Developers’ notes: We are significantly reducing the number of buffs Restoration Druid can apply to allies to make raid frames and target frames easy to parse and always show your important effects. Restoration Druid’s Mastery will also be much more effective per healing over time effect active, as they can now only apply up to 5 heal over time effects to allies. We are also streamlining several cooldowns and actives we felt were redundant with other tools in the kit by either removing them or combining them with other abilities. Finally, we are reducing the amount of maintenance buffs by making targeted changes to Lifebloom talents and offering a way to maintain Efflorescence automatically on your Lifebloom target.
In your notes, you talk about reducing the number of buffs Restoration Druid can apply to allies to make raid frames and target frames easy to parse by capping the number of Heal of time effects to 5.
I’m going to be honest, this is a horrible change. This change does not make Restoration Druid easier to play, or get into playing. In fact, it does the opposite! It makes Restoration Druid healing confusing for new players by adding a restriction to the class that no other spec in the game has. It’s a heavy handed and lazy solution to a problem that has better answers.
If you want to reduce the number of buffs Restoration Druid can apply to allies, then actually take the time to remove some of them instead of applying what is clearly a bandaid fix.
Outside of cenarion wards removal im pretty happy with the changes. Ive been saying blizz needed to strip away the fodder hots that do no actual healing themselves since like late SL cause they just make the actual hots we cast directly feel worse as they balance around the theoretical maximum we could have on a target.
5 casted hots, a total of 7 mastery stacks with harmonious bloom, down from 7 casted hots with 12 potential mastery stacks.
Grove tending was not impactful itself, cultivation hasnt done any real healing since bfa, same with efflorescence (rip to the OG fodder hot) and cenarion was nice but it looks like theyre going full tilt into abundance since its a capstone now and the lifebloom apex for direct heals.
Its not that mastery is capped at 5, its that they removed all but 5 hots options if thats what youre confusing.
i’m totally ok with them stripping HOTS away. what i’m NOT ok with is them adding a barrier that says “you can only have 5 HOTS active at a time.” It will lead to degenerate gameplay.
Edited it but thats not whats happening. They just removed all the passive hots, so we only have 5 hots to cast now.
Cultivation is a direct heal, springblossom is gone, grove tending is gone, tranq is a direct heal, cenarion ward is gone.
Rejuv, rejuv again with germ, lifebloom, regrowth, wildgrowth are the only hots we have total.
Imma guess they just dont care about wildstalker blooms since theyre a hero talent and they even said theyre removing them from the raidframes tracking (which is kinda dumb cause thats a 20% healing amp i want to know about for spot heals but whatever)
ah ok good! I didn’t realize that is what that line meant. Then I have no issue with the change. The only issue I had was if they were adding a cap to how many HOT buffs we could have active.
They took our interrupt and axed Flourish as well. Combined with losing Cenarion Ward and double Lifebloom, I just don’t really understand what they’re expecting of us. Half of delves are out without an interrupt, Flourish is our only cooldown with a realistic timer and is key to predictive raid healing, and the other two are staples for dungeons.
Why couldn’t they at least remove Convoke the Spirits instead, the annoying random bs which is completely unrelated to druid magic and really should’ve been a Shaman spell?
What’s funny is they kept the only HoTs I showed on my grid anyway.
Why bother to even show cultivation or spring blossoms on your UI? You don’t need this information on the frame, it’s pointless clutter. It was just a default Blizzard UI problem if it actually wasted space with them. I never speced into ward if I could avoid it. Haven’t used it this expansion at all.
Kind of sad to lose double lifebloom. It was annoying to maintain at times but they could have added a talent for a longer duration or a way to refresh it with regrowth or something.
The new version of nature’s bounty might create a whispering waves playstyle option for druids. Not sure if that’s a good thing but you cast regrowth a lot anyway.
Curious to see what the wildstalker new talents will be. The KotG ones were dryad related.
Skull bash I’m annoyed by, but since they didnt say whats replacing it while the node is still there for all in the class tree, and no other healer had their interrupt removed, im holding out hope that theyre just trying to simplify our dps to be caster focused and going to put solar beam there. So we’d still have some type of true interrupt, just with a longer cooldown, or our own that doesnt require shapeshifting to streamline the gameplay.
