How pro-active do I have to play my Resto?

[Weissrolf]

I played one third of MoP and two thirds of WoD as Resto Druid. Mostly I seem to do ok for my guild (as a third healer with a Disc and Paladin in the past), though usually only average compared to other druids. I noticed quickly that I don't enjoy Rejuv spamming (in generall and) pro-actively. As a result I seem to do more overall reactive (raid) healing than pro-active unless there is some big mechanism I know about.

Now I wonder if I should besser use another healing class that is based more on reactive healing? Or do Resto druids not have to play as pro-active as everyone always calls them out to do? While I enjoy several aspects of Druids, it seems to make sense looking around to see if other healers might fit my play-style more (or less).

What I enjoy about (Resto) druid:

- Mobility in all specs! This one is often more important outside of choosing to play druid, even more so outside of raid/dungeon content.
- Instant casts! This adds to mobility, but also has to do with my inability for proper char placement. I also enjoy being able to pull up the group while everyone is running around frantically to dodge stuff, me including. I also like to react quickly, instead of being stuck in casting-time while other healers try the same. HoT snipping remains to be a problem, because other healers don't properly watch for running HoT, but I can get around that by
- All 4 roles playable in one character, even more so in Legion, despite the differences in secondary stat priorities.
- Heals raid and tanks.
- Some utility (a bit less so in Legion, Stampeding Roar was something I used very regularly).
- AoE heals that let me pull up several chars with a single click/cast.

What I don't enjoy now and Legion come:

- Rejuv spamming, or spammy playstyles in general. I can very well live with having nothing to do for a second or two instead of having to click on healthbars all the time. I also keep watching other healers heals and buffs (especially absorbs in the past) when possible.
- Mushrooms (and Wild Growth) always made up a good chunk of my healing, often times surpassing Rejuv. But I seldom cared to place Mushrooms on the ground, instead I (ab)used Vuhdoo to cast Mushroom on a PC with lots of other chars in direct vicinity. In Legion I am forced to use the ground placing style, which sometimes clashes with my ability to see through the mess of PCs and NPCs on screen. This also fits the next point:
- Not seeing so much of the actual raid content, because my eyes are glued to raid-frames, my char's feet/surrounding and the occassional boss-mod announcement. My guess is that this is a question of personal style and works very much the same for all healing classes.
- Increased RNG + crit dependency in Legion. I assume this is something most healers don't like. Two of the golden artifact talents are heavily RNG based and the whole spec seems to shift towards relying on crits for throughput. This makes me feel like just a button pushers that watches from outside while the server decides my healing results.
- Utility seems to be a bit low-ish on options now.
- No real "Oh sh*t" button for single PCs anymore. In WoD I used that one quite often to keep single PCs from dying.
- Moonkin off-spec still seems "remote-controlled" in that I miss having choices rather than reacting to what's blinking on my screen.

I do have a level 100 Monk and Paladin and could still insta-level one char to 100 (maybe Shaman?). I only played those solo and (ab)used them for professions, though. Both the Monk and Paladin where leveled in tank spec, the Druid was pulled up by a friend through dungeons (invite a friend) and then leveled partly as Feral and later as Balance.

[theburned]

I played one third of MoP and two thirds of WoD as Resto Druid. Mostly I seem to do ok for my guild (as a third healer with a Disc and Paladin in the past), though usually only average compared to other druids. I noticed quickly that I don't enjoy Rejuv spamming (in generall and) pro-actively. As a result I seem to do more overall reactive (raid) healing than pro-active unless there is some big mechanism I know about.

Now I wonder if I should besser use another healing class that is based more on reactive healing? Or do Resto druids not have to play as pro-active as everyone always calls them out to do? While I enjoy several aspects of Druids, it seems to make sense looking around to see if other healers might fit my play-style more (or less).

What I enjoy about (Resto) druid:

- Mobility in all specs! This one is often more important outside of choosing to play druid, even more so outside of raid/dungeon content.
- Instant casts! This adds to mobility, but also has to do with my inability for proper char placement. I also enjoy being able to pull up the group while everyone is running around frantically to dodge stuff, me including. I also like to react quickly, instead of being stuck in casting-time while other healers try the same. HoT snipping remains to be a problem, because other healers don't properly watch for running HoT, but I can get around that by
- All 4 roles playable in one character, even more so in Legion, despite the differences in secondary stat priorities.
- Heals raid and tanks.
- Some utility (a bit less so in Legion, Stampeding Roar was something I used very regularly).
- AoE heals that let me pull up several chars with a single click/cast.

What I don't enjoy now and Legion come:

- Rejuv spamming, or spammy playstyles in general. I can very well live with having nothing to do for a second or two instead of having to click on healthbars all the time. I also keep watching other healers heals and buffs (especially absorbs in the past) when possible.
- Mushrooms (and Wild Growth) always made up a good chunk of my healing, often times surpassing Rejuv. But I seldom cared to place Mushrooms on the ground, instead I (ab)used Vuhdoo to cast Mushroom on a PC with lots of other chars in direct vicinity. In Legion I am forced to use the ground placing style, which sometimes clashes with my ability to see through the mess of PCs and NPCs on screen. This also fits the next point:
- Not seeing so much of the actual raid content, because my eyes are glued to raid-frames, my char's feet/surrounding and the occassional boss-mod announcement. My guess is that this is a question of personal style and works very much the same for all healing classes.
- Increased RNG + crit dependency in Legion. I assume this is something most healers don't like. Two of the golden artifact talents are heavily RNG based and the whole spec seems to shift towards relying on crits for throughput. This makes me feel like just a button pushers that watches from outside while the server decides my healing results.
- Utility seems to be a bit low-ish on options now.
- No real "Oh sh*t" button for single PCs anymore. In WoD I used that one quite often to keep single PCs from dying.
- Moonkin off-spec still seems "remote-controlled" in that I miss having choices rather than reacting to what's blinking on my screen.

