Resto Druid - Legion Talents

[stormgust]

Man I wish they would just axe it now, before the number tuning really starts. Or else I fear druid will be stuck with this mastery for at minimum one major patch.

If they continue with the "major changes left for expansions" design paradigm they used for legion, it's going to be a expansion minimum ...

[Nevcairiel]

One of the main arguments pushing me away from rdruid in legion. This point is literally not arguable. One can turn formulas upside down, throw around PR speech, refer to class fantasy. But this point is undeniable by anyone who has played rdruid for some time. And it is such a huge turn-off when it comes to deciding on a healing class. Monitoring hots okay, that's what you sign up for when you choose druid, but not to such an extent...

Healing in general is mostly just playing the UI, if you spread HoTs in a random pattern over the entire raid, or try to concentrate them on select targets makes no difference to me. You stare at your raid frames either way.

Druids may require a bit more "attention" to manage the HoT uptime properly than a class with strong direct heals would, but they equally look at the raid frames to see the health bars dance and react to that.

I don't really see the mastery making that part any worse than it always was. You just change casting pattern, but not the amount of time you stare at the frames - which is nearly always already anyway. That would be a hard problem to solve anyway in WoWs constraints, can't exactly heal in the 3D world without your frames anyway.

[stormgust]

Healing in general is mostly just playing the UI, if you spread HoTs in a random pattern over the entire raid, or try to concentrate them on select targets makes no difference to me. You stare at your raid frames either way.

Druids may require a bit more "attention" to manage the HoT uptime properly than a class with strong direct heals would, but they equally look at the raid frames to see the health bars dance and react to that.

I don't really see the mastery making that part any worse than it always was. You just change casting pattern, but not the amount of time you stare at the frames - which is nearly always already anyway. That would be a hard problem to solve anyway in WoWs constraints, can't exactly heal in the 3D world without your frames anyway.

It's a decision process involving several more variables, instead of just missing HP. That by default increases the time you spent looking on the raid frame.
Though in reality, you probably just ignore wildgrowth targets anyway - it's smart, several other heals were turned back into smart heals as well, those targets simply aren't in need for further healing and you'd be better of healing other targets anyway [blunt description would be, this mastery tells other healers to screw off targets you're healing ]

Really, the more I think about this nonsense, the more absurd it gets why it's still a thing - and the only reasonable argument in favor to this date was: "It's more involved than our current mastery". On paper that it, it's never going to withstand actual tests, because it quite obviously goes against everything else: our entire toolkit, every other classes toolkit, and about any raid mechanic out there actually wants you to do [caveat: unless you get to the absurd "If it's tuned to provide an average AND If other healers are compensated for that absurdity" some people here like to bring forward why tuning is not a problem ...]

edit:
Also, don't take it personal, I'm just getting more and more frustrated by the entire lack of changes to resto druids. We still have a lot of simply bad/bland talents (Abundance, but hey, at least they buffed it by 66% and it's still abysmal), swiftmend is still overloaded (this won't end good, it didn't for rampant growth, it won't with even more multipliers) and of course mastery (the stacking mechanic when properly tuned, i.e. not excessive, has this not acting different than the 4.1 mastery - it didn't work, why try again?)

And if they really want to hold onto this nonsense of a mastery, outright tune it for 3-4 stacks, and just add toggle ability (let's just call it Tree of Life, or Nature's Chakra), which converts all of our mastery into haste (maybe with a multiplier >1). Not that it would end up much different than how Chakra or ToL are played, but at least it would fix some gearing issues.

[qqemokitty]

I honestly feel so discouraged by the lack of changes and outcome I have kind of given up posting in the alpha forums, and it looks like everyone else has, too. They think (mindbogglingly) that this mastery is good so they are going with it and it's way too late to change it now. I just don't even know what to say anymore. I will play my druid regardless so I guess it doesn't matter. RIP. - Bunny

[stormgust]

I honestly feel so discouraged by the lack of changes and outcome I have kind of given up posting in the alpha forums, and it looks like everyone else has, too.

Well, at least we got a handful of people posting, Holy priests on the other hand ... Maybe it would be better to get a more heterogenous roster of testers for the alpha, instead of mostly streamers (mostly popular DD specs) and mythic raiders (usually following the class imbalance at mythic level)

They think (mindbogglingly) that this mastery is good so they are going with it and it's way too late to change it now. I just don't even know what to say anymore.

At least sigma clarified, that refreshing Lifebloom kills off the Bloom, which only Kriellya considered a problem to begin with, isn't going to be a problem.

I will play my druid regardless so I guess it doesn't matter. RIP. - Bunny

Same for me, have been playing my druid since day 1, and definitely not planning to reroll.

