Now that I’ve had a whole season with this setup, I feel a couple of gaping holes in the spec.
We Need an Interrupt
It’s ridiculous that we don’t have an interrupt. Not one. Outside of Typhoon, which is only useful in rare situations, unless I go into cat form and wild charge into melee for a daze (which is not workable…it’s just not), I have no interrupt of any kind to offer, and Skull Bash is WAY too far down on the feral side of the tree to be workable for me in Resto.
At least when we had access to Solar Beam from Restoration, we could offer an emergency interrupt every so often. Now, we have nothing, and it feels SO BAD.
We Need More Damage
The entire spec was based on the singular notion of catweaving. It’s practically forced since they took away Moonkin. Even with catweaving, which some enjoy and others (like me) despise, our damage is not as good as what other healer specs bring. No, it’s not my job to DPS, but when my group is doing well, and when we’re fighting bosses, the lack is felt.
Even with HotW, Master Shapeshifter, and a Spymaster trinket proc stacked for the boss, my damage in a dungeon boss encounter is lackluster at best. They buffed us several times with the straight % increases, and it still feels really crappy.
If I wanted to heal from melee, I’d be a MW or HPal. I don’t WANT to heal from melee. I’m not sure what the impetus was for trying to force catweaving on all druids at all levels of play.
Blizzard is changing Skull Bash’s position in 11.1. The only talent you have to take to path to it (when considering the talents resto is getting automatically) is Improved Barkskin.
Blizzard is bringing Moonkin back to the class tree in 11.1 and creating a choice node where you can gain extra damage for either physical or magic damage. That’s in addition to restructuring the class tree such that we’ll be able to take specifically cat or moonkin abilities more easily without giving up a ton of utility or defensives. It’s still too early to know what final tuning will be, but it will definitely be correct to focus on either catweaving or owlweaving in 11.1.
If I had to speculate, I’d say it was that catweaving requires more setup than owlweaving. Nothing stopped a resto druid from ignoring cat form and slinging wraths around from range with starsurge being on a single cooldown. But the need to build combo points to be able to get any damage out as a cat, there simply needed to be more juice to make that squeeze worthwhile. Selfishly this was good for me, but I understand how druids that don’t want to sit in melee weren’t thrilled with the direction.
Fluid Form is being moved to the far left capstone node, which is a bit out of the way for an owlweaving resto. They are adding Skull Bash to it which would check off an important box for your use case. It is all utility/defensive down that path with Blizzard adding the ability to laterally move from Improved Barkskin down either side or the middle. You’re looking at 5 points of talents that wouldn’t be strictly necessary for resto, but everything would give you value even if you never touch cat form. It’s probably fairly doable, especially if you were planning to get Wild Charge/Tiger Dash and Feline Swiftness/Well-Honed Instincts.
Also reminding that now that Resto has Moonkin Form, that’s an added 10% spell damage increase they didn’t have in the previous build. I’m not in the PTR myself (no disk space for that lol), and I’d love to know where that puts Owlweaving versus Catweaving.
I tend to like the burst damage that Tree of Life brings for its whole duration from range with Wrath spam and Starsurge, but maybe now picking Convoke will have a better output, especially because bosses on easier PVE content won’t even live for that long, and for trash packs, ToL’s burst is worthless because (for some gods-forsaken reason) we don’t have an enhanced Starfire to cover an AoE situation.
Edit: Took another look at the class tree and I’m really bothered on how Circle of Heavens/Wild is so deep in the middle that is almost a capstone talent, yet it will be a requirement for almost every spec.
While I definitely agree with this sentiment overall, Lycara’s Teachings is the talent immediately preceding it and is mandatory for all specs already. This is far less egregious than than all druids having to put 3 points into resto/balance only talents to reach Rising Light, Falling Night. Good riddance.
Now that you mentioned… This reminds me of how happy I was when I returned and saw that Lycara’s Teachings became just a 2 point node (3 before, what they were thinking?!), but now with this one being a requirement right after, it kind of gives me the 3 points vibe again :stuck_out_tongue .
Agree with Rising Light. That was one of the WORST decisions in making a talent, it’s actually hilarious it went live.
Yeah normally I would be right there with you calling out how terrible this is with the the mandatory 3 points. But 3 straight years of having a pre-beta class tree that Blizzard impressively made even less functional during that time has worn me down to the point where I’m just happy with improvement even if there are still glaring holes. The 11.1 class tree is remarkably better for feral and guardian in nearly every other way; I can live with 3 mandatory points at the bottom of the tree since all of those points will benefit me.
Oh, absolutely - I think it’s an improvement nearly across the board, maybe a bit questionable on the actual versatility of Resto’s dps, but I often do just either full catweave or spellcast, so I’m content with one or the other.
But hey, we got some major stuff in the previous build… there’s like what? 3 or 4 more before it becomes a release candidate by the end of February? Hopefully they’ll improve them even more.
I’m still not happy with Balance still lacking reliable defensives in PVP though, but with the current class tree at least you won’t need to sacrifice some utility or mandatory useless things to get all of the defensive nodes.
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