Is restoration druid really that good?

[jasoncb]

As a tank, I'm always happy when paired with HPally, or RDruid. The meh's are HPriest, RShammy, MWMonk, and the nooooooooo is DPriest.

What do you find the main differences are between druids and other healers? Just curious.

[Droodid]

What do you find the main differences are between druids and other healers? Just curious.

I find that having the hots going into pulls helps with the initial spikes in damage before we have any kind of mitigation up. It's small, but it's enough that I notice and can relax just a bit more when pulling trash/bosses, until I can start to reduce damage a bit. I also notice that RDruids can DPS more often than others due to hots, so it's again little, but helpful.

[Cheze]

HPS in five mans is entirely a function of how much avoidable damage the group is taking; I'm sure I could get up to 400k+ on a 1-2min boss fight (tranq by itself is ~4 million), but in practice there's never really enough damage to get your eHPS that high on a sustained basis. I'm barely ever above 250k eHPS, and even that high is pretty rare.

I am enjoying my paladin though; BoV won't be competitive in raids but it's a lot of fun to use in five mans. Paladin doesn't feel quite as strong as rdruid, but mine also isn't as well geared.

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Only trouble I have is tank healing when they are taking heavy damage and I've used all my cds. All I am left with is either spamming regrowth (feels wrong) or using healing touch (what a waste of 2 seconds tbh). Any suggestions?

cenarion ward+flourish is really good; with 4-5 other hots on the target it does a massive amount of healing over 10-12s

[Zodd]

sorry but what is hard? applying rejuv to the whole grp applying hots to the tank and cast 1 wild growth here and there? thats all a druid has to do so far in 5 mans.

Clearly this person does not run with a demon hunter tank..

As far as tank heals go in 5 man content, I was looking at the talent that reduces Healing Touch cast time as a good go-to. Those Demon Hunters really like soaking heals up...

[Deleted]

HPS when you are the only healer in the group..means....nothing? seriously guys

[Taeldorian]

Thanks for the input Smag, I definitely agree that BoV is shit.
Haven't tested mythic+ on beta, but I think I'll take your word for it and start gearing my druid this weekend.

Thanks a lot everyone

Lol what? BoV is an amazing 5 man talent. It's not clunky and it's most certainly not wonky. Saying otherwise shows how much people don't know the class.

I've gotten to mythic 10 on beta and had an extremely good time as holy paladin. BoV is an amazing tool. You don't loose out on that much tank healing especially when you can heal the entire group to full in 2 GCDs every few seconds. Point being, BoV is an extremely strong tool. The fact both you and Smag say otherwise shows you haven't spent much time as a holy paladin.

In raids we use Beacon of the Lightbringer which gives us more AoE healing and increases the potential of our mastery. We get the tank healing and as a bonus more AoE healing and mastery applying to both melee and ranged (applies to beacon and yourself).

But it's quite clear you've made your choice. Rdruid is a very viable and good choice as well, but so is holy paladin. So either way it's your choice.

[Wild]

Healing the group has caused me no trouble whatsoever. Doing dmg though is a different topic. I barely get to do any dmg while healing. IMHO I dont think we are supposed to do dmg, whats why we have "good" dds. I prefer being a good healer instead of an ok healer with ok dmg.

[Nythiz]

Hi,

I'm maining holy paladin and I feel incredibly strong in the current 5-man content. With CD's up, my HPS goes well above 400k, I've even rarely seen 500k HPS on a few occasions. Now, I made a post on the paladin forums to see if other people felt the same way - If they felt slightly over powered as well.

The only response I got "Nah we're fine, rdruid is really strong too".

I'm yet to see a rdruid pull any impressive numbers, so I'm asking you here to convince me that rdruid is in fact as strong as people say. Maybe then I won't fear the banhammer as much

Best regards, a worried hpala.

It's not really about the numbers as much as about the whole toolkit for 5 mans IMO.

I think if a resto druid would want to pull 400k he could; it would require several cooldowns, but I'm pretty sure your 400k healing does too.
I've never really been in a situation where I needed that much healing though. The only cases where I had to pull out the really really big guns was generally when DPS screwed up; and usually a WG -> G'Hanir -> Flourish does enough burst healing to bring everyone back up (like 300kish HPS or so).

What makes resto druid good:

1) Very important in 5 man mythics so far IMO has been the ability to move and heal. There are a ton of fights out there that either require you to move a lot, or have mechanics that interrupt your casting (e.g. the constant pushback from the Hydra boss in Darkheart Thicket)

2) Healing toolkit is very decent. We have multiple solid cooldowns (Flourish / Cenarion Ward / G'Hanir / Tranquility) and our tank cooldown is also on a pretty short timer (1.5 min base; 1.0 min talented).
We have good AoE healing through Wild Growth (From a "per cast perspective" it's probably one of the strongest AoE heals in the game) and it complements rejuvenation spreading pretty well.

The main thing we lack in our healing toolkit is a good single target burst heal. Our regrowth is our only option, but it needs like 3+ mastery stacks to be decent. Other healers have way better single target heals. This could be a bit of an issue

3) Feral affinity does some really solid dps. I've done many dungeons as well, where people wondered how the hell the healer is doing so much dps.
This could be really useful for time trials.

