Cover the names and guess the class.

Put Healing Wave, Chain Heal and Riptide next to each other, cover the names, and ask someone who has never played a Shaman which class each spell belongs to.

I think most people would answer Druid for the first one, Priest or Paladin for the second, and only on the third would they finally say Shaman. Healing Wave is green and leafy, Chain Heal is a golden beam that would look at home in a cathedral, and Riptide is a column of pale water. If a client sent me those three as one product range I would assume three different agencies had worked on it and nobody had been given the brand guidelines.

That is the whole problem, and it has very little to do with which colour is the right one. I am happy with green, I am happy with water, I could even live with gold. What I can't make work as a designer is a healing kit where the three spells you press most belong to three different class fantasies, because at that point Restoration has no look of its own, only a collection of looks it borrowed.

Healing Wave

Green glow, soft Nature light, leaf-like particles.

Reads as Nature

Chain Heal

Yellow and gold, luminous, a beam of light jumping between friends.

Reads as Holy

Riptide

Pale aqua, fluid, a column of water rising around the target.

Reads as Shaman

The funny part is in the icons. Look at Healing Wave and Chain Heal on the bar and you will see the same green hand on two different backgrounds, which means that back in 2004 somebody at Blizzard did design these as a family. The buttons agree with each other, and then you press them and the effects go their separate ways.

Forever is the right place to bring this up. Classic Era should stay exactly as it shipped, inconsistencies included, because that is the point of it. Forever is Blizzard going back into the old world to extend it and tidy it, with new racials, new class combinations and new talents, so a small correction to three spell effects fits the brief perfectly. I am not asking for Retail water simulations or new animations either. Everything in this study can be done with a hue shift and a particle swap on effects that already exist.

So I did what I would do for any brand with a confused palette. I laid out the colours the class uses today and what each of them says, and then I built two revised palettes, one for each honest answer to the question of what Restoration is supposed to look like. A third one turned up on the way, and it is the one I ended up choosing.

Azeroth already has a colour code.

Warcraft has been teaching us to read colour since the first Frostbolt. Green is Nature, yellow is Holy, red and orange are Fire, pale blue is Frost and purple is Shadow, and after twenty years nobody needs a tooltip to know what just hit them. It is one of the best pieces of visual branding in the game, and it is the reason the Restoration kit reads the way it does, because each of its colours is already saying something very specific.

Palette one: the classic, as it ships today

These are the four colours a Restoration Shaman actually has on the bar, sampled from the references above. Three of them heal, and the fourth is the fire that sits next to them.

Colour	What it says	Who owns it	The neighbour it looks like
Green	Nature, growth, plants	Druid	Healing Touch
Yellow	Holy, the Light, faith	Priest and Paladin	Holy Light
Red	Fire, the element	Shared, and earned	Searing Totem
Aqua	Water, but pale enough for Frost	Shaman, with Mage next door	Frost Nova

Read as a palette, this is a spell school chart with a Shaman standing in front of it. Green tells you the school and then hands the spell to the Druid, who has owned leaves and growth since day one. Yellow tells you nothing true at all, because Chain Heal is a Nature spell wearing the colour of the Light. Red is the interesting one, because it never touches a heal and yet it is the only colour here that nobody questions. A Shaman's fire is red because fire is one of the four things a Shaman is made of, so the colour belongs to the element first and the class second, and it works.

The aqua follows the same logic, which is why Riptide feels so right. There is no Water school in the game, and Riptide is a Nature spell on paper, but nobody has ever looked at it and thought of a Druid. It reads as an element, the same way the fire does.

"But a Shaman uses all the elements"

This is the reply I see most often, that the kit is fine as it is because a Shaman works with every element and so every colour is fair game. I like the idea a lot, and I think it deserves to be taken seriously, so here are the four elements next to the colours the class gives them.

