So Resto Druid is going to get a complete redesign right blizz?

Classes Druid
1

Ever since the redesign of Resto’s mastery in Legion to Harmony, the playstyle and design of the spec has become more tedious, degenerate, and hard to balance, xpac after xpac.

Resto Druid needs to get away from proactive healing and lean far more into reactive healing.

Proactive healing provides nothing to the gameplay, except making it more tedious and difficult for regular everyday players to play.

The idea of turning Resto into a healing based Aff lock was already a bad idea, but then toss in the mastery effect and it becomes a full blown disaster.

I really think almost every single aspect of Resto needs to be scrapped and brought back to the drawing board.

The idea of Resto is cool but the execution and design is lackluster, and they could do a significantly better job while modernizing the spec as a whole.

This is the spec’s description from WoD:

The many gifts provided by nature must sometimes be reciprocated. Restoration druids seek order in the world by tending directly to its many life forms. Friend to flora and fauna alike, restoration druids celebrate birth and growth. Where there is decay, they bring rejuvenation. Where there is abatement, they summon regrowth. Life not only needs protection—it needs nourishment.

To foster this harmony, the restoration druid builds a bond with the things that grow, gaining inspiration from the flower’s bloom, the seed’s sprout, the mushroom’s spores, and the tree’s growth. Like nature, the restoration druid perseveres through patience and persistence, the foundation upon which all life is built and sustained. They use this power to mend wounds and provide persistent remedies that keep their allies from falling.

Funny part about that description, perseveres through patience and persistence, if I used that as guidance and had the patience to wait for my HoT’s to heal my party, they’d be dead in seconds.

  1. Starting from scratch, I think every single spec in the game should have 4-6 core rotational abilities to play through. Then add another 6-8 defensive,utility,offensive/defensive cd’s and you’ll have a clean spec without a bunch of redundant abilities that do the same thing (e.g. why did we get grove guardians when we already have 7 core healing spells that achieve the same thing? ya ya GG helps with burst healing…that’s the roll swiftmend is supposed to fill)

Core Spells

  • Rejuvenation (add a new talent that reduces the amount of GCD’s required to spread Rejuvs - would allow Rejuv to target 3 allies, with smart targeting based on injured or not)
  • Nourish (think the name and thematic fit’s Resto druid better than Regrowth or Healing Touch - would need the mastery portion removed/changed due to new mastery)
  • Efflorescence (iconic skill that fills the roll of ground targeted AoE heal)
  • Swiftmend (single target burst healing, would only consume Rejuv, and any remaining healing left on Rejuv would be added to the Swiftmend heal)
  • Flex Slot - Not really a fan of any other healing abilities on Resto

Offensive Spells

  • Moonfire and Sunfire need to be removed from Resto and left with Balance and Guardian, makes no sense for Resto’s thematic
  • Give Resto Adaptive Swarm back with the VFX update done in Dragonflight
  • Becomes a DPS spell, replacing both Moonfire & Sunfire
  • Target an enemy, every 1 second, spreads to nearby enemies up to a max of 8

Defensive/Utility/CD’s

  • Most of our defensive/utility spells are fine
  • Personally don’t like using cat or bear form as Resto, wish I could use travel form indoor’s but nerf it to be the same movespeed increase as cat form aka 30% movespeed, just providing choice for thematic
  • Travel form should be able to use Dash indoors with the above point
  • Incarn: Tree of Life should be our one and only offensive CD, fits the theme perfectly, model could use a huge update, think Elothir from Legion, updated VFX as well, overall very cool CD
  • Tree of Life should also have customization just like our other shifts do in the barbershop

Removed/Changed Spells/Talents

  • Grove Guardians - removed - good riddance
  • Wild Growth - removed - with the rejuv applying to 3 targets and being significantly buffed to be very strong, no point for this to exist
  • Cenarion Ward - removed
  • Flourish - removed - with less focus on being a healing aff lock, don’t need
  • Lifebloom - moved in some form to the new mastery - similar to the old Living Seed passive from a long time ago
  • Regrowth - Nourish replaces it
  • Germination - changed - would be busted with new Rejuv, not needed, getting away from stacking 8+ HoT’s
  • Photosynthesis - changed
  • Invigorate - removed - unless it’s changed into the old Genesis skill, might be too strong though
  • Convoke - removed
  • Tranquility - removed
  • Nature’s Swiftness - removed

New Mastery: Lore of the Ancients
Your heals plant a Living Seed on your ally, increasing healing received by x% and increasing their Versatility by x%.
Living Seed blooms after 6 seconds, healing for x amount.

