I have played this resto druid as my main since 2010, these days much less so because it hurts my hands to play. We went from Living Seed, to the current mastery. Back then seed played itself and was a fun little mechanic. Nowadays, especially with all the little HOTS in various talents and abilities we have a convoluted overly complex mess that prevents anyone besides the best from understanding whats going on in a fight or enjoying the class for what it brings to the table. With the games mechanics and bosses constantly becoming more and more complex we need to have a talk about how much button pressing is required for our healing to have any kind of useful thorough put. Not to mention all the effort required to balancing all these HOTS with our mastery. Preferably I would like something new that gives the power back to our abilities and not gated beyond HOT Stacking before we can use the ability we actually want to. But I’m all for keeping the mastery in some interration of its current form and changing the bonus to having any HOT increases healing to the target by X%.
Healing shouldn’t be this hard to do. Its bad gameplay and indicative as to why people don’t want to heal anymore. If you change our role back to healing instead of DPSing then you need to put the fun back into doing the job.
TLDR: I love our spec being complex and requiring thinking. But these days its just too much with how complex the game has gotten to play.
As someone learning resto in prep for TWW I can confirm in dungeons right now there are moments where I’m not sure what is working that I’m able to keep people alive xD
This complexity is what makes resto druid interesting. Shaman is spam chain-heal. Disc priest is spam renew and smite. Holy priest is spam serenity spells. Holy paladin is spam flash of light.
I’ve been healing up to +14s comfortably on a 514 ilvl druid. There’s nothing wrong with the class, you just need to actually learn to play it.
Theres an innate kit thats strong and fun to play! but because of the mastery being so heavily weighted in the tuning of the class learning those little things are pretty important to do the you’re job! Just be sure to not get frustrated and practice fights on lower difficulties so you can learn where and when you need to do the preparation work to heal!
I’m not sure how the mastery makes healing on druid any more complex.
Are people really using weakauras or some mod to try and carefully track stacks instead of just spreading hots and using regrowth when extra burst healing is needed?
That said, I wouldn’t say no to a mastery that is more universally useful instead of only really mattering in M+, but what that might be, I have no good ideas.
I dont think the original “cast a direct non hot heal to buff your hots by x for 15 seconds” was much better, if anything it made the spec clunky forcing you to cast nourish or healing touch just to keep it up.
Mastery feels bad now because it was introduced when fights were less bursty and we had more of it baseline. Legion you had like 12% mastery (vs 4% now) and good stat scalling so getting like 30% per hot was easy and more then enough to cover the group with just rejuv and wildgrowth 90% of the time.
Both of those got nerfed because it was super good in the new 5 man key content bfa and SL, now mastery takes forever to get to decent levels and our hots are weaker while damage profiles got real bursty in DF and now TWW.
Living seed comming back would be good though, increase crits value and help with those brusty moments resto falls behind with. Maybe an upgrade/choice node with ysera’s gift since thats super dull now that its in the spec tree.
With tanks needing more healing again in TWW, our mastery should be better than ever as you should be able to maintain a large number of HoTs on the tank basically all the time.
It also massively helps our survibility any time we keep lots of HoTs on ourselves, which we can often predict in advance, with some kept up anyway for other reasons such as Photosynthesis.
So actually, our mastery is pretty amazing. The chance of them changing it to something worse or convoluted is far greater than the chance of them making it better or more interesting.
Its just a big issue with the apm required to heal on top of all the other things druids provide to encounters. And more specifically the amount of weight that the mastery has on the spec combined with the tuning required to reign in our baseline thoroughput with all the added hots in the tree ie cultivation, spring blossoms etc.
Also having to recast heals in order to get their full potential ads to it on already highly complicated encounters with affixes etc etc.
I’m bored of it, its unituitive and its too far down the rabbithole of APM requirements that its no longer accessible to play at higher levels anymore. I’m not trying to get carpal tunnel man. I get that people find it fun, and I’m not saying to change the spec or rotations just to put our thoroughput back into being more baseline and less into being chained by the upward potential of our mastery stacks getting too OP
Here is everything you need to know to rdruid, which i feel like is one of the easier healers. This is for 5man content.
Lifebloom on yourself and tank
place efflo below party
rejuvs for tick damage+swiftmend when that single person needs a big heal and its up
wildgrowth before big damage goes out or during incarn.
regrowth spam.
Drop trees/convoke for big healing, or big damage if youre spec allows.
lifebloom/efflo does most of the heavy lifting outside of incarn. During incarn you can spam instant regrowths which will quickly bring everyone to full, even from low health.
EDIT: If your party doesnt stand in Efflo you will quickly go oom. If you notice different groups sometimes run you dry, check efflo or party positioning.
Id prefer we keep the current mastery and they just give us a reworked living seed that works on all heal crits instead of just direct heals.
A reactionary buffer between our ramps and cooldowns for all the burst damage giving the hots time to work. we have great proactive healing but the reactive healing needed for pugs and low skilled groups is what the kit cant handle.
Resto druid can feel pretty situationally terrible since it is true a lot of your baseline heal power just absolutely sucks and with low skill groups that don’t dodge things your hots feel like they do negative healing. I don’t really like seeing that my biggest heal contribution in the overall is just spamming regrowth because the hots simply aren’t doing the work I want them to.
I’m definitely not as experienced of a resto druid player but I also notice I can muscle through a lot of the speedfarmer degenerate pulls as a shaman or a mistweaver because if I hit a button, a meaningful heal will come out and I won’t need to press more buttons before they start to be meaningfully healed
Honestly I think our mastery is fine, the issue is our HoTs don’t last long enough to utilise our mastery well, I’m suggesting perhaps Rejuvenation and Regrowths HoT rather then 12 sec maybe bump up to 15 sec baseline.
Honestly they don’t heal for much regardless it’s more a way to gain value from our mastery and the extension even though it’s 3 seconds, I feel would benefit Resto a lot.
I suggested to 15 seconds because Lifebloom is 15 sec, although 19 seconds if reapplied, which feels solid for a HoT duration.
yeah that don’t feel good though. I should feel my hots not just there for mastery stacks. Unless you’re playing high end content with perfect communication and knowledge of encounters its a dead healer with how much of our heal power is placed into the mastery and not just in the abilitys we hit. Stacking hots used to be something you did when you really needed to move health and abilities were mana costed/Innervate danced around to compensate for the solid thoroughput.
If you put old baselines on the extreme end of too much, I’m asking for somewhere in the middle to work our way back to the spec working without holding onto mastery for dear life. because right now it just feels really bad to play
It feels like old feral in regards to having to do 3x more work for the same output as most other healers. borderline subpar with current tuning.
hots are already a ramp concept, and if you build more ramp into that ramp, it starts to feel like we’re skateboarding and not healing in a game that is desperate for healers as is.
I think restos got to many optional ways to increase rejuvs duration.
Improved rejuv in the class tree, germination, nurturing dormancy; built up rejuv has a situational 21 second duration before pandemics but you have to piece it together across 3 talents 2 of which are in pretty competative parts of the spec tree.
They need to be condensed into 1 talent thats just “rejuvs duration is increased by 9 seconds” and the others given different affects besides extending the duration like mana costs or tick speed increases.
Regrowth already has this with thriving bringing it to an 18 second duration, no other random talents adding on extensions.