I am still bewildered by Blizz’s decision to remove a core and iconic spell which druids have had since the beginning. WHY? Druids are already at the bottom of the barrel in healing, now we are the only healer without a single large healing spell.
I have a huge hole in my healing rotation. Spamming regrowth feels horrible, but this is what we are forced to do.
Blizzard, will you please revisit this decision and give resto druids our spell back!
Anyone who had done even a tiny amount of research in Legion never cast that spell more than two or three times a year. It was a noob trap that had no place in our kit and I’m happy it’s gone.
In exchange they made Regrowth more efficient and Abundance more mana friendly so that it can fill the role of our single target heal in raid where necessary.
Fill gaps in your rotation with Rejuv and Solar Wrath in raid and Catweaving in M+.
Actually voulk, in legion healing touch was great for pvp. With the right build it would not only apply a missing hot, but it would reduce the casting time of healing touch. With enough hots spread through a raid/bg healing touch was instant cast.
Sure I’ll concede PVP.
i’m like 99% they ended up nerfing that because it was so strong in bgs.
Correct me if I am wrong but wasn’t there a talent in legion ( maybe it was abundance as mentioned earlier) that basically sped up the cast time of healing touch to instantaneous if you had enough rejuvs rolling. I Robert playing around with the talent in raids and enjoying it.
Also I agree not liking that it is gone. I still press my old key binding for tha skill even though it no longer of coups activates haling touch.
HT was OP in raid and obscenely strong in bgs, not so much in arena.
With 15-20 Rejuvs out each HT was healing about as much as an entire Rejuv instantly for a portion of the mana.
HT was definitely not OP in raids in legion, it could be viable in some cases, but usually still worse than CW. That being said I also disagree with the previous post that it was useless. It was just extremely niche and often the niche it did fill was not even necessary to begin with. in large group content it was better to stick to strengths and let other heals cover whatever strange situations would make HT worth casting, but I still used it from time to time, mostly in m+.
I primarily used it for two things in legion, first, battlegrounds where using nourish + abundance meant instant HoTs once you had a rejuv blanket on the group. Second I used it for heavy movement combined with high damage when it was predictable and frequent, abundance was the key as it needed to be instant, an example would be Dresaron (dragon in DHT) on high keys, before each knockback I would put out ten rejuvs and use instant HT to keep people alive and healthy while I was running against the wind since it cost basically nothing and did heal for a decent amount with mastery stacks, and there was basically nothing that I would have been doing if I didn’t have that spell as it was crucial to stay in position and I didn’t always have gate etc. Also, due to the rocks falling soon after for 90% of people’s health it was important to keep people high on health coming out of the wind phase.
All that being said, new abundance has a better variety of use cases and HT without old abundance is a dead spell for almost everything. In my opinion loss of HT is not the biggest issue with the spec and having it back would not magically make it feel more interesting. In terms of it being an iconic spell, I don’t really have strong feelings about that, but keeping dead weight because it was good years ago is probably not the best move, I can always just ignore a spell if it doesn’t do anything for me, but some people might insist on using it. If it did have an obscure use, then cool that always feels fun to find something that someone overlooked, but without abundance, I don’t think it happens.
There’s no need for hyperbole. Druid is far from bottom of the barrel in healing, and it still has single target large healing spells in Regrowth and Swiftmend. It may not feel good to spam Regrowth, but it doesn’t feel good to spam Flash Heal or Flash of Light or Shadow Mend either.
