Resto Druid - Legion Talents

[Nerxyrall]

No, I'm arguing in Blizzard balancing history from the last 11 years of WoW.

But they said this time would be different !!!111!!!!11

Honestly i dont believe it either, but agruing about how we want things or how things should be done -keeping their design goals for Legion in mind- with the mindset "blizzard will do/has done shit" doesnt benefit anything.

Now is still Alpha and stuff can be changed to fit their (and our) design goals...hence arguing in favor of that. When beta hits in a (few) weeks, we can opt more for your pessimistic/realistic mindset. And try dmg control.

[Torty]

You are the one that brought up their philosophy of active vs. passive talents and simplifying classes that way, all I did was poke holes into your interpretation of it.

Resto Druids didn't get simplified. You need to be completely clueless to think that Legion version is easier than WoD one. You also don't even read what I'm saying or have reading comprehension problems. What my proposals were is to put different type of talents in the same tiers, that is all (like burst healing, hot and direct healing). That actually makes you use your brain more before the fight instead of rolling with the stronger ones. Right now we have 4 throughput tiers. If I were to dig into your logs, would I find the same 4 being used for the last 6 months without a change or were you changing one tier around from time to time? Just curious how that's working out for you at the moment and how much thought you are putting in your talents. Surely there's no harm in doing that since your philosophy is working perfectly. NOBODY will ever pick a mathematically stronger talent in never spec out of it, right? :>

Every other person who still thinks that talents aimed for same purposes should be in the same tier is free to provide their logs for the last 6 months and we can collectively assess how much skill and brain power it takes you to never change them. I mean, sorry. Did I say never? Surely you frequently change them based on encounters since they are so closely tuned. Blizzard would never fail to tune anything and even if they do, fix will be immidiate. Would be an interesting research with, I'm sure, varying results from druid to druid.

Also, you are arguing with stuff I never said. Like this quote below.

It makes no sense to follow this philosophy at all if using the more complex option isn't rewarding (because noone would use it then), that is all.

Where did I say that more complex version shouldn't be rewarding? Can you quote that or did you just pull it out of your ass and attributed to me? Serious question here. If you fail to provide that quote, I will just stop discussing anything with you since you are clearly not capable of responding to points made and need to put imaginary fake points into opponents' mouths to further prove some of your ridiculous Captain Obvious-esque points nobody is even arguing with.

- - - Updated - - -

Honestly i dont believe it either, but agruing about how we want things or how things should be done -keeping their design goals for Legion in mind- with the mindset "blizzard will do/has done shit" doesnt benefit anything.

Now is still Alpha and stuff can be changed to fit their (and our) design goals...hence arguing in favor of that. When beta hits in a (few) weeks, we can opt more for your pessimistic/realistic mindset. And try dmg control.

Right now I'm arguing that current talent allocation is much better than previous one. So I'm doing exactly what you are suggesting to do. I just don't understand people that want same shit in one tier and then never spec out of it.

But they said this time would be different !!!111!!!!11

Pretty much. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me thrice... ah fuck it! Already got fooled 5 times, still believe my dear Blizzard. We should use the same philosophy for talents but THIS TIME everything will be different! Pinky swear!

[theburned]

Why is this thread turning into a full on active vs passive talent...Especially when the legion design philosophy seems to be different talents for different situations, which basically rewards you for using an active talent, by expanding your toolkit to better handle certain fights.

Now ofc blizzard have shown that this will be a difficult task (or more difficult for them than it should be at least, considering 4p bonus.) , but in the end they are set in their ways and trying to provide feedback that goes against that ideology seems rather pointless, like the guy on alpha forums who complained about not being able to spam his spells as a resto druid.....Rather than providing feedback that helps them get closer to the design goal.

TL;DR an active talent should allow you to perform quite a lot better on a few fights, rather than allowing you to perform slightly better on all fights.

[stormgust]

What my proposals were is to put different type of talents in the same tiers, that is all (like burst healing, hot and direct healing).

But you cannot use the same theme for an entire column here as you're suggesting. Not only does it create balance problems (between classes, especially as all other specs have an entirely different layout), as not neccesarily all fights (mostly raid is the problem here, though also could become problematic for mythic5+) are designed with 4 additional throughput/burst/single mechanics in mind (not that they will, no other healspec has it that way). Furthermore, in the usual case, you cap already at "wanting" one or two of those additional mechanics (one for single target heals - adapted between: burst, consistent, you may want an additional second burst heal hear - two seems realistic for burst CD's). You'll really just pick the best two for the most crucial mechanic, and fill the other (not yet filled) roles from the remaining talents (again depending on what of them is the best remaining for those roles). Or to put it bluntly, your suggestion doesn't change anything.

