Resto druid is a lot stronger than everyone gives it credit for

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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The general classic playerbase seems to have a lacking understanding of Resto Druid and think they can only bring one to raids because of this. I want to dispel some of this.

It should come to no surprise that resto druid is the most versatile healer in classic wow. It’s the only healer that has a plethora of ways to build your character in order to meet the needs of your raid.

Resto druid has 3 major builds for healing:

Swiftmend or “deep resto”
Moonglow || “I like mana”
Regrowth or “Parse-king”

Each playstyle is different and each playstyle fits in a different place in the raid that does not interfere with the other two druid playstyles. The strength of Druid overall is that it can heal every tank simultaneously, or keep steady healing on both the tanks, and the raid, simultaneously. But each talent spec takes it further than that.

Moonglow // Healing Touch

Moonglow is your jack of all trades healer. They have the most mana, and get great use out of Healing touch, and rejuv. For Moonglow spell crits = spell haste. Whether you’re using these crits to heal a tank faster or to tap the raid with faster heals, Moonglow has the potential to do every and any healing role.

By utilizing HT r3(2.0 sec) and HT 4(2.5 sec), you can fish for Nature’s Grace proces in order to cast at 1.5sec and 2.0 sec respectively. This gives resto druid the greatest benefit from spell crit gear of all the healers because their hps double dips into crit, which creates exponential growth with crits. A resto druid who takes advantage of all the spell crit world buffs will be quite speedy for this reason. The stength is exacerbated by the ZG Trinket Wushoolay’s trinket and the Idol of Health.

The big Healing Touch Resource

Moonglow // Rejuvenation

Moonglow as a spec takes advantage of mana talents for healing longevity, as well as rejuv talents in order to raid heal with rejuvenation as well. This means that Moonglow is great for spamming a tank with HT, but also that Moonglow is a great spec for rejuvenation raid healing. Rejuvenation raid healing does not work for all raid environments though. A Horde guild, for example, that is filled with chain healing resto shamans will shut out rejuvenation as a healing mechanic for the raid. An alliance guild that lacks uniform raid healing will find that rejuvenation can be quite strong. Any raid that has an over-abundance of healers will find that rejuvenation raid struggles as well. At least this early on in raid phases. As raids become more damaging, rejuvenation is a reliable tool for any raid faction or composition. The tier 2 8-pc set bonus increases rejuvation’s healing significantly in addition to the later druid relic Idol of Rejuvenation.

One of the biggest complains from raiders about rejuvation is that it does not stack with other Rejuvs. This is only a problem for healing tanks. It is only possible to have 8 rejuvs out at a time and there are 40 members in a raid. In terms of raid healing, having 2 druids split rejuv targets is sustainable as well as a strong form of raid healing. On multi-tank encounters, you can even split the tanks between the 2 druids. The limit of 1 rejuv per target is not enough reason to limit bringing only1 resto druid to raid. In fact you could run 3 druids to cover raid healing and they would never need to interfere with each other if organized correctly. But Horde will be hard pressed to bring multiple r.druids when you can bring multiple shaman early on in Classic. Shaman lose the ability to dominate raids with Chain heal as later raids introduce higher raid damage and more mechanics, especially those that require the raid to spread out such as in AQ and even Vael in BWL.

The Rejuvenation Resource

Swiftmend

Swiftmend is great for druids who need to watch a specific tank target like a hawk. This a common job for horde restoration druids early on, or druids in general for raids that have an abundance of healers. Swiftmend gives you an additional emergency heal for tanks so that you’re not limited to the 3min cd Nature’s Swiftness, and the druid is great for layering regrowth, rejuv, and HT spam on a tank for the most damaging fights for a tank, like Ragnaros. Mana-economy is worse than moonglow, but Swiftmend can also rejuv-heal the raid, and HT spam the tanks, just like a Moonglow druid. The layering of hots on a tank who is taking large damage can not be overstated or underestimated. They specialize in giving tanks just a little more time to catch a heal in emergencies though.

For most healers, 1.5sec is the minimum amount of time it takes to heal a tank without a pre-cast. Precasts ofcourse are subject to timing. If you cancel a heal and then the tank takes damage right after, well thats 1.4 or 1.5 seconds before you heal them. Swiftmend alleviates this pain significantly by giving them extra time to catch the next heal. If you’re healing Ragnaros tanks currently, Swiftmend can be pretty insane for keeping your tanks alive.

For swiftmend to be worth the talent points, your druid must be assigned to watch the tanks specifically, only one or two other healers depending on the fight. If shaman are chain healing off of a tank reliably or priests/paladins are flashing tanks immediately for example, then swiftmend’s value will go down as tank healing will be covered and in those cases running a different spec for raid healing would be stronger for both hps and mana-efficiency. Swiftmend ofcourse can still fill the rejuv-raid healing style, but that style is not effective in certain raid enviornments.

