Resto Druid needs some serious work / re-designs for 11.0.5

One rdruid god who can clean up does not make it a good spec. M+ wise, Rdruid really is pretty decent still, while in raid its just a nightmare due to fight design.

The problem is that Rsham has MUCH better utility, is easier to play and does more HPS while also passively doing damage. Id go as far as to say, Rsham is really just a better version of rdruid with more/better utility, that is also easy to play.

2 Likes

i just want this class reworked so that it isnt constantly GCD locked with worse ramps than disc priest in keys

They could easily fix this by changing invigorate or power of the arch druid to make wild growth apply a 6-7 second Rejuv or life bloom to all targets hit, literally nobody has picked these 2 talents in years

Also can we remove soul of the forest interaction with wild growth and just make it baseline? Who thought having to prep WG every 10 seconds in raid is fun gameplay

while we are at it make verdent infusion baseline or revert swiftmend so that it doesnā€™t eat a HoT when you use it, this just adds more ramping time

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People that are bleeding edge and playing a spec that is undertuned/broken have an incentive to say that everything is ā€œfineā€. If they can bring that same level of skill AND a strong class, they would probably be doing their guild a huge favor.

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Resto druid is a dead class.

Thatā€™s what Iā€™m saying. Why are we so revolved around soul of the forest. We have enough to manage as it is

4 Likes

Iā€™ll give this an Amen.

yes, everything in druid is broken, its far from be an playable class, blizzard devs fail hard on dots and hots, in my point of view its because the dam pvp, all fail its because of it, their cant broken the pvp style and scale, so their brutally broken druid hots and dots. a real shame.

I have no idea what ā€œslow down the damageā€ even means. For content to be hard, the damage is going to have to hit hard. I think they just wanted to nerf tank sustain because they felt it was to much, and tried to soften the blow, ā€œweā€™re nerfing tank sustain guys, but weā€™re also lowering damage across the boardā€

lol.

It means instead of peoples health bars jumping from 20% to full to 20% to full, increasing health pools of everybody so they jump up and down less drastically. Healers cant top people off nearly as fast any more. The healing is slowed down outside of cooldowns. The damage however, did not slow down in accordance with the healing. Too many abilities hit too hard

For sure, tbf, I could have been more precise in my response. Their original goal wasnā€™t neccesarily to make more steady damage, but to make less ā€œspikyā€ damage (their words, not mine). In that sense, I would say they failed. But I digress, that is more of a healer in general problem than Resto druid in particular.

Thatā€™s certainly what it feels like. It feels very much like the people who are making druid decisions are all people who main one of the holy twins because theyā€™ve taken what used to be a rewarding HoT spec and turned it into Flash Heal spam with a leaf theme.

Someone who has actually mained a Resto Druid should be put in charge at this point. Seriouslyā€¦hire someone if you canā€™t dig up a druid main inhouse. Itā€™s ridiculous.

Not only do I hate soul of the forest now, I also hate that swiftmend requires a hot to be preplaced. It should be an emergency panic heal. It should not require a hot. IT feels SO bad when you need to emergency swiftmend and you canā€™t without putting a rejuvenation or a regrowth on the target first.

It def feels like Resto Druid is balanced under the assumption that everyone takes Soul of the Forest. I personally also hate the playstyle it enforces. Iā€™d rather have the strength of Wild Growths be baseline. It doesnā€™t feel good that it requires 1 Rejuvi ā†’ 1 Swiftmend ahead of time in order for it to do any amount of decent healing.

1 Like

I havnt purchased the xpack so cant tell ā€˜how badā€™ R Druid is in PvE but those 3 suggestions seem good to me.

Iā€™m enjoying feral more than I have in the past decade. I can certainly empathize with the other specs that arenā€™t having fun, but I wouldnā€™t agree with the statement that everything is broken.

Objectively, resto druid isnā€™t terrible in terms of the numbers it can produce. Itā€™s just the most GCD-locked I can remember in a long time (if ever) so doesnā€™t feel great to produce those numbers.

The one thing I will say is that these suggestions are pretty wild, save for instant wild growth during soul of the forest. It somewhat amazes me how much people seem to think Blizzard would give this much power to a spec without taking it away from other places.

