Resto Druid - Legion Talents

[Torty]

Wow, I guess the scaling of this mastery wasn't working out long term in Blizzard's eyes. Nobody could predict that.

[Evandril]

Now the advocates of this mastery are faced with the reality of checks being put on it for few-target scenarios. And they don't like it one bit. Good.

[Nevcairiel]

Except in-game does not reflect any limit, I confirmed as well that it still scales beyond 3 stacks, and the tooltip mentions nothing of it.
The datamined tooltip text looks slightly odd, as if the limit is conditional, on what condition we don't know though.

[Evandril]

Except in-game does not reflect any limit, I confirmed as well that it still scales beyond 3 stacks, and the tooltip mentions nothing of it.
The datamined tooltip text looks slightly odd, as if the limit is conditional, on what condition we don't know though.

Yeah, first thing we did was check if the datamining was reflected in game. A cap on mastery is one of the only realistic balances for this mastery in all sizes of content.

[Nythiz]

That's pretty hefty pessimism right here. Between lowering the energy cost of the abilities, adding filler abilities or giving them ways to increase energy regeneration (clear casting, tiger's fury, straight up regen buff,...) there are tons of things Blizzard can do to make the affinity worthwhile. And I really hope they will, because having a useless talent in a row always feels super awful.

A lot of these things are "hard to change" though. The abilities you get are the same actual ferals get, so just reducing energy doesn't work. Obviously they can just add separate spells like they did with balance affinity (for balance affinity starsurge is just a cooldown rather than having an AsP cost), that would actually fix it really well; they could even make Rip and FB simply cooldowns without having a energy/CP system.

Adding filler abilities doesn't do that much, unless it's Tiger's Fury. And even then I doubt it would be a good fix. Tiger's Fury is great to get that boost of regen, but it'll only get you 2 shreds every 30 seconds. And without the rest of the package deal, the affinity will still feel very slow. Same goes for OoC, it's really good, but mostly as part of a feral package deal.

I think simply following the Balance affinity road, where you make the affinity spells completely separate on their own and simply add a cooldown on FB (Rip doesn't need one as you can't stack it anyway). That way you can use energy for shreds, have a Rip running from the get go and FB every 10 seconds or so.

As for the pessimism; that's mostly an experience thing from the last 5 beta's I actively participated in (theorycrafting and/or playtesting) where "fun stuff" like affinities got very very little attention post implementation as they take a minor role in balancing classes.
I really hope they get around to change this though, would be nice to have an alternative to moonkin questing.

New build changes

- Cultivation nerfed by 25%
- The datamining suggests that mastery is capped at 3 stacks. However, I tested it on the beta server, and it is definitely continuing to scale healing to 4, 5 and 6 stacks, so it's either a datamining error, or not yet implemented yet.

The Cultivation nerf was probably fine, but I still suspect raid testing makes that type of talent look better than it is under live raiding situations. If they really go through with capping mastery at 3, I think it is going to greatly devalue Germination/Cultivation/Spring Blossoms - or at least the value of taking all 3 talents. You will probably want 1-2 of them to have 2+ mastery stacks on most targets, but taking all 3 would likely be overkill in most scenarios due to diminishing returns from the mastery gain. I suspect Cultivation would be the first of those 3 talents that we drop, because it is more limited than Germination/Spring Blossoms, and because the value of getting a strong cooldown like Incarnation likely beats the other options on the Germination/Spring Blossoms talent rows.

Cultivation nerf was obvious. It's true that raid testing probably made that talent seem better than it'll be on live. But (quite similar to the resto shaman mastery), it's also very valuable healing as it's always effective healing that's there when it's needed most.

I'm not so sure yet about dropping cultivation in favor for something like germination. I feel like there is a lot of added value in the fact that it procs completely free.
Germination costs you an extra GCD.
I also think that the value loss of picking up all 3 (should this cap go live) is not all that huge either. It will make swapping talents easier, as we no longer have the feeling of "I need this talent to keep max mastery stacks"; but that doesn't take away that those 3 talents you mentioned will be really good picks by themselves as well.
I mean assuming we get the 3 HoT cap, the choices will be as follow:

T90:
Spring Blossoms is simply the best choice here if you don't need Inner Peace. Simple as. I also think that even with the cap the value of Spring Blossoms is largely unchanged because it's really good at giving 1 mastery stack, practically passively, at a select group of people.