For multi-druid raids, Having a swiftmend druid watch tanks, and a seperate druid watch the raid with Moonglow, or regrowth is a completely viable option for a strong healing net.

Regrowth

The regrowth resource

Regrowth is an extremely fun spec and an extremely powerful one. In tier 2, regowth becomes the fastest casted heal in the game at 1.3 seconds. Regrowth values crit chance heavily and thus relies on world buffs to give it as much of an edge as possible. Regrowth is heavily mana-inefficient, but it’s also the highest HPS of all druid builds and covers raid healing excellently. Regrowth is also the parse king. If you care about healing parses, then regrowth is your best friend.

With it’s high hps, high mana cost, and high crit chance, regrowth druids are going to be spreading regrowths around like crazy and every crit will net a -0.5 cast time on regrowth from Nature’s Grace. Paired with the 2pc t8 this goes down to 1.3sec cast time. Regrowth druids need to make best use out of mana consumables such as flask of distilled wisdom, mana potions, and dark runes in order to keep themselves afloat, but a druid running regrowth for raid healing will have zero problems healing along side a Moonglow druid who utilizes rejuvenation for raid healing.

Regrowth druids aren’t only limited to raid healing with regrowth however. In longer more drawn out fights, watching the tanks with Healing Touch or rejuvenation on the raid is still entirely possible as you will still have talents that improve those healing spells. You will lack the mana-talents for sustainability however and must mix in healing touches in order to prevent yourself from ooming too early on those longer encounters.

A druid who masters regrowth healing is worth a spot on any raid team, even if there are 2 other resto druids already on the team!

In conclusion, the most amount of resto druids I would ever consider bringing to a raid are 3 with extremely rare exception for a 4th who only watches the tanks. One who specializes in regrowth raid healing. One who raid heals with rejuvenation, and one who is either watching the tanks, or specializing in fast healing touches on the raid. This more easily achievable on alliance due to the mandatory amount of resto shamans required for a raid being greater than the amount of paladins needed for a raid. Paladins being able to dispel magic also causes fewer priests to be needed than on horde as well, but even on horde it doesn’t make sense to have fewer than 2 resto druids. If you’re only bringing one druid to raid and throwing out all the resto tier week after week, then you’re just making it harder to gear your raid for no good reason.

Additional resources:

[Zia’s resto druid guide](h ttps://rentry.co/ziarestoguide)

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:100:
I totally support this!!!

Having 3 dedicated Druids each on one of the three specs you described would be really strong for speedrunning.

They all effectively synergize if you have all three. None of the toolkit is wasted.

One Druid can just apply strong HOTs everywhere that it’s needed, another adds Rerowth to anyone missing sizable amounts of HP, and then the third druid can basically backup everyone with Swiftmend and Healing Touch as needed.

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It’s a 1.8 sec cast with full t2. Also having a cast time of less then 1.5 seconds but more then 0 seconds is basically pointless as it doesn’t allow you to move while casting but still is limited by the global cooldown.

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It’s 1.5 with nature’s grace, which causes 1.3 with tier bonus. This has a high uptime using regrowth spec and worldbuffs and spellcrit gear. 1.3 still beats 1.5 sec cast time to the heals, which mitigates overhealing and thus: parse king spec.

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Although you can’t move during the cast, the 1.3 speed does allow the druid to begin moving 0.2 seconds earlier- which is very much not insignificant.

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I see. That’s what I was missing. Still though 0.2 sec faster just means you’re always exactly 0.2 seconds ahead and never more than that due to the GCD. So if a fight is 1 minute you’ve casted exactly 0.2 seconds more worth of regrowths over a 1 minute duration. Extremely marginal.

Where you would make up time is the difference between a 1.8 sec cast and a 1.5 when you don’t have nature’s grace I suppose.

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That’s not how the math plays out. You become 0.2 further seconds ahead for EACH regrowth that you cast and move after for the entire raid. The druids ends up entire seconds if not minutes ahead of where they otherwise would’ve been for the same duration.

Put another way, for every 5 regrowths a druid moves after a 1.3 cast, they are 1.0 seconds ahead of the pathing of a druid using 1.5sec casts.

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But only when you need to move. And that’s assuming perfect execution which is challenging with that small of a window.

Honestly I feel like that build is overrated. 8/8 t2 is amazing though for the extra rejuvenation tick. And rejuvenation becomes a druid’s best heal with no buff limit and swiftmend.

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I don’t disagree here, most players aren’t going to min/max that perfectly- but the Druid will just ‘feel’ more mobile than a Druid without it. They’ll have an easier time both keeping up and staying ahead, on average.

