How different is it to pick up on Resto Druids? I’ve never bothered with the HoT style. I come from a background of Shaman and Paladin healing where it’s more reactive.
Been staring at the spells and what they do and how/when to use them. Just more concerned about how it’ll feel to play more than anything compared to say the R Shaman
I believe you have figured it out yourself already, but here it goes.
I’ve come from holy paladin too and switched to restoration druid back in Legion. At first, I found myself a bit frustrated with the lack of single target burst heals, and couldn’t bear stating into the half empty health bars while waiting for the hots to do their job.
As a proactive healer you have to keep two things in mind:
First, your encounter knowledge is crucial. You have to prepare for incoming damage before it happens, and never let the situation go out of hand.
Secondly, you gotta make peace with the fact that people will not always be at full health. Just trust your hots and try to find windows to contribute with DPS if you’re running m+. Remember you can always heal your friends between pulls.
I’d suggest you take a look at Questionably Epic for some quality Restoration guides. Also, consider joining us at the Dreamgrove discord. Best place to go for druid advice.
Cheers.
Am I going to acquire a nervous tick that’ll require medication to keep it in check due to this!? Because I’m used to a nice Holy Shock healing for 200k+ lol
Well, we DO have Swiftmend every 30 seconds for really tight emergencies.
You should consider picking Cenarion Ward as your first talent for awesome spot heals too. Unless you need to dish some insane AoE healing (for example, Galvazzt in Temple of Sethraliss) in which case, you would be better off with Abundance.
Just don’t fall into the very common trap of picking Proeperity. It DOES NOT gives you “double” Swiftmend as some people think.
Other than that, just keep in mind you don’t have to immediately heal people if they are not going to take damage soon. Keep your cool and let the hots do their trick.
No point in repeating but I agree 100% with what has already been said. You can find answers to any question you have at Questionably Epic and Dreamgrove discord. Once you understand the damage patterns things are pretty simple.
Well I’m familiar with the dungeons and all the roles. I’ve just never even bothered looking into Resto until now 
Along with knowing when damage is going to occur, it’s also important to understand when to let your hots do the work for you. If everyone is taking consistent, but low damage, you can throw hots out and then do a significant amount of dps while the hots work. Look at “kitty weaving” where you spec into feral specialization. While your hots are rolling, you can get in a rake, 5 cp rip, and maybe even a FB or two depending on how much damage you need to heal. Don’t be shy about jumping in and out of cat form. I find that it is helpful to have a heal bound to a button that is accessible while you’re in cat form so that you don’t have to waste a button press to get out of cat form and then throw a heal. I would suggest life bloom, rejuv, or swiftmend (or all three). This isn’t exactly a viable tactic during raids, unless you guys are really on farm and only need occasional heals from you. At that point, I would go boomkin and off heal along with an spriest/ele sham if you can handle it.
There was a time when all resto druid did for raid healing was blanket the raid with a hot regardless of the encounter. Mana prohibits that for the most part now, mainly because mana is static and spirit-based regen doesn’t exist anymore.
From a m+ standpoint, photosynthesis is an amazing talent. It allows you to have very strong single target healing and change to very strong group healing at a moments notice.
If you know damage is coming, or if everyone in your group is taking constant damage, keep rejuv rolling on everyone. This is a pretty solid strategy in m+, but isn’t exactly viable in raids. When a big damage spike is coming, try to time your wild growth so that it lands very soon AFTER the damage has occurred. Remember that wild growth heals the most initially and decays over the duration.
Hope some of that helps you.
Aye, I’ve always been a “battle-healer”. DPS’ing as much as I can in between heals. But it was easier when I knew I could let a person or two get low, and top them off within 5 seconds lol. Gonna take a bit to get used to HoTs.
And I main Feral, so it should be easy enough to get kitty weaving figured out. Just gotta get used to how my heals work first ![:slight_smile:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")
Thanks for all the replies everyone
You still can. If they need right now healing, regrowth into swiftmend, then throw a rejuv on them and get back into dps. If they still need healing after that, they’re either standing in bad, or getting focused because of a mechanic, and you should probably ironbark and give them dedicated healing.
