It’s no secret that the resto druid mastery has been fairly polarizing for a while now. A primary reason for this is that it’s the only healer mastery that doesn’t scale linearly. There is a positive feedback loop between the next HoT applied to a target and all existing HoTs on the target. This interaction means that any tuning Blizzard makes to the spec has to target a specific mastery stack level the druid might have out; anything below that target will feel too weak and anything above that target will feel too strong. This isn’t a problem when the incoming damage profiles are slow and steady, but creates issues when the incoming damage profile is heavy burst.
To try to resolve this reliance on an incoming damage profile, I think our mastery needs to become more linear like all the other healer mastery abilities. But I also want our mastery to still revolve around our HoTs. Seeing as Blizzard also seems to be unclear how to make good use of Flourish either, I thought that could serve as the basis of our mastery.
Mastery: Flourishing Blooms
Your healing over time effects tick (mastery)% faster and last for (mastery)% longer. Up to (mastery)% of overhealing caused by your healing over time effects will be stored on the target, blooming when the effect expires or is refreshed with less than 30% of its original duration remaining.
This new mastery will provide four main benefits:
- Breaking the feedback loop between multiple HoTs going on the target allows Blizzard to tune our HoTs independent of the potential they have when applied together.
- Faster ticking HoTs help with both burst and rot damage.
- The overheal protection will help in general, but also since our HoTs will last longer as a result of our mastery.
- The longer duration will help limit the times our HoTs fall off during our ramps.
With me repurposing Flourish, I would also replace Flourish with a new ability for ramps.
Harmony
Your healing effects on each target are increased by 10% per healing over time effect on the target for 10 seconds.
90 Second Cooldown
I think our current mastery as a cooldown effect would work quite well if we are getting the tick rate from elsewhere. This would create a very similar play style as we have today in raids where we’d ramp with the HoTs we need then hit Harmony to get all our HoTs to gain significant potency.
Any feedback on the suggestion is welcome!
5 Likes
Yes, it’s a common sense change and it baffles me that they didn’t do it in BfA. Resto druid is terribly hard to balance against other healers, and their alternating pitiful/ridiculous mastery scaling is a huge reason why. Resto druids’ mastery determines whether their hots are completely useless or ridiculously overpowered, and there is rarely an in-between.
In raids, other healers either do all the healing first and the hots are wasted, or the hots prevent any other healer from contributing. In dungeons, resto druid either can’t react in time without spamming hots every second and praying, or their hots are so overpowered as to not need to cast a single heal for 15 seconds as they tick (and allowing them to do the most dps out of all healers, which is what actually matters). In PvP, either their target is immortal or they can’t save anyone since the heals are so slow. It’s a failure in game design.
I assume the reason they haven’t changed mastery is because they’d have to bin resto druid’s playstyle and start over, but honestly they should just rip the bandaid off and do it.
2 Likes
I think they should as well. As far as I’m concerned, every healing spec in this game has gone through major redesigns to keep up with the pace and demand of the game over the years, except for resto druid and (maybe?) holy priest as well. At least priests still have access to discipline which did go through redesigns over the years, but resto druid honestly hasn’t changed at all, at least not in any fundamental capacity.
They need to figure out a way to modernize the spec without losing too much of its HoT identity. I honestly don’t think they’re capable of it, otherwise it probably would’ve happened by now. This is why we keep seeing useless buffs to resto druid’s healing aura, like the recent buff to Swiftmend (again, useless). This spec doesn’t have any issues with throughput from my experience in M+, its issues are much deeper than that.
2 Likes
Not only do I highly support this change… but I also think it’s a problem for Balance Druid.
Feral doesn’t suffer from this as much, because magical DoTs are, of course, more easily dispelled. Add to this the ramp-up of Balance and the Resto Mastery emphasis on HoTs with the lower tuning of hard-casts (which is also a problem for Boomy, though our damage was 30% shifted from Mastery to casts lately!). I’m not exactly sure what the solution for Boomy may be, though I put out lists of ideas for a re-design before. As for Resto, though, this OP has a great mastery change suggestion. It’s indeed a big question, how do we maintain the DoT/HoT identity, while not making the entire rotation hinge upon them.
I think you’ve identified the real problem. Resto Druid doesn’t need to be changed to accommodate a broken damage profile - they need to fix the damage profile.
While the damage profile does create the issues with our Mastery that you describe, it’s really deeper than that. This is one of the least fun expansions to heal, ever, regardless of what class you play. If they just fix that core issue, and actually make the entire game better for everyone as a result, then our Mastery won’t need to be changed.
While I don’t disagree with your assessment, I don’t really think it’s ideal to have a mastery that works wonders in one incoming damage profile yet falls apart in another. The change in the incoming damage profile was somewhat inevitable given the amount of power players gained due to the new talent trees. SL was already showing issues with healing feeling less engaging by the end of the expansion due to there being so few damage events. I felt like nothing more than a 4th gimped DPS in most keys due to them only really needing me to heal like 6 damage events all key.
While I do think there is too much spike damage in the current incoming damage profile, I think overall what we have is better for the game overall than what we had.
And even if I didn’t think that, it’s still risky to have a mastery that is so dependent on a given incoming damage profile. That’s why I think changing the mastery is a necessary evil. That way Blizzard can tune our kit for the actual incoming damage profile, rather than being hamstrung by our non-linear scaling.