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the movement is negligible, but the strength comes in just by the fact that you get procs that makes you faster than everyone else at getting the healing out. Right now for example in mc, there are times where I’ve had a cast fail at the end because someone took additional damage before I could get the heal out (and then died). The amount of times that is prevented by the faster cast is powerful.

also remember that with enough procs you get additional casts that you’d otherwise not fit in. Druids double dip from the nature’s grace. bigger healers and you can fit more heals in per fight. with regrowth the crit chance is so high that regularly adds casts per minute to your encounters and when you don’t get NG procs, you can start your next cast 0.2 seconds faster than normal with the tier 2

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I think Druids are awesome healers and absolutely agree that they get undersold often. However, a large portion of your argument is that having multiple Druids is not detrimental and to this, I must respectfully disagree.

The core problem here is that to justify bringing multiple Resto Druids, you’re taking a job that one Druid can handle and splitting it up over several Druids. You can do this certainly, but you don’t really gain anything. It actually makes more sense to just let the one Druid (typically the one with the most spell power) do their thing and the other Druids slot in where they can.

Where they slot in though depends largely on what fight you’re doing and how many healers you’re bringing. Both make it kind of trickly, especially the latter.

For the fight (trash included), it’s going to largely depend on who is taking damage. In most raids, tanks always take damage, melee usually take damage, and ranged sometimes take damage. A single Druid is enough to keep rejuv up on two groups worth of people fairly easily. There will be some drop off but that’s not a bad thing since there will be other healers and it gives you some space. That single Druid can completely cover two groups of tank/melee, and mostly cover three groups. That’s most of the damage a raid will take right there. A second druid can cover those cases where the whole raid is taking damage (which happens, but is far less frequent). If you’re that second druid and you don’t have anybody to rejuv, you need to find something else to do.

The comp is probably what makes being that second (or third) resto druid the most problematic. Looking at Naxx, early fights are typically easier and don’t require a lot of healers and later fights are typically harder and require more healers. However, if you wanna clear the raid, you need to build for those healer heavy fights (Loatheb, Sapph, and KT). This means that all the other bosses you’ll have more healers than you need. As a Druid, our two main contributions are efficient HoTs and efficient and large single target HT spam.

In a raid with a lot of healers where the raid isn’t taking much damage, you’re in what I like to call “reactionary healing mode”, which is that you’re reacting to incoming damage. In this scenario though, with HoTs that tick every 3s and HT casts that take 3s, there’s plenty of opportunity for a Priest or a Paladin to sneak in betwen. As you correctly pointed out, we can downrank to a 2s or 2.5s HT cast, but you’re just going to get beat out.

A druid really shines best when there is room for our heals to work. Those are when there is consistent and predictable damage coming out. Either some or all of the raid is taking light damage where HoTs can shine (example: Heigan Hall or Gargoyle trash), or a few people in the raid are taking heavier damage (ie, Patchwerk or Heigan). Anywhere else and they really struggle… which is ok because it’s cool that we have a niche.

However, the problem is that niche is effectively filled by that single resto druid. You can jump through a lot of hoops to try to give that second resto druid something to do but they will never be as effective as they could be, in a general sense, as if they were the only resto druid. It will always be better overall to just bring a priest/paladin over a second resto druid, except in those few occasions where there’s enough for that second resto druid to do. If you are a second resto druid, it’s far better to either have a set of damage gear, or a damage character, that you can swap to for everything else.

Since Classic launched in 2019 I’ve spent maybe 3ish total years as a raiding resto druid. I started in 2019 and played until AQ40, then took a break for a while and came back to it a little over a year ago. I’ve always been that second resto druid, typically because I tend to value mp5 over raw +heal. I’ve spent a lot of time, especially in the last 8 months, working to find a way to be flexible and effecitve in raids. The above is the culmination of all of that. I’ve worked closely with our raid’s main resto druid–who is awesome and I like him a lot–to try all sorts of diffrent assignments and approaches. None of them really work better than just letting him do his thing and me finding something else to do. Fights where there’s lots of healing or I can find a niche, I do really well at. Fights where we really only need one resto druid, I do worse at. You can see it reflected in my parses…

https://vanilla.warcraftlogs.com/character/us/grobbulus/tathayis

So all that to say… yea, Druids are awesome! They’re bar-none my favourite healer to play. However, you just can’t get away from the fact that you really only need one. Sometimes you don’t get to choose and you just have more than one, but it’s always going to be a bit awkward to make it work and it’s just not going to be better than bringing another P* healer. Raids got a whole lot more enjoyable when I started swapping to dps gear (I’m moonglow spec) for trash and fights where we didn’t need me as a healer. It’s not a lot of DPS to be sure, but it’s better than 90% overheal :wink:

That was a big post! Thanks for coming to my TED talk, lol.

