Resto Druids have always had good raw healing compared to most healers. Still, I’d say that we were hit harder than most healers by the healing nerfs because it didn’t just weaken our healing power, it also slowed down our ramps. When it takes 3-5+ HoTs to top someone off instead of 1-2, that’s a lot of extra GCDs. Things are better in raids since there are multiple healers working together to help cover any liabilities created by our slow ramps, and once our ramps are going they are quite powerful. In M+ it can make things frustrating at times, and much harder to catch up if you fall behind on healing.
Still, even in M+, when a Resto Druid gets passed over for another healer, it’s usually for other reasons besides raw healing ability.
-We don’t have a traditional, no-BS interrupt. We have to rely on clunky abilities like Typhoon that don’t work in some cases, or go all-in with Feral-related talents to get to Incapacitating Roar or Skull Bash.
-We have a severe lack of damage-reduction abilities. Basically just Ironbark.
-We don’t have anything that really “buffs” other players, aside from Mark of the Wild and Stampeding Roar. Nothing equivalent to Paladin Blessings, etc.
-We don’t have an offensive dispel (Only soothe for enrage).
-We don’t have a true turtle ability (100% damage reduction) nor can we grant one to others.
-Our ramps are slow, making us bad at reacting to damage spikes quickly unless you use a cooldown.
-Tranquility is terrible in M+. It takes too long to heal, can’t move while casting it, is too easily interrupted, and is worthless against any kind of burst damage.
-Incorporeal requires that we talent into Hibernate, and even then we can only get one of them.
-Difficult to get both ghosts on Afflicted weeks because our Dispel cooldown is too long, meaning our only option to get the 2nd ghost is to heal it, and HoTs don’t usually heal fast enough. Even if you burn NS+Regrowth+Swiftmend it pretty much requires that either the Regrowth or the Swiftmend crits or it won’t be enough in many cases.
If it’s a good druid healer and a good group, all of these things can be worked around or aren’t that big of a deal. Still, it makes it very appealing for groups to just get a Holy Paladin instead, which can pretty much do every single one of those things that we can’t do while also offering fast reactive healing.
I am hopeful that the Grove Guardian treants will give us some on-demand burst that will make up for the slow nature of our ramp-based HoT healing. I think it will definitely fill a hole in our toolkit, but will it be enough to make us a more desirable healer overall? I guess we’ll find out on September 5th.
