When are you going to finally relent and admit that removing Heal and Renew as button presses and deleting ALL of our active mana recovery was shortsighted and demonstrated gross misunderstanding behind the roles of these buttons?
You can’t keep reducing mana costs on spells that are specifically designed to be fast and expensive and expect it to fix a problem YOU created going in to this expansion.
This spec needs its cheap, slow heal back and it needs its instant cast cheap powerful HoT on a short cooldown back, it needs Shadowfiend and Symbol back or something else needs to be turned in to active mana recovery (might I suggest Holy Fire DoT ticks restore a portion of mana per tick) so you don’t just inevitably run out of mana after a few mins unable to do anything or prevent this from occurring through diligent use of your toolkit. It is not fun to be reliant on Druids to be actually able to cast ANYTHING that does healing late game, it makes you a detriment to the other healers on your team.
This problem is going to continue to exist if you try and solve it through adjusting existing spells to be cheaper, Benediction is a nearly 2k mana cost ability with Surge of Light active and you still chunk through your mana bar because rotationally you have no control over when you gain or spend this proc.
Again, why are we the only healer with no way to control our mana consumption rate through actual healing? Why is it that seemingly your players knew day 1 that this problem was going to happen yet 9 months later the devs haven’t figured this out? This is just unnecessarily frustrating and it could have been solved so long ago.
There’s also something to be said about having a range of buttons that serve different needs existing being enjoyable for the player, the talent trees should serve to facilitate this in a way that doesn’t force it on everyone so that people who enjoy more straightforward game play can continue to have that, TWW’s talent trees seemingly understood this distinction and the devs have apparently forgotten this for Midnight and it’s saddening to see that happen. Midnight definitely threw the baby out with the bathwater. The feeling of spec mastery really matters, feeling like you purchased a Ferrari and know how to make it purr.