I’ve been a “main” Rsham for several years now, and anyone who has played a shaman knows how much utility it has, plus it has Heroism.
I’m looking to learn Guardian druid and Resto druid in particular and was wondering what it has that’s unique/fun. And then from there, I want to try and learn Balance…for funsies.
One of the best mobility in the game, not only do we have incredibly movement speed, resto druid can also cast while moving for 90 percent of their tool kit. It Is THE ADHD healer.
Add in instant cast mount, breaking out of roots/slows and interacting with items while flying.
Movement speed increase is nice. In addition to Stampeding Roar (which can be used in either Bear or Cat form), you have Dash / Tiger Dash (depending on talents), and if those are both on cooldown you still have the ability to simply shift into cat form and take advantage of it’s built-in speed boost. In the outdoor world, you can shift into Travel
Form, even while in-combat (although there is a speed penalty). When you are running through mobs in Travel Form, you don’t have to worry about being knocked off your mount. Being dazed will slow you down but it won’t shift you out of Travel Form.
Stealth is amazing. Some other classes have the ability to go invisible obviously, but this is a no-BS implementation similar to rogues.
Fall damage reduction in Cat form is pretty handy. There are plenty of times when you can survive a fall by shifting into cat form, and survive even longer falls if you layer barkskin and potentially ironbark on top.
You also potentially have access to Flap while in Moonkin form to slow-fall, if the fall damage reduction while in Cat is not enough. Never have to worry about being ported to the wrong Dalaran, etc.
Bear form itself is basically a no-cooldown semi-turtle form. If you know you are about to get hit by a mechanic, then you can just shift into bear form. You can even Barkskin+Ironbark+Bear Form. This allows you to cheese a lot of mechanics that would otherwise one-shot you.
Typhoon + Mass Root is a personal favorite, when a tank sucks and I pull healing aggro on trash.
The amount of quests that are potentially made easier by being able to interact with objects while still in flight form is large.
Being able to cast HoTs like Rejuvenation while on the move as a Resto Druid is amazing, although we are currently more reliant on plant-and-cast Regrowth spam than we have been in a very very long time.
The focus on HoT based healing itself is unique and fun, and forces you to be very proactive with your healing (whether that’s good or bad depends on you), but also allows those HoTs to keep ticking while you do other things.
You can switch roles while keeping most of the same gear (weapon being the biggest exception if you are switching between Intellect and Agility). It can be nice to switch roles and already have good gear rather than gearing a 2nd character.
While not having lust/hero could be seen as a negative, it’s also nice to NOT have that responsibility. Same with NOT having to interrupt, especially after the upcoming Skull Bash changes. No one bugging you for summoning stones, or lock rocks, or mage portals, or mage food. You get to just chill and focus on your job.
Thank you for the replies. I healed a +2 tonight, which I know isn’t a whole lot, but I wanted to try/practice. I used Cell to track my HoTs, which I’ve never used an addon to heal before. The group stayed alive and full health most of the time, except for the Prot Pally whom I’m reasonably sure thought he was a BDK from the way his health spiked.
Is it possible to heal with Rdruid without an addon? How on earth do people keep track of such things?
You can heal without addons as resto with raid frames turned on in party settings and mouseover macros decently, the only thing is blizz only shows 3 of the ~8 possible different hots on the frames so you have to directly target people to see more then your last 3 cast for mastery ramping.
Theyre fixing it kinda by removing a bunch of the little mastery padding only hots and upping the default display to 5 next expac, and if youre geared you probably don’t need to know every individual hot on the target bellow a 10, its more making sure your cultivation stacks are decent so regrowth is faster and doesn’t burn mana, and timer watching for lining up flourish/convokes/treants during big damage.
Is it possible? Sure. But with the current state of default frames, you would have to be a masochist to even try. Will things be better in midnight? I guess we’ll find out.
You also do not need to make macros for mouse over anymore, it is built into the combat options in the settings now. Just go into settings and turn on mouse over casting.
Well if since you are new…Do not use an addon. Learn to Play with Blizz’s UI, you can customize it to a degree. Turn on Mouse over Casting. You will be ahead of the game in Midnight when they go away.
I found that setting doesn’t consistently play well with type of shift/alt, help/harm or stance based macros healers and druids tend to use combined with mouseovers, where the macro version works with pretty much everything.
For basic resto with no modifiers extra modifers the setting itself probably is fine though yah.
well probs the main utility swap from Shaman to Druid is removal of bloodlust, but you get Battle rez. Both super great utility abilities. Other than that Resto druid, in my opinion, is one of the most unique healers in the game.
Also, this ^. Probably one of the best defensives in the game, with no cooldown. The payoff is that you generally can’t do anything while in bear form, and with how much “up-time” is needed in the game nowadays, sometimes it is not even worth doing.
Just play with some kind of addon, even if its a minimalist addon that only expands Blizzard default raid frames ability to show buffs.
You can only see 3 buffs on default frames. This makes it so you frequently cannot tell who already has rejuv in a ramp in raid, which leads to wasted globals if you’re rejuving some one who already has it. Its very inefficient and hampers your build up to 12 abundance.
For M+ it doesnt matter.