I remind everyone it’s still 15% nerfed since 4th season of DF. Maybe unnerf it at least by 5%?
While I would take whatever buffs Blizzard decided to bestow, this is honestly just kicking the can down the road some more. The resto druid mastery works really well with slower, consistent damage profiles like we had for a long time prior to DF; but with Blizzard moving to a heavy spike damage profile, the need for resto druid to keep multiple HoTs on all targets at all times really hamstrings the ability for druids to have time for anything except casting more HoTs. Unless Blizzard changes the damage profile to back to something similar as Shadowlands, the resto druid mastery is highly likely to continue to be more of a design anchor than anything else.
2 Likes
If Blizzard is determined to plow forward with all of the bad changes that they made to damage profiles, then it’s obvious that something will need to change.
But on a personal level, I’d really hate to see our mastery change. It would be almost like re-learning how to heal at this point.
One thing is for sure, I’ve never had to work this hard on gearing before (in terms of hunting for specific stats). I’ve focused on Mastery for a long time, but never to this extent. Right now I have almost no crit or versatility on my gear whatsoever, and barely enough haste, all so that I can have 24k+ Mastery.
Thankfully with Abundance and the new Wildwood Roots talent, I don’t actually need crit to get Regrowth close to 100% crit chance, and I don’t need to stack haste to cast Regrowth faster than the GCD - I just need to play smart and pre-cast a LOT of rejuvenation.
It’s painful, stressful, and it feels like I’m fighting a losing battle at this point, but at least for now I’ve still managed to hold on. I just don’t know how much longer i’ll be able to keep riding on the back of my own stubbornness.
There are rewarding moments, such as the way this week’s affix just automatically melts off due to all of the HoTs that I had already casted anyway. For my play style, with all that mastery, it’s like a free affix.
While I agree that I’d prefer Blizzard change damage profiles back to closer to what they were in Shadowlands, I am not convinced there couldn’t exist a mastery that still encourages a similar gameplay loop as we currently have. The challenge for our mastery is that it doesn’t scale linearly; Blizzard has to balance our HoTs around the potential we have when we stack multiple HoTs on top of one another. Hence, each HoT does very little on its own since there is a positive feedback loop with the more HoTs we apply.
If instead our mastery scaled linearly, some of our HoTs could be tuned to be better standalone. Most of our kit can still be tuned around needing to stack multiple HoTs on each target to keep them alive, certainly during big damage events; but it would become possible for us to have options that a small to medium damage event wouldn’t also require us to commit 3 globals per person to deal with.
Further, there wouldn’t be any reason our current mastery effect would have to go away completely. Blizzard could add it back as an effect we cast or CD. For instance, Germination could apply our current mastery effect to the target rather than a second stack of rejuvenation.
Just spitballing here, and please don’t get caught up around the numbers. Let’s say our mastery became this:
Your healing over time effects tick (mastery)% faster, last (mastery)% longer, and bloom for (mastery)% when they expire.
Then since I stole Flourish’s effect for our mastery, Flourish becomes:
Your healing is increased by 10% for each healing over time effect on the target for 8 seconds.
This effect is increased by 100% when not in a raid.
Like I mentioned before, the numbers are flexible here, but I think this demonstrates the overall concept I am going with. Mastery still gives us a heavy incentive to rely on our HoTs, mastery will help reduce the globals we need in small group content because our HoTs last longer, we wouldn’t immediately become overpowered if Blizzard makes Wild Growth a solid standalone AOE heal if we’re ever caught out without multiple mastery stacks on everyone ahead of time, and we still get the payoff of our mega ramp especially in raid since are rewarded for every HoT we have out.
I was speaking PvP wise bro and Mastery there is nerfed by 15%. So let’s say if you have 19% mastery you will effectively have 16,25%.
R Druid lacks single target healing due to removal of Adaptive Swarm. I don’t know what damage profile was in SL in PvE but in PvP it was terrible and I’d never want it back.
yea currently we are EXTREMELY gcd locked on resto druid, its pretty rediculous. I would love the chance to dps more in cat form but right now it just seems to stressful. They could also do more aoe spells like even an aoe rejuvenation (perhaps less power) that way you could get hots out on multiple people; Tossing out rejuvs on multiple people just for the mastery stack feels bad, especially when you dont even know if you are getting full value out of the rejuv (due to possible overhealing). I dunno its just a big change from Feral druid, where you are sitting there waiting on energy to cast Shred, hop over to resto and its like I’m spamming healing spells like 100 APM.
P.S. They could even do something unique with Rejuv, like adaptive swarm. Throw out a rejuv on a target. If there are multiple targets taking damage, the rejuv splits and goes onto other targets, changing the spell ID (weaker version). If needed, you can then throw out the original Rejuv back on the target for another mastery stack. Anything to get heals out on more targets without actually requiring that you select every target would be nice.
GL they remove Focused Growth next patch. Resto Druid is literally a dead spec in PvP next patch unless they bring more changes.