Specifically for m+, the healing % increase buff you get from treants being active needs to be 10% instead of 5%. For raids by all means keep it at 5%, but much like how atonement increases outside a raid environment, the treant buff needs to as well.
I say this simply because in a dungeon environment it just can’t compete with Wildstalker. Especially after the mastery buff which subsequently buffed Wildstalker throughput. Since symbiotic spores count as a mastery stack, not only are you getting the 20% from having the spore active on the player, you are getting another 20% (what my current mastery is at) from mastery. After testing numerous dungeons symbiotic spores have a ~20% uptime on each player. So 20% of the time you are going 40% more healing.
How does KotG compare. 3 treants active giving a 15% total healing increase for 15s on a 60s cd. A 25% uptime on a 15% heal compared to a 20% uptime on a 40% heal is a no brainer which is better. Yes KotG also has dream petals which need to be accounted for but by and large they offer negligible healing in a m+
The main point I want to make is the mastery buff resto druids gave Wildstalker a further leg up on KotG
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I wouldn’t mind seeing the buff increased, especially after the GCD change, which makes it harder to cast all 3 at once.
But what you didn’t mention is that the treants also do their own healing. 2 or 3 treants spamming Nourish can add up to a decent amount of healing, especially since they continue to heal even in situations where the entire group gets stunned, etc. They can also help overcome range limitations. Situations where the group is split or you’re trying to heal people on two sides of a platform. You can cast a couple treants before running to the other side so that people on the first side continue to receive some healing.
Overall, I did prefer how they were implemented initially. They are significantly weaker now, but I still consider them useful.
For M+ if treants gave a 10% buff I still wouldn’t play it. I’m not convinced that it would be stronger healing than WS even then, but a big turnoff is that KotG adds almost nothing in terms of damage.
Their design intent seems to have been wildstalker buffs cat damage and KotG buffs spell damage, but the KotG damage buffs are almost inconsequential. When I run WS the vines and bursting growth is like 25-30% of my overall damage. Meanwhile with KotG what do you have… trees occasionally casting moonfire, wrath and starfire do 10% more dmg, and every 5 regrowths you get an instant wrath or starfire that deals double damage. That’s literally it, and one of these is a choice node. KotG’s description in game says “…treants to protect their allies and crush their enemies”. Apparently the trees casting a moonfire every 6 seconds is considered “crushing enemies”. The treants should be casting starfire or starsurge and more frequently…or make petals have a damage component like it does for boomies. There are a ton of things they could do, just do something.
I dunno, I feel the resto druid designer/balance team needs to give the spec more attention. It feels half assed in many ways. I’m still convinced that our talent “invigorate” was coded incorrectly and they never bothered to fix it. I think the tooltip description is what they wanted it to do, but messed up and never fixed it. Invigorate’s description:
“Refreshes the duration of your active Lifebloom and Rejuvenation effects on the target and causes them to complete 200% faster”
It doesn’t do this. It sets the duration of lifebloom and rejuv to 3 seconds and makes them tick faster. Needless to say this is an awful ability and it being in the 2nd to last tier is just confusing, but the ability itself doesn’t make any sense, but an ability that the tooltip describes does make sense which is why I think that was their intent.
But the treants are giving 5% all healing and 10% life bloom/rejuv/efflo healing per.
I didn’t think they stacked the 10% based on the talent description but it clearly does.
That’s 15% all healing and 30% rejuv/bloom healing every 51-60s. It definitely favors rejuv/abundance playstyle which I prefer and its been slapping for me in 10s.