Really, the only way to do it adequately is, to try again with how they've done it for other classes and as I suggested, but you distorted by taking everything to the extreme:
You, out of my post, got that I wanted:

Your's would be putting ToL, HotW and NV in one tier since they are basically the same

I never wanted three active on a tier, nor three abilities which would be categorized as burst raid heals, only of different strength. But apparently you take everything against your suggestion always to be the utmost extreme of the opposite side, even if it isn't, as if you're unable to think in more than black and white.

Too lazy to check where I suggested something similar, but what I wanted is something you yourself wrote, i.e.

The only way I ... HotW with Germination and SotF.

And that's what my suggestion is for all tiers to look like (similar obviously), once you get rid of a single target themed column in favor of a row (small change: +a strong, i.e. not abundance, contender placed onto a different row). That one choice you can make for single vs. group should be plenty for all cases, yet by placing the remaining choices on a single tier, you have the advantages that you actually can choose consistent vs. burst single target for both raiding and smaller groups. In your suggestion though, at least in raiding, though likely also in smaller groups, the single target talents would be subject to your group healing needs, and whence subject to your choice on those talents (an additional factor here being, that most group healing talents also come with an inherent single target bonus, not neccesarily as strong, but it is there)

[Nevcairiel]

Where did I say that more complex version shouldn't be rewarding? Can you quote that or did you just pull it out of your ass and attributed to me?

Active choices shouldn't be stronger options or they would always get picked. Wtf is even this logic? You want choices and then say that one of the choices needs to be better. How exactly is that going to work in your world? Either neither of them is much stronger than another or you don't have a choice. I hope you realise this simple logic. You probably should, considering we ALWAYS picked stronger throughput options even if they were only marginally better and were substantially harder to play.

Absolutely sounds to me like you want all talents to be of equal power, no matter if more complex to use or not.
If you meant something else, maybe you should elaborate on what you meant, because thats how I understood it, and judging from his comments, Tiberia as well.

Or feel free to stop discussing either way, you sound rather bitter at the game and seem to prefer arguing against me instead of my arguments either way, which brings nothing to the table.

[Torty]

Absolutely sounds to me like you want all talents to be of equal power, no matter if more complex to use or not.
If you meant something else, maybe you should elaborate on what you meant, because thats how I understood it, and judging from his comments, Tiberia as well

You still fail to provide a quote where I said that complex versions shouldn't be rewarding. Seriously, you just put something in my mouth and argue with it, completely messed up what I meant even though I explained what I meant in other posts, which you failed to read or something. Like here, my post you literally replied to asking why I don't want complex version to be more rewarding:

I never said that passive talent should be stronger than active talent. First I said that active shouldn't be stronger than passive in all situations (these 2 points are not equal) and then I said that passive talent should be buffing different way of healing.

Is it really THAT hard to understand this? Not being stronger DOES NOT mean being equal or weaker. You know why? Because talents can do different stuff. Is Tranq stronger than Tree? No. Is Tree stronger than Tranq? No. Are they equal in power? No. It's working that way, because they are better and worse for different things. And then you can change Tree and Tranq to talents. Let's say we compare Cultivation to Tree of Life and assume that Cultivation will be tweaked a little bit higher. Will Cultivation be better than Tree? No. Will Tree be better than Cultivation? Also no. Will they be equal? Absolutely not. Is this problematic design? I think not. You can get away with always speccing Cultivation if you choose to (which I think is important), but you will be disadvantageous at certain fights which require burst healing. There WILL be some fights where this passive talent will be better than the active one. Does that mean that you are not rewarded for good play? You can argue that, but I would argue that making a choice to spec into something out of something else requires higher skill than just rolling with one active version all the way no matter what even if it's complicated to play (which ToL isn't, by the way). Like right now you just roll with Tree of Life and never spec out of it, because it's so much better than passive SotF at ALL TIMES. And if Abundance stayed in that tier (even buffed) I would've been using ToL for the whole expansion without speccing out of it ever, because it would've been better at ALL TIMES.

"Skill" for talents should also be measured on when and why you pick them, not only how you use them. That's why there are 3 in each tier. Abilities are only measured by how you use them, but talents are not abilities. Here you go. If you don't get my point after this explanation and continue asking me why I hate actives, I will just give up.

