Every Resto Druid loves Flourish, so why not make it a variant of the mastery and a primary playstyle for Resto Druids?
Mastery: Flourishing Bloom
Your healing casts apply Flourish on your target, which increases the rate of your heal over time effects on them by XX% for 3 seconds. This effect stacks.
Casting Regrowth, Swiftmend, or Nourish increases the duration of your heal over time effects on your target by Y seconds, up to a total of Y * 4 seconds per effect.
This encourages using HoTs as a healing amplifier for both HoTs and spot healing if necessary. It also means casting HoT results in an immediate healing increase for burst damage.
Obviously there would need to be more talent support especially for raids, such as:
- Lifebloom also grants a permanent stack of Flourish for its duration.
- Ironbark and Overgrowth also applies multiple stacks of Flourish.
- Wild Growth applies Flourish to all affected players.
- Efflorescence applies a stack of Flourish each tick to injured targets.
- Tranquility also provides a stack of Flourish per tick.
Mostly spitballing.
So resto druid mastery needs some work, but I feel like this idea doesn’t address the primary issue I think exists with the mastery. On paper, druid mastery is excellent because it allows us to dial up how much healing we need to apply. In previous expansions when players weren’t getting chunked for 60% of their health pool, this was very valuable. The problem is that in the world we live today where players do eat these chunks of damage, we have to put a zillion globals of healing spells out just to keep them standing.
Your suggestion wouldn’t address this; we’d still need to keep putting heals out to keep up with the incoming damage. In fact, with the limited duration effect on your idea, we would be worse off at times because we would have to keep dropping heals into everyone to keep applying the flourish effect.
Perhaps our mastery could be an increase in the healing rate of our HoTs permanently rather than a buff that requires continual applications to keep up? If more HoTs had more of a linear effect on our output, it would give them the ability to make some of our HoTs strong on their own. Without that, we’re always going to have commit a ton of globals in order to keep up with other healers.
Its funny… blizz is so afraid of our mastery and tune around it. Yet, my priest’s top two spells in raid content is Halo and Echo of light.
I mean maybe a multistike type of effect? Small absorb? Living seed kinda deal? At this point i dont see the purpose of mastery as a stat. I’d rather have spirit back.
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They could also just get rid of all the fodder that clogs the mastery with padding and buff the baseline heals to be more comparable to legion.
Resto only had 5 baseline hots, with the new talent trees it more then doubles up to 12, and a lot of them dont actually do any meaningful healing after years of rebalancing to compensate so they are just a mastery stack.
They could ditch half of them, buff the core we cast by like 50% and our hots might actually do something without 12+ seconds of gcd lock ramp at all times.
I don’t mind having heals that are functionally just mastery stacks when they are a side effect of other things we are casting. I don’t care what number Spring Blossoms actually heals people for, I’m going to use Efflorescence for its heal and Verdancy anyway, so it’s just a bonus to get a mastery stack. The problem is when I am casting (Mastery Applicator #3) directly that it feels bad.
With that said, I do think there will never be a way to have enough HoTs that are side effects that wouldn’t result in it being overpowered the way our mastery functions, at least in Blizzard’s eyes. Your suggestion of pruning the number of possible mastery stacks we can have and retuning the HoTs themselves is probably the only way resto druid won’t feel terrible with the current mastery we have.
Maybe resto Druid can use a mastery effect like monk mw currently has. Except ours will be stronger if the target has no current hots and is weaker the more hots the current target has.
No No No and H*ll no! Resto Druid is fine and elite! Learn to play?
Eh I don’t like this very much if I’m being honest. While there definitely should be a balance struck with how many GCDs we need to commit to heal, creating a disincentive to cast HoTs for more healing seems like the wrong way to go. There would likely be a breakpoint where it would be correct to stop applying HoTs to a target and switch exclusively to Regrowth spam. Or maybe this would make Nourish worth casting… cringe
Class design isn’t just about how the class performs, it’s also about the feel. Resto druid is by far the most GCD locked healer of the bunch in order to build enough mastery stacks to keep the group alive. We have by far the most casts for our ramp, and have essentially no way to keep a group alive through the spike damage all content has these days without investing a dozen or more GCDs ahead of time. Even if it is performing well, which current data suggests is not the case in M+ or raid popularity, it is pretty miserable to have to always keep 3 mastery stacks on everyone to have any hope of keeping up with the frequent spikey damage events.