or am I the only one…
I know it’s really powerful but I’ve never been a fan of “doing damage to heal”. I just go straight up heals and I know I’ll have to learn how to cat weave eventually if I wanna do anything higher than m+ 10s but for the life of me I just can’t get behind this mentality of healing.
/raises hand
Yep. I’m not sure what spec I logged out in, but you can see what I chose if you like…it’s all out there in several places.
I am a chicken weaver.
Mmm…I’d say that doesn’t hit until 12+ Our damage is not needed in 10’s. It is significantly lower than other healers, however, and I’m hoping they make the appropriate changes to Wildstalker for Midnight to smooth that out.
Cat Weaving isn’t difficult. I just don’t enjoy it. So…I don’t do it and won’t until/unless we hit the 12’s.
I mostly do boomy weaving, still opt for kitty convoke when single target matters but talent wise im all set to cast.
Healer dps is so low this season that the best resto druids out there are doing 700k while their party memebers are doing 4.5mil so unless you plan to push 14+ i think youll be fine with boomy damage as long as youre actually doing it.
Im super lazy with my dps, just maintaining sunfire in packs and moonfire on priority targets and i still average like 200k without call/heart or DoC while running wildstalker with no access to or buffs for bloodseeker vines (they really should trigger from moonfire after the damage split) in pugs theres not a lot of time to damage anyway.
I tried to kitty-weave but you have to commit to too many globals without healing, and it doesn’t have sunfire. You have to bleed individually or at least build combo points to bite and it’s like 4-5 globals.
Chicken-weaving you can just sunfire and weave in moonfires when you don’t have to heal. You can also get skull bash and fluid form with the chicken build.
I find I do more dps as a chicken with less effort, but I only heal pugs.
The kitty weaving is pretty hard in pugs where you go cat and then have to shift back constantly
I will second this. As soon as I can be bothered to juggle my key binds around, switching to chicken-weaving is on the docket.
I don’t think you really have to do much damage even in keys above 10. I’m pretty aggressive with damage in 10s or below, but in like 13/14 pugs I find the vast majority of time I’m healing and going overkill on it to ensure people survive…it’s just way more value than squeezing in another 100-200k overall. You can get like 200k by doing bare minimum damage…and you don’t need to kitty weave to do that. If you lean fully into magic damage I bet you could easily do 300k or more without much trouble which isn’t a whole lot less than most people who kitty weave…single target bosses where there isn’t much healing required is where you will lose the most damage, but I can think of only like 3 bosses like that…and 2 of them are in ML.
I would say up to 15 keys, you can play what you prefer. I’ve timed multiple 13s as KotG Resto.
back when I played Rdru, I’ve always done boomie weave in.
Back in Shadowlands kitty was more powerful already, but I could never find the confidence nor the time to go kitty and apply bleeds, so I just moonfire/sunfire.
Played Rdru in S1 in lower keys - same thing - i just did some range DoTs.
Now that I Run 12-13’s on my ret, every resto that tries to kitty ends up doing less damage than those that sunfire/moonfire.
I don’t “cat weave” nor do I ever plan to. It’s just one area of playing a druid that I have basically no interest in, despite having played since vanilla. I use bear form as a turtle-form and I use cat form for the movement speed increase, and that’s about it. I don’t really care what type of DPS is better because I don’t care about doing DPS.
I don’t have any issues doing +10 as a KotG Resto Druid, 2-chesting most runs. I maintain that the best contribution that I can make to DPS is by keeping the other players alive and healing aggressively to the point that the group feels comfortable pulling more / pulling faster. Any downtime I have is usually better spent pre-HoTing rather than dishing out trivial DPS while my existing HoTs expire, which then forces me to play catch-up when real healing is required.
But there is also a big disparity between pugs and coordinated premade groups. Healers who mostly run in coordinated premade groups talk about all the free time they have while in uncoordinated pugs it’s a battle just to keep people alive through all of the mistakes that people make. Honestly, most healers who can carry pugs through a +10 are probably better than healers who are being carried through a +12 by their premade group.
Finally, I’ll say that it’s not an accident that all relevant rewards end at +10. People need to decide for themselves why they play certain content and what they want out of it. For me, it’s the gear - doing 8x +10 to fill my vault each week, as well as helping friends. I don’t feel any specific compulsive desire to do content beyond where the relevant rewards end. If you feel like torturing yourself just to pump-up a novelty score and get another mount, there is certainly nothing wrong with that. I already have 20 years worth of cool mounts that I never use due to being a druid and using travel form 99.9% of the time, and in the end I’ll probably still outgear you 
I’ve tried both and am starting to revert back to the Moonkin form weaving build. I don’t think healer damage is that important. Plus, as someone else here mentioned, the cat weaving build requires too many globals and puts your party at too much risk. I primarily PUG and don’t bother with anything above keystone level 10.
healer dmg doesn’t matter until you are pushing the limit of your time with no deaths and no big time wastes
owl resto is more than enough for 15s
The problem is no way to make use of Symbiotic Blooms as owl-weaving and you need them in high key mythics. Which essentially makes cat-weaving required. We can go wildstalker and still owl-weave, but its a waste, and we lose out a lot just to gain the blooms.
Im 100% pug, working on my +10s and do not cat weave. I am not good at melee, too overwhelming.