T15:
Thing here is much like you implied. There aren't much better options for talents other than germination. Not that germination is super strong, but it gives you the flexibility. Maybe Prosperity if SotF turns out really good at certain intervals so you can line it up better with WG, but that seems rather unlikely. CW is quite solid, but I'd say it's solid in the exact same situations germination is at it's best(mostly small scale fights like mythic+ and PvP).
I'd probably go with germination for the large majority of fights, purely for the flexibility of having access to an extra rejuv for targets that need it.

T60: So here it's more easy to switch to Inc/SotF without losing a mastery stack per definition. Which is good. But I feel like in situations where I would have switched to either of those, I probably would have anyway. And Cultivation is still extremely strong on fights where there is more constant pressure and frequent burst moments.

Will dropping the 3 talents be easier? Yes. But I feel like they're still very strong contenders by themselves even if you ignore the mastery benefit they provide.

Yeah, first thing we did was check if the datamining was reflected in game. A cap on mastery is one of the only realistic balances for this mastery in all sizes of content.

Even if it's not implemented. It at least shows that blizzard is finally aware of this issue.
It's a bit of a shame they didn't listen during alpha when there was still time to consider replacing the mastery altogether. Now there is very little time to do anything other than a bandaid fix until next expansion.
Not that a cap is a bad bandaid fix; but it's a rather dull one and frankly removes a lot of the supposed interaction this mastery was going to create, because getting 3 mastery stacks on people that are hurt isn't all that hard.

[theburned]

Even if it's not implemented. It at least shows that blizzard is finally aware of this issue.
It's a bit of a shame they didn't listen during alpha when there was still time to consider replacing the mastery altogether. Now there is very little time to do anything other than a bandaid fix until next expansion.
Not that a cap is a bad bandaid fix; but it's a rather dull one and frankly removes a lot of the supposed interaction this mastery was going to create, because getting 3 mastery stacks on people that are hurt isn't all that hard.

A change was both necessary in a 5 man group and does not hurt a raid too much, we will lose a lot of tank healing on it, but the mastery will still remain pretty good in a raid situation, but the lack of versatility added from mastery will put it right back behind crit again for me at least.

[Deleted]

I think simply following the Balance affinity road, where you make the affinity spells completely separate on their own and simply add a cooldown on FB (Rip doesn't need one as you can't stack it anyway). That way you can use energy for shreds, have a Rip running from the get go and FB every 10 seconds or so.

Pretty much what I'm hoping for. When I said reduce the energy cost of claw (or whatever the pointbuilder ability is called again) I was totally aware that this would have to happen seperately from the feral version of the spell.

[stormgust]

Oh a cap on mastery. So all left now is for them to realize that three likely is still to high, try out a cap of two, realize that this annihilates the intended gameplay, and last minute revert back to the current live mastery.

[Torty]

A change was both necessary in a 5 man group and does not hurt a raid too much, we will lose a lot of tank healing on it, but the mastery will still remain pretty good in a raid situation, but the lack of versatility added from mastery will put it right back behind crit again for me at least.

You only have more than 3 hots active at the same time on tank and maybe sometimes on a couple of melees. I don't think this nerf affects any raid stat priority, only minor nerf in relative value, and Mastery is still king in 5m.

[Tiberria]

You only have more than 3 hots active at the same time on tank and maybe sometimes on a couple of melees. I don't think this nerf affects any raid stat priority, only minor nerf in relative value, and Mastery is still king in 5m.

What you have to consider is that well over 40% of Druid healing in raid tests is going to tanks, which has a huge impact on stat priority. You can count on at least having Rejuv x 2, Lifebloom, and Spring Blossoms on the active tank, plus probably the Regrowth HoT most of the time, the Wild Growth HoT a decent chunk of the time and the Cultivation HoT sometimes. The average amount of mastery stacks on the active tank is probably 5.0-5.5. If we have 20% mastery rating on gear, that means that we are getting an average of about +125% healing done to tanks through mastery.

