State of Resto Druid Runes

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
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First off I just want to say I am enjoying Phase 2 of Season of Discovery and this post is not meant to just complain but to create a discussion. Almost every class has issues but this post is dedicated to Resto Druids who I do consider to have some of the weakest and most problematic rune choices (including 1 essentially “empty” rune slot - more on that below.)

Druids currently have the following dedicated Restoration runes:
(The more often picked Balance runes in parentheses)

Chest: Living Seed (Fury of Stormrage)
Hands: Wild Growth
Legs: Lifebloom (Starsurge)
Waist: Nourish (Eclipse)
Boots: None (Dreamstate)

Wild Growth is the only dedicated Restoration rune currently used and I find that to be a huge problem. I have no issue with the hybrid Resto/Balance playstyle and I love that it’s an option, but it should not be the default and only option due to all other Resto runes being essentially unusable. So why are they unusable?

Lifebloom: The generally unused WotLK version of this spell was chosen instead of the beloved TBC version. It has an extremely high mana cost but returns 50% of it’s cost when it “blooms.” It does almost no healing in the HoT portion with most of it’s healing being backloaded into the “bloom” portion. This makes it extremely difficult to get value out of it especially in raids where another healer is present. Additionally, stacking the spell to 3 is extremely punishing in Classic where playing around the 5 second rule is a major part of healing gameplay, and extending a 3 stack is essentially flushing your mana down the drain and a huge trap to new players.

Solution: Change the spell to the TBC version. Low mana cost, stronger HoT healing.

Nourish: Another WotLK spell that was generally unused in it’s time is imported here… Druids did not really need this as it is essentially a boring flash heal. The healing of this spell is fine but it’s mana cost is outrageous. A mana cost 50% higher than a Priest’s flash heal is insane, especially when you remember you already need to have a HoT on the target to get full value out of it.

Solution: Reduce the mana cost significantly and it may actually be usable, but still niche (for comparison, Priests get Empowered Renew in this slot. Yes, Priests do Resto Druid things better than Resto Druids now.)

Living Seed: An actually useless rune that I imagine is hovering somewhere around 0% use across all druids. Wildly outclassed by Fury of Stormrage and a talent that was skipped for years is what was chosen for Resto Druids.

Solution: Add an additional effect “Your periodic healing can now critically strike.” I think most druids would still prefer Fury of Stormrage but at least there could be a discussion about it.

Last but not least, the Boots slot. There is not Restoration rune for this slot, and instead we were given Dreamstate (or the last stand ability which could see use in PvP? idk this is a PvE focused discussion.)

So either they simply forgot to add a Restoration rune to this slot or they thought Dreamstate is somehow useful for Restoration. It is not (nor should it be) and here’s why: First of all, the 50% mana regeneration while casting only procs from Damaging spell critical strikes. So you not only have to not be healing to proc it, but you also have to crit. My reasonably well-geared level 40 Resto Druid hovers somewhere around 10% spell crit WITH the Gnomeregan buff. So 1 in 10 Wraths will proc the buff. Except if you’re spamming Wrath, you are already outside of the 5 second rule and and gaining no benefit from the proc which lasts 8 seconds.

The only way to gain benefit from this rune is to proc Eclipse for spell crit on Wrath using Starsurge. So the entire basis of this rune is knowingly predicated on ignoring Lifebloom, Living Seed AND the brand new Nourish (which was added at the same time as Dreamstate??) to instead use Fury of Stormrage, Eclipse and Starsurge. And even with FOUR OUT OF YOUR 5 RUNES INVESTED in this meager interaction, it is still nearly useless for Resto druids.

Solution: There is no solution other than to give Resto Druids their own rune in this slot. My suggestion is a Rejuvenation equivalent to Empowered Renew as it is INSANE to me how Priests were given this power before Druids who have for nearly 20 years been the primary HoT based healer.

I hope all the Resto Druids in SoD are hanging in there, I wish you all the best and I hope we can see some changes come through. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

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Druid situation is so insane right now that healer druids are complaining they are putting talent points into their damage tree and taking damage runes to do damage at the same time they heal. Someone needs to give the devs a time out for catering druids to the point they think their healer role needs buffs because it can dedicate more resources into dealing damage as it heals. Druids have collectively lost their marbles, i have never seen a more entitled group of players in any MMO in my entire life.