4) Resto druid mastery is a really really strong stat for healing output in 5 man mythics. Makes us scale really well I think.
Only downside is that this stat doesn't improve our DPS, so I'm not really sure if we'll be stacking this or rather go for a stat that also increases our dps output (e.g. crit); is going to depend on the way you have to play in the mythic+ dungeons.

[Sprucelee]

HPS when you are the only healer in the group..means....nothing? seriously guys

In ez mode 5-mans until Mythic+'opens up, the tank is the "other healer".....

[Deleted]

You don't rate healers by sheer output so numbers aren't saying anything about how "good" a spec is.

All I can say is, and this is anecdotal evidence from me obviously, I find it way easier to heal groups effectively with my druid than I do my paladin. Yes, the heal burst potential of my paladin is amazing. But I have to work way harder healing groups with my paladin than I do my druid.

[Alltat]

HPS when you are the only healer in the group..means....nothing? seriously guys

It's a measure of how much HPS you can pump out to keep the group alive through screwups until you eventually wipe, but... yeah.

But really, nothing we can say now has any relevance to raiding and anything that can be said now will be forgotten in a week, so what else are people going to talk about? Unlike DPS, healers can't even calculate any good stat weights until we have some log data to show us raid spell breakdowns.

[tratra]

Clearly this person does not run with a demon hunter tank..

As far as tank heals go in 5 man content, I was looking at the talent that reduces Healing Touch cast time as a good go-to. Those Demon Hunters really like soaking heals up...

I do run with DH as a tank a lot of the times and he is alright with the 3 hots on him. I am letting him use his spikes, DH heal more than I do at the end of the day. Don't get worried if you see a DH tank losing hp so fast, he surely can make up for it using his own heals.

You just wanted to say something just to say it... If you are having to do more than 3 hots on the tank and maybe a regrowth here and there and a swiftmend even if he is DH then you are running your mythics with incompetent people.

[theburned]

Too busy doing 150k+ DPS the whole instance and never ran with a group that took that much consistent damage. Bigger pulls don't mean more damage, they mean more mitigation/CC/stuns....

The few times things have gotten slightly out of control I spiked to 300K with little to no planning, just reactive healing.

that holy paladin 500k+ ST burst dps though, we cant get anywhere close :/, we are more consistent in damage though, think I was bursting up towards 330k (ending fight at 283k) as best so far a rdruid.

[Neemo]

As a tank, I'm always happy when paired with HPally, or RDruid. The meh's are HPriest, RShammy, MWMonk, and the nooooooooo is DPriest.

Bear here. I've got no issue with Shammy heals atm. But that may be because increasing my already massive health pool is kinda funny XD
Otherwise I pretty much agree with this.

[Deleted]

As a tank, I'm always happy when paired with HPally, or RDruid. The meh's are HPriest, RShammy, MWMonk, and the nooooooooo is DPriest.

Disc priest here. You haven't seen a good one yet then. The mechanics changed drastically and many of the disc priests played it because of the formerly stupidly easy mechanics and (apparently) fail/struggle to adapt. So far I the only feedback I got for my healing was positive.

[Cheze]

a tank that can't be saved by 4-5 HoTs + some combination of ironbark/cenarion ward/ghanir probably couldn't be sustainably healed by any class; it just feels worse as a druid because you don't have a flash heal type of button to panic-spam before your external ends and the next spike inevitably kills them

[Alltat]

that holy paladin 500k+ ST burst dps though, we cant get anywhere close :/

Paladins have always had better emergency burst healing than anyone else. Sort of like how priests have always had better absorbs. That's just life. We have adequate burst healing if we can spare some cooldowns to do it, so five man is fine and in raids we're probably mostly going to be doing raid healing anyway. As usual.

a tank that can't be saved by 4-5 HoTs + some combination of ironbark/cenarion ward/ghanir probably couldn't be sustainably healed by any class; it just feels worse as a druid because you don't have a flash heal type of button to panic-spam before your external ends and the next spike inevitably kills them

Pretty much. If you put all your HoTs up along with Ironbark and the staff, well... if that doesn't keep a tank alive, that tank wasn't meant to live. The group is doing something else wrong. All that tank damage is the game's way of saying that you're not doing it right.

[Fluffytoy]

I've pulled well over 400k HPS in Mythic dungeons as a resto druid. It's usually things like pulling 2-3 packs of mobs at once or two packs and a boss. Generally speaking the damage doesn't go out enough to require ridiculous HPS. If I see it coming it's easy to heal through. If I get surprised by "Oh no now we have 3-4 groups on us" then it's either a wipe or a rough pull through (Gotta catch up on my HoTing everyone).

That being said healing isn't about numbers. It's about efficiency, keeping players alive and lasting as long as your group needs to kill an encounter. I can rip ridiculous HPS but it's going to shit on my mana. Or I can keep people alive for a long fight and be a good player.

[theburned]

Paladins have always had better emergency burst healing than anyone else. Sort of like how priests have always had better absorbs. That's just life. We have adequate burst healing if we can spare some cooldowns to do it, so five man is fine and in raids we're probably mostly going to be doing raid healing anyway. As usual.

From my experience prior to legion druids are the only ones who've had any kind of burst dps, in form of HotW, now its hpalas though.