Waves as possible.

Conclusions

Farseer presents an incredibly strong option because of how well it interacts with Ascendance and its ability to proc Stormstream Totem way more often than Totemic, these combined with the better healing profile offered by having most of your healing come from abilities that you directly target on the players that most need healing results in a very fluid gameplay that feels very impactful.

The gameplay of managing your mana by restoring a good portion of it during Ascendance and then dumping it with Chain Heal outside of it is a very interesting design that lets you play with your resources and plan ahead depending on what the situation is gonna need. Overall the spec is very simple but it is very fun to play and offers some interesting decisions about what you want to do and what would the best way to do it be.