I’d be curious what your PVE progress is with those toons at least. I can’t speak for PVP, though from what I understand, overstacking Rampant and Grove is actually useful there (much more of your healing is reactive and you can’t rely on procs smoothing out). But you don’t sound like you’re speaking from the perspective of a current mythic rdruid.
In PVE, overstacking those traits is…bad. You’re advertising it to heal reactively to compensate for bad DPS, but we can’t actually get away with that in any content that matters. We’re fundamentally not built to do it, and we sacrifice far too much of what we are good at by trying. It’s like making a crutch by carving it out of your good leg. Once things hit hard enough to count, our best solution to bad DPS is usually to point and laugh.
In a raid, adding to Regrowth’s secondary hot is almost completely meaningless. If you’re trying to spot heal, the castbar alone means Regrowth is going to get off one less tick than Rejuv before someone else snipes it – and they will, because unless it crits the initial heal is vanishingly unlikely to top them off. If your healers are any good, you may not even get that because there’s a good chance they’ll be full by the time your castbar finishes. If the hit left a lingering dot, Regrowth’s hot is strictly inferior to Rejuv even if you over-traited it. The only time you’re using non-clearcasted Regrowth is if you’re desperate (which happens, do what you have to) or running Abundance (where it’s still your tertiary heal).
“But I parse better when I spam it!” Well, yes. There’s a finite amount to be healed, and healing parses mostly just tell you whether you overstacked them to crutch pinch phases and early learning. If you’re on an easy farm kill, fine, steal as much as you can, but you might also go oom 20 seconds sooner during the hairiest part. Unless your raid is pared down enough that your hots can tick out and you can be the star backbone healer while your resto shamans go nuts with DPS because they forgot which spec they picked, you’re not going to be the star backbone healer. You’re there to preempt and efficiently counter lingering effects and lesser rot hits so other healers can focus on spot spikes, and a lot of it doesn’t even show up until late in the fight.
In M+, sniping isn’t a concern because you’re the only healer and damage is typically easy to predict, so you can apply exactly as much healing as will do the job and get back to DPS. There’s at least a potential argument to make Regrowth more efficient there, but those other throughput traits you’re missing out on completely destroy it. Covenant alone outperforms either of your overstacked traits regardless of circumstances. Hell, Early Harvest outperforms either of them, and it’s not even one of our better ones.
You are right, a lot of people in M+ cat weave which is mostly about haste and mastery, involving hot stacking. How many globals you can get off per second and how long your dps windows are. Druids are strong and arguably the most popular M+ healer because of it. They are phenomenal healers when they are by themselves and when there is predictable damage going out. As soon as there is another healer in the group, their healing output will suffer.
If you do end up stacking these 3 traits your regrowth will heal twice as much as a single rejuvenation with about a 700 mana cost difference, not to mention it heals over 12 seconds. I don’t know if you know this but a single rejuvenation heals for as much as the regrowth instant heal in a 15 second window. If you have three rampart growth traits the HoT from regrowth heals for just as much as the instant heal. If you want to combine with abundance that only increases it’s potential even more. Using these traits its harder to go oom. You are using a more direct and more efficient mana per heal, with potential to be a free cast from lifebloom procs and a choice to reduce mana cost and higher crit chance through abundance.
You only want to be stacking haste and critical strike up to certain % breakpoints where you know you will get an extra tick off a HoT or a set crit %. Stacking the azerite traits with proc haste trinkets will most definitely give you more haste than you want. I can get up to about 70% haste which anything over 31% is a little unnecessary and you will benefit from mastery more in my opinion. It may feel better to play with a lot of haste, but there will be a certain point where you will not get as much benefit as you would from mastery or versatility.
Yeah, but if you’re stacking Rampant that much, you’re missing out on far more powerful stuff than making our worst button slightly less sucky. One trait of Bonded Souls is often like 3-5% of total healing, and also helps keep you topped off so Waking Dream gets out to the raid. Covenant is ridiculously good for everything. Lively Spirit turns Innervate into a burst throughput cooldown, and we ache for those.
I’m well aware how much Rejuv heals, and there’s a reason almost every druid parse has it taking up the highest percentage of their healing. Regrowth’s initial hit is often either wasted entirely to overhealing or rendered pointless with an inevitable snipe that would’ve topped them off even if you never cast it, so in the overwhelming majority of cases the secondary hot is about all that matters. Rejuv is already stronger than that even if you overstack Rampant, and one Autumn trait makes it last longer too before you even consider that it comes with a free mastery layer. Rejuving a DPS who has or is about to get a long dot is far more helpful (especially with Autumn) than spending more mana to waste the initial hit and leave a shorter, weaker hot on them. We have to heal proactively like that. It’s what we’re built for.
