The spec has really changed almost to the point of being the opposite of what it used to be. From TBC onward for over a decade it primarily healed with instant cast spells. The vast majority of your healing came from HoTs. Wild Growth was instant cast from WotLK until it was desecrated in WoD with a pointless cast-time. They did the same thing to Prayer of Mending, but they reverted that at some point back to instant. Rejuv was your main heal for probably 90% of expansions except TBC was all about lifebloom. Regrowth was hardly ever pressed in several expansions.
Direct heals were only used in an emergency or to proc the original mastery buff outside of maybe vanilla where everyone focused on boring downranked direct heal clones. You were an actual HoT healer and probably one of the most mana efficient classes in the game, especially during the perma tree expansions. You could HoT from dawn to dusk without running out of mana.
Maybe M+ style content and the very high burst damage and healing needed at times was the reason resto druid was transformed into more of a direct healing bot that used HoTs as buffs instead of a HoT healer. I feel like you could do dungeon healing design as a HoT healer, they just didn’t try. Regrowth could be more like Enveloping Mist, weighted towards the HoT and using the HoT as a buff to ramp up your other healing (which could be as easy as making it count as multiple mastery stacks). That way your single target focus would still be HoT healing.
Nature’s Bounty is an abomination that doesn’t belong in the druid kit at all. All your HoT healing has to be tuned down in order to tune around the existence of this direct healing mechanic. Even if you don’t spec into it, its existence is destroying the balance of the spec. It’s also just a clone of Whispering Waves, which they removed entirely from shaman in beta because they hated it so much. If they’re going to leave this in the kit, maybe it should be a choice talent against a talent that significantly improves HoTs. I’d just get rid of it personally.
I’m not sure Overgrowth moving lifebloom is of any benefit. I’d say it should apply independent lifeblooms but the interaction with convoke and everbloom would be broken unless they could just say only your primary lifebloom interacted with everbloom and lifetreading.
Abundance should obviously have just stayed a stacking mechanic even if it capped at 5 at 12% per. No idea how they could have gone through the PTR and all the feedback and concluded maintaining 5 was an improvement to the spec. It does literally nothing in solo/delve play now and now requires more specific tracking than it ever did before. It’s a major nerf in an emergency where you don’t already have 5+ up.
I’m confused as to what they intend with the KotG + dream + elder druid option. It has the highest DPS potential in AoE of any healer in the game, but the dream mechanic is so clumsy that you can’t rely on it actually keeping people alive in many situations. The potential HPS during your window is crazy high but it doesn’t prefer low-health targets like ancient teachings or way of the crane. A low health target can be skipped starfire after starfire and then when you finally give up on RNG and have to manually save them, you have no HoTs on them to swiftmend or buff regrowth. You can do over 100k DPS in AoE (sometimes 200+ if there’s enough mobs) and if you’re lucky easily keep the entire group topped during your starfire spam, but sometimes you have one person going down and a few getting minor injuries and the RNG keeps sinking all your healing into the people that don’t need it instead of that one person that’s dying. Not only is the healing itself a casino, but you’re falling behind on maintenance HoTs during the elder druid window which makes it hard to recover from unless you save convoke for bad dream RNG recovery.
Kittyweaving could easily be improved by suggestions that have been given for years. Instead it’s still a tab-target mess that does terrible damage for 10x the effort of any spec that actually does decent damage for a healer. This seems like massive wasted potential for a strong shapeshifter themed spec.