I do have a level 100 Monk and Paladin and could still insta-level one char to 100 (maybe Shaman?). I only played those solo and (ab)used them for professions, though. Both the Monk and Paladin where leveled in tank spec, the Druid was pulled up by a friend through dungeons (invite a friend) and then leveled partly as Feral and later as Balance.

Legion is a lot more centered around smart spell usage than mindless proactive spamming, there is ofc some play to this still, but not so much as before, and it feels a lot more rewarding when you get the right targets. Dreamwalker increases healing done to targets with rejuv on them (believe it also scales with mastery), cultivation activating a 2nd mastery stack and a lot more healing towards the target, having hots up for tranq on important targets to get more healing out to the correct targets.
Also mana is a lot more tense so just throwing out hots randomly without knowing that they will take enough damage in the near future is very punishing.

- No real "Oh sh*t" button for single PCs anymore. In WoD I used that one quite often to keep single PCs from dying.

I believe this is an intended weakness, we have a 30 sec cd swiftmend though, but its throughput feels rather meh without hots on the target (which leads to some proactive play again, very strong with hots on the target, getting 2-3m heals on tanks from it.)

- Moonkin off-spec still seems "remote-controlled" in that I miss having choices rather than reacting to what's blinking on my screen.

I dont understand why you would say the current incarnation of moonkin is remote controlled, literally every part about the specc is 99% under your control (owlkin frenzy procs being the unknown, it shouldnt really proc during a raid though.)
MoonMoon spells 15 sec recharge 3 charges, astral power 2.5 charges of building up starsurge 5/3 - 2 starfall charges (just taking full astral power bar here.)
Then there is shooting stars talent which is 1/8th of a SS charge pr proc, its not creating any reactive gameplay even though its a bit RNG.

Back to resto though, mushroom being remote placed is pretty much always better and creates much more control, I dont see why people would not want to place it themselves, how are you supposed to place it under the boss prepull if you have to target a player and things like that. Mushroom feels fairly weak and insignificant though, its always good to use, but its not a massive part of your healing.

Crit being a good stat is not really a big problem for resto druids, we get so many ticks in with rejvus and wild growths and whatnot that relying on a 20-40% crit chance is not really important, regrowth would be the biggest issue when used on tanks its crit scaling is pretty good (3.6x), but having that 10-20% chance to not crit can seriously screw you over. dreamwalker isnt all that bad either 50% is a pretty high chance, sadly its not calculated individually on rejuv targets rather than pr wild growth cast. PotA is so low that its rather a small bonus when you get it, you cant really rely on it, (in the start I believe it was something like everyone within 15 yds or just everyone in the raid, which would've been a bigger problem.)

Our utility is perfectly fine, Iron bark and innervate being quite strong both of them, we have nothing like roar anymore, but stronger targetted utility can be good aswell, while I dont know a whole lot about when it would be good in raids, ursol's vortex is pretty good utility in dungeons.

Additionally SotF prosperity is looking to be a pretty strong specc with heavy emphasis on wild growths, spring blossoms puts more emphasis on the efflorescense, flourish also contributing very much to wild growth (but also some towards rejuv spamming prior to casting it.)

If you want strong reactive heals holy paladin is probably the way to go though, but overall the gameplay of resto druids is a lot more enjoyable than before.

[Nythiz]

You post is made up of some contradictions which makes it really hard to give you real good advice.

You say you hate spamming spells; however pretty much every healer spams. The difference is that resto druids have a lot of instant and short casts making it feel more "spammy". At the same time, you also mention that you like the instant casts; which creates a bit of a conendrum.

Let's get to some of the points though and see what legion offers.

I played one third of MoP and two thirds of WoD as Resto Druid. Mostly I seem to do ok for my guild (as a third healer with a Disc and Paladin in the past), though usually only average compared to other druids. I noticed quickly that I don't enjoy Rejuv spamming (in generall and) pro-actively. As a result I seem to do more overall reactive (raid) healing than pro-active unless there is some big mechanism I know about.

Now I wonder if I should besser use another healing class that is based more on reactive healing? Or do Resto druids not have to play as pro-active as everyone always calls them out to do? While I enjoy several aspects of Druids, it seems to make sense looking around to see if other healers might fit my play-style more (or less).

That is one of the major setups of resto druids though. Your effectiveness as a resto druid healer is also by a large marging being able to predict when damage is incomming. That means that you need to have solid knowledge of the fight.
Being able to predict the big raid damage coming up is what makes resto druids super strong in a lot of raid encounters; also because you're buying the other healers time to get off their heals.

If all you are mostly reacting to raid damage, you are somewhat running behind the facts.

As for the pro-active thing. I often feel that's at times very misinterpreted. Every healer needs to be proactive and reactive, the difference is in the toolkit you have available for each of these tasks.
Resto shamans can easily do some proactive healing by using something like: Healing Rain, Cloudburst Totem (gathers all healing for up to 15 seconds and then explodes for AoE healing); Healing Stream totem and other tools. Their strong direct heals (including Chain Heal) however means that a lot of their power doesn't really shine until after the damage has been dealt.

As a resto druid you similarily have tools for pro active and reactive healing. Using Wild Growth proactively for example is not the best approach as it's healing is strongest at the beginning, plus in legion it is smart healing. However we do have a big array of tools that we can use proactively to prepare for upcoming damage.

So no matter what healer you picks, you should always be healing proactively. Some more than others perhaps, but all classes have tools for it.

What I enjoy about (Resto) druid:

- Mobility in all specs! This one is often more important outside of choosing to play druid, even more so outside of raid/dungeon content.
- Instant casts! This adds to mobility, but also has to do with my inability for proper char placement. I also enjoy being able to pull up the group while everyone is running around frantically to dodge stuff, me including. I also like to react quickly, instead of being stuck in casting-time while other healers try the same. HoT snipping remains to be a problem, because other healers don't properly watch for running HoT, but I can get around that by
- All 4 roles playable in one character, even more so in Legion, despite the differences in secondary stat priorities.
- Heals raid and tanks.
- Some utility (a bit less so in Legion, Stampeding Roar was something I used very regularly).
- AoE heals that let me pull up several chars with a single click/cast.