Having Wild Growth apply Lifebloom to all targets in particular is absolutely bananas. That is our best HoT by a country mile, with like a third of our spec tree improving it or benefitting from its presence. Itā€™s limited to 1 target unless we invest a capstone talent that brings that total up to 2 (even when it is applied via Overgrowth) for a reason; yet with this change we would be able to apply it to up to 6 targets (8 if it didnā€™t replace the 2 hard casted ones) every 24 seconds. If Blizzard were to make this change, they would drastically nerf nearly everything else resto druid could do.

Wildgrowth putting out lifeblooms is a popular suggestion because its already a pvp talent, same way MS was a popular suggestion for DF, we had mana problems and it was a talent that could ā€œfixā€ that by moving to the base tree; Now we have a gcd problem with hot spreading so letting wildgrowth reliably apply another decently powerful hot could ā€œfixā€ that.
Tbh the lifebloom portion of early spring as a choice node against undergrowth would make more sense then PoA atm, choose perma 2 lifeblooms or a temporary but not rng (like poa bonus hot) group wide lifebloom.

Natures swiftness is also just a bad ability currently, its only good to buff the rng regrowths out of convoke, opening it up to include wildgrowth might make people actually consider things like twinleaf even if all it did was make it instant (not like roots or rebirth get that 100% heal bonus) without shaking up to much.

they dont need a rework they just need to get rid of most of the modifiers and restore base power to resto druid, would clear it right up. extend durations and remove the increase duration hots talents

Yes, but PVP damage patterns are not the same as PVE damage patterns. What is fine for one isnā€™t something you can just plug and play into the other without regard for the differences in the mode. Having Wild Growth apply lifebloom even when tied to natureā€™s swiftness would allow full lifebloom out every cooldown, which would also come with the extra Verdancy procs that would entail. Like I said, it would be absolutely bananas.

To be clear, Iā€™d be cool with some other HoT being applied. Perhaps a new HoT tuned exactly the same as lifebloom with the same mastery modifiers of lifebloom, but without the side effects. Iā€™m truly not opposed to there being added value from Natureā€™s Swiftness interacting with Wild Growth, just copying Early Spring to PvE isnā€™t the play, unless itā€™s part of a much larger rework to make lifebloom far less of a heavy lifter for the spec.

This would turn out like Grove Guardians versus Nourish, unless the cooldown on the group lifebloom is much longer. For any nontrivial content, having 5 lifeblooms for every major damage event would easily outweigh having two out permanently.

Sure, but making it the catalyst to an overpowered combo is never the best idea, design wise. I have no problem with Natureā€™s Swiftness interacting with Wild Growth in some unique way as a way to make it more useful. It just shouldnā€™t be by far the most overpowered ability group that becomes mandatory for all content all the time. And that is what Wild Growth applying Lifebloom when you have Natureā€™s Swiftness up would do.

I dont think making it all one thing is a good idea, overstacking soul or swiftness would make the spec feel bad ontop of being a balancing nightmare. I do think resto needs an actually reliable cooldown in 5 mans since flourish is gutted, incarn ramp is slow and convoke is rng hell and i dont think a capstone aoe lifebloom would be a bad option. Maybe tie it to tranq so it can be worthwhile in 5 mans.

Early springs lifebloom is kinda already like this; wether intentional by blizz is unknown. The only interaction that actually carries over consistently is the triple mastery stack. They dont scale with budding correctly, theyre inconsistent with photo for the tick speed, trigger verdancy on the end bloom only, burns focused growth, clearcasting procs dont increase when its out and since it removes your actually functioning lifeblooms 1 of those 5(7) freebies has to be replaced if it lands on you while running photo, 2 if youre running undergrowth, its kind of a mess of a talent really.

Honestly the problems with Flourish for 5-mans have little to do with its power level; we still made good use out of Flourish in DF S3 in keys despite Blizzard taking the nerf hammer to it. The problems are that itā€™s a choice node against Photosynthesis which is simply better over the course of a whole dungeon and it still requires the full ramp ahead of time doing no favors for its GCD saturation.

I think a capstone CD that allows for applying HoTs including lifebloom to the whole party would be an interesting addition. I donā€™t think the party all getting lifebloom would be game breaking on its own, just that it occurring once every 24 seconds (if certain talents are taken) would be far too good. Make it a 60, 75, 90 second CD (Iā€™m not sure what would be appropriate power level) and thatā€™s probably okay.