Also, one more argument against this mastery, from a pure psychological point of view, it plays exactly like the 4.1 Mastery. Doesn't matter wether you perform above a zero benefit with but one HoT, it's not full benefit, and thus is going to be percieved as the same "no benefit" like 4.1 Mastery was (and given rejus tuning, 1 HoT actually is equal to no benefit currently). For that it's completely irrelevant, that this time we occassionally (read: tanks, we don't even have remotely enough GCD's/AoE HoTs to consistently beat "below average" for the raid) get more than the average value. Though back then, it probably was tuned for above average with a HoT anyway, so it wouldn't even be a difference to begin with. The only thing which changes this time is, that the stacking mechanics allows for the "above average" values to get ridiculous high (not going to be the case post tuning case - but then it's really just 4.1 mastery).

[Pyrianis]

Heh, I'd been wondering why Cultivation looked so strong in the alpha logs despite being trash on paper. Turns out it was bugged and double-dipping!

[stormgust]

Heh, I'd been wondering why Cultivation looked so strong in the alpha logs despite being trash on paper. Turns out it was bugged and double-dipping!

Cultivation's performance is actually hard to judge on alpha raid tests, and thus the talent hard to tune, because with classes and fights not properly tuned, and fights unkown, the triggering condition will either be not met (i.e. you push so much heal at the beginning, that it doesn't trigger), or it will continue to refresh itself (you ran out of mana, damage is excessive). Though my I still go with my initial feeling, if the treshold is high, it's really just a meter padding talent (unless you have a damaging aura), and rather similar to spring blossoms (just that one is for spread, the other for stacked fights), and otherwise it's more a niche talent (HoTs are usually too slow to get low HP targets out of danger -> useful mostly on aura fights -> inferior to a "permanent" effect like spring blossoms).

[Zerxes]

Saw Kriellya's post on cultivation. Glad blue posters will respond to his feedback, but ignore a large outcry of resto druid posts......

[soulstaz]

Well, at least we got a handful of people posting, Holy priests on the other hand ... Maybe it would be better to get a more heterogenous roster of testers for the alpha, instead of mostly streamers (mostly popular DD specs) and mythic raiders (usually following the class imbalance at mythic level)

I feel like no resto druid main have been really invited to alpha testing. Im on the same boat as other people here. I played much more Hardcore in the past. Now my guild is only Progressing on M Xhul. So no alpha for me. We also had Hamlet in the past that was giving a lots of really good insight to blizzard. Now he is gone and work for blizz. The resto druid theorycrafting community is pretty much empty outside of Tiberria i guess. Aniway, Crit-haste resto druid are back i guess. For some reason, i believe that blizz want resto druid off of mastery so that we dont have too much strong stat when going to an other spec which almost always involve having mastery. I havent really check yet Bear, Cat and boomy stat priority for legion but. maybe blizz is trying to reserve the mastery gear toward those spec ?

[Deleted]

Cultivation's performance is actually hard to judge on alpha raid tests, and thus the talent hard to tune, because with classes and fights not properly tuned, and fights unkown, the triggering condition will either be not met (i.e. you push so much heal at the beginning, that it doesn't trigger), or it will continue to refresh itself (you ran out of mana, damage is excessive). Though my I still go with my initial feeling, if the treshold is high, it's really just a meter padding talent (unless you have a damaging aura), and rather similar to spring blossoms (just that one is for spread, the other for stacked fights), and otherwise it's more a niche talent (HoTs are usually too slow to get low HP targets out of danger -> useful mostly on aura fights -> inferior to a "permanent" effect like spring blossoms).

Also you can count on it being strong in small scale pvp, which rdruids have historically been disturbingly good at. I feel like beating a dead horse, but it just adds to the pile of hard to balance aspects.

I feel like no resto druid main have been really invited to alpha testing. Im on the same boat as other people here. I played much more Hardcore in the past. Now my guild is only Progressing on M Xhul. So no alpha for me. We also had Hamlet in the past that was giving a lots of really good insight to blizzard. Now he is gone and work for blizz. The resto druid theorycrafting community is pretty much empty outside of Tiberria i guess. Aniway, Crit-haste resto druid are back i guess. For some reason, i believe that blizz want resto druid off of mastery so that we dont have too much strong stat when going to an other spec which almost always involve having mastery. I havent really check yet Bear, Cat and boomy stat priority for legion but. maybe blizz is trying to reserve the mastery gear toward those spec ?

Hmm, yeah, I guess if any healer should like crits it's the HoT healer, which can still be kinda consistent while using a heavy crit setup. I never really liked how much difference for example a holy shock crit makes for the very short term healing throughput.

[nightfalls]

I havent really check yet Bear, Cat and boomy stat priority for legion but. maybe blizz is trying to reserve the mastery gear toward those spec ?