Good these are some of my favorites too. And also a few that make resto druids really strong in specific tasks. There are few other healers that retain a large percentage of their throughput on the move like resto druids do; the few spells that are not instant are short enough that you can quickly cast it before running on.
A lot of this is going to stay from what I've seen so far.

What I don't enjoy now and Legion come:

- Rejuv spamming, or spammy playstyles in general. I can very well live with having nothing to do for a second or two instead of having to click on healthbars all the time. I also keep watching other healers heals and buffs (especially absorbs in the past) when possible.

This is changing a bit. Like Theburned said: mana is going to be a bigger concern. Just mindlessly spamming rejuvenations is going to bite you in the ass eventually.
However, the nature of our instant casts simply make our playstyle spammy at times. When you know big damage is coming up, or big damage just happened, you can bet your ass you'll be spreading some rejuv love around. So yes, spamming is here to stay. Albeit a lot more tactical and less mindless.

- Mushrooms (and Wild Growth) always made up a good chunk of my healing, often times surpassing Rejuv. But I seldom cared to place Mushrooms on the ground, instead I (ab)used Vuhdoo to cast Mushroom on a PC with lots of other chars in direct vicinity. In Legion I am forced to use the ground placing style, which sometimes clashes with my ability to see through the mess of PCs and NPCs on screen.

Mushroom and WG can be top healing. It always kind of depended on your playstyle, talent choices and encounters.
Prosperity + SotF is a very strong talent setup that give a lot of strength to reactive WG casts, seems like a playstyle you would like.

Frankly, I don't really get how placing mushroom is all that difficult. Maybe you are zoomed in too much? It's pretty easy as a ranged class to keep overview of the fight at hand. Whenever in doubt, just place your Efflorescence(/Mushroom) right under or slightly behind the boss and you should get most melee in that.

This also fits the next point:
- Not seeing so much of the actual raid content, because my eyes are glued to raid-frames, my char's feet/surrounding and the occassional boss-mod announcement. My guess is that this is a question of personal style and works very much the same for all healing classes.

That's the life of being a healer. But that's not all that much different if you're playing DPS and probably even tank. Your eyes are also glued to your cooldowns, your resources, the fire under your feet and bossmods.
But yes, you'll be staring at green/yellow/red bars a lot of the time. Maybe as a paladin or shaman you'll have more time to look around while you are casting some 2+ second heals.

- Increased RNG + crit dependency in Legion. I assume this is something most healers don't like. Two of the golden artifact talents are heavily RNG based and the whole spec seems to shift towards relying on crits for throughput. This makes me feel like just a button pushers that watches from outside while the server decides my healing results.

Your hyperboling the reliance on crit. We are a HoT class. When we heal there are somewhere between 5-20 HoT ticks going off every second or so.
For a hard cast class like a paladin or shaman the difference between a crit or not is noticable; for a HoT class like us it's pretty much straightforward throughput, you won't notice the difference between a 18 second rejuv with 6 crits or with 4 crits. That is why crit is a pretty good stat for us as well.
It also evens out very fast so, there is no feeling at all that "the server decides the healing result".

This point is practically non-existent for druid healers.
(And most other healers have ways to make crit feel less irky, or it's simply a bad stat)

As for the traits. Yes and No.
I agree that the RNG can mess things up, but it depends on the trait.

Dreamwalker for example gives WG a 50% chance to also heal all the targets affected by rejuv for an amount.
- It won't have enough of an impact to make a difference between someone dying or living.
- You're not going to hold out on WG so that we can get extra juice out of this, WG is too important and too high on the priority list to skip out on that if it can be used to it's full potential.
- You're not going to stack rejuvs before every WG cast, for the same reasons.

So the extra healing is entirely a bonus. If it doesn't proc, shame. If it procs, neat-o. On the HPS it adds up enough to make it a "fun" trait. But it's actual effectiveness at that moment in a fight is not big enough that the RNG has too much impact.

Power of the Archdruid is a bit worse. Not because it's stronger or anything. But because you can really waste it if you're not careful.
You don't want to waste that proc on Regrowth if you can, but use it on Rejuv. Also you have to somewhat make sure that there are at least 2 targets within 15y of your healing target otherwise it's not doing anything.

So PotA is worse RNG, just because you have to (possibly) alter your rotation and game around it to get full use out of it.
However it's saving grace is probably that it's probably never significant enough (in the context of a whole fight) that it's worth fussing about a miss-used PotA.

- Utility seems to be a bit low-ish on options now.

This is a weakness we will have. However we still have some solid tools. Rebirth is still good, we still have the shortest (and maybe even best) tank cooldown, the ability to heal on the move at all times could be considered a form of utility. Innervate might be good, I haven't really looked into it enough to know if there is another healing class that can massively benefit from it.

We aren't shamans or paladins with the utility we bring. But I don't think we should glorify that utility too much yet. I mean something like wind rush totem is awesome, but it's not like you're stacking shamans for that and its far from as good as stampeding roar was.

- No real "Oh sh*t" button for single PCs anymore. In WoD I used that one quite often to keep single PCs from dying.

Ye but that has been a change across the board for healers it seems though. I found that there are some semi-substitude skills for nature's swiftness and Genesis (as those are the ones we're talking about). Cenarion's Ward, Swiftmend and our new artifact ability (+100% HoT healing rate for 8 seconds) can pick someone up enough to get him out of danger.
But ye, we lost some burst single target healing.

- Moonkin off-spec still seems "remote-controlled" in that I miss having choices rather than reacting to what's blinking on my screen.

Wut?
Are we talking about the same balance spec? Because the new one is much better and very much so under your control and influenced by your choices.
Unless you mean balance affinity, but that's just an affinity.

I do have a level 100 Monk and Paladin and could still insta-level one char to 100 (maybe Shaman?). I only played those solo and (ab)used them for professions, though. Both the Monk and Paladin where leveled in tank spec, the Druid was pulled up by a friend through dungeons (invite a friend) and then leveled partly as Feral and later as Balance.

