Evokers are extremely strong. If you’re running stasis/dream flight then basically half of your keybinds are raid savers. Don’t fully empower dream breath, etc. But the skill ceiling is high
I literally said within the first ten posts in this thread that I thought Holy Priest was easier than Druid. You’re just in here raging because I think Flourish is an “oh s***” button and you apparently don’t.
That’s probably a fair statement… I have my share of panic moments when mana bombs are going out and I’m one of the recipients.
This is actually not exactly true. Rdruid has plenty of emergency and spot healing options.
NS is only a 1min cd and our tier gear reduces its timer considerably. But I’ll walk you through our emergency/spot healing options.
Regrowth- Remember that if target has RG HoT on them already, RG has a 40% higher chance to crit on top of your crit rating. RG crits with a couple mastery stacks can hit pretty hard (120k+). The HoT itself barely does anything but the initial heal is quite significant.
Nature’s Swiftness - For huge emergency tank heals, (or a DPS full heal) combine NS + SM + RG. I’ve seen those hit for 400k+ with only a few mastery stacks
Verdancy procs- Holding a LB refresh for quick top ups is pretty useful.
Your HoTs provide a baseline amount of throughput. Every HoT stack increases your total healing on the target by your mastery %, per stack. So people should usually have in m+ during dmg events 3+ mastery stacks. This makes our spot healing quite effective.
Side note: Rdruid is unironically the best tank (or single target) healer in the game by far. And I have the logs to prove it. For example, on heroic brood, I’ve outhealed entire raid team healers with my single target healing on the tank alone. We can easily sustain 60k+hps on a single target if we want, for as long as we want and burst 150k+ ST for minutes at a time.
For example, here’s a log of me carrying a normal council fight in a group whose tanks didn’t understand what was going on and so were taking excessive (usually unhealable) damage.
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/zafnv8jg13DPGm6J#fight=38&type=healing&source=1&target=1038&options=8
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/zafnv8jg13DPGm6J#fight=38&type=healing&source=1&target=1037&options=8
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/zafnv8jg13DPGm6J#fight=38&type=healing&options=8
If you just go to overall healing, you’ll see I healed the tanks a total of 17mil where the healer below me in similar gear was only 6 mil. But my total throughput (including overhealing) would’ve healed the tanks 39mil for a total raw HPS throughput of 177k HPS across 5 minutes lol.
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Flourish, convoke, tranquility, regrowth, and nature’s swiftness are gone? I’ll be danged.
I used to think this back with the old mastery. I dont like the required ramp up of the current one. The old one had zero interaction and was boring, but the current one leaves me feeling gimped. And I do easy content.
I wish we still had heal/tank/dps forums…
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Evoker healing abilities have intricate interactions, true. Preservation evoker could just have a high skill ceiling, BUT due to how easy it is to pump healing without knowing what you’re doing also gives it a low skill floor.
Helium add on helps a ton with any healer spec
I can personally tell you that having 10 hots on you from a druid is definitely going to be healing you more than me slapping bacon on one person and LoD’ing. Light of Dawn is better than it was in SL, by a slim margin, but its still nothing compared to basically any other healers AOE.
We only have one “brain dead” healing spell in LoH, and that’s a one and done, 10 min CD usable on one person. If they didn’t nerf Divine Toll into the ground, then I could agree a little more.
Between the Glimmer nerf, the Divine Toll nerf and the incredibly lackluster healing from Silver Hand, paladins AOE throughput is somehow exactly the same, if not a little worse than it was in SL.
There’s also a difference in the “kind” of difficulty between something like a Rdruid and a Hpal. Yes, a Rdruid requires being proactive, which means you obviously need to know your class and know the fights and dmg profiles. However, just because you have to be proactive, it does not automatically mean that it’s the hardest healer to play.
Reactive healers are harder for other reasons. In being reactive, we don’t have the luxury of preparing much for things. When dmg goes out, we have to be Johnny-on-the-spot immediately. That means we have less time to think about what to use, who to use it on and when to use it.
I have to formulate a battle plan mid fight, much more than a druid does, because most of what a druid does is planned ahead of time. Hpals should still have an idea of what to do before a fight starts, but we have less of an ability to actualize that plan than a druid does, before the fight.
Everything is reactive, more than any other healer, even Hpriest or Shaman. And that means that I have to react much, much faster than other specs usually do. And it’s not just muscle memory the way playing COD is. I have to react and think about what I’m doing and going to do, in the moment. This means I have to move extremely fast, and make very important decisions, sometimes within the length of a global cool down. I make the wrong decision, and someone dies.
This is true of any healer, of course, but other healers also have at least some sort of proactive spells to ease that reactive burden. Hpal does not - at least not to the extent that any other healer does. And certainly not in an AOE context.
I also don’t have anywhere near the raw throughput that a RDruid or PrEvoker has, unless I have a set of wings on my back, which obviously isn’t super often. Which is where most of the “pro” part of proactive comes from when concerning a HPal - knowing when to pop wings/Am.
Yes, I’ve got my Blessing of Sac, good for a tank every min. I’ve got my Silver Hand again, which is sort of like a Hot, a particularly crappy HoT, on a long CD, anyways. I’ve got my BoP, again, good for one person, long CD, and unviable for anything that isn’t physical dmg, or to be used on a tank without good coordination.
Each healer is difficult for their own reasons, but a blanket statement that Rdruids are the hardest to heal on is incredibly subjective at minimum, and just outright misinformed, or even disingenuous, at worst.