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The entire point of the post which you did not (or cannot) read is that Resto Druids only use damage runes because there are no usable healing runes, which puts them at a major disadvantage to Priests who have a vastly superior toolkit that continues to grow, while Resto Druids (and Paladin/Shaman) continue to fall behind. This is why most raid groups require a priest healer.

Resto/Balance should be an option not the only feasible playstyle.

And in fact if your problem is with Resto Druids being able to do damage while “healing” wouldn’t you be in favor of usable healing runes to draw some druids away from the hybrid playstyle? Lol

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If resto druids were actually struggling they wouldnt be putting talent points into balance tree and taking damage runes so they had something to do in between heals. Every single rune slot has a healing spell except for 1 that has a survivability cooldown. Druids have 3 talent trees and 4 roles all which are performing ok and which all have multiple runes. meanwhile you have classes with 1 role and only 2 viable talent trees who get runes in phase 2 that are almost completely useless in raid environment.

Resto druids complain their healing is too good and they dont feel the need to put points into resto tree (LOL)

Feral tank druids are complaining they dont AoE tank as good as paladins (the aoe tank) and get hotfixes to give them multiple new options on top of their multiple options for generating multi target threat. meanwhile rogues multi target ability is even worse than swipe, oops but the devs made a twitter post about how tanks arent really suppose to do aoe threat anyways so they arent going to touch it again after the [druid] hotfix for a while (i guess they need to wait and see if it buffs druid enough)

Boomkin get to have a 6 second cooldown for 50% of your health in damage instant cast ability with no set up that can stun for multiple weeks while bringing raid buffs and doing middle of the pack dps, which isnt enough apparently.

Feral DPS get to bring windfury buff and pack leader buff.
“but not many people are playing druid tank” yeah no wonder, no one wants the responsibility of tanking, especially not when you have a healing spec that gets to dps at the same time and a damage spec that has pom pyro mage tier burst while healing itself with the best mobility in the game.

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Your entire response is at best outdated and at worst completely made up.

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Right, the devs couldnt pretend that starsurge wasnt broken anymore and it finally got fixed. and Druids are getting massive buffs to starfire to compensate but still cry bloody murder because needing to hard cast to kill people in PvP is too hard.

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OP is right on the mark. The counter that resto druids have it so easy healing they are using damage runes or talents, you are missing the point entirely.

The resto druid is using damage runes because the healing runes are giving 0 value. Lifebloom is almost always a waste of mana to press, not just in terms of efficiency but also overhealing/getting sniped.

I had this same issue playing resto @ 25. I did the damage thing and it was ok, but I would have preferred an ultra efficient lifebloom, something on par with penance, so that even if my lifebloom is sniped/overhealing it’s not so bad. As it stands dumping huge mana on 3x bloom and having the healing portion sniped (maybe even sniped by your own HT because tank is gonna die and you can’t wait), it feels really bad.

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It’s kind of funny Aggrend just pulled the “there’s other versions of WoW for that” when talking about why they don’t improve tank AoE threat much in SoD, but there are other versions of WoW that try to force healers to DPS and they still decided to do it to resto druids in SoD. Not to mention the poor atonement copy and paste that is arcane mage healing. :man_shrugging:

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I hope we can see some changes coming in the next couple weeks!

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Druid is just one of my alts and I haven’t leveled any alts to 40 yet after leveling my shaman, but my hope for resto druid continues to basically be:

  1. make living seed give a crit chance to HoTs

  2. make lifebloom have a chance to proc clearcasting per tick (an alternative to lowering the mana cost but would be a neat mechanic to play around with WG and LB, especially with the mana return mechanic)

  3. make dreamstate proc on healing crits as well (which would make it pair well with either a fury playstyle or a living seed style if it worked on HoTs)

Nourish doesn’t seem that interesting, it should probably at least benefit from regrowth talents on top of HT.

If they add efflorescence rune in the next phase or whenever since it’s been datamined, I think they should also change it to make swiftmend not consume the HoT.

I think an interesting rune option or perhaps even just a buff to lifebloom baseline would be to use the budding leaves effect from retail:

Lifebloom’s healing is increased by 5.0% each time it heals, up to 75%.

The HoT buildup sounds like how people thought empowered renew might work, though in practice it doesn’t actually work that way and just is a flat increase that doesn’t stack per tick.

If something like that was a rune I think I’d want it up against Nourish instead since I wouldn’t really want to use Nourish anyway and would rather Dreamstate just be changed to work for non-fury resto as well.