Shaman is pretty good. You'll lose out on some instants, although you still have some strong short casts (riptide is instant / healing surge is strong and short cast / healing spring totem is instant / etc). You get some more utility, and a shift towards more reactive healing if that is your thing.
You will lose out on some of your cool perks though:

- You lose a tank spec (caster and melee dps from shaman are really fun now though)
- You lose quite a bit of moblity. You have ghost wolf, but it's not blink and there is no dash.
- Your AoE healing is extremely strong, but it's not the bursty effect of Wild Growth; but rather more sustained strong AoE.

[Weissrolf]

Hey everyone, thanks for putting things into perspective!

Legion is a lot more centered around smart spell usage than mindless proactive spamming, there is ofc some play to this still, but not so much as before, and it feels a lot more rewarding when you get the right targets.

I do hope that this is not mostly based on mana restraints. Not because I couldn't live with it for my personal playstyle, but because how unrewarding it has been in the past to heal intelligently compared to mindless rejuv spamming. You could even ignore to consciously handle your mastery and still produce the numbers.

I believe this is an intended weakness, we have a 30 sec cd swiftmend though, but its throughput feels rather meh without hots on the target (which leads to some proactive play again, very strong with hots on the target, getting 2-3m heals on tanks from it.)

Swiftmend surely can help, and did so in the past. It does lack the instant throughput of nature's swiftness, though. Practice will tell...

I dont understand why you would say the current incarnation of moonkin is remote controlled, literally every part about the specc is 99% under your control (owlkin frenzy procs being the unknown, it shouldnt really proc during a raid though.)
MoonMoon spells 15 sec recharge 3 charges, astral power 2.5 charges of building up starsurge 5/3 - 2 starfall charges (just taking full astral power bar here.)
Then there is shooting stars talent which is 1/8th of a SS charge pr proc, its not creating any reactive gameplay even though its a bit RNG.

Edited this after looking further into Balance. Seems like talents allow for quite some variation in game-play and decision making.

Back to resto though, mushroom being remote placed is pretty much always better and creates much more control, I dont see why people would not want to place it themselves, how are you supposed to place it under the boss prepull if you have to target a player and things like that.

I was using the cluster scanner of Vuhdo. That way I could make sure that many targets where inside the circle and could keep my eyes on the health frames. Worked quite well, at least according to the amount of healing mushrooms did.

Mushroom feels fairly weak and insignificant though, its always good to use, but its not a massive part of your healing.

It was in the past. My average healing distribution in BRF was around 17% on Rejuv, Mushrooms and Wild Growth respectively. Depending on fights one of these three could drop towards 13% and one could increase over 20%.

Crit being a good stat is not really a big problem for resto druids, we get so many ticks in with rejvus and wild growths and whatnot...

This is a good argument. Crit on loads of ticks should average out nicely, so for HoTs it's really kind of a reliability stat.

dreamwalker isnt all that bad either 50% is a pretty high chance, sadly its not calculated individually on rejuv targets rather than pr wild growth cast.

I just read from somebody that in 2 hours of raiding he saw as little as only 5 procs of Dreamwalker. So it's still a gamble of luck.

Our utility is perfectly fine, Iron bark and innervate being quite strong both of them, we have nothing like roar anymore, but stronger targetted utility can be good aswell, while I dont know a whole lot about when it would be good in raids, ursol's vortex is pretty good utility in dungeons.

Iron Bark needs a talent to get back the healing bonus, though. And I will very likely miss Stampeding Roar, because it's such a massive help with a raid full of people struggling for proper positioning.

Additionally SotF prosperity is looking to be a pretty strong specc with heavy emphasis on wild growths, spring blossoms puts more emphasis on the efflorescense, flourish also contributing very much to wild growth (but also some towards rejuv spamming prior to casting it.)

I'm still wearing Living Wood Raiments, so I can even get 3 Swiftmends out for the time being. Good thing about Spring Blossoms is that it keeps running once you leave the circle and can be refreshed/applied by (re-)entering the circle after its creation. Nice thing about Flourish is that it also works on Spring Blossoms and Cultivation! Of course it does not work on Efflorescence, because the mushroom is handled like a totem, not a HoT.

If you want strong reactive heals holy paladin is probably the way to go though, but overall the gameplay of resto druids is a lot more enjoyable than before.

But Paladins are moving so sloooow in comparison.

- - - Updated - - -

You post is made up of some contradictions which makes it really hard to give you real good advice.

You say you hate spamming spells; however pretty much every healer spams. The difference is that resto druids have a lot of instant and short casts making it feel more "spammy". At the same time, you also mention that you like the instant casts; which creates a bit of a conendrum.

One can like the challenge and satisfaction of being a healer and still dislike spamming. On top of that I specifically dislike how in the past spamming Rejuv blanketing didn't really produce as bad a numbers as it should have compared to healing on basis of educated decisions. As soon as mana is a plenty you could get away with a lot of rejuv blanketing.

That is one of the major setups of resto druids though. Your effectiveness as a resto druid healer is also by a large marging being able to predict when damage is incomming. That means that you need to have solid knowledge of the fight.

This is directly related to my original question. Of course it's always better to know the fight, this much is true for every class and spec, but how much does Resto have to know more about than others? While we all read/watch boss guides I still like to learn during the event. And especially with dungeons I always got the feeling that knowing my spec and watching my feet does the job (which obviously is more of a reactive role).

Being able to predict the big raid damage coming up is what makes resto druids super strong in a lot of raid encounters; also because you're buying the other healers time to get off their heals.

Of course. Although my past experiences were about absorb blanketed raids and healers not caring for who is protected by a HoT or not. This in turn made me working reactively in that I specifically targeted players who where not shielded or affected by Weakened Soul.

If all you are mostly reacting to raid damage, you are somewhat running behind the facts.

It's not like I dispise proactive playing. I do find myself more in a comfort zone when I can play reactive, mostly because of what I wrote earlier about dungeons. Know the spec, don't stand in stuff and keep people alive and kicking. You can hardly be in error when you put a heal on a low healthbar. Putting out a hand full of Rejuvs on people who might or might not need it is another matter.

