It’s certainly taken a few buffs to get here, but our HoTs actually are doing quite a bit of healing when you get a few stacked up on folks. Regrowth is certainly a big part of the gameplay as well, but the HoTs do a pretty good job in between the actual damage events.
Resto druid is more of a proactive healer than a reactive healer like basically every other healing spec in the game. You need to get used to the concept of doing lots of overhealing (which is basically a no-no for every other spec) to ramp up your HoTs before the damage even goes out. Which unfortunately means your rotation is a lot more involved and it also means you need to be knowledgeable of every fight so you know when that damage is about to go out. There are also some key talent points that you’ll need to keep track of during combat to really optimise your healing (such as clearcasting and reforestation).
All that said, I don’t think resto druid is a very beginner friendly healing spec. It will take some getting used to but once you get the hang of it it’s actually quite fun to play. I even dropped my resto shaman (the meta healer in M+) for my druid just for the fun factor.
Resto druid once you start understanding when things come out becomes THE most fun healer especially during this season where healing is quite important for surviving group wide AoE. It is one of the only healers that has a very good mana pool for just a healing, with some passive damage going out.
It is hard but once you hit walls for other healers you can just push through with the highest hps in mythic+ and under healed raids, becomes even more fun with hots actually doing quite a bit of healing.
It’s about 50/50 in terms of proactive versus reactive healing across the different specs. Resto druid has the most amount of globals of prep, but neither disc priest nor preservation evoker has the tools to react to unexpected damage, either. Mistweaver flirts the line between proactive and reactive depending on whether it’s raid or dungeon; for raid there is quite a bit of prep required while dungeons it’s fairly reactive.