It’s not unintentional that most of our traits and talents deal in putting up free mastery stacks. Healer stat weights almost inevitably draw a big circle around mastery because we just get SO MANY freebies and every one of them is a flat percentage increase to everything we do. Our heals are quadratic.
I think you missed the part where regrowth does x2 the amount of a rejuvenation. Here’s the breakdown:
Right now my rejuv heals for about 16k over 15 seconds. Even if you factor in your mastery, which requires a hot to be on there in the first place so you need to cast rejuvenation or efflorescence (with spring blossoms talented) first to get the benefit of mastery. Lets say mastery is 20%. Pretend we have germination. The first rejuv does not benefit from mastery so that is a flat 16k heal over 15 seconds. The second one will heal an additional 20%. So my second rejuv will heal for 20k over 15 seconds, factoring in mastery. So we are healing the target for 36k over 15 seconds at the cost of 4200 mana.
Now for regrowth 2800 mana cost without mastery instant heal of 15k and another 14k over 12 seconds. If there is a rejuv on the target already, thats an 18k instant heal and a 17k hot. With germination thats 21k instant heal and a 20k heal over time. Now based off these numbers the regrowth alone heals for 41k, but at a mana cost of 7000 because you need the two rejuvenations. If you had one rejuvenation there it would be a 35k heal + 16k from the single rejuvenation at a mana cost of 5000. If you add the healing done by two rejvenations, thats an extra 36k healing done. So effectively you have just healed someone for 77k healing for 7000 mana and 3 globals, with 21k insant heal and 20k over 12 seconds with an additional 41k over 15 seconds. If you factor in abundance with this, there is a 12% reduced mana cost and crit chance on regrowth as well, further reducing the mana cost down to 2464.
This is your first mistake as far as PVE is concerned. Germ is a firehose and eats far too many globals to be much help outside of a few Tyrannical bosses like Korgus or Gold Serpent who have ridiculous but predictable dots. Photo is more efficient and Flourish is more useful as a much-needed burst cooldown. Germ is for PVP.
And what I’m saying is that in a raid setting, that primary 15k heal might as well be zero. Even if it crits. That’s how easy it is for other healers to snipe us, and it’s about 50/50 that they already did it before your cast even goes off. You spent three traits, more mana, and a full castbar to put up a 14k / 12 secondary that gets outhealed by default un-traited Rejuv.
That’s what I’m getting at here. PVP, yeah you have to have the mana firehose and reactive healing because people can hard swap at any time. But in PVE, if you’re healing damage that’s already been taken, you’re behind. In a raid you have other healers who are better at it, and in M+ you want your hots up before the pull even starts so you can kitty more. If they’re targeted with Upheaval or whatever, they should have two layers up before it even hits (not counting the Spring Blossoms they already had by default or the Grove they’re going to get the moment it happens). Druid is about healing the damage that’s about to be taken.
Germination was an example, notice how i said pretend. The only reason we are able to get heal sniped is because we lack direct heals. Before it was because healing touch was on a 2.5-3.5 cast timer and other healers have 1.5 sec cast times. This was a big problem with druid raiding in classic and you will find that it will be a big topic again with classic coming out soon.
This build provides an efficient way to direct heal your group members, you won’t be able to get heal sniped as easily in raids. It’s pretty hard to find yourself falling behind in this.
I am aware that cat weaving is popular in m+ and the play style of that build. You can put your hots on before the pull, they are gonna fall of pretty quick when you go for the stealth rake though. However, the benefit of druids is that there are multiple ways to play them so you do you pal. I’m just here giving out information, you take it how you want it.
Oddly enough I played with a druid that had 3× rampant growths when I was tanking a heroic BoD. They were spamming regrowths and running out of mana constantly. I’ve only healed a normal but I felt strong enough without the trait to heal the raid quite effectively. Spammin regrowth in a raid situation seams counter productive when holy priests, monks, and shamans can spot heal better.
Getting heal sniped isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It means someone better and more efficient at spot healing did spot healing. I mean, you can waste mana trying to beat your own teammates to the punch, take half of what they were already going to heal in one shot, and ultimately make no difference doing it…or you can DPS some more, innervate someone else, and stockpile for whatever crazy BS happens at the end.
Almost every fight in Dazar has precipitous changes in healing demands as the fight goes on. There’s no reason to break your back trying to pad a parse that doesn’t matter as long as the boss dies.
