Restoration Shaman's core maintenance kit - Riptide, Earth Shield, and Healing Rain - looks simple on paper, but Mastery: Deep Healing means overhealing is more costly for this spec than for most others. Here's what Healper actually checks in a Restoration Shaman log, and why.
What top Restoration Shamans actually did
Measured from 400 logs of top-performing Restoration Shamans at keystone level 11 in Midnight Season 2 (Curse of Ula'tek), across 8 dungeons. These are measurements of what that cohort did, not targets anyone set - and the middle-half column matters more than the median, because it shows how much honest variation there is between good runs.
| What | Median | Middle half | Logs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Riptide uptime | 96.0% | 93.7-97.7% | 400 |
| Earth Shield uptime | 92.5% | 64.0-99.5% | 400 |
| Healing Rain uptime | 72.5% | 65.4-77.8% | 388 |
| Average mana through the run | 84.6% | 74.8-90.7% | 400 |
| Overhealing | 32.6% | 29.2-36.9% | 400 |
19 of those 400 runs had the healer bottom out on mana at some point (4.8%). Running dry is not rare at this level, and the spread in the mana column is why: the middle half of this cohort is a wide band, not a target.
The same corpus broken down per dungeon, with the cooldowns this spec actually pressed, is on the Restoration Shaman benchmarks page. Mythic+ only: the raid brackets carry no per-log data in any season, so nothing here describes raid.
Riptide uptime
Riptide is tracked as HoT uptime - the percentage of active combat time it's active on at least one target, with pandemic refreshing preserving part of the remaining duration on a timely reapplication. It's the backbone of your passive throughput, and top performers spread it across multiple targets rather than parking it on one person, since every active Riptide boosts the value of your other healing.
Earth Shield: near-permanent on the tank
Earth Shield should almost never fall off - Healper checks its uptime the same way as any other maintenance HoT, and top performers sit at 95%+. Because it boosts the healing the target receives from you specifically, a dropped Earth Shield doesn't just lose its own procs, it quietly reduces the value of every other heal you land on that target until it's reapplied.
Healing Rain (for Totemic builds)
Healing Rain is tracked from healing-tick clusters rather than buff events, since it's a ground-targeted AoE rather than a buff applied to players. It's meant for stacked-group damage rather than constant uptime, so the bar is lower than Riptide or Earth Shield - top performers land around 35-45%. Farseer builds skip Healing Rain entirely in favor of ancestor-based healing, so Healper doesn't track or penalize it for that hero tree.
Mana and overhealing
Mana is checked the standard way - average % across the fight, whether you went fully OOM, and healing produced per point of mana spent. Overhealing matters more here than for most healers because of Mastery: Deep Healing, which increases your healing on already-low-health targets - overhealing specifically means you're not converting that mastery into value, not just wasting a cast.
Cooldowns: Unleash Life, Ascendance or Healing Tide, and Spirit Link Totem
Unleash Life has a short 9-second cooldown and boosts your next heal by 25% while cutting its cast time - Healper flags it when talented but never used across a fight long enough to have used it. Ascendance and Healing Tide Totem are a choice node on a shared 180-second cooldown; whichever you've picked is checked against how many times the fight length should have allowed it, since both are meant to be used on cooldown rather than saved for a single "perfect" moment. Spirit Link Totem, also on a 180-second cooldown, redistributes health and reduces damage across the group - it's checked the same way and is best used proactively before a known burst rather than reactively after damage has already landed.
Want the exact scoring breakdown and percentile math behind all of this? See how we calculate your score.