Yeah the first couple I ran I was kinda panicky and didn’t dps near as much as I could have. Slowly getting more comfortable with it.
My HoTs do a bit more healing than I thought they would.
Once you pick up rDruid and get comfortable, you’ll never go back. Be patient with yourself while you learn it. It’ll be worth it.
Well it’s not as proactive as disc so there is that. We are also highly sought for M+. For me it just came down to playstyle. Disc is a little to punitive for me but rdruid with instaforms, hots, stealth, brez and movement friendly made it my favorite healer.
“Excuse me, but “proactive” and “paradigm”? Aren’t these just buzzwords that dumb people use to sound important? Not that I’m accusing you of anything like that. [pause] I’m fired, aren’t I?” Great Simpson’s episode!
On a more serious note, I main a mistweaver monk, but I tried leveling a Druid as I like balance more than windwalker as a DPS offspec for weeks when healing isn’t fun (looking at you, grievous). I tried healing a few dungeons as resto, but it felt like healing wearing a straight jacket. That being said, I fully recognize that I was still trying to heal like a MW rather than a resto.
For me, MW is by far the smoothest healing in WoW; the style just clicks with me. With resto, I constantly felt like I had no option but to spam regrowth on someone taking heavy damage, which just felt terrible (given the largely wastes HoT component). This was lowish-level healing, so maybe it gets better later.
I’m the opposite. I went from resto to Mistweaver. I’ve noticed that Resto really shines when you’re with a group that doesn’t hate elitismhelper.
Mistweaver rocks when half your team has 2 left feet.
Can someone expand on this? Is this because each charge has its own cooldown? I’m confused. You get two charges which in essence is two swiftmends back to back. What am i missing?
Basically you are giving up a 30 sec healing cooldown (Cenarion Ward), for a 3 second cooldown reduction on swiftmend (plus an extra cast or two).
You can have a 25 sec swiftmend and a 30 sec cenarion ward, or a 22 sec swiftmend and maybe 2-3 extra swiftmends over a typical encounter and no cenarion ward.
Its just not close from a numbers perspective (at least for pve). And in the rarer situations where you want the focused single target healing, abundance and germ is typically better.
If you want a more detailed looked at things, questionably epic has a good write up. Can’t link for some reason…
questionablyepic(dot)com/firstrowshowdown/
Thanks for sharing the link. While i fully trust what they (and others) are saying, I can’t seem to wrap my head around why without doing some testing of my own. You would think adding an extra Swiftmend on a 22 second cooldown that heals for the same amount as CW on a 30 second cool down would balance out. I’m guessing the trap is that you can;t use that extra Swiftmend every 22 seconds?
Their website said something along the lines of you get 2-3 extra swifmends compared to 12 CWs. That just doesn’t seem like it makes sense, but i’m sure i’m missing something. Consider me one of the ones that fell into that trap.
It all boils down to the 2nd charge not having its own separate cd, and the fact that you do not lose the baseline swiftmend if you don’t take prosperity.
You get an extra swiftmend cast right off the bat, but after that it takes awhile to get an extra cast compared to the baseline swiftmend cooldown, and during that time you get no cenarion wards.
The easiest way to get a rough idea of the disparity without making a spredsheet is to see the talent as a 3 sec reduction per cooldown cycle. So in order to get another extra swiftmend cast you need to complete enough cooldown cycles to makeup an extra cooldown (25/3 = rounded up is 9). So 9 x 22 is roughly when you’d get an extra cast over baseline (so around 3.3 minutes). In those three minutes you’d get 2 less swiftmends running baseline but 7 cenarion ward casts. The longer the fight goes on the wider the disparity gets.
Ideally you are also flourishing some of those cenarion wards, which makes the disparity even larger.
Obviously this doesn’t account for the gcd, and typically you aren’t using both swiftmend charges right off the bat any way, but its a decent enough rough idea.
Its slightly different for dungeons, but there again, if you are wanting focused single target healing youd probably opt for abundance and germination (for specific keys at higher levels).