Not trying to be toxic here, but I really dislike the grove guardians playstyle, and the shift in focus to instant single target heals over HOT effects. I don’t understand why blizzard keeps doing this thing to HOT/DOT specs (see Affliction lock) where instead of powerful DOT or HOT effects, they are heavily de-emphasized in the name of weirdly bursty single target healing/damage. Or in Resto’s case, pets, for some reason?
Why is this tree spamming regrowths on people instead of my core spells doing most of my healing? I want spells like wild growth, rejuv, flourish, (hell, even adaptive swarm), to feel interesting to press. I don’t want to just spam out treants to do a substantial amount of my healing. If they literally removed the grove guardians talent from the game, and just baked all of that healing into my actual direct healing spells, I would be happy, but instead we are getting an entire hero talent tree based around it for some reason? I just don’t get it.
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Grove guardians are just another HoT…. They fit with resto extremely well and are fun to play with imo.
If I were someone who didn’t like trees, I would probably spec into nourish. While not as powerful as trees, the option is there.
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Yeah, I agree having such a large part of our healing be out of our control feels kinda rough. Feels like I’m not the one doing the actual healing. Like I’m being carried by my pets.
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Really does seem like a missed opportunity from a resto perspective to have a whole talent tree designed around Force of Nature that doesn’t expand the number of spells they cast beyond the who-cares-moonfire. Even just having one talent that makes your trees echo the spells you cast at 10% effectiveness (rather than nourish spam) would be more interesting, and turn trees into a more interesting throughput cooldown. Pooling tree charges to dump 3 and wild growth with 3 echos as a mini-ramp?
And don’t get me started on the balance perspective…
Think my main problem with them is that they keep rebalancing them away from their original niche.
When they were introduced season 2 They were essentially 3 extra swiftmend charges that could then do a little sustain if you needed more triage and that was great.
They single handedly solved resto’s mythic plus problem against the super high burst damage blizz was shoving down healer throats season 1 and 2. But they keep changing it with aura nerfs, the tier bonus and now a hero tree to be essentially a slower off gcd regrowth instead of a front loaded swiftmend.
Still a burst counter but not nearly as good, more of a passive sustain now with so much power shifted to their nourishes.
Its extremely unfortunate that they brought back the tier set that effectively locks us into taking it.
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I’m fairly new to resto, having only started healing for the first time ever this xpac. Just from having played before and after grove guardians, it’s a significant change. In season 2, even though I knew catweaving was better than constantly casting wrath and starfire, I couldn’t bring myself to do it, because I felt like people would die if I wasn’t immediately capable of throwing a heal out. Now this is definitely due to my relative inexperience at the time, but once grove guardians became the go-to, I felt much less worried anytime I went into catform.