As for the pro-active thing. I often feel that's at times very misinterpreted. Every healer needs to be proactive and reactive, the difference is in the toolkit you have available for each of these tasks.

Question is how much of a difference it makes for playing a Druid vs. other classes. I am not ranked, my best result ever was 95 percentile on heroic Iron Maidens (18.5% Mushrooms, 18.5 Rejuvenation, 16.8% Wild Growth), alongside Disc and Shaman healers. So while I try to do my best, it's not like the raid stands and falls with my effort.

So no matter what healer you picks, you should always be healing proactively. Some more than others perhaps, but all classes have tools for it.

Agreed. It's just that every (often)time(s) I find myself casting Rejuvenation on someone *after* he took damage that I wonder if I should be doing this as a Druid?!

Good these are some of my favorites too. And also a few that make resto druids really strong in specific tasks. There are few other healers that retain a large percentage of their throughput on the move like resto druids do; the few spells that are not instant are short enough that you can quickly cast it before running on.
A lot of this is going to stay from what I've seen so far.

If my old guild should take up raiding again - and if I'll take part in that - then healing during movement is something that helps them a lot. That is because proper movement is one of our biggest weaknesses. Several of our players move too late, even with something as pretictable as Oregorger range camp. One reason why I dislike being stripped of Stampeding Roar. Fights like Oregorger or Emperor make it obvious how to place mushrooms proactive.

Other fights where I might know that something big is coming are not so clear-cut. Whome do I put Rejuvs on when I don't know who is getting hit? Or I know that all get hit, but don't know what the other healers are doing. Or I rather prefer to put out a strong Wild Growth after the damage took place, but then I know that the other healers will spend their mana even while my HoTs are running.

Concerning the latter I think that MoP messed with people's heads. Everyone still expects to see full health bars, else they feel fragile. You can tell them all night long that you got them covered and up before the next blast, they still want to get capped quickly (including the other healers who keep spending/wasting their mana on that).

This is changing a bit. Like Theburned said: mana is going to be a bigger concern. Just mindlessly spamming rejuvenations is going to bite you in the ass eventually.

Unless trinkets change that aspect massively again. Personally I hope we are not as mana starved as at the beginning of WoD, when Burning candles where something to invest gold in. Overall my main concern with mana is not how Druids will handle that, but how other clerics will do. If they are mana starved then Druids can shine, if they keep spitting out heals then running HoTs may again be mostly ignored by other healers (the ones I know).

Mushroom and WG can be top healing. It always kind of depended on your playstyle, talent choices and encounters.
Prosperity + SotF is a very strong talent setup that give a lot of strength to reactive WG casts, seems like a playstyle you would like.

Here is one parse of Ko'ragh where you can see that my Active Time is the lowest of all 4 healers (one new druid healer came along, I played Balance for all Encounter except the last two). And even with my Mastery being up only 89.5% of the time I pulled ahead in numbers, with Wild Growth being a very clear first place: 30.5% WG vs. 16.5% Tranq vs. 14.4% Rejuv vs. 11% Mushrooms. Most likely reason: The other two "real" healers went out of mana early in the fight (Disc @ 2:30, Shaman @ 3:30), my own mana never went lower than 25%. Wild Growth definitively is my thing, oftentimes more than Rejuvenation. But that could be lazyness or inability to properly learn the spec.

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...4&type=healing

Frankly, I don't really get how placing mushroom is all that difficult. Maybe you are zoomed in too much? It's pretty easy as a ranged class to keep overview of the fight at hand. Whenever in doubt, just place your Efflorescence(/Mushroom) right under or slightly behind the boss and you should get most melee in that.

It's not like I cannot do it, but I prefered the cluster scanner approach, especially because it left no doubt (and cost less mana for a time).

But yes, you'll be staring at green/yellow/red bars a lot of the time. Maybe as a paladin or shaman you'll have more time to look around while you are casting some 2+ second heals.

Also depends on the fight and raid progress (aka experience on specific boss). But as Balance I definitively saw more of the Encounters than what I get to see as Resto.

Your hyperboling the reliance on crit. We are a HoT class. When we heal there are somewhere between 5-20 HoT ticks going off every second or so.
For a hard cast class like a paladin or shaman the difference between a crit or not is noticable; for a HoT class like us it's pretty much straightforward throughput, you won't notice the difference between a 18 second rejuv with 6 crits or with 4 crits. That is why crit is a pretty good stat for us as well.
It also evens out very fast so, there is no feeling at all that "the server decides the healing result".

I didn't really consider how much Crit's "unrealiable" part is swallowed by masses of HoT ticks happening. Yes, the more ticks the better it's averaging out. Good to be reminded on that part of the mechanic.

Dreamwalker for example gives WG a 50% chance to also heal all the targets affected by rejuv for an amount.
- It won't have enough of an impact to make a difference between someone dying or living.
- You're not going to hold out on WG so that we can get extra juice out of this, WG is too important and too high on the priority list to skip out on that if it can be used to it's full potential.
- You're not going to stack rejuvs before every WG cast, for the same reasons.

The last point was what I was mostly worried about. Like: "Is this promoting me to cast more Rejuvs (spammy style) just so that I can even make any use of my *golden* traits"? One developer said in an interview that artifact traits are a bonus that will not define your play-style on top of your base spec. People seem to think differently, considering how many discussions resolve around traits.

So the extra healing is entirely a bonus. If it doesn't proc, shame. If it procs, neat-o. On the HPS it adds up enough to make it a "fun" trait. But it's actual effectiveness at that moment in a fight is not big enough that the RNG has too much impact.

Is this a drawback for Druids compared to other (healer) classes, or are traits generally balanced toward being a bonus more than a defining momentum?

Power of the Archdruid is a bit worse. Not because it's stronger or anything. But because you can really waste it if you're not careful.
You don't want to waste that proc on Regrowth if you can, but use it on Rejuv. Also you have to somewhat make sure that there are at least 2 targets within 15y of your healing target otherwise it's not doing anything.