Feel like this is much more simplistic and easy to balance, while also being far more thematic and fitting to a Resto Druid.
Also leans into the Ancient of Lore, which in the lore, is who would teach Druids about healing.

From the Warcraft RPG, which is considered “non-canon”, even though alot of lore still is canon :
An ancient of lore seems to be in a constant state of autumn - its leaves are gold and scarlet. Its craggy face bears a look of wisdom. Lanterns hang from its branches, symbolizing the light of wisdom. Ancients of lore instruct nascent night elf druids and priests about the ways of magic and the secrets of nature. Ancients of lore prefer to use their spells to bolster their allies, but in times of great conflict they turn their magic abilities and their powerful arms on their enemies.

ALSO, THE NEXT HERO TALENT FOR RESTO SHOULD BE THEMED AFTER THE ANCIENTS OF LORE

This post is long enough, maybe devs will see it, maybe they won’t, who knows.

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I really do not want to see this happen. Reactive healing is boring to me, I hate playing health bar whack-a-mole. I know there are many players who do like this kind of healing, and thankfully there are specs in the game that are reactive. But going all the way back to vanilla, resto druid was the epitome of a proactive healer. Shifting heavily away from that because the current mastery and incoming damage profile lead to some unsatisfying gameplay in current WoW is a pretty drastic shift that is likely going to drive many existing players away.

I don’t know how you’re defining a “regular everyday player.” There have been times when resto druid was by far the most popular healer across all content levels, even when there were other healing specs that were competitive performance wise with druid. I really think it’s a vast oversimplification to try to draw a line in the sand that all average healers dislike proactive healing.

To be clear, there is a place for there to be more reactive tools for the resto druid toolkit; honestly the same thing holds true for disc priest as well. Being a primarily proactive healer doesn’t mean there can’t exist reactive tools for certain situations. But I really don’t think we can claim that proactive healers are immediately loathed by the average player that wants to heal.

Why was this a bad idea? That’s fine if you think so, but just stating it was a bad idea doesn’t really allow for much of a conversation from anyone who might have even a slightly different opinion.

I really don’t think resto druid needs to be thrown away and completely rebuilt from scratch. Honestly I think there are three issues with the spec that could be resolved without removing the essence of resto druid:

  1. Our mastery fundamentally only works with certain incoming damage profiles. From Legion through SL, the incoming damage profile in both raid and M+ worked perfectly with our mastery. We could dial-a-HoT count per the incoming damage of an encounter to be ridiculously efficient. With the DF damage profile change continued into TWW, we have to maintain 3 mastery stacks on everyone at all times just to keep everyone standing. This forces us to be heavily GCD-capped.
  2. Due to the multiplicative scaling of our mastery, each of our HoTs is tuned to be tremendously weak on its own (except Cenarion Ward). Small tuning increases to a HoT can quickly spiral out of control because our mastery allows us to drastically raise our ceiling. This means that we are very hamstrung with handling unexpected damage.
  3. Our HoTs frankly don’t last long enough. With us needing to maintain numerous mastery stacks at all time, having our earlier applied HoTs fall off as we’re ramping for the damage event is a big problem. This gives us far less wiggle room in terms of when we apply each HoT, creating even more pressure to get the timing exactly right in advance of a damage event.

Note that all of these problems are directly or indirectly influenced by our mastery. So long as the damage profile is going to require multiple mastery stacks just to keep up with the demands of the incoming damage, Blizzard is going to struggle to appropriately tune the spec and not have the spec feel bad trying to keep up with the minimum throughput requirements.

