Hows resto looking for M+ and heroic raiding?
We are one of, if not the best M+ healer.
We are in a good spot for raiding also, moreso on fights with steady ticking damage. The basic pros and cons of Druid healing remain. You still have to be as proactive with your healing as possible, and ramp up your healing to pump out truly great numbers. You will likely get beat by other classes on fights that favor reactive instant burst healing, and shields from other classes will tend to auto-snipe your HoTs, also deflating your numbers a bit. But if you are a good player, you certainly won’t hold your group back by healing on a Druid.
This is true for mythic raiding, but less so for heroic I feel. The raid-wide ticking damage that Druid excels in counteracting isn’t actually hitting hard enough to stress healer output to the point where you’ll put up the real big numbers. Maybe extremely early in the tier, or if you’re playing with other healers whose output is sub-standard. But once you’re 2-4 farm clears in and the ilevel starts creeping up you’ll run straight into the timeless rdruid problem of you take 5 seconds to top that health bar and the priest/shaman/whoever spike healed them to full 3 seconds ago.
That would only apply if you are talking about damage that is completely unpredictable, where you have been forced into pure reactive-healing, which is where we are at our worst.
In reality most raid-wide damage in these fights is highly predictable, often occurring on a rotation throughout the fight. In these situations we have the advantage, due to how much healing we can put out before the damage even occurs. In Aberrus Heroic for example, on fights like The Amalgamation Chamber, The Forgotten Experiments, Zskarn, and Magmorax, I’m often parsing in the high 90’s and in some cases doing near double what the other healers are doing. Things are a bit tougher on fights like Rashok and Neltharion, but I’m still competitive.
In Heroic, raid size is also a huge variable. In a smaller Heroic raid, say 10-14 people, that’s a small enough group that many of our M+ strengths begin to come into play. The average number of HoTs we can keep on each person will be higher, making it easier to pre-HoT and giving us higher Mastery utilization. In larger raids, say 25-30 people, it can be the opposite. It can feel futile trying to pre-HoT that many people. In that case, it often makes more sense to attempt to identify a subset of the raid that is consistently taking heavier damage and focus more HoTs onto them, as opposed to trying to layer a single rejuv out across the entire group.