"Shamans are great raid healers, have very good burst healing and numerous great cooldowns, Spirit Link Totem being first in line. They provide great raid utility notably through Wind Rush Totem and Ancestral Protection Totem.

Looking back on Legion, resto Shamans started with the kind of Chain Heal spamming gameplay that Blizzard clearly wanted gone. They spent a good first half of the expansion combatting it by adjusting legendaries, nerfing Chain Heal and introducing tier sets that incited us to play more around Healing Wave and Ascendance.

I'll attempt to make a ""priority list"" for healing in a standard healing situation :
- Keeping Healing Rain down provided the raid isn't moving out of it in the next few seconds or isn't too spread
- Using Riptide to gain a Tidal Wave stack on a target that doesn't have the HoT
- Using Healing Stream Totem on cooldown (or wait a bit to benefit from the DR if that can be useful)
- Chain Heal provided there is enough to heal, you're not capped on tidal waves and riptide is on cooldown
- Healing Wave for days

Cloudburst Totem is used on cooldown by default or slightly offset to align with burst damage intake, examples being Krosus Smash (every 30 seconds so it lines up perfectly with the cooldown) or Argus Tortured Rage (by putting Cloudburst a second before the Rage, it will explode right after the next one, allowing you to cover 2 rage casts with an Ancestral Guidance or Ascendance).

Cooldown overlaps and double dipping on Cloudburst really are most of the depth of the class in my opinion and T21 set pushing us for Ascendance changed the rotation to maximize Cloudburst from Chain Heal spamming to something that looks more like:
1. Drop Cloudburst
2. Use Ascendance
3. Time Artifact to land under 10 seconds left
4. Use Ancestral Guidance + Velens
5. Healing Rain
6. Weave Healing Surge/Healing Wave with Chain Heals

You can either overlap everything for a huge Clouburst or split Ascendance and Ancestral Guidance between two Cloudbursts.

For BFA, it looks like the class is losing a lot of its depth through the removal of Ancestral Guidance, Cloudburst is also switching to effective healing meaning we won’t be able to feed overheal into it to prepare for large bursts like we did in Legion.


Resto Shamans have a lot of buttons but they’re pretty straightforward, that being said I always love to talk about Resto Shaman so if you want me to go more in depth feel free to ask.
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