I really don’t know how this could possibly be tuned to not be either useless or completely broken. Given that you want to remove nearly everything that isn’t this spell, this would have to do most of our heavy lifting; getting 3 applications out of 1 GCD every time sounds like it would be broken assuming Rejuvenation does significant healing on its own.

Do you not realize how overpowered it would be that for the same cost of SOTF and Wild Growth, you would get the same amount of targets healed from a HoT that by your own admission has to be strong, with zero cooldown?

This is one of our best heals in small group content.

Overall, I’m not really sure how you picture resto druid would play out with your proposed changes. It seems like once we get rejuvenations up and efflo down, we’re largely just resto shamans playing whack-a-mole with Nourish as damage pops up. I am really not sure how this isn’t just a reskin of resto shaman with different names for the abilities and a lack of totems.

Being able to expend GCDs now to gain healing later is a very unique gameplay loop that can be quite powerful in a lot of cases. Getting rid of that just because we happen to have a bad mastery seems fairly criminal. Every other spec except disc priest already has abilities that are very powerful when played reactively; we don’t need to be removing druid from that list.

As far as the mastery, I really think it should still be focused on our HoT based gameplay, but just remove the multiplicative scaling. That would allow Blizzard the latitude to buff some of our HoTs to be at least decent standalone, letting mana be the driving force behind how often we can use each HoT. This would also allow them to remove/rework many effects that are effectively just mastery stacks like Germination and Spring Blossoms. This would be my idea for our new mastery:

Mastery: Flourishing Blooms
Your healing over time effects tick (mastery)% faster and last for (mastery)% longer. Any partial healing that remains when a healing over time effect expires or is refreshed with less than 30% of the duration remaining will bloom on the target.

Then with me basically repurposing Flourish, Flourish would basically become our current mastery:

Flourish
Your healing effects on each target are increased by 10% per healing over time effect on the target for 10 seconds.

Personally, I really like the ramp healing structure in raids as a druid, and I don’t really want to lose that. While having the mastery as a permanent effect creates problems, as a cooldown, I don’t think it would be that bad. We would still have a clear ramping strategy that we can toggle with Flourish after we’ve completed our ramp.

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Dont ruin resto for the rest of us when we’re one of 2 whole fully proactive healers in the game and the only healer with this much of a focus on hots, just because you dont like the class.

Resto needs some slight mastery tweaking so baseline hots can be scaled better and we arent gcd capped maintaining all of our hots to garuntee safety for a group.
Take it down from 12 mastery multipliers to a max of 7 by deleting the mastery fodder only talents

and a pass over for cooldowns so we can have 1 reliable emergency button as appose to the current:
tranq being trash, incarn being another ramp button that doesnt save anyone and convoke being rng mess of weither itll save the group or makes half the casts moonfire.

It does not need its entire hots layering identity replaced and turned into a bad mash of resto shaman running riptide/ancestors build with Holy priests single target only even in aoe situation with none of the good cooldowns of either.

4 Likes
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I was thinking this exact same thing the other day. Replace those “only exist to create more mastery” talents with talents that make spreading hots or maintaining hots easier so as you said, we’re not so GCD locked.

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I’m super new to Resto and don’t have much serious input to add, but I’d say getting HoTs rolling at the start of anything can feel a bit rough compared to any reactive healing I’ve done so far. I like the concept of stacking my HoTs, but actually doing it feels tedious more than fun sometimes.

Please yell at me if that’s a bad take though. I’m not used to constantly cycling buffs/debuffs like this.

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Maybe I should try a different healer like holy priest or something more reactive because that’s the style of healing I like.

Problem is, I pretty much only play Nature based classes in every single game I play because that’s what I like.
That’s the angle my entire post is coming from.

WoW has nothing to offer me except Resto, because Presvoker isn’t even close, and I’m not playing as a scalie.

