I use 3 regrowths and then nourish for the instant cast at 400% effectiveness (based on mastery) and it is actually a decent single target heal.
Useful when you need a strong single target heal and swift mend is not available.
Is it the most optimal? Probably not. But restoration druids do tend to be lacking some options when stuff really hits the fan and sometimes the answer is a simple strong single target heal.
I am using it in mythic + and I kind of prefer it for now.
Nourish has always been a decent single-target heal.
The problem with nourish isn’t how much it heals. The problem is that it does nothing to contribute toward our ramp. Regrowth, for example, leaves a HoT behind that not only continues to heal but adds a mastery stack. Swiftmend ties-in with Soul of the Forest, Reforestation, Verdant Infusion, etc. Nourish just gives you that one heal, while your HoTs expire.
Nourish costs too much for the amount it heals, while also removing the function keeper of the grove making you have to play wildstalker and basically lets your mastery stacks slowly wither away.
Regrowth heals for more, costs less mana, has free procs and gives you a mastery stack.
Mana cost of Nourish is the real problem. Way tooo expensive
Ive found nourish heals significantly more then regrowth how are you getting regrowth upfront heal to hit as hard a nourish?
A primary reason Nourish isn’t recommended is because it doesn’t really fit in with the strength of resto druid yet is too weak on its own to really fill the gap in the kit. Most druids get far more mileage out of maintaining maximum efficiency in what we do well knowing we’re going to eat it on the single target spot healing.
Abundance (talent) will make Regrowth crit almost all the time if you have enough rejuvenations out. Flash of Clarity (talent) will buff Regrowth by 30% if you cast Regrowth during a clearcast proc (which you should have often if you have high lifebloom uptime).
Nourish does heal more then regrowth baseline (446% spell power vs 330% with hot for regrowth). It does not heal more for its mana cost until ~4 mastery stacks, which is fine to maintain on 1 person with lifebloom’s x3 and rejuv/wildgrowth but pretty intensive to maintain on a 5 man party.
Then you have regrowth’s clearcasting % buff, mana free proc, abundance to garuntee crit, leaving a mastery stack, being a spawn for wildstalker, and faster cast time, meaning overall youll get more healing out of regrowth for the mana/time investment.
If Nourish had the old pvp talent from Legion where Nourish would add a missing hot every time it was cast, and if all hots are present it crits, it might actually see competitive use over grove guardians.
Eventually they removed Nourish and just made regrowth add missing hots before that was removed too. Tree of life was insanely op with that talent, just spam regrowth and you were unkillable. All hots and guaranteed crit.
I wasn’t a fan of that play style though personally so I’m kind of glad it’s gone, but nourish needs SOMETHING. It’s a trap talent. There is no reason to pick it in ANY situation.
Sure, and please don’t take my comment to mean that Nourish has never been useful or that there aren’t ways Blizzard could make it better. Just as it currently functions with its present tuning, it doesn’t really fit. And the opportunity cost of not having Grove Guardians given how much Blizzard wants us to use them is too high at this point.
It’s a long-cast time heal that does not apply its own HoT like Regrowth does, and requires other HoT’s on a target before you are able to heal them for big bertha numbers. It BETTER be a decent heal. But alas, because of its shortcomings it is worse than my Rsham’s Healing Surge (without even adding the multitude of modifiers I can add to healing surge). And I don’t have to do anything before surge. Damage? Surge. Full heal.
Design wise, Nourish is attempting to stick with the general theme for resto druid of being enhanced by HoTs. The idea is that you will already have HoTs on everything that moves, meaning your Nourish casts will naturally get that bonus. In a vacuum, this isn’t the dumbest design ever.
In practice, even in the best case with Nourish, druid is still going to be one of the worst single target healers when compared to most other healing specs. It’s far better to focus on juicing up what we do well, knowing we’re going to have an uphill climb if we ever find ourselves needing to single target heal.