I don't think Blizzard works that way (i.e. intending for different specs to have different "best" stats, to try to encourage some weird way to divide the gear). That would be quite boring if they did.

Generally Mastery is supposed to be at least somewhat good, since it's an "interesting" (versus crit, haste which do the same basic thing, though perhaps with some small secondary effects) qualitative stat. If Mastery sucks, developers have failed.

It's not surprising that with the raiding community, so goes the theorycrafting community. Not just Hamlet, but a ton of theorycrafters have been hired by Blizzard now, and it sadly seems either no one is stepping up, or the devs are now belitting the people who are - or maybe some combination of the two.

I do think this is a good thing, but with the game mechanics completely simplified and well-documented (versus prior expansions) there also hasn't been as much of a need/demand for very deep TC. The main thing people are doing are simulations, short formulative spreadsheets, and play-testing to make sure that the mechanics actually work as "advertised" right now. Sure some are trying to do more, but it's questionable how much of that is really "needed" versus just the TC'er showing off.

[Kaeth]

Also you can count on it being strong in small scale pvp, which rdruids have historically been disturbingly good at. I feel like beating a dead horse, but it just adds to the pile of hard to balance aspects.

At some point (far too late to overhaul mechanics, of course) the dev team will finally realize what an untunable trap this new mastery is. I foresee their taking the following steps to "balance" it at that point:

1) Thanks to PvP stats' being based on a set template for each class/spec and scaling only with player item level, resto druids will discover that their PvP template has only a token amount of mastery. Meanwhile ...

2) Druid set pieces and leather armor drops in the first raid tier will be drowning in mastery. Maybe there will be a gorgeous haste/crit chest piece available from an early boss, but for PuG gropus using Personal Loot, it'll "accidentally" be left off the loot table for resto druids for the first month.

Voila. This mastery doesn't have to make druids overpowered in PvP. And post-release data will reveal that throngs of restoration druids are "happily" wearing mastery-heavy gear sets! See, we were all just being cynical when we should have trusted in The Blizzard to balance our new (i.e. Cataclysm-era) mastery mechanic.

[Nythiz]

At some point (far too late to overhaul mechanics, of course) the dev team will finally realize what an untunable trap this new mastery is. I foresee their taking the following steps to "balance" it at that point:

1) Thanks to PvP stats' being based on a set template for each class/spec and scaling only with player item level, resto druids will discover that their PvP template has only a token amount of mastery. Meanwhile ...

2) Druid set pieces and leather armor drops in the first raid tier will be drowning in mastery. Maybe there will be a gorgeous haste/crit chest piece available from an early boss, but for PuG gropus using Personal Loot, it'll "accidentally" be left off the loot table for resto druids for the first month.

Voila. This mastery doesn't have to make druids overpowered in PvP. And post-release data will reveal that throngs of restoration druids are "happily" wearing mastery-heavy gear sets! See, we were all just being cynical when we should have trusted in The Blizzard to balance our new (i.e. Cataclysm-era) mastery mechanic.

I doubt that would be a valid way to balance.

Blizzard has been very happy with their "one size fits all" gear types for each class. Which means that Balance druids, whom might very well still want to use mastery as their go to stat will be sharing our gear. Same with guardian/feral really; I doubt that druid's new mastery will cause them to suddenly implement spec restrictions or extra gear sets.

The most likely in my eyes, is that druids turn out decent in PvE and super strong in PvP / 5 mans and Blizz swing a nerf bat (probably at the wrong thing); later on in the expansion we start to fall behind in PvE, but because we gear to avoid mastery the issue turns out to be small enough that they let it ride until the next expansion.

[Nevcairiel]

PvP has for the first time its own dedicated tuning knobs, so I don't expect being too strong in PvP to be a reason for broad nerfs, they would likely just tune the PvP only.

That leaves 5 mans and perhaps some raid fights that favor strong low-target-count healing (the latter is probably fine, as they are open to classes being stronger in some raid circumstances). How much they care to nerf for 5m performance is another question, with all the new CMs etc. There will always be one class thats the best at 5m healing, how big the gap will be is the only question there.

So even if the mastery remains as it is, and tuned for raid performance (ie. < 2), there may be hope for not being nerfed, and just being stronger in 5m, with the alternative of being on-par in 5m and potentially weaker in raids - but maybe they are at least going to recognize that dilema and favor the raid performance in the end. But only time will tell.

Although history is probably not in this theorys favor.

[Tiberria]

I think the biggest thing - if they insist on sticking with this mastery design - to make it reasonably tunable is they need to reduce/remove the amount of stuff that gains limited to no benefit from mastery. For example, Tranq scales horribly with mastery in Legion, because you probably will have 0 HoT effects (let alone 2 to get a strong gain) on the majority of targets Tranq heals. They could fix that by making Tranq always heal as if there were X stacks of Harmony present. Similar is Efflo. If they don't want to force Spring Blossoms as a target selection to get any type of reasonable gain from Efflo, they should probably also lock it to always heal as if a minimum amount of HoT effects are present.

