Introduction

A new season has arrived, which means, new gear!
There have been a few changes regarding Restoration Shamans and the new Season, which will affect the way we prioritize our stats, gems and enchants.

The following changes were made for resto shamans in patch 4.3:

• Wind Shear’s base cooldown has been adjusted to 15 seconds, up from 6 seconds.

A nerf to our precious [Wind Shear], the cooldown was increased by 9 seconds to a total of 15 seconds, the lock-out period remains the same (2 seconds).

Even though the [Wind Shear] change hits us quite a bit, I think we’ve got some nice compensation in return:

• Ancestral Healing now also causes the shaman’s heals to increase the target’s maximum health by 5/10% of the amount healed.

This will help us quite a bit, basically after healing a bit the target’s HP is increased by 10%, this is a welcome change for us.

• Riptide’s periodic healing coefficient has been increased by 50%. The initial direct heal is unchanged.

This feels like a very big difference, [Riptide] is healing for so much now, if you have earth shield up, [Healing Stream Totem] and [Riptide] all together on one target the heals from HoT’s are very strong, this will especially help out a lot against DoT setups.

Stats

The stat priority has changed a bit since the previous season.
Last season you’d be gemming full resilience, and sit around 4200 resilience rating.
This season, if we’re going to gem for full intellect, we’ll be still sitting at 4200+ resilience rating.
This is around as much as we need, we do not need more resilience than this, and since resilience is getting worse the more you get, this is in my opinion the sweet spot.

Basically with the new gear the situation is as following:

We have more stats, which causes players to do more damage.
If we keep the same amount of resilience, lets say 4200, we will reduce the same percentage of damage, even though the damage is higher we’ll be going down at the same rate since we also get more stamina from our gear which causes us to have a higher health pool.
We also get more spell power, which causes our heals to be higher.
So with the same percentage of damage reduction, increased Health, Healing and Damage you’ll be dieing at the same speed.

That’s why I recommend for season 11 to take the following stat priority:

Intellect>Resilience>Spirit>Mastery>Crit>Haste

It’s better to invest in extra intellect if you yourself have no problems surviving, of course this is also setup-based, but overall bigger heals will help you and your team out a lot more.

Another reason why I recommend doing this is since we have gotten our [Wind Shear] cooldown increased, which means we’ll be putting less time out into exposing ourselves for getting offensive Wind Shears off, and we’ll be more in the back just healing, which causes us to put ourself less at risk.

First off we need to get our caps, we have two caps as a caster:

• Spell penetration (Soft cap 195, hard cap 240).
• Hit Cap (4% -> 410 Hit Rating).

The Spell penetration cap can be easily achieved by buying a PvP Cloak or Necklace giving us plenty of Spell Penetration.
I’ve also done some calculating regarding the option to put a Spell Penetration enchant on our cloak ([Enchant Cloak - Spell Piercing]) and using Spell Penetration gems [Stormy Ocean Sapphire] in Blue Sockets to get our cap, but even though the cloak or necklace provides more spell penetration than we need, gemming and enchanting for it is simply not worth it, because we’d simply be losing to many intellect in return.

Last season I was talking about the possibility to “nevermind” the hit cap with certain setups, this season this has also changed a bit.
We’ve gotten a lot more spirit now, that regen hasn’t really become much of a concern, that’s why I recommend you to get the Spell Hit cap for almost every setup.

Gear

The thing we should keep in mind when we’re choosing our gear pieces is our stat priority.

Our stat priority currently is Intellect>Resillience>Spirit>Mastery>Crit>Haste

Main-set

Since we need the 4-set bonus from our Restoration gear, we can choose 1 of the pieces of our main set elemental, to match the Secondary stat we prefer.

Basically now it’s about preference, some people prefer to go with Elemental Gloves, others (including me) prefer to go for the Elemental Leggings.

The Elemental Gloves will provide you with extra Crit, while the Leggings will provide you with extra Mastery.

Personally I prefer Mastery over Crit, but it’s all about preference.