Element	How the Shaman shows it	Example	Used by a heal?
Fire	Red and orange flame	Flame Shock	No
Water	Pale aqua and blue, liquid	Water Shield	Riptide
Air	Blue-white storm	Lightning Bolt	No
Earth	Green and leafy	Earth Shock	No

The argument explains the fire and it explains the water, which are the two colours nobody was complaining about. The green is a closer call than I expected, because in Classic the Shaman's earth is green as well: Earth Shock comes out in the same leafy green as Healing Wave. So on paper the defence covers it. The catch is that it is the Druid's leafy green, used with nothing added to tell the two classes apart, so Earth Shock doesn't rescue Healing Wave, it just shares its problem. And gold is not an element at all. There is no fifth totem for sunlight, and nothing in the class fantasy that would make a Shaman's water or wind come out looking like a Paladin's blessing.

So if the defence of the kit is that it shows all the elements, it only half works. It explains the green on paper without making it look like a Shaman, and it has no answer at all for the gold. I would happily sign up for a Restoration that really did heal with the elements. It would look like water, and maybe a little like wind and earth, and it would look nothing like Healing Touch or Holy Light.

School is the category, class is the brand

The usual reply is that Healing Wave is a Nature spell, so green is correct. It is correct as a category, in the same way that two competing brands can sit on the same supermarket shelf. A spell school tells you what kind of magic something is, and it has never told the artists how it should look.

Lightning BoltShaman, Nature WrathDruid, Nature

Lightning Bolt and Wrath are both Nature damage, and one is a blue-white crack of storm while the other is a bolt of leafy green light. Nobody has ever mixed them up, and nobody has ever complained that Lightning Bolt isn't green enough. The damage side of the class solved this in 2004. Shaman Nature there means storm, and it looks like nothing a Druid would cast, so the same school can clearly hold two brands. The healing side simply never got the same attention.

Healing Wave reads Nature, Chain Heal reads Holy, Riptide reads Shaman. That gives me two ways out: make all three look like Shaman Nature, or make all three look like Shaman water.

If the answer is Nature, make it ours.

The first route keeps everything inside the spell school and asks what Nature looks like when a Shaman is the one casting it. The good news is that Blizzard already answered that once, and most of us played through it.

1. 01
   Warcraft II

   There is no chain heal here, and no Shaman either. The only spell that heals someone else is the Paladin's Healing, one target at a time. The Horde has no healer of its own: the closest it gets is the Death Knight's Death Coil, which takes life from an enemy and gives it back to the caster. Healing in Warcraft starts out as something the Light does.

2. 02
   Warcraft III

   The bouncing heal arrives with the troll Shadow Hunter. His Healing Wave "calls forth a wave of energy that heals a target and bounces to nearby friendlies", in the warm yellow light people still remember. Chain Heal itself doesn't exist yet: it is a World of Warcraft spell, added in the 2004 beta. WoW split that spell in two: the name went to Healing Wave, and the bounce and the glow went to Chain Heal.

3. 03
   Patch 3.0.2 / October 2008

   The Wrath of the Lich King pre-patch quietly changed Chain Heal. The patch history describes it in one line: spell graphics changed to look more nature-like and less holy.

So the gold is real heritage, and I understand why people defend it. What heritage can't do is explain what the colour means once it lands in WoW. In a strategy game with four armies, a warm glow only had to say "this unit is being healed", and it said it well. In a game with nine classes that have to be told apart at a glance, the same glow says Priest or Paladin, because by 2004 gold had become the colour of the Light. Nobody defending the current look has explained to me why a troll's voodoo and a Shaman's elements should share a colour with a cathedral, and I think that is because the honest answer is that it was inherited and never questioned.

Except that it was questioned once. I do love that last line in the list, because it means somebody at Blizzard looked at Chain Heal in 2008 and saw exactly what this study is about. Their fix was a very designer thing to do. They didn't throw the gold away and they didn't paint the whole spell leaf green. They kept a hot yellow heart in the middle of the beam and wrapped it in a bright storm green, so it still glows like the old chain but no longer looks like it came out of a Priest.