But you cannot use the same theme for an entire column here as you're suggesting. Not only does it create balance problems (between classes, especially as all other specs have an entirely different layout), as not neccesarily all fights (mostly raid is the problem here, though also could become problematic for mythic5+) are designed with 4 additional throughput/burst/single mechanics in mind (not that they will, no other healspec has it that way). Furthermore, in the usual case, you cap already at "wanting" one or two of those additional mechanics (one for single target heals - adapted between: burst, consistent, you may want an additional second burst heal hear - two seems realistic for burst CD's). You'll really just pick the best two for the most crucial mechanic, and fill the other (not yet filled) roles from the remaining talents (again depending on what of them is the best remaining for those roles). Or to put it bluntly, your suggestion doesn't change anything.

It might create balance problems, sure. So is everything in this game, including any other possible layout. You can argue that this might bring MORE balance problems, which is a valid point and I agree, it might bring more balance problems than it solves and will be harder to balance.

My main gripe with them doing stuff they tried before is that it didn't work EVER. I don't see why it will work in Legion and I'd rather they try something else. Like what they are trying right now. I think it will bring more choices since you will be actually using other talents unlike now, where you just use the same ones. I've asked people whether they specced out of the godly 4 in the last 6 months and I think silence kinda answers that question. If you want Tree of Life to be baseline, then THAT should be your feedback, not that Tree of Life should be a stronger talent choice.

[theburned]

I am with Torty on this one, having 3 different talents doing different things is good, issue is that it doesnt work that well for healers, because the line between aoe and single target, burst and consistent isn't as big. So we will mostly lean towards what is most powerful, rather than what is best for the situation, and you have to balance it so nicely to actually hit a spot, for a dps spec it's a lot easier, I need burst aoe on this fight, I pick these 4 talents, great I am set, I need single target consistent damage, great this talent feels better, oh I need single target, but aoe burst every x seconds, these talents are better.

things like this brought me to believe the old SB/cultivation/inner peace row was a very good one, cultivation had an uptime downside, but was great for important and spread healing, SB stacked up healing 100% uptime, Inner peace burst healing a bit more often. (lines up great with our rin.... nevermind, trinkets though might be a thing.)
Idk, abundance if they somehow managed it to add enough throughput, it would have been between consistent, burst and spot healing, which was also an okay choice, but the difference between ToL and abundance in power was just too great.
last tier, mana conservation vs defensive cooldown vs burst, while flourish will pretty much always be picked because the additional healing is free, the talents have a good distinction between them.

[theburned]

After trying out stonebark at mythic skorpyron I have to say I have somewhat changed my mind about the talent. Rather than mostly useless I would say its situational

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports.../#type=healing

cultivation felt like a strong talent because the tank healing was very high, no real burst damage incoming anywhere to justify ToL, no damage patterns which would promote SotF, so it was the obvious choice.

Spring blossoms for obvious reasons, mostly stacked up fight

And flourish doesnt really feel close to as strong with cultivation compared to SotF or ToL, the tank damage was heavy so stonebark felt like the obvious choice, was also dead on mana by the end of the fight, more due to misplays, but MoC could've saved me some.


damage reduction by ironbark.(numbers in millons)
0,95
2,33
1,36
0,93
1,61
1,245

total damage reduced: 8,425

33% of total reduction: ~2,8 (how much less healing the talent would do)

well my math messed up because I forgot to account for the artifact talent, but just add 8% to all of the numbers.

now while not important for theorycrafting, the tank would without a doubt died during the 2nd ironbark, because I would've had to wait another 30 seconds to cast it, but it also lined up quite nicely with call of the scorpions, not perfect, but quite nicely.

[Torty]

Cultivation needs a nerf. It's ridiculously overtuned right now, the numbers are too high, if you also account by how much it increases Rejuv healing. Even at about average proc rate it was absolutely dumpstering ToL.

I also got somewhat disappointed in Flourish. Like, it's nice, but something feels off. Everytime I used it, it didn't feel like it made much of an impact. There are certain encounters where it can shine, but most of the tested ones had short spurs of damage and then nothing. I feel like it can perform very good for something like Council or Gorefiend, but I would've rather taken MoC over it on some fights from the hindsight.

[theburned]

Cultivation needs a nerf. It's ridiculously overtuned right now, the numbers are too high, if you also account by how much it increases Rejuv healing. Even at about average proc rate it was absolutely dumpstering ToL.

I also got somewhat disappointed in Flourish. Like, it's nice, but something feels off. Everytime I used it, it didn't feel like it made much of an impact. There are certain encounters where it can shine, but most of the tested ones had short spurs of damage and then nothing. I feel like it can perform very good for something like Council or Gorefiend, but I would've rather taken MoC over it on some fights from the hindsight.

Flourish seems to shine when used together with SotF there is some very good synergy which makes both talents feel very good.