If you’d pick the leggings mastery you would get the following items as your main set:

• Helm: Restoration [Cataclysmic Gladiator's Ringmail Helm]
• Shoulder: Restoration [Cataclysmic Gladiator's Ringmail Spaulders]
• Chest: Restoration [Cataclysmic Gladiator's Ringmail Armor]
• Gloves: Restoration [Cataclysmic Gladiator's Ringmail Gauntlets]
• Legs: Elemental [Cataclysmic Gladiator's Mail Leggings]

Off-set

Allright, now for the off-set:

Since we can get basically every off piece except one PvP ring without spirit, you’d want to be maximizing your spirit as following:

Necklace: [Cataclysmic Gladiator's Pendant of Diffusion]

Cloak: [Cataclysmic Gladiator's Drape of Meditation]

Bracer: [Cataclysmic Gladiator's Armbands of Meditation]

Belt: [Cataclysmic Gladiator's Waistguard of Meditation]

Boots: [Cataclysmic Gladiator's Sabatons of Meditation]

Ring1: [Cataclysmic Gladiator's Band of Accuracy]

Ring2: [Cataclysmic Gladiator's Band of Meditation]

Relic: [Cataclysmic Gladiator's Relic of Salvation]

Trinket1: [Cataclysmic Gladiator's Medallion of Tenacity]

Trinket2: Here it’s a matter of what we “can” do.
If you do not have any PvE access what so ever, I recommend you to try gather some gold together and buy a [Darkmoon Card: Tsunami] trinket.
Even though this is a quite old item, it’s still really a good one and totally worth every gold coin!
If you do have access to PvE gear, I recommend you to go for [Heart of Unliving].
This is an insanely good trinket providing a crazy amount of regen and quite a lot of intellect also.
Personally I’m never raiding with a guild, although this doesn’t mean I have no chance to get this trinket.
Simply queue up with the LFRaid tool, even though the item level trinket you get from here is quite low, this trinket remains insane even from the LFR level.
LFR is very easy to do, almost every pug is able to down every boss with ease, so just give it a chance when you got the time as once you get this trinket it’s definitely worth it!
At Raid Finder level (ilvl 390) this trinket provides +286 intellect and +780 spirit, the intellect is quite close to the amount from a Tsunami card, but the spirit is basically the double!

Gems

With patch 4.3, new epic gems have arrived.
These gems are obtainable through the Dragon Soul raid, and cost quite a bit of money on the Auction House currently.
If you’re a wealthy person I recommend trying to purchase a couple, because extra stats are always welcome!
For gemming I recommend the following:

• Red Socket: +40/+50 Intellect [Brilliant Inferno Ruby][Brilliant Queen's Garnet]
• Yellow Socket: +20/+25 Intellect and Resillience [Willful Ember Topaz][Willful Lava Coral]
• Blue Socket: +20/+25 Intellect and Spirit or Hit-Rating [Purified Demonseye][Purified Shadow Spinel][Veiled Demonseye][Veiled Shadow Spinel] (Try to perfectionize your hit cap to exactly 410 Hit Rating, you can use a combination of these gems to try to get closer to the exact cap, since extra hit rating has no value whatsoever).
• Meta Socket: +54 Intellect and -10% Silence Duration [Forlorn Shadowspirit Diamond]
• Prismatic Socket: +40/+50 Intellect [Brilliant Inferno Ruby][Brilliant Queen's Garnet]

Enchants

In patch 4.3 no new enchants were added, so basically we can leave our enchantments the same as we had last season:

• Helm: +60 Intellect and +35 Resillience [Arcanum of Vicious Intellect]
• Shoulder: +50 Intellect and +25 Resillience [Greater Inscription of Vicious Intellect]
• Cloak: +50 Intellect [Enchant Cloak - Greater Intellect]
• Chest: +20 all Stats (20 Int/20 Spirit/20 Sta) [Enchant Chest - Peerless Stats] OR +40 Resillience [Enchant Chest - Mighty Resilience]
• Bracer: +50 Intellect [Enchant Bracer - Mighty Intellect]
• Gloves: +65 Mastery [Enchant Gloves - Greater Mastery]
• Legs: +95 Intellect and +55 Spirit [Powerful Ghostly Spellthread]
• Boots: +50 Hit Rating [Enchant Boots - Precision]
• Weapon: Power Torrent [Enchant Weapon - Power Torrent] or Heartsong [Enchant Weapon - Heartsong]
• Off-hand: +40 Intellect [Enchant Off-Hand - Superior Intellect]

Last Words

This was my article regarding Gear, Stats and Changes for Restoration Shamans in patch 4.3.
If you want to get a perfect Hit Cap (410 hit rating) I recommend you to try out the site www.wowreforge.com, it has helped me a lot perfectionizing my stats, you can import your character there from the armory and let it calculate the best way to reforge for you.
If you have any questions or suggestions please let me know.
Thanks for reading!