Palette two: Chainlight

This palette is sampled straight from that Wrath-era Chain Heal and builds the rest of the kit around it. The outer green belongs to the same family as the Healing Wave green, and the core is the old gold turned up towards yellow, so one beam carries both of the colours the kit already had. Chainlight, the hero colour, is the band where the two meet.

Keeping it away from the Druid

Green on green only works if the two greens can't be confused, so the separation has to be deliberate, and hue alone won't do it because the storm green is close to the green a Druid uses. The difference is in the core and the shape. Druid green is botanical all the way through, and it comes with leaves, petals and things that grow. Chainlight always has that yellow heart burning in the middle, which no Druid spell has, and it should move like energy travelling along a wire and never like something sprouting.

In practice Healing Wave keeps its cast, its timing and most of its green, loses the leaves and gains the yellow heart. Chain Heal is already there if Forever uses the 2008 version. Riptide is the awkward one on this route, because pale water in a yellow-green kit becomes the new odd one out, so it would keep its shape and take a Chainlight rim to tie it back to the other two.

The risk with this palette is that yellow-green is also the colour of poison, and Nature is the school of stings and venom as well as healing. The way around it is brightness. A heal should be light with a yellow-white core, and a poison is always murky and dark, so as long as Chainlight stays luminous it reads as energy and never as something you would want cleansed.

If the answer is water, keep it away from Frost.

The second route is the one Riptide already points to, and the lore has been pointing there for much longer than Riptide has existed.

1. 01
   Canon / Original game

   In Call of Water, the class quest for the water totem, Islen Waterseer puts it like this: "If there is one lesson you must learn of water, it is this: water means rebirth. Its power flows, erodes, and makes clean all manner of things."

2. 02
   Canon / Original game

   The Horde version of that quest ends at a shrine in Silverpine that has been tainted by the plague. The Shaman's job is to defeat what the water has become and make the pool clean again.

3. 03
   Original game

   Healing Stream Totem is a Water totem. Healing through water was on the action bar years before Riptide.

4. 04
   The Burning Crusade

   Water Shield arrives, blue and liquid and unmistakably Shaman, in an art style that sits comfortably next to the 2004 effects.

5. 05
   Wrath / Forever

   Riptide gives Restoration its first heal that looks like water, and Forever keeps it as the talent at the bottom of the tree.

So water as the healing element is as old as the class, and I could stop here and say make everything look like Riptide. The trouble shows up as soon as you sample it. Riptide today is a very pale aqua, close to white at its brightest, and pale blue-white is already taken. Frost has owned it since the first Mage pressed Frostbolt, and if the whole kit simply copies Riptide we trade a Druid problem for a Mage problem, where Healing Wave stops looking like Healing Touch and starts looking like Frost Armor.

Frost is water with everything taken out

The way out is to ask what kind of water a Shaman actually works with. Mage water is conjured out of nothing and frozen on the spot, so it is pure, cold, still and hard, which is why Frost lives in pale cyan and white with sharp edges. Shaman water is found, in rivers, marshes, tide pools and rain, and it has been somewhere before it reaches you. It carries silt and salt and a bit of green from whatever grows in it. That is brackish water, where the river meets the sea, and it has a colour of its own that no other class is using.

I do love a coincidence, and Call of Water has a good one. The teacher that quest sends you to, an orc Shaman living alone out in the Barrens who starts you on the path to the water totem, is called Brine.

Palette three: Brackwater

Here the hero colour keeps the hue Riptide already has, which sits between green and blue, and gives it the body it is missing, so it lands on a teal with some depth to it. Riptide's own pale aqua stays in the palette as the accent, and the highlight is a warm foam, never the white-blue of ice, which also gives me somewhere to put the Spirit side of the class as mist and pale wisps.

