Resto Druid - Legion Talents

[Sprucelee]

Looking at top 10 HPS logs in general is a fairly terrible way to evaluate talents. Top logs are generally driven by a confluence of factors - using less healers than the average, a very screwed up kill where the raid took a lot more damage than the average raid, and/or good RNG with things like trinket procs or even just more damage to heal when you use Tranq than the average Druid has on that fight. Just because the person with the number 1 parse took X talent does not mean that taking X talent is the best option for you or your raid, or that you will come close to producing similar results by taking that talent, both due to factors within your control (target selection, player skill), and factors outside of your control (there needs to be the stuff to actually heal at the right times).

I don't think there's currently a way in WCL to do this, but what you need to see to evaluate talents like that is not what the top 10 outlier logs have, but what the average healing done on a fight is for someone taking SoTF vs someone taking Cultivation (or whatever other combo). What you're also not factoring in is that the nature of Cultivation and Incarnation makes it not surprising that they feature in edge case logs.

1. Cultivation requires players to be at low enough health points to get enough benefit to make it worth going with over an SoTF build. Top logs are inherently going to feature raids using less healers and raids where player health pools sit lower, or situations where near wipes turn into kills. That doesn't mean that you can mis-interpret that data and say that the #1 HPS parse that took Cultivation = SoTF is garbage, because it very well might not correlate to a raid team that is using 1-2 more healers than that top log, or that is using a different strategy, or whatever else.
2. One of the things that has become pretty clear (despite their efforts to rein in raid CDs) is that Druid numbers on a lot of fights continue to live or die on how effective your Tranq usages are. Incarnation is going to inflate the magnitude of those edge cases if you using it to buff Tranq. Not only that, but as a CD you use when shit hits the fan, its numbers are going to be inflated in cases where you get extremely strong usage out of the CD (i.e. low healer counts, near wipes, etc.)

At any rate, I think you are just misinterpreting the data to prove your personal dislike of SoTF. We all get it, you hate SoTF as a talent and a play style, but tunnel visioning top rankings (especially as a healer during progression) is just silly.

I enjoy using it, particularly in lower level 5-mans, and have been somewhat sad when it became apparent it was a less optimal choice in many of the raid encounters and Mythic+ content. Just like I noted before, in the context of a healing team, the rotational play-style is not nearly as strong. While getting nice flourish/g'hanir combos off feels really good, and the spec is enjoyable when it fits an encounter, I have seen limited applicability so far.

For posterity, some of your genius from this thread, since you seem to forget:

As far as where we are now, I think it's pretty clear that ToL is a dead talent and is not a reasonable option in any realistic situation.

What I dislike is your inflexible advice and napkin math TC, which approaches healing similar to DPS, but at the most basic level. And you seemingly STILL have no clue what my actual point is, and keep going on these tangential walls of rambling nonsense; I have been maintaining that ALL of our talents are viable. And that has been true, outside of MoC/Abundance. And most importantly, I was emphatic that talents like ToL, while not better on paper, actually become great during progression when adjusting to a fight/comp... It just happens to be icing on the cake that ToL has proven to be more than competitive, if not one of the best options on many encounters.

Simply, you were WRONG.

[Cheze]

All are pretty solid options, our talents are tuned pretty well outside of MoC/Abundance, comes down to level of play (low Mythic+ is different than 10+), play-style, role, and comp

I was fucking around with abundance in some lower-end M+ last night and it was actually kinda interesting; giving up cenarion ward kinda sucks but being able to spam a hurting tank with ~1.2s HTs is pretty nice (plus regrowth's healing felt a lot more reliable.) The biggest issue I had with it was that with a large number of rejuvs out the cast time on HT got pushed below the GCD, which felt very awkward to me. I'm not sure how/if I'd redesign it, but even as it is now it's probably better than it gets credit for.

maybe if 6+ rejuvs just made HT instant it'd feel better? That might be too powerful though (especially in pvp)

[Sprucelee]

I was fucking around with abundance in some lower-end M+ last night and it was actually kinda interesting; giving up cenarion ward kinda sucks but being able to spam a hurting tank with ~1.2s HTs is pretty nice (plus regrowth's healing felt a lot more reliable.) The biggest issue I had with it was that with a large number of rejuvs out the cast time on HT got pushed below the GCD, which felt very awkward to me. I'm not sure how/if I'd redesign it, but even as it is now it's probably better than it gets credit for.

maybe if 6+ rejuvs just made HT instant it'd feel better? That might be too powerful though (especially in pvp)

If it (Abundance) has any place that makes it an option, it is dungeons. No matter how you slice it, you will be casting direct heals, and sometimes a bunch (in raids we should never plan to be in that position). Having guaranteed crits, or cheap/fast HTs can be nice. Tyrannical Mythic+ bosses can actually eat up your mana, and make you have to be more conservative, so access to fast HTs could be helpful there.

MoC though, is just kind of lost, basing your healing style around free regrowth spam really does not fit any situation well with its current tuning.

[Deleted]

Huhu, i followed your posts and wanted to say something to cultivation:

From my little opinion most players are in normal and heroic mode because its xrealm and are playing atleast with some randoms. Sure, there a alot of people playing with a guild, or a bunch of friends, but the flexibilty of a randomgrp is very interesting for a lot of people. Even if they do guildruns, they try fights random, which there guild was unable to beat and so on.

I believe most raidruns at the moment are organized via the raidfinder-tool.