- - - Updated - - -

Dreamwalker now scales with spell power

[stormgust]

After trying out stonebark at mythic skorpyron I have to say I have somewhat changed my mind about the talent. Rather than mostly useless I would say its situational

The question here is, wether tank damage isn't simply overtuned across the board, i.e. still WoD level tank damage, yet the active mitigation not being anywhere close to yield that. No one ever questioned Stonebark winning out on the other option, if it's the only way to save the tank - it's all about wether it is needef if tank damage is tuned correctly.

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports.../#type=healing

If you look at the HoT averages per target (your tank is consistently running 5 stacks...), I'd expect a mastery nerf sometime soon, with the respective consequences on talent performance/selection (or use the simply way out: nerf rejuvenation...).

Cultivation needs a nerf. It's ridiculously overtuned right now, the numbers are too high, if you also account by how much it increases Rejuv healing. Even at about average proc rate it was absolutely dumpstering ToL.

As I said, the entire conditional is easily fulfilled whenever you' use ToL, so you can expect at least one, though usually two procs per rejuvenation. One proc already is +40%, two consequently +80% to reju's performance, not counting mastery stack. The ways to nerf it are: trigger treshold and healing. The problem with low thresholds (30% or so given the current values is), that this could prove to trigger too late to actually save people or simply not triggering on most fights (i.e. heavily situational, and probably too risky to play with for most healers). The other option is to decrease healing, but here - given the mastery stack - the only realistic values would be "token" level (60%/6s similar to SB imo is already too much with the additional mastery stack). Problem here: can you ever achieve the mastery values, to make it worthwhile to actually pick the talent, or would going haste/crit be the better option.

I also got somewhat disappointed in Flourish. Like, it's nice, but something feels off. Everytime I used it, it didn't feel like it made much of an impact.

As you said, it's only ever going to feel impact (as a throughput CD), on fights like Council or Gorefiend. For other fights you're probably better of to judge it for it's efficiency gains, rather than increased throughput (with the respective changes to when you actually use Flourish).

[Torty]

My problem with Cultivation is that it's doing more healing per tick than Rejuv. I think it's super silly, the hp threshold is fine. I want Rejuv to be my most powerful hot, maybe Wild Growth and Lifebloom being slightly better considering they have restricted usage. It should work as a bonus, not completely overshadow the spell it procs off.

Mastery will be the best stat by far if things stay this way with overtuned SB and Cultivation. Will it be nerfed? Maybe. I would rather see a cap on it and increase in its effectiveness per hot.

[Tiberria]

My problem with Cultivation is that it's doing more healing per tick than Rejuv. I think it's super silly, the hp threshold is fine. I want Rejuv to be my most powerful hot, maybe Wild Growth and Lifebloom being slightly better considering they have restricted usage. It should work as a bonus, not completely overshadow the spell it procs off.

Mastery will be the best stat by far if things stay this way with overtuned SB and Cultivation. Will it be nerfed? Maybe. I would rather see a cap on it and increase in its effectiveness per hot.

I think that's probably more a factor of them needing to move more healing into Rejuv itself and some healing out of other things to compensate. Rejuv as a standalone spell really isn't a particularly good spell; it's actually inferior to Renew, Riptide, etc. What makes it strong is all of the procs and artifact traits and talents that improve it.

I think the problem that they would run into with Cultivation is that it needs to be strong now that it's competing with Incarnation and SoTF. It probably needs to add more average healing than Incarnation per fight, because if they are the same, you are almost always going to take the burst healing cooldown from a practical perspective. It also needs to compete with SoTF, which is going to become absolutely insane with the 4 piece. Nerf it down by any significant margin, and it will never be taken, given that it is passive baseline healing competing with 2 major burst talents. I also think that the nature of Cultivation and raid testing will make it look significantly more overpowered in raid testing than it will really practically be on live. Fight tuning is way off, they generally test raids at a much lower ilvl than most Mythic guilds will actually be at during progression on them, and people take more spiky, unpredictable damage because there is no known strats for the fights. All of those factors probably result in health pools being artificially lower in testing and making a talent like Cultivation look a lot better than it really is.

I think they changed the secondary stat scaling this build again. Here are the most recent values at 110.

466 mast = 1% mastery rating
325 haste = 1% haste rating
350 crit = 1% crit rating
400 vers = 1% versatility

Mastery now moves past Crit at 1.33 HoT effects on a target. I am pretty sure that it was 1.5 the last few builds and more like 1.7 in early Alpha?

