Haven’t healed at all since DF started but thinking of going back to healing on the side, so I just want to know how it feels right now to heal the current raid as Rdruid.
It really varies from fight to fight. Our strengths are the same as before - spread healing, tank healing, and being able to heal on the move. But the multiple blanket healing nerfs as well as several more specific Resto Druid nerfs in Dragonflight have left us feeling much weaker than at any time in at least the past two expansions. In raids, our HoTs feel weak and slow.
Tank healing is still strong, due to our mastery and being able to keep many HoTs reliably stacked on the tanks, but Tank self-heals are so strong this expansion that the value this brings to the raid is much less than before.
There isn’t as much “rot damage” in this raid (slow, mostly unavoidable ticking/dot damage), which is really where our HoTs tend to shine in raid Healing. Instead, damage tends to come in short bursts which favor classes that have lots of bursty healing cooldowns. Something like Tranquility has almost no chance to heal the raid before an evoker hits Rewind, or similar, and then you look like a tool as you sit there casting Tranq on full-health targets. Many of the fights force the groups to stay fairly tightly stacked, again, favoring the toolkits of healers such as evokers.
Resto Druids aren’t “Bad” healers at all, but they are definitely not one of the top healers for this raid. On a lot of fights, healing with a Resto Druid feels like trying to eat soup with a fork. You have to put in 120% effort just to be 80% as good as other healers who happen to have buttons to mash that almost perfectly align with the damage patters of this raid. There are still some fights where our healing toolkit works very well, but those fights are in the minority this tier.
It’s amazing how many times I’ve been out-healed only to notice that my parse was actually higher than the person who out-healed me. That means it’s basically normal for Resto-Druids to get out-healed on most fights right now. Since we completely lack a raid-wide damage reduction cool-down, throughput has largely been where our value has come from. Without that, we are solid B-tier.
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As a Rdruid main for 10 years, this made me sad. I can see this happening though since I have seen the type of damage going out but I guess I was still holding out for hope, hence my question lol.
Thank you for taking the time to reply, for the detailed explanation and for your insight! It was very clear and easy to understand. 
I’d say give it a go and see for yourself…
My experience at least is very different from the person that commented above… It will variate form fight to fight on that I agree, but as an aggregate Resto Druid is one of the highest HPS healers this tier.
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/33#metric=hps&dataset=95
Obviously there’s more than HPS and some other specs do have strong Raid utility that might be valued higher in some scenarios… But still, as far as HPS healers go Resto Druid is one of the strongest and more consistent ones imo.
The part I mostly disagree on is the damage profiles, or that most fights providing “too bursty” of a damage profile, in fact I’d say it’s the opposite, there’s a lot of “rot” damage happening and even the ones that do have specific “big damage” mechanics they are not as “bursty” as they used to… It’s more like “big damage over 12 to 20s”… To the point that a CD like flourish is actually very good precisely because it’s a “long duration” effect that can cover a long-lasting DOT (or something like Rashock’s intermission for example).
I am not currently playing my Resto Druid but I do Raid with one and have mained it in the past too, I also set-up CD rotations for my guild… But for example I technically “main” Disc but I’ve been progging as Holy precisely because there’s not enough big burst damage moments for Disc to shine and the consistent healing from Holy has been more useful to deal with the continuous damage.
Imo it’s not until Mythic Rashock (so the 5th M boss) where the damage patterns start to slightly favor bursty specs (and just slightly since the “burst” is kind of staggered a bit). For the next one (Zskarn) the damage is again like this, the main “damage” mechanic is “big damage over 15s”.
Thinking about it a bit more… I think that in lower difficulty content like LFR or Normal then yeah maybe there’s simply not enough damage going out and whenever the “burst moment” happens it might not be big enough, so the more bursty CDs will just snipe the slower ones. But that changes once you move into more challenging fights.
If you look at Heroic raids, which far more people play (nearly 10 times as many parses), things look a lot different:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/33#metric=hps&dataset=95&difficulty=4
And even though the numbers for mythic might look like things are okay, when you actually look at the rosters of most high-end mythic guilds, it’s becoming increasingly rare to see a Resto Druid. Holy Priest is by-far the most overpowered class this tier, followed by Holy Paladin, with Evoker having the most overpowered cooldowns.
And again, just looking at HPS doesn’t take into account the utility of raid-wide damage-reduction cooldowns, something Resto Druids don’t have.
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I mean yeah… I’m pretty sure I pointed that out myself too.
I agree that not having the Damage Reduction CDs do push Resto Druid a tier below the top performing specs (Holy Priest and Holy Paladin), however it is still the 3rd most represented spec on the back of very solid HPS so it’s not like things are in bad shape either.
I still stand on my comments about how the damage profiles look this tier.
Think resto suffers the most from over healed raids which a lot of pugs like to do.
I find 3 healing 20 mans as resto is great in heroic since your hots have time to work and healing cooldowns are better coordinated but when im stuck in a group trying to 5 heal and dont want to just burn mana sniping i drop meters pretty massively.
Playstyle wise the rejuv build is really nice to watch. Watching 5 rejuvs become 15+ during a flourish or heroism will never not be satisfying and our tierset is really nice this season, looks and function wise.
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