If you implement a 3 stack cap, that means that we are now only getting +60% to the tanks. If tank healing averages 40% of our total healing done, that works out to over a 20% throughput nerf and a 20% change to the relative valuation of mastery. I don't think there's any way it doesn't change the stat priority.

At any rate, they just confirmed that there was no intended mastery cap, but it is something they are debating/may do later during tuning. I would be against doing it, because really - I think implementing something like that defeats the entire purpose of introducing this new mastery design. It's a more involved mastery that involves more player intervention to maximize than any other healing mastery; it needs to have a reward/skill cap attached to it for it to at all be a positive addition to the spec. If they can't do that because of tuning (and that is no surprise to any of us that vehemently opposed this thing for most of Alpha), they really should just revert to the old Harmony.

[theburned]

You only have more than 3 hots active at the same time on tank and maybe sometimes on a couple of melees. I don't think this nerf affects any raid stat priority, only minor nerf in relative value, and Mastery is still king in 5m.

While it may seem very minor exactly those situations you talk about was just enough to put mastery above the other stats, while people like Tiberria who can only see numbers, still put it below crit and haste. because numbers are most likely below, while I can't blame him for trusting in numbers.


Blue post on the matter of caps.
A cap on mastery stacking is a possibility for eventual tuning, but is not added in this build. The discussion about it is still germane.

So unless my english is very bad it means that nothing is set yet and we should still do what we can to help shape a mastery which promotes, fun, balanced and rewarding gameplay. The current one is fun and rewarding (at least to me.) yet not very balanced. So to me the obvious choice would be to make as few changes as possible.
And from my understanding a cap heavily restricts the gameplay and still requires a lot of work without making a lot of spells/talents feel weak/awkward/useless/unrewarding.

In regards to what I would be good here's my post from the beta forums:
Personally I would prefer a more diminishing return style, where the effect of the mastery was less valuable the more hots you have (still some effect pr extra stack..), along the lines of 20%-15%-12%-10%-8%-8%-8% Quickly ramping up at the start then falling off the more you get out.

[Tiberria]

In regards to what I would be good here's my post from the beta forums:
Personally I would prefer a more diminishing return style, where the effect of the mastery was less valuable the more hots you have (still some effect pr extra stack..), along the lines of 20%-15%-12%-10%-8%-8%-8% Quickly ramping up at the start then falling off the more you get out.

I think that type of design would be too counterintuitive, especially for the average player to understand, because it wouldn't be reflected on the tooltip, and we would probably end up with a very complex set of conditions for when it's worth casting X spell on Y player at Z stacks of mastery on them. I just think it's more complicated than a stat should be.

If the real concern is that the mastery design makes Druids too overpowered in 5 mans if the stat is tuned in a way that it is useful in raids, wouldn't the easiest approach be to either add a cap or a reduced scaling co-efficient outside of raid groups. They can obviously do this given that Tranq, HTT, etc now heal for more outside of raid groups in Legion. If that isn't desirable, I would strongly like to just can this mastery completely.

[Nerxyrall]

I think that type of design would be too counterintuitive, especially for the average player to understand, because it wouldn't be reflected on the tooltip, and we would probably end up with a very complex set of conditions for when it's worth casting X spell on Y player at Z stacks of mastery on them. I just think it's more complicated than a stat should be.

Since Druid has actually a real simple toolkit/spells/mechanics with little difficulty to understand . One mechanic/stat/etc which is more complicated isnt that much of an issue. I would asume in 90% of cases the "casting X spell on Y player at Z stacks"-problem isnt really that relevant. The first 1-3 mastery stacks would benefit the most, the rest would in such a small way, that you wouldn cast them only because of the stack. Even now i cant imagine that you cast that many spells to get an additional stack, you cast them because the healing the spell does and the mastery-stack is a bonus.

If the real concern is that the mastery design makes Druids too overpowered in 5 mans if the stat is tuned in a way that it is useful in raids, wouldn't the easiest approach be to either add a cap or a reduced scaling co-efficient outside of raid groups. They can obviously do this given that Tranq, HTT, etc now heal for more outside of raid groups in Legion. If that isn't desirable, I would strongly like to just can this mastery completely.

