I don’t have good gear myself just yet, so I can’t gauge in practice, but all I read is that Rdruids are in a terrible state in PVP and PVE as well. How that holds up?
Granted, I only (used to) do mid-level stuff, like random BGs, solo Blitz, Arena skirmishes, and as of PVE, mid M+ keys. The reason I used to enjoy Resto is that I like not having cast times for many abilities.
The core of the issue is our Mastery combined with our current talent trees.
Our mastery stacks. So if you have 20% mastery, and you have 5 HoTs on someone, that’s 100% increased healing on that target.
That is great in theory, and it has worked out well in the past, but because of current talent and ability bloat, it’s now possible to put a LOT of HoTs on someone. We have Germination which allows you to cast two Rejuvenations on the same target. You have little mini-HoTs like Spring Blossoms (from Efflorescence), as well as the HoT from Cultivation, which don’t do much healing on their own, but add a Mastery Stack. Lifebloom can be talented to add 3 Mastery stacks instead of 1. Regrowth can be cast lightning quick now.
The result is that instead of this being a wonderful fun Mastery to play around, we got nerfed so that we now MUST have a ton of HoTs on anyone just to be able to put out decent/normal healing. For example, if you just toss a Regrowth on someone who needs an emergency heal, it will be incredibly weak. A Druid is balanced now around the idea that you will already have multiple other HoTs on that target first.
But unfortunately, you can’t always predict the future, to know who to put HoTs on in advance so that you can actually do respectable healing to them. In PvE, you have more latitude since encounters have somewhat predictable damage patterns. In 5-man groups there are few enough people you can mostly keep at least some HoTs on people basically all the time. In PvP however, things are chaotic, especially when people are also purging your HoTs.
To add salt to the wound; Grove Guardians, which were added last expansion to patch a hole in our reactive-healing toolkit, were nerfed badly so that they no longer fill that role. Instead they now mainly serve to buff our HoTs, turning them into just another spell that we have to cast ahead of time just to be able to do decent healing with our normal spells.
In PvE, if you are really familiar with your entire toolkit, know how to put it to use, and are great at getting out spells in advance, we can still do okay. In PvP it’s a disaster as you’re not going to be allowed to sit there and ramp to the degree we need when facing off against anything resembling a skilled opponent. All that remains is casting weak nerfed spells that can’t stand on their own on people who have few or no Mastery stacks.
Oof, that’s… awful to hear in detail like that. I’ve seen complaints but nothing pointing out the specifics. I presume because the abilities were adjusted around Mastery, that there’s not an alternative build with another stat like crit or haste?
Not even the Wildstalker tree would be something desirable to fill in Resto’s weaknesses?
Now I’m second guessing this druid. I know WoW’s class design is a rollercoaster every patch, and if the situation is that bad, what are the chances of things being looked at the next major patch?
Good question. I’ve seen no evidence that major changes are coming, but who knows?
They have thrown us some bones. We got Forest’s Flow (talent), which is basically a cut-down version of our Season 3 Dragonflight tier bonus. We got Wildwood Roots (talent), which buffs Abundance (talent) so that each rejuvenation we have out now also decreases the cast time of our Regrowth.
It’s now possible to get the cast time of Regrowth down VERY low, even below 1 second, which can be very useful in PvP. BUT, this is totally dependent on the number of rejuvenations that you have out, so it doesn’t break us away from the core issue of having to cast a bunch of pre-HoTs first, just to buff Regrowth in this case. These new talents have also created a situation where Regrowth is becoming responsible for a much larger portion of our healing than before, moving us away from our heritage of being a healing class that mainly healed via instant-cast spells.
Haste is a great stat, but eventually you get to the point where you’re just casting weak spells quickly. You also don’t need a lot of haste to be able to cast very quick Regrowths via Wildwood Roots (talent), although haste does help get those Rejuvenation pre-HoTs off quicker. Your best bet is to figure out how much haste you need in order to cast your rotation effectively and then focus on other stats after that.
Crit is still our worst stat, especially since you can get Regrowth up near 100% crit (even if you have almost no crit on your gear) just via Abundance (talent), but again, this does require those pre-HoT rejuvenations.
Vers is going to be our best PvP stat, for obvious reasons. It’s not a terrible stat in PvE either, but it simply can’t compete with Mastery due to the fact that the Mastery bonus stacks.
In the past, stacking Mastery and playing around it was a choice for those who preferred to focus on maximizing their healing throughput. Now it’s a necessity just to perform our role effectively at all.
After spending those 2 days trying my luck in Random BGs, and Solo Shuffles… I must say I’m not doing bad with Rdruid.
In fact, I’m finding easier to do my job correctly compared to my Disc priest with equal entry-level gear, in spite of Disc being praised as the strongest PVP healer atm (or so I read). I guess that focusing myself only in healing (Rdruid), as opposed on keeping shields + dpsing something to heal (Disc). Got way more wins.
BGs in specific seemed to be way smoother, and I set a “Bear Emergency Macro” with barkskin + renewal + frenzied r. for when I’m being focused by too many people and it makes surviving way better.
Been doing KotG hero spec, because the cooldown reduction on Incarnation is way too good, but gonna see how Wildstaker fares.
What most people won’t tell you about Disc is that more than any other in the game it is the spec that scales hardest with your teammates. Other healing specs have a lot of CC, ability to break roots, immunities(both damage and to various CC), mobility, etc which allows them to make some pretty sick and powerful plays to carry bad teammates.
Disc has damage and some powerful defensives but it doesn’t really have the play making power. It can keep people alive and contribute damage to the kill, but it needs a team that can set up those kills, and keep pressure to allow the spec to be aggressive. Without that disc goes from being the best healer in the game to being the absolute worst spec in the entire game and it’s not close.
As for rdruid I’ll put it this way. Just about every expansion I have had a passionate hatred for the class as it’s tends to be Blizzard’s baby. Anytime it got even remotely close to S- tier blizzard buffed the damn thing into the stratosphere and made sure it was perpetually the best healer in the game and it wasn’t close. I hate the spec with a passion and wish it would die.
But even I’ll tell you the thing is legitimately under performing and needing some serious buffs along with Hpriest and Rshaman for pvp. Purges and target swapping are absolutely brutal to the spec because of how poorly balanced, and frankly designed, their mastery is. If they can’t have full HoTs on a target then they can’t heal the target and while in theory the idea of more hots = more healing seems good on paper it simply doesn’t work out that well in practice.
That actually makes a lot of sense, coming to think of it. The matches I’ve been as a Disc healer (both casual BGs and Solo Shuffle) were either extremely good or extremely bad, no middle term.
EDIT UPDATE (since I can’t post twice in a row):
Well… I must say I got stuck in the 1500-ish rating for SS.
No matter the combination of talents and tricks I try, the healing is just not enough after dampening gets more loaded… whereas I see other healers not struggling at all to keep people alive even after a while. The only wins I’m managing to fetch lately are when I land with very good dpsers that can sort out the match quickly or if the other healer is another Rdruid.
I guess I should try maybe Wildstalker and somehow find space to put pressure on the healer… Or maybe the Master Shapeshifter + Dream of Cenarius combo that allows me to help burst between the insta cast Regrowths.
I actually landed in a BGB by accident as Resto (forgot I queued as it) and it went really well, so maybe I’ll have an easier time in battlegrounds.