This feedback is part of my healer feedback and wishlist on every healer for 11.2. I have every healer at 680+, 3100 io+, HoF CE on most of them (probably all of them soon), and my current highest IO is over 3800. I am not an expert but I feel as though my credentials are probably above the average person’s.
Restoration Druid was a class I had a lot of fun on in the TWW Beta, playing it extensively. I posted A LOT of feedback on it in the ‘In Development’ forums but unfortunately it was all ignored. Since then most of the changes I had asked for were implemented by not all of them.
11.2 Feedback
None specifically to 11.2
Hero Spec Distinction and the HoT Problem
This is a long one so buckle up, TLDR at the end.
One of my biggest gripes with Resto Druid was the same as Mistweaver. The class plays the same regardless of which hero spec you pick. Unlike Mistweaver though, Resto Druid is not a jack of all trades with no weaknesses. My initial impressions of the Hero trees were that they would shore up those weaknesses but regrettably they never did and it still struggles to this day and will likely still continue to struggle in future.
The core problem with Restoration Druid is the nature of HoTs. HoTs occur over 12+ seconds usually, whereas most lethal damage events occur over 4-8 seconds. This means that depending on the scenario Resto Druid needs 300 to 400% of the necessary healing to actually address a damage event and keep people alive. This puts Resto in a feast or famine state in content, constantly. You have either situations like DF Season 3 and 4 where the devs just let Resto have 5 times the healing of every other spec and it’s OP and no other healers are in the meta, or you have situations like TWW Season 1 (which I posted in the beta about constantly) where RDruid was going to be basically unplayable without substantial aura mods.
This particular scenario would not aggravate me as much if the Hero Talents were not specified to basically be the solution to this… But they were never refined to actually address it… What do I mean by this?
Wildstalker focuses on having a plethora of constant hots, high consistent throughput, and a focus on heal over times. This is great when the dungeon is like Floodgate or Darkflame Cleft. The important damage events are giving me time to let my HoTs tick.
Keeper of the Grove was supposed to be more burst healing oriented, focused around power in Treant windows. The problem with this was that the Devs chose to tune it such that the Treants minorly (and in most cases less than Wildstalker) just buff the Druid. And Resto Druid heals over time. So you are back to square one in that you are still relying on effects which occur over 12+ seconds to heal damage events which occur in 4 seconds.
So what’s the deal? How could Keeper of the Grove be used to fix this?
Well there was a “bug.” And here I thought it was a feature because it existed for so long… On the TWW Beta and in Dragonflight, summoning a Treant had an insanely short micro-cooldown. In fact it essentially had no cooldown. Nowadays I think it’s 0.5 seconds which is a pretty long time. Well when it had like a 0.1 second cooldown you could summon 3 of them almost instantly to react to damage. In TWW/KotG this would give you 3 charges of Dream Petals. The cool part of Dream Petals was you could choose to spend them on single target spells like Rejuv and Regrowth. Or – And here is what was a bug I guess. If you cast Wild Growth, it would expend all Dream Petal charges at once. Now because the range on Dream Petals is so small you could rarely see the effect of this but if you were in a pre-made on the Beta where people would stack together closely, all the Dream Petals would cleave and it could do a massive burst heal that you could actually feel.
This gave you an amazingly fun and rewarding cooldown via your treants to deal with aoe burst damage in a short duration rather than rely on solely your hots. You still needed hots because of your mastery but the burst heal was less from the hots themselves. The even cooler part of this being it was variable cooldown. Maybe for one damage event you just needed 2 Treants, but for a big one you needed 3 Treants worth of Dream Petals.
The crazy part of this entire thing to me is that Dream Petals is the first core talent you get as a Keeper and it does essentially nothing right now. You do not play around it at all, I would not be surprised if you had someone play RDruid who hasn’t before if they could even notice a difference between summoning a treant and not summoning one.
So what I would personally do is to reduce the GCD on Treants back to the really really short cooldown or just remove Nourish and make a choice node where your Treants have a micro-cd and one where they don’t. Most of the time when you want to summon a Treant you want to summon 2 or 3 of them anyway, double tapping it is not a big deal. I would expand the range of Dream Petals to 12 yards. Therefore if someone is in Efflo they can expect to be cleaved by it. Currently I believe it’s 8 yards so even if you’re in efflo you can still get missed by it and there is 0 way to get PUGs to stack within 8 yards. It’s physically not possible. But people do sometimes respond to “Stand in Efflo” And then I would re-introduce the “bug,” imo feature, that if you use Wild Growth it will expend all Dream Petals at once. So basically just take things back to how they were on the Beta but with an increased range on Dream Petals. Beyond that it might be useful to buff Dream Petals and reduce the power of Harmony of the Grove and Power of Nature slightly.
Another way to do this is simply have anyone within your Efflo get hit by Dream Petals you expend up to 5 targets. So something like Shaman’s Healing Wave/Healing Rain cleave in Totem but for Dream Petals.
This would also fix the issue where Keeper of the Grove and Wildstalker fundamentally feel the same when you play them. And imo they should feel different, because if they feel the same you should just have one hero talent spec, not two. With these changes players could decide if they need burst healing or sustained healing for an encounter or dungeon and decide which to play.
TLDR: Treants used to have a shorter GCD and Wild Growth used to expend all Dream Petals. This led to an extremely fun and rewarding burst healing combo if you were pixel stacked, which allowed Druid to deal with burst damage healing events without needing to do 300-400% of the required healing of the damage event (because of the fact HoTs heal over time so they have to be overpowered to keep people alive during burst damage normally). The old usage of Treants, Wild Growth and Dream Petals fixed this but it was removed before 11.0 and TWW even released.