Spell Interactions
Here you will find details on how the Restoration Shaman spells work. The goal here is to document in depth how the spells actually interact with each other and with other mechanics in order to understand them better.
Specialization Spells
Chain Heal
- Chain Heal starts on your target and jumps on the path that will do the most overall effective hps.
- By default it jumps three times for four total targets healed. This can be increased by Ancestral Reach or Flow of the Tides.
- Unleash Life and Flow of the Tides buff the healing of the whole Chain Heal cast. Most other conditional bonuses only increase the healing of individual jumps.
Healing Rain
- Healing Rain will do its first tick of healing as it is placed down and its last one right before going away.
- Acid Rain doesn't scale with haste. It also doesn't do its first hit as soon as Healing Rain is put down.
Healing Stream Totem
- By default Healing Stream Totem will heal a single ally every two seconds reduced by haste.
- Quickstream reduces the time between ticks by 15%.
- Living Stream doubles the healing of Healing Stream Totem but decays over its duration, averaging a 50% increase.
- Splitstream adds an additional target to every tick of Healing Stream Totem.
- Every tick of Healing Stream Totem has a chance to apply Earthliving thanks to Primal Catalyst.
- When Stormstream Totem procs, you will get a free use of it regardless of the current cooldown of Healing Stream Totem. Stormstream Totem also adds one more target to heal going up to three with Splitstream.
- Elemental Resistance makes healing from Healing Stream Totem apply a buff that reduces fire, frost and nature damage taken.
Unleash Life
- On cast, you will get the Unleash Life buff increasing your next Chain Heal, Riptide or Healing Wave by 25% and reducing the cast time by 30%.
- Your Season One Tier Four Piece makes this buff have two charges.
- Earthen Accord increases the healing of Unleash Life by 30% and makes the buff increase your other spells by 30% instead.
Deluge
- "Affected by your healing rain" on the Deluge tooltip is simply people inside the Healing Rain area regardless of when Healing Rain last ticked.
- For Chain Heal it only buffs the heal on that specific target and doesn't modify subsequent jumps.
Ancestral Vigor
Targets that get their HP increased by Ancestral Vigor keep the same percentage hp going up and down as the bonus applies and expires.
Hero Talents
Surging Totem
Surging Totem completely replaces Healing Rain when you spec into Totemic, and will maintain the rain for you in the area the totem is currently placed at. However because the cooldown of Surging Totem is longer than what baseline Healing Rain has, the spec also has the Totemic hidden aura which the following effects:
- Healing Rain heals for 30% more (this is mentioned on the Surging Totem tooltip).
- Downpour healing increased by 100%.
- Overflowing Shores healing increased by 100%.
- Tidewaters healing increased by 100%.
- Acid Rain damage increased by 30%.
Call of the Ancestors
Your ancestors cast their own version of the spells, those spells have their own power that is different from yours and are not affected by your talents that buff certain spells unless specifically mentioned, like on Whispering Waves.
Ancestor Lava Burst will always crit regardless of if the target has Flame Shock on them or not.
An important thing to note about ancestors is the way they respond to spell queue: If you spell queue either Unleash Life or Ancestral Swiftness the ancestor that spawns from them will also respond to the spell you queued from. If you start casting a Healing Wave and midway through the cast you use Unleash Life to queue it so it casts right after your Healing Wave, the ancestor that spawns from Unleash Life will also do their own Ancestor Healing Wave cast to match yours even though the cast happened before it spawned. Abusing this can get you a lot more casts out of the ancestors over the course of a fight or key.