The other changes im willing to see how they play out over alpha, lifebloom becomming the focus of the apex i dislike cause the first point just seems like a bunch of overhealing in single target and has anti-syngery with how we move harmonious lifeblooms for low gcd spot heals while the last point is more single target overheals and maybe a forced play at verdancy being our main aoe burst but we only had one lifebloom for 14 of the years the specs been around so going back doesnt bother me.
Cenarion ward i do think could have stayed since it had a pretty simple to understand and use function, but i dont really know where itd go now that abundance and its improvement is a capstone talent.
Tranq flourish i actually like the idea of, i just think tranq needs to be reduced down to a 2 minute cooldown to compensate/meet in the middle for uptime.
Yseras gift being moved to the bottom of the tree seems like they just sent it to die though. Our capstone area is so competative idk why they though it could be there and have a chance outside of maybe pvp.
And photo should have kept the hot speed increase and just have that when its on any target instead of the bloom chances, the apex already forces a ton of blooms every time we swiftmend, a few more isnt exciting.
Its early days they can reiterate with feedback, just got to hope they listen.
The core soul of the forest and PoA changes look pretty nice, fewer fodder hots padding the mastery and slowing the gcds is great, a stronger baseline wildgrowth is good, the efflo and treant changes are interesting, and the hero talent changes theyve posted look okay.
They’re fundamentally changing the way healing works for every healer. We’re going to have to see how it ends up feeling when we can actually see gameplay or play with it ourselves.
I’m excited Resto is going to focus on fewer, but more potent HoTs. Potency was spread way too thin before and resulted in far too many auras on nameplates which is a tracking nightmare.
Why would you hold out hope for less options? There’s no reason we can’t have a world where both cat form DPS and caster DPS are viable options for resto druids.
I have been wishing for a while now that moonkin weaving would be competitive with cat dps, but I am still ticked off to lose skull bash.
Taking out reasons to shift between forms, taking out reasons to stack and maintain HoTs, converting a bunch of our heals to direct instead of over time? Are we designing druid for people who don’t like druids??
Because a worse interrupt like solar beam is still better than the complete removal of an interrupt from our kit that they already announced we’re getting.
Dev log said resto doesnt get skull bash at all, its already that way on alpha, what they didnt say is whats going in the same node slot since its still in the class tree.
Imma hope its solar beam so we have an interrupt option at all, or that theyre making a custom one for resto, probably a ranged one that doesnt require shapeshifting but has a longer cooldown since theyre trying to simplify everything.
Edit- Blizz if youre watching, faerie fires right there. Resto only, 40 yrd range- Interrupt an enemy’s spellcasting and prevent any spell from that school of magic from being cast for 5 sec. 30 second cooldown.
Get brownie points for a call back, doesnt require shapeshifting, closer to your average range interrupt then solar beam, can use those butterfly animations you just made.
Cenarion ward is the only hot I’ll miss. Casting Cenarion ward and extending it with swiftmend was so powerful that I worry about how we’ll do in arenas without it. Cenarion ward is also thematically unique and impactful. This should NOT be removed.
I would be sad to see Flourish go if they hadn’t already gutted it and made it useless by needing the 100 percent increased tick to 25. It was dead for me the moment they did that.
Skull bash, I don’t really care. It’s kind of funny because the day before it was removed I was saying I missed when Shamans were the only healer with an interrupt because it was supposed to be their unique class flavor.
While I’ll miss Skull bash’s utility in devs, I’m glad it will make R Shamans class identity stronger.
Hopefully we’re not the only healer losing our interrupt though, then I’ll be pretty mad.
Ps, can we finally add frenzied rejuvenation to fluid form? It’s too clunky having to use a global to shift first.
I was hoping the extra efflo talent meant the efflo would follow your lifebloom target around and just stay stuck to them but vidoes from alpha show it just casts efflo when you cast LB. Still saves a key if you want, but it would have been neat if it stayed with them.
