Despite the mastery changes, swiftmend actually does 20% less healing in PTR compared to live with 2 hots on. Per the changes, we are supposed to be getting a significant mastery buff from the first couple hots. It currently does not seem like we do.
Rejuv also healing for either the same or slightly less depending on build.
This is pretty much all rdruid healing on the PTR: at 1 hot it’s slight buff over live, at 2 hots it’s a noticeable nerf compared to live.
Nobody is going to play resto in the next patch unless they fix it
If the current numbers hold true, it will turn out to be quite the epic mastery nerf. I can’t really imagine what they were thinking. It’s not at all like it was described in the patch notes, so I’m holding out hope that there are some early PTR tuning problems or something.
If they push forward with this, then I can only think of two possible reasons:
-They want to let us languish for a season with a broken Mastery before redesigning it completely. Leaving it broken for a season will make people desperate for change and lower the expectations for whatever the new design is.
-They want to throw a wrench in stat priorities, making Mastery the stat that no one wants.
We get to go back to vers then happy days.
I’ll probably give them a couple of builds to see if they can get this number-adjusting right.
Yeah something is off. On live my rejuv ticks for like 60k, on PTR it ticks for 61k.
Now since the mastery is reduced for additional heal over time effects, the healing simply goes down for each additional heal over time. I reported it as a bug on the PTR so let’s hope they look at it.
Really?
I was waiting to play cat weaving resto for sooooo long, I had lots of hope for this patch
Sad if confirmed
Well… i guess we can look forward another 18% in buffs when the season goes live.
Fully hotted target getting 1.8-1.9m regrowths on live, around 950-1050k on PTR. Basic math is hard for engineers, apparently. How did this slip…
When they announced this, when they said “diminish after the first hot” I thought to myself there’s no way they gonna get this wrong and have it diminish lower than live mastery numbers. It will be 30% boost for first hot and reduce in boost so that it’s basically live mastery numbers at really high hot counts
EX:
18.85% mastery on live and 24.5% mastery on PTR would be something like:
1 hot = 24.5% effective mastery
10 hots = ~18.85% effective mastery
…But I gave them too much credit…
They sure got it wrong and then some.
At 1 hot we get a 5%ish buff, 2 hots is ~1% (so a single rejuv is +4k/tick unless they have spring blossoms on them already then it’s ~1k/tick stronger (just to paint a picture of how small this buff we’re paying for is).
Basically past 2 hots we got nerfed.
At 11 hots in testing I’m seeing a 41% throughput nerf. For perspective, that’s more than 1/3 of our hps… just… gone at high hot counts.
At 11 hots the new mastery tapers so quickly that 24.5% base mastery on PTR is only adding 0.04% hps for that 11th hot. The numbers at 11 hots on PTR are equivelent to having 7.38% mastery on live, 4% of which are baseline/free?
It was probably a case where the engineer threw together a formula for non-linear scaling they thought would work and YOLOed it onto the PTR where QA (be that actual Blizzard employees or us) can find that the formula isn’t working.
I knew the healing would feel worse with the mastery change. I don’t want that mastery, it is gonna feel worse than what we have now…I have more control over my healing throughput with the current mastery stat, and my damage profile is completely fine?
I don’t even know why they’re messing with our mastery in the first place…just give us our spells back man, geeze guys.
We are a HOT class, we like putting hots on people…if you want spot healing to return, why did you take away adaptive swarm? You’re trying to fix something that isn’t broken…
but you know what they say when you’re designing something like a Hammer… 
I wish the druid developer would just listen to us for once…it would make them look better, and help them understand what the class is all about (if they’re not as experienced).
Our mastery leads to our GCD saturation being feast or famine based on the incoming damage profile. When incoming damage is fairly low to moderate, our mastery is perfect. Being able to dial-a-healing value based on the demands of the incoming damage is very powerful.
The problem is that when the incoming damage profile is heavy, on average, we need to maintain more mastery stacks on the team permanently. This leaves us less room for anything other than continually throwing out mastery stacks as each upcoming damage event requires higher throughput. Even if objectively resto druid can pull it off, it doesn’t really feel great to have to ramp at all times which is the case in many content today.
In theory, front-loading our mastery should be a way to help address this issue. It would allow us to commit fewer globals during the time in between major damage events but when the damage is still moderate, compared to today where even moderate damage requires 3-4 globals.
The current implementation on PTR however is awful. Front-loading our mastery should never cause our healing to be lower after the change than it is today. Even if at some number of HoTs the scaling needs to become linear again, the worst case scenario at any HoT count should be equal to what we have today. There’s clearly either a bug or major design failure on the PTR, and that needs to be changed.
I understand. Is there still time to just revert the change entirely and give us adaptive swarm as the fix back? or that not happening in 11.1? 
I mean I’m certainly not in any Blizzard design meetings, but I would be shocked if Adaptive Swarm were to return for resto before 12.0 prepatch, at the earliest. In most cases by the time a design of something like talents make it to PTR, that is set in stone. The numbers are fair game, but I doubt Blizzard would want to have to balance around adding another spell to the tool kit at this stage.
i disagree with you on how they can’t add the spell back due to some sort of complex balancing, or things being set in stone. They’ve always switched talents and spells around after PTR…If they can add augmentation Evoker to the system mid-season, I think they’re completely capable of adding an existing spell to the tree too.
I just think the new mastery and adaptive swarm aimed to achieve the same goals, provide the same sort of gameplay, but one feels a lot better than the other. If anything, the new mastery feels like it doesn’t synergize with the new tree very well (with nodes like harmonious blooming).
(EDITED: Misunderstood part of your post)
bringitbackby12.0 
That wasn’t quite what I was trying to say. I didn’t mean Blizzard couldn’t or would be unwilling to add a spell in the middle of an expansion or after a PTR goes live. Just that I don’t think they would be willing to make such a change as that in response to PTR feedback. If they weren’t already eyeing a design change like this, they’re unlikely to undertake it now. The only way I could see it added before 12.0 (or at least 11.5) is if it was already in the works and just missed the cut for the first build.
Blizzard didn’t decide to add augmentation or completely rework mage during their respective .5 patches based on feedback during the testing cycle, they clearly had planned it out well sooner than that and were ready to bring it to live.