The Basics
The core of Restoration Shaman is a mix of short cooldowns and choosing between filler spells. Your goal is to maximize usages and value of spells that you cast very often over and over again while filling the time in between with the correct spells depending on mana and target count.
You have a big utility kit that can cover a wide range of situations which means it is likely some of your time is also spent on interrupts, dispells, purges and crowd control. None of the tools at your disposal are complicated or hard to use but you have a lot of them and need to prioritize what to press correctly.
Healing Wave and Chain Heal
One of the most important parts of the spec is how Healing Wave and Chain Heal compete with each other. As of Midnight these are your two only options to do healing outside of cooldowns and you will constantly have to pick between them. The actual balance is a bit tricky and the best spell varies depending on a lot of factors so you should expect to cast a good mix of both during normal gameplay. For a quick comparison:
Healing Wave:
- Costs very little mana
- Heals a single target for a moderate amount
Chain Heal
- Costs a lot of mana
- Heals multiple targets, the total healing is higher but it is heavily spread across the targets
If the goal is purely hps then Chain Heal is the winner but mana is a limiting factor if the fight goes on long enough, if a single target is taking heavy damage or you can't be sure that Chain Heal will bounce properly then Healing Wave is a much better tool and overall does a better job at keeping specific targets alive. You can also choose to use Healing Wave to conserve mana during a low damage period in order to dump it to increase your healing later by using Chain Heal several times.
Neither of the two spells is always the right choice and the ideal gameplay includes a good mix of both. During your moment to moment decision making you need to be asking yourself "how many targets need healing?", "are my teammates too far apart from each other?", "how much mana can i spend on this fight?", and "who is really in danger of dying at the moment?" which will lead you to picking one over the other and eventually practice will make it easier and faster.
Riptide
Riptide is the one spell that does everything for Restoration. It is a very short cooldown single target spell that does good instant healing and also leaves a heal over time effect. The most relevant part of Riptide however is how many other effects are tied to it in different ways. Just to name a few: Every cast can activate Deeply Rooted Elements or proc Stormstream Totem, every active Riptide heal over time increases your healing via Undercurrent and Deluge, and you can consume them to make Chain Heal stronger with Flow of the Tides.
There is a balance to be found in using Riptide as a spot heal on people that need emergency healing and using it on targets that don't already have the effect so you can maximize coverage. You should ideally try to spread the effect as much as possible on different targets but also you shouldn't be afraid to use it several times back to back on the same target if that is what you need to do to keep them alive.
The one thing that you really don't want to do in regards to Riptide is sit on all the charges without using them for a long period of time.
Healing Totems
Another important part of the spec is your rotational healing totems and for Midnight the only two relevant ones are Healing Stream Totem and Stormstream Totem. Healing Stream Totem is a very simple fire and forget healing over time effect, it is not super strong by itself but still good enough to justify keeping it on cooldown. It is much stronger for Totemic where using it also casts a Chain Heal, it hits multiple targets every time and can also apply Earthliving Weapon but even for Farseer you will still use it very often.
As for Stormstream Totem because it is our apex talent the power it has is much higher and is a very important part of your gameplay. You will get guaranteed procs of Stormstream every time you use Natures Swiftness or Ancestral Swiftness which means Farseer will get twice as many as Totemic, but Totemic's are slightly stronger due to inheriting bonuses from [Healing Stream totem]. You also have a 6% chance of getting one on every Riptide cast.
Stormstream procs last for 60 seconds and stack up to two so you aren't in a rush to spend them and can sit on them while waiting for the correct moment to use them. Farseer is particularly good at this as it can force several procs in less time and also loses less by not casting Healing Stream Totem to save them.
Use your procs smartly, plan ahead your usages from Swiftness, and don't waste them. Stormstream Totem will end up being one of your highest sources of healing in any type of content so you should treat the procs with the importance they deserve.
Ascendance
Newly reworked for Midnight, Ascendance is a very strong but very particular cooldown. To note in its current iteration Ascendance only affects your Healing Wave and Chain Heal which means all your other spells do the exact same healing regardless of it being up (without considering [Preeminence]). As for Healing Wave the effect is very strong but also incredibly annoying in that having guaranteed critical strikes on a spell means all the critical strike you have from your gear or external effects does absolutely nothing and is simply wasted while you cast the spell. Chain Heal gets a more straight forward bonus that simply lets it do more healing but it also has some rough edges in that targets can't get healed by multiple jumps of the same cast which means on dungeons you will simply waste several of the jumps from the Ascendance bonus.
The real winner ends up being Healing Wave, because the second heal at half strength still counts as a cast of the spell it procs it's own [Resurgence] and does so every time as both of them are guaranteed critical strikes. The end result is that Healing Wave heals for a very high amount on two targets and restores more mana than what it costs to cast so you can press it as many times as possible without having to worry about cost and doing a very high amount of healing.
Chain Heal does not actually do more healing than Healing Wave during Ascendance. The spell does become much better at spreading healing across a raid and picking the targets that need it the most but in regards to raw numbers it is still behind and the only way for it to catch up is if your Healing Waves are doing a lot of overhealing or if you have lots of critical strike on your gear which benefit Chain Heal but not [Healing Wave1. Even still this situation doesn't take into account that ]Chain Heal[ is still a very expensive cast while ]Healing Wave! becomes literally free.
Simply put, don't over think it, if you are in Ascendance you want to cast Healing Wave as many times as possible.
Farseer vs Totemic
The two hero specs have very distinct identities: While Totemic heavily focuses on passive healing and enhancing your short cooldowns, Farseer improves your hard-casted spells instead. Totemic is the easier of the two, as having a high portion of your healing come from auto-targeting sources removes most of the need for good target selection and lets you simple use spells without having to think too much about it. On the other side Farseer has a much better healing profile because adding power to spells that you have direct control over lets you focus your healing right when and where you need it to keep targets alive.
One very important difference is how each tree handles Healing Rain. While Farseer has pretty much zero interactions with the spell leaving you to cast it and maintain it normally Totemic takes it over with Surging Totem giving you the ability to move it and making it overall much simpler to manage. This lack of quality of life for Farseer Healing Rain means on some situations where it is just not feasible to use it you might drop the spell entirely.
At the end of the day the thing in favor of Farseer that cements it as the strongest of the two is Ascendance. Because Farseer directly interacts with the two spells that Ascendance improves upon and Ascendance itself is so incredibly strong Farseer is simply superior when it comes to actually outputting healing. The two trees aren't terrible far apart from each other but the extra synergies and better profile for Farseer mean there is not a lot of reasons to play Totemic right now.