Okay lets face it - no amount of % buffs are going to fix this spec. Though it is definitely undertuned healing-numbers wise and aura buffs are nice, most of the issues with Resto Druid actually stem from its inherent design just being outdated and archaic. Where other healing specs have been innovated and improved over expansions, Resto Druid has much stayed the same, and even regressed in many aspects this expansion. It is terribly un-fun to play, and just weak, full of design flaws.
Lets take a look at a lot of the issues with Resto Druid right now:
Little to no emergency/recovery healing in dungeons. Convoke is extremely unreliable, and tree form is a weak 3 Min CD.
Any sort of recovery healing requires a lot of GCD’s to be casted before spamming regrowth.
In dungeon environments, having to cast 8 globals (bloom x 2, rejuv x 5, wild growth) to get hots up on the group just to be able to begin to cast regrowths and do some relevant healing does not feel good and is just cumbersome, tiring, and quite
frankly… annoying.
Extremely counter-intuitive playstyle in terms of raid healing.
You’re spamming out a bunch of hots and overhealing before any damage actually goes out, without anything to increase the duration of rejuv on people with full hp, and no way to spread rejuvs automatically. Its literally just a budget disc priest and a watered down ramp healer at this point that doesn’t actually ramp heal properly because by the time damage goes out your rejuvs are almost gone.
Design-wise, raid healing on this spec is just so terrible. Rejuv should have a longer duration on full health target similar to how it used to work (back in Legion was it?), and there needs to be a rejuv-spread node. Or, implement some type of shield mechanic that rejuv gives people at full hp.
- As Automaticjak has highlighted in his videos recently, Resto druid healing power is more Regrowth-focused and not HoT-focused in dungeons; anytime you don’t have 20 GCD’s to prepare for damage in order to stack hots for your mastery before regrowthing, then you will do pitifully low amounts of healing. Along with this, regrowthing (outside of tree form) requires rooting yourself in place, statically casting, which is never good, and feels terrible.
Due to having such a GCD-intensive spammy playstyle for healing in M+, RDruid has incredibly low damage because it just doesn’t have GCD’s available for spreading dots and doing damage in cat form
Tranquility is an out-dated, and quite frankly awful healing CD and needs to be drastically changed
Why does Tranq still require standing still to cast with how incredibly weak it is? Give it a longer HoT component, give its HoT a stacking damage taken decrease component, make it 2.5 mins by default and just bake the Inner Peace node into Tranq by default and put something else in its place that is actually helpful. Inner Peace is complete garbage.
Flourish / Photosynthesis being in the same node
Why? PLEASE just give resto druid Flourish by default and put an actual useful node in its place that can innovate the spec.
Just wanted to highlight some of the weaknesses for Resto druid right now, I’m seriously hoping there are still more changes to come for Resto for 11.0.5 to shore up a lot of these weaknesses, or its going to be in serious trouble still.