Resto Druid still has the worst runes in the game

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
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Lifebloom - Instead of the TBC version, we got the WOTLK version which has an absurd mana cost and doesn’t heal for very much at all. It’s one of our worst heal-per-mana spells, on top of sharing a rune slot with Starsurge, a much better choice for complementing Resto’s current “dps and heal” playstyle.

Nourish - It’s…decent at best. But the fact that it requires a HoT to reach its full potential just means that this will really only be used on tanks. Which are already handled just fine with Rejuv+Regrowth and/or Healing Touch, or by the Priest/Paladin/Shaman since their ST heals are much stronger. The best use case of this rune is as a “flash heal” equivalent, fast but inefficient. It also shares a rune slot with Eclipse, which just makes its opportunity cost even worse.

Living Seed - Blizzard is just trolling with this one. It’s hot garbage and legitimately a contender for the worst/most useless rune in the entirety of the game. HoTs can’t crit, and even if you do use direct heals, we just don’t have anywhere near enough crit chance for this rune to work. It’s genuinely all-around awful, like they just copypasted it into SoD without actually thinking about how it would work. Having something that only procs on spell crits is terrible when you don’t have much crit chance.

We don’t even have a rune for the Feet slot, all we have is Dreamstate…which again, is part of the “dps while healing” playstyle, requiring you to take Eclipse and Starsurge and Fury of Stormrage to make good use of it. Which further invalidates these three healing runes.

As it is right now, Resto Druid’s runes are so awful that our best way to play is essentially being a Balance druid that occasionally presses Wild Growth or throws out an instant-cast HT. Which, I don’t really have a problem with, but it feels like Blizzard doesn’t have a clear vision for the spec, seeing how they’re putting in these healing runes that are essentially noob traps with how bad they are. Being a DPS that occasionally heals is just so much more effective, with the current runes we have.

So as to not look like I’m just whining, here’s some potential solutions:

Living Seed - Make it a 50% chance on every single Healing Touch, similar to how Shaman’s “Overload” rune works. Or perhaps make it always proc on the end of every single Rejuv / Regrowth. Or just rework this rune into something entirely different.

Nourish - Reduce the mana cost, or make it refresh the duration of Rejuv/Regrowth, or do SOMETHING to make this actually worth casting over Healing Touch, and worth dropping Eclipse for.

Lifebloom - Change it to the TBC version where it’s very cheap to cast but doesn’t heal for very much until you stack it up to 3. This makes it into a good tank heal, which is currently resto druid’s weakest aspect. We have great raid/aoe healing, but weak single target.

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Agreed 100%

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Can I just add that Wild Growth was great at level 25 for the mana cost and heal amount and available mana pools… but at 40 (albeit still using BFD gear), the mana cost feels oppressive and the healing is usually just a bunch of overheal. It kind of touches on the inability to downrank these rune abilities. I was doing just fine as a “Restokin” (balance spec, resto runes) in P1, but I am OOM like crazy in P2 on just simple stuff like SM… and they nerfed balance PvE DPS into the ground, so… resto no good, balance no good… druid gets parked.

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The tbc version of lifebloom is just better. It has great second-to-second decision-making built in, and is therefore probably the most interesting heal in the game. I don’t know why they would give us the garbage version, but class homogenization is what killed wow and birthed the retail monstrosity. Resto druids should just be about hots.

Nourish is completely pointless when healing touch already exists. You should barely ever want to cast direct heals anyways, again, because class flavor.

Wild growth is lazy but at least it’s a hot.

I just hope to god they don’t add tree form. I want to actually see my druid for once, and there also needs to be a reason for caster form to exist.

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That too, even in full BFD gear + some gnomer pieces, Wild Growth still costs like 15% of my mana per cast. Not being able to downrank it really sucks. Downranking heals is a big part of healing in vanilla, and we can’t do that with rune abilities.

Yeah honestly I would rather rework Nourish rune into:

Rune of Nourishing - Your Healing Touch spell has its cast time reduced by 1 second, and now heals for an additional 20% on targets with a Rejuvenation, Regrowth, Wild Growth or Lifebloom active.

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I think nourish has a place when you throw up your hots but tank gets crit or hit by some mechanic etc and the hots can’t keep up and he needs a quick spot heal. Even with tbc lifebloom this could occur with some unexpected spike damage. That should be nourish’s time to shine. Unfortunately, a downranked healing touch would do the same job but with more mana efficiency. It’s a shame because nourish is the rune I wanted most of these new p2 runes. I got it and found out it’s just a mistake to ever cast it.

They need to make it so that with a hot up, it’s better than a downranked HT in terms of healing-per-mana. It can be worse than HT if there’s no HoT.

They could keep the healing the same and refund some 50% on cast if a HoT is up if they are afraid of buffing the raw healing value

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Certainly lifebloom should cost less and it would be one of the best runes in the game if only it were affordable. Even more questionable design choices on the other runes.

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Ele sham here…

What?

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Just to get the rune for nourish on pvp severs we have to use clever use of mechanics like logout skips and other things. It should never be that tedious to get a rune that isn’t even that good. I feel like whoever is designing these resto Druid runes doesn’t actually play resto druid

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Druid runes in general are just wildly terrible.
Wild Growth being overtuned and everything else being undertuned is but one of the issues.

Balance isn’t as bad but is close when it comes down to it. Starsurge was bad when it was a nuke and now it’s bad that it buffs a wildly unsustainable spell, and Sunfire is almost completely irrelevant in this phase and the foreseeable futue.

All Resto and Balance rune load outs are practically identical. Fury of Stormrage, Wild Growth, Starsurge, Eclipse, Dreamstate.
For either spec there is no real reason to change from this build.

They needed to in general make baseline changes to more classes/specs than they have.
Sure they’ve done stuff to Spriest and Shammy baseline but nothing for caster druids.

They need more mana efficiency on practically all of their spells, both for sustain, but also just so they are valuable in terms of mana per healing.

My concern is that just massively buffs Healing Touch in general, and probably incentiveses HoTs even less as your already strong efficient heal simply got a cast reduction.

I love the direction though, I agree with the reduced cast time and buffed heals from targets with a Hot, I simply think it needs a baseline healing nerf to keep in line with the cast time reduction.
Then have the buff when healing a HoT’d target simply bring it back above the base healing.

Or maybe it still heals slightly less, but it also refreshes HoTs on the target (or simply adds some duration).

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This is just objectively true.

A bunch of druid runes are outright dead

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5/6 of the Resto runes are currently essentially unusable due to their tuning.

Pretty sure just having Lava Burst and Shamanistic Rage is alone to be considered better runes, plus I’m pretty sure there are other good ones.

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Overload is nutty

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Well, at least they work. Resto Shamans have a rune thats broken and bugged since P2 launch lol.

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Thats ok because druid was never designed to be the best at anything. Seems like its working as intended.

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It was and was great through beta.

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Yeah healer gameplay is definitely one of the SoD teams weak points

They only let priests be good healers and the rest get bad runes or just literally go dps runes

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Shaman and Druid need better DEFENSIVE runes. Compared to priest and paladin, these classes are left out in the cold, naked.

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They’re unplayable. Resto shaman is so much better its hard to believe these two specs exist in the same game.

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Resto Shaman says elsewise… nice try. At least you have a useful heal. Even lifebloom be it costly is better than a hard cast era non-rune heal.