Best PvP Talents for Restoration Shamans – Cataclysm PvP Guide - Skill Capped (2024)

Welcome to Skill Capped’s Guide on the Best PvP Talents for Restoration Shamans in Cataclysm

All sections for Restoration Shaman PvP have been divided into corresponding sections for the most optimal race, talents, glyphs, gear, professions and macros. This will help you have a good understanding on Restoration Shaman in PvP for Cataclysm, the strengths and weaknesses associated with this specialization, and help you conquer the arena. This section will show you what are the best PvP Restoration Shaman talents in Cataclysm Season 9 and why you should choose them.

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Table of Contents

Best Restoration Shaman PvP Talents

Restoration Shaman offers the selection of multiple builds, both of which have their own unique strengths when used in arena combat. Depending on your preference and composition, here are the talent builds you should choose from as a Restoration Shaman in Cataclysm Season 9.

Ghost Wolf Build

We recommend that you use the Ghost Wolf build, as it will be more impactful and will allow you an easier time avoiding your opponents. The Ghost Wolf Build is more effective against a large variety of compositions, making this a better option to choose from.

This will be your default talents for Restoration Shaman‘s Wind Shear build. As you may be confused by the selection of these talents, let’s look further into why these talents are chosen.

At the top of the Restoration Tree, the talent, Resurgence, grants additional mana when your casted healing spells crit. This synergizes with your talent, Tidal Waves, providing a critical strike modifier on your Healing Surge after using Riptide on a friendly target. This can offer variance on what healing spell you plan to use when consuming Tidal Waves. Healing Wave will be a shorter cast, but will provide more healing than Healing Surge.

Another important spell chosen in the Restoration Tree is Spirit Link Totem. This spell, when placed, will rebistribute all friendly players’ health to the same percentage when in the totem’s radius. This also reduces damage taken when nearby the totem, making it your best defensive cooldown for this specialization. Also, Cleansing Waters, applies a heal when dispelling a harmful effect off of yourself or allies. It also reduces the amount of mana spent on dispelling, which gives Restoration Shamans more of an incentive to dispel debuffs throughout an arena match.

The main reason why this talent tree is referred as the Ghost Wolf build is because of the talent, Ancestral Swiftness, allowing your Ghost Wolf spell to be instant cast and have increased movement speed. Being able to kite your opponents easily, especially from melees, will make it incredibly easy to prevent your enemies from landing successful attacks.

Wind Shear Build

This will be our second build, which involves using shock spells to in order to gain value from our additional talents in this talent tree. As the name suggests, Wind Shear is the ability most affected by this build. These changes give Wind Shear a shorter cooldown, making your team utility stronger than the previous build.

As we look into the Restoration Shaman talent tree, it’s important to identify what spells will be changed. Instead of going directly to the Enhancement tree for instant Ghost Wolf, you will go into the Elemental tree for the talent, Reverberation. This will remove 10 seconds off of your Wind Shear cooldown, allowing for you to have more control in terms of aggressive and defensive play. Restoration Shamans in Cataclysm are best played defensively, which involve sitting away from your enemies. This allows you to avoid as much Crowd Control and damage as you can. Ghost Wolf enables better survivalibility and defensively play, which is why we prefer choosing the Ghost Wolf build over the Wind Shear build. The Wind Shear build’s advantage is if you know you won’t be attacked, granting you more control over an arena game.

There is flexibility in talents that you plan to select based on a particular composition that you anticipate to fight in arena. Here are the talents that can be moved around.

Optional Restoration Shaman PvP Talents

While there are not many adjustments that we can make for our two builds, there is one adjustment we can make for the Ghost Wolf build. This focuses on the talents, Totemic Focus and Focused Insight, to reduce the mana cost of your totems or to reduce mana cost of your casted spell after using a shock spell, respectively. Having more of your talent points placed into Focused Insight could make your character spend less mana if optimized properly, while also buffing your heals when needed.