I agree to an extent, to me what feels bad is using the same tool to deal with all situations, and what feels good is having a versatile kit that can react to different situations differently. But in raiding this is not really necessary, having 3-5 healers means they can each focus on their specific role mostly and use their most effective spells, which tends to reduce them to a couple of spells for the majority of the fight, that is just the way optimization works.
to me, saying that druid is “the bottom of the barrel in healing” without saying the content you are talking about is a debatable, but so is saying that they are far from it. I would argue that druid is pretty close to the bottom of the barrel in healing raids at the moment (lowest average for Uldir mythic on warcraft logs as one indicator), but only a crazy person would say that they are at the bottom for m+ (excuse my hyperbole), then we could talk about rbgs and arena which again would have totally different rankings. So since OP didn’t say what content they are talking about, I can only assume they are a huge fan of whatever druids are bad at, which in this case I would guess is raiding. Of course the idea that the thing that would make druids better at healing raids is HT seems questionable to me.
All that said, the healing balance has been very good in raiding this expansion in my mind, so being at the bottom is far from being not viable even at high ranking mythic progression.
Come now, I would never say Disc is bottom of the barrel in healing, although it is in Normal, Heroic, and Mythic raid up to 60% percentile, and by a larger amount. I think we can both agree the use of the phrase in this situation is hyperbole. “Druids do the lowest healing by a marginal amount in mythic raiding between the 60th and 95th percentiles” just doesn’t have the same punch.
For sure, when pushing for changes of course everyone is going to use the most compelling wording they can think of that is still technically true (or in a lot of cases provably false). personally I use high percentiles to see which class is the best and low percentiles to see which class is hard (relatively speaking), but one could argue about where is a reasonable percentile to make the swap.
Healing balance is really good right now, so I would rather wait and see how everything ends up with better gear, as you say, some of the wording in this thread makes this seem like a bigger issue than it is.
Edit: Doclobster here, not sure why it changed my character.
Except for the fact that differently from priests and paladins, we druids didn’t sign up for spamming direct heals. It just doesn’t feel right for our intended play style.
To OP:
Who cares about Healing Touch? I’d rather have mobile Tranquility, Living Seed or Displacer Beast back. Your priorities are weird…
Doclobster: agreed, though I get quite frustrated with hyperbole and do not find it more compelling in an argument. I know I am in the minority there. You’re a breath of fresh air to discuss this with.
You should see Disc priests crying that we even have Shadowmend as a spell, much less that we have to spam it in dungeons. All specs have a “theme” (HoTs, shields, totems, etc), that doesn’t mean they cannot have heals outside of their theme. Every healer needs a spammable direct heal for tanks dropping like a rock - it’s not about how it feels; it’s pragmatic.
I was never advocating for completely removing all direct heals from Restoration druid. All I said was that compared to Legion, our play style has deteriorated greatly. I remember being able to complete high keys while keeping Regrowth cast to a minimum and having a lot more downtime to help with DPS.
The instant cast HT build was totally dominant in battleground PvP. I could keep people alive even we with 5+ dps on them.
I was never advocating for completely removing all direct heals from Restoration druid. All I said was that compared to Legion, our play style has deteriorated greatly. I remember being able to complete high keys while keeping Regrowth cast to a minimum and having a lot more downtime to help with DPS.
I don’t really agree that our play style has deteriorated in mythic+ specifically. If you had said raiding, I would agree to an extent, as to me there is less flexibility to choose talents and gear in raids than there was in legion (or at least less flexibility that feels competitive).
In my experience in mythic+ the reason we were able to keep regrowth casts to a minimum in legion was because mostly we could just use rejuvenate/wild growth/efflo/LB combined with CDs like flourish and EoG to cover most damage. regrowth was mostly in rare circumstances like when someone was getting particularly blasted. We basically never had to regrowth a good tank because a good tank was their own healer in legion. This was changed with the new direction they took with tanks as opposed to a new direction to us for the most part, tanks just need more dedicated healing now.
In terms of having more downtime, of course we had more, between legendary shoulders (if used) and persistence relics we were sitting at rejuvenates that could last up to 31 seconds and for 22 seconds baseline, with the current duration of 15 seconds (16 with AL trait) we would need to cast 50%+ more rejuvenates to have the same coverage (though having the same coverage is not really going to happen). I agree that this feels bad after having had the long duration, but I don’t think it is reasonable to expect our class to play as care free as it did it legion, we didn’t even need to be proactive in a lot of cases, we could just default to having 6+ rejuvenates out on our party the whole dungeon.