This will likely be what Vuhdo's cluster finder is going to look after next. I cannot judge what 15y is on the field, other may be able to do so, I need an addon for that.

This is a weakness we will have. However we still have some solid tools. Rebirth is still good, we still have the shortest (and maybe even best) tank cooldown, the ability to heal on the move at all times could be considered a form of utility. Innervate might be good, I haven't really looked into it enough to know if there is another healing class that can massively benefit from it.

Please give me back Stampeding Roar! Other than that, less utility in form of special spells means less complexity while healing. Can be good, can be bad. Is there any reason why I shouldn't be using Innervate on myself unless other healers can really make more out of it?

Ye but that has been a change across the board for healers it seems though. I found that there are some semi-substitude skills for nature's swiftness and Genesis (as those are the ones we're talking about). Cenarion's Ward, Swiftmend and our new artifact ability (+100% HoT healing rate for 8 seconds) can pick someone up enough to get him out of danger.

Yes, I am looking into that already. I also found out that if you extend Lifeboom's duration in its last 5 (6) seconds then not only does it extend, but you will get the full instant bloom effect *the very moment* you cast the second (extended) Lifeboom! HP wise that's worth about 4 ticks of Rejuv when I checked on dummies and myself.

Are we talking about the same balance spec? Because the new one is much better and very much so under your control and influenced by your choices.
Unless you mean balance affinity, but that's just an affinity.

I still fail to see where it leaves me with decisions instead of reacting to power counters and procs. But that's probably due to not getting much experience with the changes yet.

Edited this after looking further into Balance. Seems like talents allow for quite some variation in game-play and decision making. I think I can well live with this. So let's concentrate on Resto.

[Hanyuu]

I think Resto druid is the strongest healer coming into legion, but I don't think any are unplayable. (Disc is in a weird spot not being really a full healer).

I think one of the glaring things that they are emphasizing now is healers have weaknesses. Paladins need to be close to their targets (mastery, light of dawn) and are not mobile but are tougher healers (extra hit points) with strong direct heals--their personal throughput cool down instead of a raid one exemplifies this. Monks are incredibly mobile and seem to be good raid healers, but their tank cool down felt lack luster to me. Resto druids and holy priests feel like they are more balanced healers. You've swiftmend to bring people back as a Resto druid and your talents let you adapt to your role. Ironbark seems amazing as a 1 minute cool down if you are healing tanks in a 5 man. Holy priests seem to have great healer utility with hymn and get some nice passives. I noticed shamans have alot of misc useful things--heroism, a ranged interrupt while the other healers don't seem to have any, purge to remove buffs, the option to talent into a group run speed totem, an aoe stun for 5 mans and so forth. Their raid niche is clump healing and they can "save" the day with their mastery better than other healers--after all, druids might top them off, but its a shaman that can help prevent a death. Their mobility is lacking but still better than paladins and their tank cool down is powerful but requires positioning. They'll never win the numbers--once your raid has things on farm, but before that point when people are learning, they are highly valuable.

From what you said, I'd probably try a shaman. But like I said originally, druids seem to be the best. Swiftmend can stop a death, but not as well as shaman mastery. Likewise, a shaman has some mobility options (with windrush totem, gust of wind, ghost wolf, spirirtwalker's grace, and riptide), but it pales compared to the instants a druid has. In essence, you have to make a trade off--what's more important to you?

[Nythiz]

One can like the challenge and satisfaction of being a healer and still dislike spamming. On top of that I specifically dislike how in the past spamming Rejuv blanketing didn't really produce as bad a numbers as it should have compared to healing on basis of educated decisions. As soon as mana is a plenty you could get away with a lot of rejuv blanketing.

Mana should be more of a concern, over the course of the entire expansion, than it has in the past few expansions. The main reason for this is the removal of spirit which means that our sustainability no longer scales exponentially over the course of an expansion.
There will still be somewhat scaling as we progress, as we get more throughput and with certain trinkets we'll probably also get more sustain as we get along the expansion; but it should be much more linear.

Of course as resto druid there will always be rejuv spamming. Because the moment mana allows you to be more liberal with your mana, this is simply one of the most effective heals when you look at HPM/HPCT and HPS. And those fights are always around; so the question is how much are you willing to bare.

This is directly related to my original question. Of course it's always better to know the fight, this much is true for every class and spec, but how much does Resto have to know more about than others? While we all read/watch boss guides I still like to learn during the event. And especially with dungeons I always got the feeling that knowing my spec and watching my feet does the job (which obviously is more of a reactive role).

I'm personally someone who grasps encounter mechanics quite fast; even without reading a guide. That resto druid also plays in my personal strengths, which I like and it means I can get more out of the class.

How much does resto have to know more than others? Not all that much really.
You simply can't predict all damage. You don't know if DPS #5 is going to stand in that fire or move out; you don't always know if the tank saved his cooldown for boss ability #1 or boss ability #2.

However, if you know that every 60 seconds the boss will do an AoE that brings the entire melee group to 20% health; you can play in on that knowledge and start giving each melee a rejuv 5-10 seconds before that boss attack hits.

Does that mean that you have to know more than a resto shaman or a holy paladin? No, because it's in their best interrest to know that same thing. The main difference is that a resto druid can BENEFIT much more from that information due to our toolkit. Because what can a shaman do? He can drop down a cloudburst totem, he can drop down a healing rain, he can maybe Riptide one of the melee; but he'll lose out on a druid who is pre-rejuving the damage, has efflorescence down and has a SotF-WG ready to go.


Contrary we also react to big RNG hits a bit worse than other healers do, unless it happens to hit enough people to make Wild Growth a strong choice (which is why WG is a very reactive spell for druids and very vital to our viability in raids / dungeons).

Of course. Although my past experiences were about absorb blanketed raids and healers not caring for who is protected by a HoT or not. This in turn made me working reactively in that I specifically targeted players who where not shielded or affected by Weakened Soul.


