So let me get this straight. Our damage got baseline nerfed and now we are forced between taking magical damage talents or physical damage buffs in the talent tree just to get to 50% of where we once were??
On top of that, these talent nodes were just dumped into our tree as ADDITIONAL nodes. So now we have a complete jungle of a talent tree. Sure, I love theorycrafting etc etc. but once you get midway into a season, you just want 2-3 builds you can easily swap out and play the game. Now we are going to have constantly be editing this tree and it the pivot options just don’t feel rewarding. It actually feels punishing. Our tree needs to be streamlined more. Bottom half of the Druid tree is an absolute mess.
I really don’t understand where you’re getting 50% of where we were. The talent to select your preferred damage style is 25% while the blanket nerf is 20%. Since our best best for dealing damage was always to prioritize one flavor versus the other anyway, that’s going to be a 5% total buff to that flavor.
Moreover, you can’t just look at the damage changes in isolation. The healing changes to druid are all buffs and our mastery is becoming front loaded. This is going to result in needing to cast fewer HoTs to keep your team alive during the majority of a raid/dungeon, freeing up globals for damage. So it’s likely resto druid will see a damage per global increase while also seeing a higher percentage of globals for damage.
Why would druids have to do this? Sure, at the start of a season when we need to figure out what works, there may be more of an exploratory period to try things out. But by the middle of the season, what works is going to be well defined and it’s still going to be that 2-3 builds you mentioned. The fact that there are more combinations isn’t going to change the fact that only a few of those combinations are going to be ideal.
While I will agree that the bottom of the druid tree is still in need of some work, I do want to highlight the fact that there are 4 specs sharing this tree. As much as resto and balance may have taken a hit with this rework overall, it’s an improvement for guardian and feral druid. Every druid has needed to spec down the magical wing of the class tree since the start of DF due to must-have abilities that benefited all specs of druids down there; it will be nice to finally be able to choose not to do so without sacrificing throughput.