The tuning is probably much more feasible if they can fix it so that 20%+ of our throughput gets no Mastery gain so that it being balanced around 1.7 stacks doesn't really mean it's balanced around closer to 2.4 stacks. As far as 5 man healing, I don't know that it's that ridiculously OP, because when you look at the tuning of our single target heals, they are like 30% behind what other healers have. We basically need 3+ mastery stacks (and probably more than that because every other healer also gets mastery gains on their single target) before approaching the single target power of other healing specs. It's very possible that this mastery will only realistically put our single target on par with other classes so that we aren't at a disadvantage in 5 mans rather than making us completely overpowered for them.

[Kaeth]

I doubt that would be a valid way to balance.

Of course it wouldn't. That post was pure sarcasm. But I still wouldn't put it past the dev team to do something like that, valid or not.

[stormgust]

PvP has for the first time its own dedicated tuning knobs, so I don't expect being too strong in PvP to be a reason for broad nerfs, they would likely just tune the PvP only.

That leaves 5 mans and perhaps some raid fights that favor strong low-target-count healing (the latter is probably fine, as they are open to classes being stronger in some raid circumstances). How much they care to nerf for 5m performance is another question, with all the new CMs etc. There will always be one class thats the best at 5m healing, how big the gap will be is the only question there.

If Kalgan's recent post (and blizzcon plans) are any indicator, there should be a stronger focus in 5m, so I'd consider it unreasonable to assume that they want the gap to be "too large" (however you want to define that, I'd say about 15-20% are "ok")

So even if the mastery remains as it is, and tuned for raid performance (ie. < 2), there may be hope for not being nerfed, and just being stronger in 5m, with the alternative of being on-par in 5m and potentially weaker in raids - but maybe they are at least going to recognize that dilema and favor the raid performance in the end.

At raid performance it's unreasonable in focused healing, it's 2.35 the secondary stat budget at 4 HoTs (if it stays at 1.7), it's going to be 3.5 when needed, and you can break 4 times via CD's. Though, due to GCD restriction, raid performance would actually need to be <=1.5 (25% yields that average), and not 1.7 as currently assumed by blizzard.

But only time will tell.
Although history is probably not in this theorys favor.

We don't have time, and as you said, history is not in favor of this theory.

I think the biggest thing - if they insist on sticking with this mastery design - to make it reasonably tunable is they need to reduce/remove the amount of stuff that gains limited to no benefit from mastery. For example, Tranq scales horribly with mastery in Legion, because you probably will have 0 HoT effects (let alone 2 to get a strong gain) on the majority of targets Tranq heals. They could fix that by making Tranq always heal as if there were X stacks of Harmony present.

The spells limited/not affected are the least concern for tuning, as they're not exposed to the ridiculous gains on high stacks to begin with. You just increase the spellpower coefficient and be done with it.

Similar is Efflo. If they don't want to force Spring Blossoms as a target selection to get any type of reasonable gain from Efflo, they should probably also lock it to always heal as if a minimum amount of HoT effects are present.

Again, spells not being affected at all isn't the problem, just shove it into the coefficient (and adjust throughout the expansion). Also, your suggestion would more or less eliminate Spring Blossoms to actually increase outgoing HoTstacks, as it would focus on a rather limited number of targets.

As far as 5 man healing, I don't know that it's that ridiculously OP, because when you look at the tuning of our single target heals, they are like 30% behind what other healers have. We basically need 3+ mastery stacks (and probably more than that because every other healer also gets mastery gains on their single target) before approaching the single target power of other healing specs. It's very possible that this mastery will only realistically put our single target on par with other classes so that we aren't at a disadvantage in 5 mans rather than making us completely overpowered for them.

You just described where the major tuning problem lies: to get rid of excessive mastery scaling on focused heal, they're required to tune our single target spells under the assumption of X HoT stacks, yielding no benefit at all (read: perform worse) below that. Thus they inherently underperform whenever you cannot realistically achieve X stacks (raids), just for the sake of getting rid of the excessive bonuses. Though Sigma apparently is completely ignorant of this tuning, and actually presumed that we now have an "advantage" in tank healing, while in fact - unless we pick a certain talent build - actually perform worse than on live.

I wonder though, when they realize that rejuvenation (all HoTs actually) would also have to be tuned for X stat, for it truely never to become excessive.

[Zerxes]

So legion alpha class feedback forums are gone?

[Nevcairiel]

So legion alpha class feedback forums are gone?

?
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/22813759/

Seems to still be there just fine.

[stormgust]

A new build, and going by design notes we're in for no changes yet again...