A Look Back at Restoration Shaman in Dragonflight & War Within Wishlist - Editorial

wowhead.com:

With the sun setting on Dragonflight and The War Within on the horizon, our Restoration Shaman Writer, Theun, offers a retrospective highlighting Restoration's journey in Dragonflight and shares their hopes for the spec's next evolution with a War Within Wishlist.

Dragonflight Retrospectives & War Within Wishlists

Restoration Shaman's Journey Through Dragonflight

Restoration Shaman has had plenty of highs and lows in Dragonflight. This article is going to take a look at how the spec performed throughout each of the 3 seasons thus far, how the spec evolved throughout the expansion, and what are some of the key things still missing that keep Restoration Shaman from being great. A quick disclaimer: a lot of this might sound overly-negative, but the spec has come quite a long way over the course of Dragonflight (for example, for the first time in ~7 years Healing Stream Totem is perfectly fine to take!), however in order to keep this as short as I can, I'm mostly looking at things that still need changing.

• In Season 1, Resto Shaman started off pretty weak in Raid, requiring multiple rounds of buffs (and a miniature «rework» if you'd like to call it that) heading into 10.0.7. In Mythic+ however, it was one of the most popular healers in high level keys. This was largely because you tried to bring Bloodlust in the healer spot, and after 10.0.7, Acid Rain was massively buffed, giving us a huge damage increase in an AoE setting like Mythic+.
• In Season 2, we were featured in the Race to World First with Method running a Resto Shaman for their World 3rd kill of Sarkareth! We were also quite strong in Mythic+ at the start of the season before the 10.1.5 update that introduced the «God Comp», but obviously fell out of favor after the update (as did almost every other spec not