It's not like I dispise proactive playing. I do find myself more in a comfort zone when I can play reactive, mostly because of what I wrote earlier about dungeons. Know the spec, don't stand in stuff and keep people alive and kicking. You can hardly be in error when you put a heal on a low healthbar. Putting out a hand full of Rejuvs on people who might or might not need it is another matter.

There is nothing wrong with preferring reactive healing style. And even with a resto druid you can make that work just fine. The fact (or strong opinion) remains though, that to get the maximum potential out of your resto druid, you'll have to dedicate a good portion to proactive healing.
It's like cooking a steak; nothing is preventing you from eating it right as you're done cooking it. But letting it rest, will make it that much better.

Agreed. It's just that every (often)time(s) I find myself casting Rejuvenation on someone *after* he took damage that I wonder if I should be doing this as a Druid?!

Don't misinterpret pro-active healing or put too much weight on that term.
Healing someone who needs healing is (pretty much) ALWAYS a good thing. I'm not saying that if you heal reactively as a resto druid you're doing it wrong. FAR FAR from that, in fact a large majority of the damage that's landing on your party/raid is hard if not impossible to predict. There isn't always the option of proactive healing.

Proactive healing for resto druid mostly differentiates itself compared to other healers in these points (although to be frank this still also applies to other healers, albeit to a lesser extend):

1a) Keep your tanks Hotted; they will take damage, so you simply want to keep those HoTs rolling on them.
1b) This applies to players with a debuff as well (Heartseeker on Killrogg / Gift of the Man'ari on Socretar / etc)

2) If you know damage is going to land on X players, try to get a few hots rolling before that damage is going to land. Not only will this create buffer for yourself and other healers, you'll need to spend a lot less GCDs after the damage lands. You don't need to cover the entire raid, even if you can just get 3-5 rejuvs rolling you have already gained an advantage. Watch your bossmods and know the encounters.
Example: Someone gets the Fel Surge debuff on Xhul. Don't wait for the damage to land, pre-HoT, he's going to take the damage anyway and he might be out of range to heal when he actually gets hurt.

That's mostly it, it's not that 90% of your healing has to be premeditated; but you can get ahead of other healers by applying some basic tactics and fight knowledge to your healing style.
If all you do is react to damage, your resto druid won't be bad; but you'll have a very tough match to compete with other healers who have much better tools for such a job.

Other fights where I might know that something big is coming are not so clear-cut. Whome do I put Rejuvs on when I don't know who is getting hit? Or I know that all get hit, but don't know what the other healers are doing. Or I rather prefer to put out a strong Wild Growth after the damage took place, but then I know that the other healers will spend their mana even while my HoTs are running.

Whom do you put rejuvs on? That depends a bit on the situation. If the damage is rather random (e.g. someone gets targetted by a random ability) than there is little you can do to predict who you need to heal. In that case just rejuv after the damage goes of (or better yet, use WG if enough people got hit).
If mana allows it, and you know an ability comes up that hits ranged target you could always prehot a few, you might get lucky. But a lot of time you'll simply be reacting to this kind of damage.
There is plenty of damage that is predictable though. Just to pick a few from HFC fights:
- Debuff on council, perfect to keep people hotted on that. You might not see this as pro-active healing, but it very much is. You can react when they drop below 60-80% HP, but then other healers will just snipe with a better toolkit. Keep a rejuv (or even lifebloom) on them and your effective healing skyrockets.
- Heartseeker debuff on Kilrogg. Pre-Hot as the target runs to the assigned position
- Chakram / Laser on Iskar
- etc

Unless trinkets change that aspect massively again. Personally I hope we are not as mana starved as at the beginning of WoD, when Burning candles where something to invest gold in. Overall my main concern with mana is not how Druids will handle that, but how other clerics will do. If they are mana starved then Druids can shine, if they keep spitting out heals then running HoTs may again be mostly ignored by other healers (the ones I know).

Resto druids will have it pretty harsh mana wise. That's partially because we are meant to have a harder time on this than some other healers; but also because going full out with a resto druid will just run you dry in a matter of seconds. People assuming we can use WG on cooldown or we can constantly have half the raid covered with rejuvs are in for a rough ride :>

In general healing should be tough but doable; I thought BRF was a pretty good spot for healers to be at mana wise.

The last point was what I was mostly worried about. Like: "Is this promoting me to cast more Rejuvs (spammy style) just so that I can even make any use of my *golden* traits"? One developer said in an interview that artifact traits are a bonus that will not define your play-style on top of your base spec. People seem to think differently, considering how many discussions resolve around traits.

I feel like people are just discussing, because there is little else to do. Sometimes the most irrelevant things are the core of the most heated arguments; but such are the boards during the pre-expansion drought.

Is this a drawback for Druids compared to other (healer) classes, or are traits generally balanced toward being a bonus more than a defining momentum?

A lot of other healer classes also have a talent that is very RNG based; and they also have a talent that affects their raid cooldown in some way. The biggest difference from what I'm seeing so far is that most other healers have a 3rd golden traits that is more reliable and we seem to have 2 RNG traits.
E.g. shaman:
- 1 golden trait makes healing tide totem stronger per tick.
- 1 golden trait gives Riptide (their HoT) a chance, estimated at about 15%, to summon a totem that heals nearby allies for 175% spellpower. Pretty weak to be frank due to the low chance, but hey it's fun when it pops just like Dreamwalker.
- 1 golden trait is like cultivation for their healing stream totem. Very strong and very consistent. There are a few mechanical things holding it in check (no benefit from mastery or crit), but other than that it's a hugely beneficial trait.

Most healers seem to have something like that, but it seems that resto druids get 2 pretty RNG-y spells and PotA in particular is quite dull to be frank.

This will likely be what Vuhdo's cluster finder is going to look after next. I cannot judge what 15y is on the field, other may be able to do so, I need an addon for that.

Maybe. Generally there are some clusters of casters and melee always is. So target selection shouldn't be too hard. And 15y radius is a pretty generous circle. But in hectic times this could indeed be wasted if not careful.

[Mallphas]

Mana should be more of a concern, over the course of the entire expansion, than it has in the past few expansions. The main reason for this is the removal of spirit which means that our sustainability no longer scales exponentially over the course of an expansion.