I think having this mechanic for 1 spell.( Or 4(Hymn htt revival tranq) ingame is allright)But having to much spells tied into "am i in a raid or normal group" is kinda strange and uneccessary complicated.

With Theburned´s suggestion it would keep the advantages of the new mastery, while keeping it in check on 5-man and tank-healing. Obviously hard to tune, but it should be possible to find a good middle ground. It was suggested several times for a reason.

[Rife]

Does mastery in beta work like mastery in live where you have to cast a heal or use Swiftmend to get the buff? Or is the beta mastery always active?

[theburned]

I think that type of design would be too counterintuitive, especially for the average player to understand, because it wouldn't be reflected on the tooltip, and we would probably end up with a very complex set of conditions for when it's worth casting X spell on Y player at Z stacks of mastery on them. I just think it's more complicated than a stat should be.

If the real concern is that the mastery design makes Druids too overpowered in 5 mans if the stat is tuned in a way that it is useful in raids, wouldn't the easiest approach be to either add a cap or a reduced scaling co-efficient outside of raid groups. They can obviously do this given that Tranq, HTT, etc now heal for more outside of raid groups in Legion. If that isn't desirable, I would strongly like to just can this mastery completely.

I mean you could easily simplify it to a flat 15-20% multiplicative reduction easy to put in a tooltip as towards gameplay this is already in the fact that it is additive stacking so each subsequent hot doesn't add as much as the previous one relatively.

Your example about complex situations, sounds like an issue only computers would run into, in most cases it will be about who needs how much healing when, rather than what it would seem that you suggest, eitherway the times it turns out to be that complex it will either be easy to see what person needs the most healing, or it is too small of a difference for it to matter.

[Torty]

What you have to consider is that well over 40% of Druid healing in raid tests is going to tanks, which has a huge impact on stat priority. You can count on at least having Rejuv x 2, Lifebloom, and Spring Blossoms on the active tank, plus probably the Regrowth HoT most of the time, the Wild Growth HoT a decent chunk of the time and the Cultivation HoT sometimes. The average amount of mastery stacks on the active tank is probably 5.0-5.5. If we have 20% mastery rating on gear, that means that we are getting an average of about +125% healing done to tanks through mastery.

So you are telling me that 40% of our healing has 3 hots and there are a lot of other instances where we get 2 hots... and then tell me that Mastery will be below Haste and Crit. What? That's not how math works.

If you implement a 3 stack cap, that means that we are now only getting +60% to the tanks. If tank healing averages 40% of our total healing done, that works out to over a 20% throughput nerf and a 20% change to the relative valuation of mastery. I don't think there's any way it doesn't change the stat priority.

You don't need to explain to me that it's a nerf, I most definitely understand that myself. I'm talking about completely different thing.

While it may seem very minor exactly those situations you talk about was just enough to put mastery above the other stats, while people like Tiberria who can only see numbers, still put it below crit and haste. because numbers are most likely below, while I can't blame him for trusting in numbers.

No, what puts Mastery above is having majority of your healing come from double (and more) hot situations. Since Mastery is scaled to provide the same throughput at 1,33 hots, you only need 66% of your healing to come from double hots and 33% from single hots. Any situation where you benefit from 3 hots pushes this number even further and situations with 0 hots (Tranq and Efflo are most obvious ones) push these numbers lower. So if 30% of your healing really comes from 3 stack healing (20% nerf from 40% rounded down), and like 20% fom 2 stack, then Mastery is obviously a better stat, just by smaller margin. Especially if you value this healing more than random 0-1 heals you dish out (since those would be on low priority targets anyway).

At any rate, they just confirmed that there was no intended mastery cap, but it is something they are debating/may do later during tuning. I would be against doing it, because really - I think implementing something like that defeats the entire purpose of introducing this new mastery design. It's a more involved mastery that involves more player intervention to maximize than any other healing mastery; it needs to have a reward/skill cap attached to it for it to at all be a positive addition to the spec. If they can't do that because of tuning (and that is no surprise to any of us that vehemently opposed this thing for most of Alpha), they really should just revert to the old Harmony.