7

Its rough to start when you dont know damage patterns but once you get use to starting 5~10 seconds before the damage comes in and gear to > then 25% haste and ~15% mastery the gcd itself is low enough that it smoothes out decently and hots pump really hard into targets youre layering.
Before then though it is a struggle and will stay a struggle if youre doing a lot of pugs since restos weakness is failure damage.

Also depends on your content of choice and hero talents. Wildstalker + cenarion and lifebloom build makes keys up to at least a 10 pretty smooth if the group doesnt absolutely suck. In raids keeper incarn/treants +abundance for mass rejuv ramp and endless mana will get you through heroic just fine.

8

Didn’t even bother reading all of that

Resto is fine, it’s fun and doesn’t need any redesign outside of some mana and mastery tweaking as my only issue is I get oom In longer fights

Other than that it’s a great and fun spec with access to stealth, bear form, great mobility and buttons to press

If you think it needs a complete redesign then it’s time for you to play a different healer

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Doing this would mean you’d simply be a mastery bot with your sole purpose being to exist to give mastery to your friends. Our mastery needs some attention but this isn’t it.

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While I can empathize with the game not feeling like it has a place for you, you are trying to change the very essence of a spec that has existed since vanilla. A lot of us enjoy the overall play style of resto druid, and it is the only spec that relies nearly exclusively on HoTs. You’re asking for quite a bit of collateral damage and potentially driving away players who currently enjoy the spec for your personal preferences. And what you described already mostly exists in the game with resto shaman; there’s no world where it makes sense to have two specs that are basically copies of one another when trying to appeal to the largest number of players.

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I’m really not a huge fan of the idea of a complete overhaul.

I actually like our current mastery. All you have to do is look back to BFA, Shadowlands, etc to see examples of when it worked fine. Even in Dragonflight when things were rougher, it was mostly back into a great spot by the later seasons.

So just de-bloat the spec. I actually like Grove Guardians, but if they have to go in order to de-bloat the spec and return most of our spells to being potent on their own and not just mastery-fodder, then so be it.

I don’t want spells like Nourish to be part of my core rotation, ever. If I want to cast Flash Heals, I can play a Priest, Paladin, etc. I’m not super thrilled with where Regrowth is at the moment either, but at least it leaves a HoT behind.

In BFA we had Azerite abilities that converted some of our overhealing to a shield (https://www.wowhead.com/azerite-essence-power/the-well-of-existence-72). If blizzard is dead-set on continuing with the bursty damage patterns, then having an ability like this return would go a long way toward making our proactive healing pattern more viable.

2 Likes
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Resto shaman is super reactive and also nature based.

I don’t like these changes for a few reasons, chief among them is losing a kit in exchange for a one button answer to every damage pattern.

And personally, I like proactive healing. I think resto could use some spell consolidation and extension of hots, so that mastery could feel more impactful over less GCDs, but just blowing up the spec to be a one-spell wonder is a no from me.

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All i want is tranq to move health bars again and be mobile. Shoot if i gotta plant and cast unlike most other healing CDs, that CD better be the GOAT. Get rid of dumb mastery fodder talents like cultivation so i can have a talent point or two more to spare. Our class is the most talent point starved besides maybe disc priest. Just look at all the healing classes talent buildouts on wowhead. Count how many empty talets their builds have compared to ours. Our spec tree looks like the Charlie Brown Xmas tree…
And fix my class tree… we have 11? dead ends?

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14

I hugely agree with everyone here to get rid of the mastery stack talents like cultivation, spring blossoms, and grove tending. They exist to just water down our mastery and sure when all 3 are up on a target, healing feels good but that requires the target to be in efflo, under 60% health, and for you to swiftmend them. In heavy damage scenarios that ramp is too late into their health bar. Remove those and buff our base mastery so that our other stacks can have more impact. double rejuv wild growth and regrowth should be enough to survive most moderate damage events as that is like almost 6 seconds of cast time on one player.

I like the talent that makes lifebloom count for 3 stacks of master because that gives me more control when to shore up someone taking heavy damage.

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We need work for sure, but this is the worst take I’ve seen. Ick.