How I learned to live without Spirit Link, or a fond farwell.

Anyone who has known me for any length of time knows that I’ve been a huge fan of the spell Spirit Link since it first made an appearance back in the Wrath of the Lich King beta. The spell allowed restoration shaman to link players together, distributing damage among them. The spell was eventually removed due to balancing issues, and I only got to play with it for a few, fleeting moments.

When Cataclysm was announced, the developers made a note that they were going to try to work Spirit Link back into the game. It was a spell a lot of players were excited about and wanted to have in their arsenal. It was a promise to give us something we didn’t have, a defensive cooldown. Shaman throughout the community came up with various ideas on how to balance it and let it come back to the game. I was included among that number. Alas, it was not meant to be, and Spirit Link has drifted off without much of a word about it from the developers.

After lamenting the loss of the spell, I came to a realization. I’ve been healing through the beta both in dungeons and raids and not once did I ever say to myself  “I wish I had Spirit Link right now!”. That exact phrase I muttered to myself at least a dozen times in Wrath. But looking at the way Cataclysm is designed, it is now impossible for Spirit Link to be incorporated into the game. Looking at the damage model for the new expansion it is quite easy to see this. Let me explain a bit here for clarification sake. When I say damage model, I quite literally mean damage model. Everyone is taking damage in Cata. There is rarely instances in a raid where someone is not taking some damage. This is very unlike Wrath, where there were a few fights that had massive amounts of raid damage. Let’s use the new Nefarian encounter as an example. The new fight has you engaging the reanimated corpse of both Onyxia and Nefarian. Onyxia has some fun new abilities including shadow flame (doing her dad proud) and a new electrical charge. Needless to say, she does a ton of raid wide damage. Combine this with Nefarian flying around and summoning adds, throwing his own shadow bolts and you have yourself a recipe for pain.

At no point in this fight would it have been safe to link multiple players together. Simply put, any additional damage on the non tanks would have killed them. Now, almost every fight in Cata is like this. Heroic dungeons feel like raid bosses (at least until we outgear them but still), and raids feel much more difficult. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just an evolution of the game. Players are more accountable for their own health totals than every before, and healers have a whole new set of concerns. With this new model, Spirit Link just doesn’t fit anymore. Players simply would die if linked together. Now you could argue that a defensive cooldown could be extremely useful here, but Blizzard has done us one better.

Instead of a defensive cooldown, we get an offensive healing cooldown. I’m not talking about Nature’s Swiftness here, but our new level 85 spell, Spiritwalker’s Grace. Traditionally the role of a healer is to indemnify. That’s my nickle word for the day. It means to secure against hurt, loss or damage. By this I mean we wait for people to get hurt, or hurt enough and react by healing them in an attempt to bring their health back to 100%. Most of the new healing abilities for the other healers are more preventative. They stop damage from happening. Shaman without the ability to keep damage from happening are forced to be more aggressive healers. This fits really well with the tools we are given.

So let’s take a look at our new cooldown. Spiritwalker’s grace lets us cast any heal while moving. Let me state that again for dramatic effect here, it lets us cast any heal while moving. This means in those fights (read: all of them) that require us to move, we can pop this cooldown and run-and-gun casting our big heals, like Chain Heal, without having to stop. Mull that over for a second. Pretty awesome right? This gives us not only some added versatility, but the ability to manage that versatility. We choose when to use it, which adds that level of healing skill everyone has been talking about wanting for a while now. Sure, we can’t power word: shield someone, but you bet your ass we can drop a nuke heal while on the move! While other healers can throw shields and HoTs while running, we can cast full blown spells. The cooldown lasts 10 seconds, and only has a 2 minute cooldown. It fits really well with our healing style as well. Shaman are not the healers that sit in the back and chant. We are the healers that charge into the thick of battle to drop our totems and throw fire at the enemy while making our own troops whole again.

Honestly I think this new ability hasn’t gotten nearly enough media attention, as players remain too focused on what could have been. It really is quite awesome, and with it I’m no longer pining for Spirint Link. While I  will always remember it with fondness in my heart, I’ve come to accept that its departure was for the best and to move on. So goodbye Spirit link, it seems to me you lived your life like a candle in the wind, never knowing who to cling to when wrath set in. And I would have liked to have known you
but I was just level 70, your candle burned out long before, but your legend never will.

I think other restoration shaman will start to feel the same as time spent with the new spells comes.

So what do you think? Still miss Spirit Link? Do you like Spiritwalker’s Grace?

Until next time, Happy Healing!

6 thoughts on “How I learned to live without Spirit Link, or a fond farwell.”

  1. I think my own experiences on beta mirror yours in that I’ve never once thought, “Man I wish I had Spirit Link”. As much as I’ve fussed about the spell, I agree that it isn’t the end-all solution, nor is it all that relevant in fights where the tank isn’t getting hit like a truck.

    However, what I have found myself thinking time and time again (and *especially* in hard modes) as I felt the healing team struggling to keep up with damage is “I wish I had a raid or personal CD to pop right about now”. Because while Spiritwalker’s Grace mitigates the HPS loss found at the low end of the spectrum, what it does not do is affect the top end, which is where you need some burst capacity to handle intense healing periods.

    Are we going to be functional without a CD? Presumably. Will that stop me from mentally hitting my priest’s Divine Hymn keybind (which is also my paladin’s wings and my druid’s Tranquility) whenever the raid’s health starts getting dangerously low? Not in the slightest.

    Reply
    • I think I’m a little bit spoiled not really having spent any time with as raiding druid or priest so I’m just used to not having them. I think we’re more than functional at the moment, and honestly I don’t think I’ve seen quite so intense a healing situation in Cataclysm yet that we haven’t been able to heal through it. Not saying that’s not the case, but while the damage is more widespread it seems more, well for lack of a better terminology here, even paced. That said I still have that “oh shit” knee jerk reaction to the raid’s health when it’s low

  2. Based on the Beta information you mentioned it feels like Resto shaman will be popular again, and I mean in the way we were BC. During Wrath so much of the healing was “heal this guy” not a true amount of raid healing. I ended up spending half of Wrath as a tank healer, why well 80% of raid bosses had something that required everyone to stand over 10 yds apart. Hmm.. wasn’t that the limit of our “Major” spell Chain Heal prior to updates in patches. I remember back in BC, my shaman was my alt, didn’t have shit for gear yet I got pulled into Hyjal my first night with a new guild solely for the fact that as Resto shaman were so in demand for fights like Najentus(BT) and the random damage going out to everyone.
    Spirit link would have been a great option during Wrath as it would have given us that Defensive spell to help out our numbers, and overall perception of Shaman Healing.

    Like you I never raid healed as a priest or druid and thus dont know quite how that works out. But all their options always seemed to have an answer to any situation. As a shaman what options did we have for those random situations, nature’s Guidance? It worked nicely for that one time you needed to get off two chains back to back or helped trying to get off a Healing Wave for a Fusion Punch in Ulduar, but it never felt like we had the full scope of other healing classes.
    I think that is enough rambling for now, remind me not to post comments this long one day later.

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