They all suck for their own reasons, and if I wasn’t so attached to my pink bubble fairy, I’d main my RDruid, because it IS easier to heal on. And it’s easier to heal on at higher levels for one simple reason: they have more throughput than my Paladin does, and more than most other specs.
It boils down to one simple fact: the more you’re able to put out, the easier the content is. Druids atm (along with Evokers) simply have the highest throughput. It doesn’t matter how complicated it is to heal on a class if you don’t have the raw healing to make it through the dungeon/fight to begin with. So when you say “hardest” to heal on, that can mean several things. And right now, every spec is struggling to put out Evoker and druid numbers. So, logic would dictate that they are currently the easiest healers to heal with atm.
i actually find raiding as a druid a bit easier but more tedious than m+. its legit just keep up hots and focus incarnate windows with cds for maximum through put. there is legit 3 hots,4 if you count regrowth and one ground circle heal. Everything else is cds or dpsing.
I will give my opinion.
For my part, I would say that the Rdruid is not the easiest for new players or tanks/dps that are trying to test the healer.
But at the same time, it is not so difficult, if you manage to get used to it.
But everything will vary depending on the type of content in which you play.
For example, if you do M+ between 20 and up, you can obviously struggle if your teammates aren’t organized, eat damage, don’t use their interrupt/cc, or don’t use defensive cds.
But at low M+ (less than 15) you can play quietly (if you focus on healing).
Difficulty enters the Rdruid (as well as other healers) due to different factors:
-The level of the key
-Your team
-Your composition
For my part, if I go with a full melee composition, it’s very easy for me to handle the incoming damage, since my tier and my build (which focuses on Efflo) mean that I don’t spend as much mana.
However, if it’s a ranks/caster party or at least 1 caster it can make it a bit difficult for you.
For example: I have once gone to TJS +18 (to farm the staff) with 1 hunter, 1 Spriest and 1 Arcane Mage. Several things happened, among them the lack of interrupts and worst of all… the 3 casters were going as far as possible and apart… making my build and my tier very useless. To top it off, since they were casters/ranges they received a lot of incoming damage and I had to go heal them because it was difficult for them to stay in melee in situations where there was no distance. And unfortunately at regularly high M+ the healer must do consistent dps in addition to healing or else the key’s success will look very tight.
Finally, in conclusion for me.
The difficulty is subjective, but I could not say that the Rdruid is very easy, if you do high level content (PvE) with dps or tanks that eat mechanics, since as I said, dps is required for the success of the key in many occasions (And the Rdruids take the Catweaving for dps).
In any case, if you want a not-so-complicated healer you could go for Hpriest.
only an evoker could write this
Sigh, guess i’ll also have to grind up 20s on my Rsham to get away from this lol.
Promise you, won’t be much harder.
Definitely not holy priest – i have 4 full bars of abilities that all get used regularly. Generally, newer classes have fewer abilities, so I’d wager evoker since all other healing specs date back to vanilla (and have similarly full bars)
Been using healbot since og wotlk. It’s been good to me! But the vuhdo functions seem way better if you can figure them out. Either way, they’re just raid frames with clickable keybinds and macros.
Def recommend either to help with healing reaction times.
Personally…
I came back to retail from classic and found that i REALLY enjoy rdruid healing (after playing rsham and disc priest on classic for the past 2+ years). The mobility and amount of heals you can pump out is so much fun. HOTs take a bit of time to get used to. You need to know when to expect damage to prepare your big heals.
Disc priest is cool if you like preventing damage. It’s always been a personal favorite of mine (i also loved healing as a SCH on ffxiv, so that’s just my preference). I also like to damage stuff and heal while doing that.
I wish resto shamans had some more love. They’re underwhelming… but still have cool lore and concepts, so I’ll always support them! Lol
I’d say hit up icyveins and look at the kits. Each class has a different way to play and can require multiple skills, macros, and keybinds to be efficient.
If you have the patience to learn it, grid. If you don’t, VUHDO. Healbot is terrible.
Look at WCL mythic stats for healers “all percents” and look at the spread on the bar from low to high.
That is generally the easiest way to find difficulty. The specs with the largest “spread” generally have the highest skill cap. Not a be all end all way to do this but shows you the bottom tier mythic players versus the top tier etc.
Generally have to avoid heroic and only do mythic because it’s normalized with 20 players versus 10/30 which makes logs meaningless.
The one misleading one is disc priest because the skill floor is really low lol and it’s definitely harder than rdruid or evoker. But I’d rank them:
Disc priest
rdruid/evoker
Hpal/rsham
MW
……
……
……
Knowing your ABCs
Holy priest
Get Healbot Continued. You can set it up to use left mouse, middle mouse, right mouse and other keybinds. So if you have an MMO mouse you can just program it to use regular clicks, ctrl clicks, alt clicks, shift clicks or others. Very simplistic and you just click on the health bars that need healing and remember which button does what.
As for “face roll easy” healing then I would recommend Druid (heal over time) or Holy Priest. Druid will have more versatility and survival though. Those are my recommendations to you as a long time healer main who has used healbot for over 10 years.
Keep in mind that only considering mythic players only considers the skill gap between the top 5%- 10% of the player base (or 1% if you believe general forums lul).
This skews the data immensely because the difference between a mid tier mythic player and a AOTC player is night and day. They’re in different worlds pretty much.
When I say skill gap I mean the worst resto druid, mr. Ultra casual doesn’t-have-vortex-on-bars resto druid, and sweaty top 1% mythic rdruid.
I think that’s more relevant given the discussion is about beginning healing.