Maybe your legion vs BfA experience was different but for me the change felt more like a healer style change than a specific resto druid style change. Healing in general feels more frantic in dungeons because they all feel less powerful, 15-20k hps overall for a dungeon feels pretty solid currently, with people having 150-175k health without stamina, where as in legion I was seeing more like 1.2-1.7m overall hps with a health pool of like 6-7m that lower ratio leaves things like quaking (that felt trivial in legion aside from a spell lock) feeling like a pretty considerable damage taken increase that leaves us with much less time to dps.
I could write volumes about which style of healing between legion and BfA feels better, but I don’t agree at all that the style has deteriorated, I find myself using more talents and making more hard choices than I did in legion, which to me is a plus. In legion most of the decision making was what gear to wear, with the actual spell casts being rejuv either way. Now you wear whatever one size fits all gear you like, and have to choose between spells, that fwiw all feel kind of weak in comparison.
Last thing, to your point about living seed in your previous post, I loved living seed and would also much rather have that back than healing touch, living seed was an interesting mechanic that made our direct healing feel much more druid like.
Great post, I have tryed to explain that same thing about how heals are relatively smaller compared to health bars and I think that’s part of what causes many players to feel weak and perhaps confused thinking that other classes didn’t suffer the same change, but it’s across all healers.
While it can feel bad at first, I think the change is overall a good thing, it allows the less bursty healers to have a bit more time to react and make damage in fights a bit less bursty (at least in theory). It also leaves some margin for us to gain power (and feel more powerful as we gear up).
About Druid in particular, I think the nerf to Tranq was perhaps a bit too big but I also think is a change in the right direction, having most of the healing loaded into a big CD that is also available more often than other raid CDs is not what Druid should be about (leave it to Disc Priests), Druids are supposed to be more about consistent healing through the fight with one big CD every 3m… Flourish already gives enough flexibility to use it as a second burst heal tool on a shorter CD if needed and rewards players who can predict damage and play proactively.
As for dungeons I think Druid’s kit is one of the better and most flexible ones, form the healers I play I think is the one that has the most options for viable talents in M+.
I honestly can’t remember how the hps/max health ratios looked at the start of legion but I suspect they were closer to what we are dealing with now than what we had at the end of legion. So I agree we will see power increase over the expansion, or at least I hope we will.
I don’t raid anymore so I can’t really say how bad the Tranq nerf feels, but seeing druids at the bottom of hps near the end of a raid tier makes sense, the more people avoid unneeded damage taken, the more direct healers should and will pull ahead.
I think everyone sort of has their own opinion as to what the core identity of a resto druid is, for me it has always been mobility and consistency. Losing HT didn’t bother me because that didn’t fit what the spec meant to me. To me the reason they generally have consistent healing is because HoTs make a lot more sense as a safety net than an emergency heal. But I would not mind losing some consistency if it meant we could gain more control. I would love to see some more stuff along the lines of genesis from prior to legion (though it was seldom useful) it was a cool idea to be able to get a burst of healing at the expense of removing your safety net for a time.
I pretty much agree with everything you’ve said here. When I said our play style has “deteriorated” I actually meant that restoration druids now see themselves forced to cast a lot more direct heals compared to Legion. In my humble opinion, this change brings us closer to other healer’s play styles and takes away our position as the quintessential HoT based healers.
Yes, I am well aware that every healing spec feels weaker now thanks to the ratio between HPS and health pools, but I still feel druids got affected the most for the sole reason that we were too reliant in our G’hanir traits and legendary gear (you pretty much said that yourself when you brought up Aman’Tul’s Wisdom and Persistence trait.)
Maybe it is just me being over dramatic, but I can’t help but feel like I’m playing a different class than I used to play.