With that I fully agree.

It was a fucking stupid Mastery in the first place that they somehow managed to scrap into something fun. Now they are nerfing everything fun about it and make it essentially a passive version of Harmony. Great spec design.

[tritus]

Does mastery in beta work like mastery in live where you have to cast a heal or use Swiftmend to get the buff? Or is the beta mastery always active?

Nope.

I'm sure this has been mentioned before, but my biggest gripe with the mastery (disregarding the group size balancing issues) is that it promotes suboptimal play. In an environment with more than 1 healer (raids, specifically), if there are 2 targets with the same amount of health missing, but target A has a rejuv already on him, and target B has none of your HoTs, target B should receive your next heal. However, the new mastery will train druids to heal target A again, which is counter to what I'd consider optimal triage healing.

[stormgust]

With Theburned´s suggestion it would keep the advantages of the new mastery, while keeping it in check on 5-man and tank-healing. Obviously hard to tune, but it should be possible to find a good middle ground. It was suggested several times for a reason.

That suggestion isn't any better though. Not only is it overly complicated, but just a nightmare to tune (not that the current mastery isn't). You'd require: x_1+...+x_k (k being the maximal number of HoTs) <= M (to fix the problem of the current mastery iteration) and x_1>= m_1 (raid healing performance has to be met). To have the intended gameplay (layering HoTs) benefit, and not usually have switches after the first HoTstack, you'd also need something like x_1+x_2 >=m_2 (and so forth). You'd require a rather flat drop of the first handful of stacks, running out of budget early on, i.e. the proper numbers should be something like: 25% - 20% - 15% - 0% - 0% - 0% - 0%. (or 20 - 15 - 10 - 5 - 3 - 2 - 1, i.e. the tailstacks are so marginal, that they're essentially not better than no benefit, with the only change being, the first stack will get more value assgined, so that you actually end up with less incentive to stack than under a hardcap design. Of course you can fix that by additionally requiring x_1= x_2 = ..., but that woudl yield a distribution of e.g. 20% - 20% - 5% - 5% - 3% - 3% - 0 still , i.e. the tailstacks performance still being marginal relative to a fresh stack).

[tonydanza]

All they need to do is add a cap to mastery for content outside of raids (Mythic + etc)
Capping it in an environment where hot stacking on many people is already prohibitive is terrible. What it does to the gameplay and stat priority is just terribly terribly dissappointing.

Yeah, it's difficult to tune. But, dont cap it in raids. Outright revert to the old mastery is far better than a cap. Heck with a longer SM cooldown now the old mastery would be more engaging than a capped garbage mastery. We would actually have to cast something non-intant. And that,sadly, is more engaging than a craptacular 3 stack cap on mastery. Capping mastery stacks immediately makes various builds/talents less desirable, and Im sick and tired of running the same talents tier after tier, expansion after expansion.

- - - Updated - - -

I think having this mechanic for 1 spell.( Or 4(Hymn htt revival tranq) ingame is allright)But having to much spells tied into "am i in a raid or normal group" is kinda strange and uneccessary complicated.

People have been saying that for years. Yet now we finally have "pvp talents" and regular talents.
It's not that hard, complicated and certainly not a bad thing to have variations in abilities depending on content.
Having X spell behave/interact differently in Y content than it does in Z enables far superior balancing.

[Nevcairiel]

All they need to do is add a cap to mastery for content outside of raids (Mythic + etc)
Capping it in an environment where hot stacking on many people is already prohibitive is terrible. What it does to the gameplay and stat priority is just terribly terribly dissappointing.

Making a core concept like mastery work differently depending on where you are is even less intuitive than any other suggestions.

Having PvP talents that only work in PvP is different to having talents that only work in different areas of PvE. It would be comparable to having PvP talents stop working in Arenas or something.

Should the mastery get a cap when a Heroic raider is only running with a 10m group, because that group size is small enough that he can layer more HoTs on specific people? Deciding things on group size or the type of content you do is just a big headache to get into.