You aren’t spamming regrowth here, the idea is to let the hot run because its doing just as much as the insta heal and combine it with your other hots. At this point regrowth would be considered a superior single target heal and the only single target heal that is more mana efficient is a flash heal from a holy priest or penance from a disc priest. Flash of light from a paladin and healing surge from a shaman heals for less and requires a little more mana if you don’t factor in paladin healing crit and that shamans get mana back when healing surge crits.
Don’t get me wrong, this trait isn’t a requirement. What I am getting at is that there are several ways to play the druid class and this is another style of choice. Nobody is really min maxing unless you are going pushing mythic progression. I actually find this playstyle a lot less demanding because instead of rejuv spamming and going back to shred spamming in cat like a child with ADD , you are weaving in regrowth casts and aiming to maximize their potential.
The power of any given trait can vary greatly depending on the circumstances. Try doing some low level Mythic+ PUGS sometime Sevaryn. The amount of Regrowths you have to throw out is disgusting. I rarely have issues keeping the tank up so Grove Tending has little value to me. Same with Waking Dreams. Traits like Bonded Souls put out a lot of healing but you can’t count on them when someone is in the red. I personally only do Mythic+ PUGs. You can say my situation is not ideal but it’s also not uncommon.
Edit: also have to stick up for Germination. I tried Photosynthesis for a while and found that it was too unreliable to be useful, despite how much healing it provides. When my tank is in trouble that extra Rejuvenation is a powerful, guaranteed extra HoT. Germination is also very nice for spot healing during heavy movement. I would give the talent a big thumbs up if the group healing component didn’t require you to use a GCD and waste a Lifebloom on yourself. I don’t begrudge anyone using it. It’s just not for me.
Not too long ago on these very same forums, germination was an accepted talent for m+, as was photo. They were each useful in their own regard and varied vastly in play style. That was about all you could say about it. Pick what play style suited you best and proceed.
Somewhere down the road this morphed into “my play style is better, therefor the other talent is bad”
It’s all a bunch of crap.
Pick what you like the most for forget everyone else. It’s a game. Have fun!
Imagine playing Druid and not realizing that every HoT provides its own Mastery stack. One rejuv on a target with 20% mastery heals for 20% more. You don’t need 2 or more.
Stacking more than one Rampant Growth is terrible because of the opportunity cost of the much stronger traits that you give up.
The math is literally there to support that. You obviously cant read eh? The opprunity cost of what? Autumn leaves? Lively spirit? Lmfao. You only need one waking dream, thats to make yseras gift tick for 4 seconds. The extra bonus healing done by rejuv is not good at all. Grove tending is good. but again you only need one or two because all you are looking for is the extra HoT effect.
The “opportunuty cost” of other traits do not compare to the amount of direct healing and mana efficiency you gain.
You don’t even need one Waking Dream. Autumn Leaves, Lively Spirit and almost all of the stat traits are better than multiple Rampant Growth in raid. The math has been done to death by people who understand the core spec mechanics to a much higher level than “the first rejuv doesn’t count toward mastery”. The “math is literally there to support it” is wrong and I already pointed out why.
Buddy the same people who run the simutlations also listed rampart regrowth as an A tier trait level, while incite the pack or tradwinds (mastery stat increase) is on the B tier. The benefit of the regrowth trait is that it is a constant and you can always rely on it. You cant rely on a % chance to proc. It can easily occur during periods of minimal damage and end up being a waste. Not to mention that you can get way more mastery than you need. The stat priority for healers are more even than most people realize. After a certain amount, there will be diminished effects.
Yes the first one is an A tier trait and I am 100% on board with that. You get a free mastery stack with a high uptime on a key target like a tank. I only take issue with #2 and #3. It doesn’t stack well.
Eh. I have occasionally with friends, and yeah I can tell when I heal more on a key that doesn’t even have all the affixes than when my guild’s main M+ team ropes me out of the blue for a +15.
Stacking Rampant doesn’t really help that though. The hot is the only part that benefits. Most of your Regrowth spam is on the same target who keeps standing in the fire, so you’re not going to risk leaving them below full for long and they won’t get any benefit from the slightly stronger hot. Might as well just take better throughput traits.
It has its places, but it hurts your GCDs really badly and it pretty much amounts to just spraying people with your mana bar. I typically pick it up for certain Tyrannical weeks, and it’s a tossup with Flourish for Greivous depending on the dungeon.
Photo shines best when there’s little splash and you can leverage the tank procs for bigger pulls, or in AOE rot fights where everyone is taking constant damage and the Lifebloom on yourself isn’t wasted at all. I picked it for Bwonsamdi this past week because I knew I was going death realm, and it worked beautifully.
Yeah it’s not universally bad. Just tends to be too wasteful and slow on the windup for most cases and you have to know why you’re picking it.