*EDIT: Quick note here… I’m not posting my logs to flex or anything. I don’t claim to be the best resto druid in the world here. I posted them so you can see that yep, there are fights where I tend to have a lot to contribute and there are fights where I tend to not. I’ve never been big on WoW parse culture so please don’t take that as any kind of “lulz my parsez gud ur bad so ur wrong” type of nonsense >.<

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I feel like your logs kind of disprove your theory. You have logs in nax where 2 resto druids are beating everyone in healing except for 1 priest, or logs where 1 druid is beat everyone and then the other druid is matching the priest and thats without nobody running regrowth spec, so intheory it could be better.

If anything your logs speak to how well multiple druids run together.

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Currently leveling my Druid as Feral Bear Tank, but thanks to Dual Spec I 100% will be going Resto for my second spec and I think I’ll bookmark this thread for that later.

This is some serious gourmet :poop:. TY!

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I just feel differently that the movement is negligible, but I’m a mobility-fiend with WASD. I do agree that the more important point is that the Regrowth is actually landing on it’s target 0.2 seconds earlier than if you didn’t have that set bonus. This saves lives.

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Resto is very strong, but kind of by itself. When there’s more than 1 in a raid the one with the highest spell power gets to use hots, no one else.

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I think you took the wrong thing from what I wrote. I’m not sure if you read it (I know, it was long) or just went straight to the logs, but my point is…

Examples where I excel:

  1. Patchwerk - Heavy damage and I have my own target.
  2. Maexxna - Lots of raid damage so the other druid and I can worry about different HoT targets easily.
  3. Heigan - Tank is taking enough damage that HT spam on him isn’t starved out while the other druid can HoT.

Examples where I struggle:

  1. Anub’Rekhan - Only melee typically takes damage, other druid has this covered, and not enough healing for me to really contribute with HT.
  2. Gluth - See #1.
  3. Fearlina - See #1.

The recurring theme is, if either there is a tank taking a lot of damage that I can spam HT on or the entire raid is taking enough damage that I can HoT without stepping on the assignments of the other druid, then I do well and am making use of the things that make resto druids great healers. If those two conditions aren’t met, I’m just trying to out flash heal the P* healers.

Because really, those are a Druid’s key strengths…

  1. HoTs you can spread all over the raid.
  2. Large, efficient single target heals you can drop on tanks.

I was going to mention this but my post was long enough so I didn’t haha. Still, I think you’re overvaluing this spec. The trouble with it is that regrowth is terribly front-loaded but really mana inefficient if its HoTs don’t get a chance to tick and using it to fish for NG procs for a speedy HT is actually challenging in any of those scenarios where Moonglow doesn’t already work. You’re sacrificing mana and healing power for more NG procs that will just end up as over heal anyway.

I’ve experimented with this healing style a lot and all it does is make me OoM faster resulting in similar quantities of over heal. I know you said it was a parse king but my experiences show the opposite. Any scenario where regrowth would be successful, I tend to have the same success with moonglow and can last way longer on fights.

I guess I do need to be fair here though… I don’t play in a meta guild and so we absolutely are not speed clearing. In fact, we often go into Naxx with 30 players depending on the night (usually shy on DPS, not heals). So perhaps Regrowth is a different ballgame when fights are much shorter?

I don’t want to be misleading here and say that NG is a bad talent and doesn’t help, it absolutely does! However, I just don’t think it’s worth trading Moonglow for and there’s not really any scenario (except maybe speed clearing) where it’s a worth while trade? Here’s the spec I typically run…

https://www.wowhead.com/classic/talent-calc/druid/51005020025013--50500311501402

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Another fine addition to my collection.

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The biggest issue with rdru healing is that the sweatier your group gets the worse rdru is in the first place. So much of their healing is locked behind hots that you literally can not put up due to the buff cap (assuming it still exists, it was a problem in classic 2019), pushing off a fury warrior’s ony buff to put up a hot is a surefire way to get the boot from one of the sweatier raids.

This isn’t a problem if you’re playing with people putting up 3 elixirs, their food buff, and 8 wbuffs and bare minimum raid buffs.

It quickly becomes a problem when you add a flask, scrolls, full buffs (kings/might/salv/fort/motw/lotp/trueshot/bshout, 23 so far) + getting procs (double crusader, maybe a weapon proc, sharpening stone, 27), now you have 5 buff slots of overhead and just as a warrior you need room for death wish, reck, and blood fury, and 1 trinket, you have 1 buff of overhead… add roids and you’re at the cap. There’s no room for anyone to even put up power word shield to prevent damage. You just have to push raw healing out at this point. And hpals/priests/rsham are just better at it in every way.

Side note, I don’t think rdru gets the most benefit out of spell crit, I think that’s still hpal who get full mana cost refund on crit with their healing spells.

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My Durid is just waiting for TBC at this rate but I love the class, 2019 represent.

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I believe buff cap was removed this time.

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