At any rate, I have to wonder about the value of Haste in Legion. If we really are as mana constrained as it appears we will be, and without any trinket or gear based regen scaling, I don't know that extra Rejuv, etc casts we get from Haste will be that valuable, because we probably can't afford to cast X% more Rejuvs anyway. If regen is constrained to the point that Rejuv isn't double dipping from Haste (+ticks and +casts) in practical value, the stat probably falls behind other stats. It already has the disadvantage of giving no benefit to Tranq, Swiftmend or any of our RG/HT casts - which account for probably 15-20% of our output. If the only practical value of haste is extra HoT ticks, it actually is worse than Crit and barely ahead of Vers in stat value.

As far as mastery as the best stat, I'm not so sure. When you factor in portions of our healing that don't benefit from mastery (probably ~15% from Tranq ticks on non HoT targets, Efflo ticks, etc.), the real breakpoint is closer to 1.5 HoT ticks before it moves past Crit. It's probably more like - Mastery is our best stat if 50% or more of your HoT based healing (LB, Rejuv, WG) is on targets that have a Spring Blossoms HOT, a Cultivation HOT or another HoT on them, and falls below Crit when you are below that threshold. Mastery is probably almost certainly the #1 stat in a Cultivation/Spring Blossoms build, whereas it would be #3 or #4 in a SoTF/Inner Peace build. If taking one of Cultivation or Spring Blossoms, it's possibly a toss up.

[Keiyra]

Haste still increases the HPS/HPCT of RG/HT which I wouldn't call "no benefit" - more like low benefit, and it does shorten the GCD of swiftmend ( which is a very minor benefit granted but it exists) as typically we follow the ABC mantra. Shortening the channel time of Tranq can be beneficial in some situations so there is that too.

Haste also has a strong benefit on any dps'ing we do if we take balance affinity. Not so sure i'd toss it to the bottom of the stat pile so soon, especially this early on. It wont be the clear winner it is now that's for sure.

[Saracens]

This discussion has been enlightening, to say the least. I have a question that might have been covered, but I'll ask anyway. Thoughts on Prosperity vs. Cenarion Ward vs. Germination?

[Keiyra]

This discussion has been enlightening, to say the least. I have a question that might have been covered, but I'll ask anyway. Thoughts on Prosperity vs. Cenarion Ward vs. Germination?

If things stay the way they are now:
At the start of legion: Germination>=CW>Prosperity

Once you get Tier 4pc: Prosperity>>>Germ=CW if you take SOTF; if you don't then same as above.

The bigger choice I think (pre 4pc) is Germination or CW. Germination doesn't add healing on its own, but it adds mastery stacks...this is prolly more useful in smaller content or when focusing healing on limited targets, compared to spreading out more rejuvs for raid healing.
Very flexible in terms of target selection, but gotta see if doubling up rejuvs just leads to more overhealing in a raid setting.

CW is strong, but even more focused in use, mostly likely for tank healing, or perhaps strong single target debuffs, benefits from Flourish every other use as well.

Not quite sure which is better yet to be honest, maybe switch around as needed.

[Saracens]

If things stay the way they are now:
At the start of legion: Germination>=CW>Prosperity

Once you get Tier 4pc: Prosperity>>>Germ=CW if you take SOTF; if you don't then same as above

Ok, thanks. I think 4pc plus SoTF is going to be beastly, from what I've seen logged and discussed here.

[theburned]

I think they changed the secondary stat scaling this build again. Here are the most recent values at 110.

466 mast = 1% mastery rating
325 haste = 1% haste rating
350 crit = 1% crit rating
400 vers = 1% versatility

Mastery now moves past Crit at 1.33 HoT effects on a target. I am pretty sure that it was 1.5 the last few builds and more like 1.7 in early Alpha?

Mastery moving past crit at 1,33 HoT effects has been in effect for several patches (early April I believe.) Though you are entierly correct that the numbers have changed, Previously mastery was 400/%, crit 300/% and haste 275/% I believe, no clue about versa, but it might have been buffed relatively to the other stats, haste has been nerfed by 8,4% compared to crit/mastery.
This would be a case of Blizzard rebalancing the stats to make gear scale more linearly.

As for haste I believe quite a few of our talents scale quite nicely with haste, such as ToL (more casts during it.) Spring blossoms, more ticks from the actual hot, and more hots around, so it scales exponentially, Flourish to some extent. But yea I definitely agree, haste is coming into close range of the other stats with this.

[xdmemes]

Germination doesn't add healing on its own

Why doesn't it provide healing on its own?

[theburned]

Why doesn't it provide healing on its own?

Theoretically you can just spread out all your rejuvs, thus it doesnt really add any healing, in reality though it means you will heal using another rejuv instead of HT, which then turns out to be extra healing.