Are any calculations regarding DMC trinket out yet? It would be nice to know if its powerfull as it were in previsouly expansions since its expensive in every one of them.

[Weissrolf]

Of course as resto druid there will always be rejuv spamming. Because the moment mana allows you to be more liberal with your mana, this is simply one of the most effective heals when you look at HPM/HPCT and HPS. And those fights are always around; so the question is how much are you willing to bare.

If it's a conscious decision and not something forced down my throat then I can live with it. Just pretty please have making educated choices be more rewarding than mindlessly blanketing the raid in Rejuvs.

You simply can't predict all damage. You don't know if DPS #5 is going to stand in that fire or move out; you don't always know if the tank saved his cooldown for boss ability #1 or boss ability #2.

Indeed, but in the past I had the feeling that blindly blanketing the raid with Rejuv was awarded by being really quite successful. And since I never liked spamming Rejuv before known damage hits unknown people I often felt like I didn't play the way the game wants me to play the class. Especially when I see that Druids using Rejuv blanketing get similar or better numbers. I know one Druid player that I can compare against in comparable fights, where I cast 90 Rejuvs in 7:30 of Ka'ragh she casts 140. So there is a visible difference in style.

And while I like that the game allows for different styles to be valid, I keep wondering if the game wants me to use more Rejuv?! At least I do see Rejuv popping up in two golden artifact traits and it remains to be one of the best heals in our arsenal.

However, if you know that every 60 seconds the boss will do an AoE that brings the entire melee group to 20% health; you can play in on that knowledge and start giving each melee a rejuv 5-10 seconds before that boss attack hits.

I think this part is where I somewhat failed in the past, giving Rejuv to a whole group of raid members before a damage spike. Of course I had the tanks in mind and sometimes single players I knew to easily get in trouble, but not something like "the whole melee group".

1a) Keep your tanks Hotted; they will take damage, so you simply want to keep those HoTs rolling on them.
1b) This applies to players with a debuff as well (Heartseeker on Killrogg / Gift of the Man'ari on Socretar / etc)

These two I already did in the past, albeit 1a often was less important because of Disc + Paladin love. Sometimes in 1b situations I would use Lifebloom and especially Iron Skin on a raid member instead of a tank, because tanks were already covered.

There is nothing wrong with preferring reactive healing style. And even with a resto druid you can make that work just fine. The fact (or strong opinion) remains though, that to get the maximum potential out of your resto druid, you'll have to dedicate a good portion to proactive healing.
It's like cooking a steak; nothing is preventing you from eating it right as you're done cooking it. But letting it rest, will make it that much better.

I have to weight the pros and cons here. While I like many things about Druid healing, I also noticed that I also somewhat seem to prefer clicking on healthbars when they are already down. And then again, every Rejuv on a bar below 100% feels like I lack in the proactive department.

2) If you know damage is going to land on X players, try to get a few hots rolling before that damage is going to land. Not only will this create buffer for yourself and other healers, you'll need to spend a lot less GCDs after the damage lands. You don't need to cover the entire raid, even if you can just get 3-5 rejuvs rolling you have already gained an advantage.

I will try to wrap my head around those 3-5 Rejuvs before damage lands. In the past our melee group was small to non existant, so it wasn't easy to decide on whome to put proactive Rejuvs on, other than the active tank and healers (including myself).

Example: Someone gets the Fel Surge debuff on Xhul. Don't wait for the damage to land, pre-HoT, he's going to take the damage anyway and he might be out of range to heal when he actually gets hurt.

With these single targets I (usually) do pre-HoT, sometimes I also use Iron Skin. And if a Clearcasting is up I might also go for a Living Seed. The combination of these depending on the situation and target.

That's mostly it, it's not that 90% of your healing has to be premeditated; but you can get ahead of other healers by applying some basic tactics and fight knowledge to your healing style.
If all you do is react to damage, your resto druid won't be bad; but you'll have a very tough match to compete with other healers who have much better tools for such a job.

Thanks for the feedback on this. With all the emphasis on Rejuv here and Rejuv there (in talens, traits, logs and discussions) one easily gets the feeling that you fail do play Druid properly if you don't produce high number of Rejuv casts, which seem to hit best if cast preactive.

In general healing should be tough but doable; I thought BRF was a pretty good spot for healers to be at mana wise.

I could live with BRF level mana.

[Nythiz]

Are any calculations regarding DMC trinket out yet? It would be nice to know if its powerfull as it were in previsouly expansions since its expensive in every one of them.

Hard to tell. But our mana at level 110 = 1.1 million. That makes our base mana 220000.
If a rejuv costs 10% base mana (according to wowhead), that means it costs 22000 mana.

The trinket seems a bit off, since it's saying it reduces mana cost by 166-644; which is really nothing when a single rejuv costs 22000.
Maybe there is some hidden factor, since it's talking about BASE mana cost, so maybe it's 5 fold of what it states, in which case the trinket would be pretty decent (about 10% mana reduction on rejuv)

Hard to say at this point. But mana reduction is nearly always a very solid pick early on. And the DMF trinkets have a rich history of always being very good.

[kooz]

try resto shaman, it's more reactive in its nature, but I feel it's easier to play than druid even though druid has been my main for a long time. Technically I enjoy druid more while shaman might be better for raid progression and I like a few things about its toolkit...druid has now stronger tank healing than shaman and better for mythics though.

[dmartin69]

Well I have been playing my Resto Druid who I main and it seems familiar if not exactly the same. The only thing that is interesting is the recomendation to keep all hots Rejuv, Regrowth, Lifebloom and effloressence on tank area at all times....

[Weissrolf]

Thanks everyone for their input! Still thinking about which of my two missing healers I'm gonna push to 100 (Shaman, Priest), but it's very likely that I will stay with Druid as main. This discussion put things into perspective and I just don't want to miss the overall mobility, including for leveling/questing. If we get a new raid together and another healer class is desperately needed I can still decide otherwise, but Druid it remains for now.