Keeping it away from the Mage

The rule I would give an effects artist is simple: if it could be an ice cube, it is too blue. Frost is light, clean and cold, so Brackwater has to be deeper, slightly murky and warm in its highlights, and it should always be moving. Healing Wave becomes a soft swell of Tidepool with a little foam where the leaves used to be. Chain Heal keeps its jump and its brightness and becomes a current running from one friend to the next, with a foam-white core so it stays as readable in a raid as the gold was. Riptide keeps its shape and its hue and only gets deeper, so it stops looking like ice and stops being the exception.

Retail went down the water road too. Healing Wave got a water-based animation in patch 4.0.6, and years later the whole kit followed, with surges and jets and a casting animation to match, and plenty of people said they missed the golden chain. This is a much smaller idea. It keeps the 2004 shapes and the 2004 particle count and only changes what colour the light is and what the little bits floating in it are.

Three spells, one pair of hands.

This is the cover-the-names test again, run four times. Read each column from top to bottom and ask whether those three lights could come from the same pair of hands.

Spell	Classic, today	Chainlight	Brackwater	Tide aqua + Chainlight
Healing Wave	Leaf green	Storm green, yellow heart	Tidepool	Tide aqua, Chainlight rim
Chain Heal	Chain gold	Yellow heart, storm green	Tidepool, foam core	Tide aqua, Chainlight rim
Riptide	Tide aqua	Tide aqua, Chainlight rim	Riptide aqua core, Tidepool	Tide aqua, as it is today

Colour test only. The lights show palette and temperature, they are not mock-ups of the spell effects.

The first column is three strangers, and the other three are all families. Chainlight is the Healing Wave green wrapped around the Chain Heal gold, and Brackwater is the Riptide aqua with some depth put back into it. Neither brings in a colour from outside, so nothing in them would feel new to someone who has played a Shaman since 2005.

The fourth column wasn't in the plan. It turned up while I was building this grid, in the cell where Riptide had to sit inside the Chainlight palette and I gave it its own pale aqua with a Chainlight edge so it wouldn't be the odd one out. That one light looked more like a Shaman than anything else on the page, so I tried it on the other two spells as well.

How it could look in game

Coloured lights only go so far, so here are the three reference frames again with the spell effects retinted. The shapes, the casting poses and the scene are the same in every row, and Riptide is left exactly as it ships.

The second row is the smallest change of all, because it only puts the 2008 Chain Heal back. Healing Wave and Chain Heal already look related there, which shows how much that one patch got right, but Riptide is still standing on its own at the end of the row. The last two rows are the ones where all three finally belong together.

My pick: Tide aqua with a Chainlight rim

If I have to choose, this is the one. The green edge is still a throwback to the Nature heal every classic Shaman grew up with, so nobody loses the spell they remember. With water at its heart it can no longer be mistaken for a Druid's green, and without the gold it stops borrowing from the Light, which leaves Restoration with a look that belongs to the class and to nobody else. It also solves the Frost problem from the other side, because a pale aqua with a living green rim is not something ice has ever looked like.

All water is the cleaner idea and I still like it a lot, but it cuts the last tie to Nature, and I think that tie is worth keeping. Forever is Classic plus for a reason, and this is the kind of small, careful change that makes the plus mean something.

How small the job is

For Healing Wave it means a tint on the existing glow and taking the leaves out. For Chain Heal it means a hue shift on the beam. For Riptide it means nothing at all, because the other two spells come to meet it. The animations, the timing, the particle counts and the size of every effect stay exactly as they are, so everything would still look like it belongs in the 2004 client.

Cover the names. Still a Shaman?

Every Restoration effect in Forever, the three in this study and whatever gets added later, should pass that one question. I am not asking for every Shaman spell to turn blue, or for the school to change, or for the old effects to be thrown away, and Enhancement and Elemental can carry on exactly as they are. The only thing I would like Blizzard to decide is what Restoration is supposed to look like, whether that is water, spirit, a Nature of its own or a bit of each, and then let the three spells we press all night say the same thing.