Mythicraids are the hardest for sure but only interessting for very small amount of people. So there talentchoices should stay on a other paper, then what the majority of healdruids face at the moment. To be clear about that. At the moment, and from my raidingexp, also in any given future we will always encounter hard, challenging fights. As an example, if your randomhealers, playing alot less effective then you, if the die in the encounter and combatrezz is already used, if some heal has a dc and so. The list is long. In any fight basicly something goes wrong. Thats the nature of the randomfactor. So in any fight the lifebars start dropping and cultivation starts his work.

I mean, comon, u know what i mean :-)

This week i raided in a strong randomcrew and I was able to beat any encounter hc in first try with a lot of that stuff happening and my culti got into enragemode. At cenarius hc we killed him barely alive with 6 people and i healed with 370k hps thx to culti!

I would say for the majority of the people culti is the the best talentchoice. The others are strong to but more of situational like tree is uberstrong in xavius because of the dreammechanic.

So shortcall: Any guide should advice to take culti as standard and the others in specific encounters.

I would not say that all are even, its only a matter of personal preference, I would strongly say culti is the best at the moment.

[Tomali]

The positives to running cultivation is that you gain an increase to HPS for changing nothing in your healing strategy. That alone has its merits. I don't think the average raider uses their cool downs efficiently.

However, cultivation is only useful based on how often your raid is below the threshold. My experience with PUGS is that they are almost exclusively over healed, either due to skill, or because people don't really know how many to bring with flex, or to make up for failed mechanics. Also, raw throughout outside of raid cooldowns isn't that important due to overheal. ToL gives another button to press during heavy damage mechanics or when someone doesn't follow a mechanic perfectly.

[Tiberria]

I have found little use for Cultivation even in like +8 to +10 mythic+. I find that the problem that you get at very high Mythic+ levels (at least with the affixes we have had the first 2 weeks) is that it's the party damage that actually becomes a bigger threat than the tank damage on many trash pull. At a high Mythic+ level, basic unavoidable damage like cat pounces (and god forbid the Scorpion pulls in Nelth's Lair) become near 1 shots. You end up actually needing quite a decent amount of AoE healing and the ability to keep people close to topped wherever possible to avoid gibs. I prefer the Cenarion Ward / Soul of the Forest combination for most 5 mans so you get the combination of a tank healing boost but also the more powerful SoTF WGs. I actually find WG to sometimes be my #1 heal even in a 5 man, due to the raid damage seemingly scaling harder than tank damage.

[Deleted]

I have found little use for Cultivation even in like +8 to +10 mythic+. I find that the problem that you get at very high Mythic+ levels (at least with the affixes we have had the first 2 weeks) is that it's the party damage that actually becomes a bigger threat than the tank damage on many trash pull. At a high Mythic+ level, basic unavoidable damage like cat pounces (and god forbid the Scorpion pulls in Nelth's Lair) become near 1 shots. You end up actually needing quite a decent amount of AoE healing and the ability to keep people close to topped wherever possible to avoid gibs. I prefer the Cenarion Ward / Soul of the Forest combination for most 5 mans so you get the combination of a tank healing boost but also the more powerful SoTF WGs. I actually find WG to sometimes be my #1 heal even in a 5 man, due to the raid damage seemingly scaling harder than tank damage.

SotF feels quite subpar without Prosperity tho..

[Sprucelee]

I have found little use for Cultivation even in like +8 to +10 mythic+. I find that the problem that you get at very high Mythic+ levels (at least with the affixes we have had the first 2 weeks) is that it's the party damage that actually becomes a bigger threat than the tank damage on many trash pull. At a high Mythic+ level, basic unavoidable damage like cat pounces (and god forbid the Scorpion pulls in Nelth's Lair) become near 1 shots. You end up actually needing quite a decent amount of AoE healing and the ability to keep people close to topped wherever possible to avoid gibs. I prefer the Cenarion Ward / Soul of the Forest combination for most 5 mans so you get the combination of a tank healing boost but also the more powerful SoTF WGs. I actually find WG to sometimes be my #1 heal even in a 5 man, due to the raid damage seemingly scaling harder than tank damage.

Just simply a sub-optimal build, cultivation easily outperforms SotF in 5-mans, your are either geared wrong or just failing for other reasons.

The fact you think WG+SotF outperforms cultivation on group AOE (much less without prosperity...), in comparison to a mastery build where you will have 3-5 HoT stacks on all players (5-7 on-tanks), is just odd. Cultivation essentially doubles your rejuv healing (slightly less, though with the extra mastery stacks it evens up) continuously during any AOE mechanic, with no CD, and adds another free mastery stack for all spot healing. And cultivation only requires someone to dip to 60% to reset the duration, in reality this happens far more than people think for a player that even looks "OK" at 80-100%, dipping to 60% and back up happens often in the 6 second duration when many mechanics hit for 30-40%+.

And the mechanic you noted don't even make sense in that context... For instance Scorps are purely a throughput mechanic, not a one-shot mechanic. If we were talking Arcway or the last boss of BRH, OK, but that becomes a binary issue of group comp, mitigation, and mainly chain stuns (including pounces). You don't heal through one-shots, you stun, mitigate, or CC. Whenever throughput is needed, cultivation is the clear winner.

The only 15+ clears so far used cultivation for a reason.....

[Tiberria]

Just simply a sub-optimal build, cultivation easily outperforms SotF in 5-mans, your are either geared wrong or just failing for other reasons.

The fact you think WG+SotF outperforms cultivation on group AOE (much less without prosperity...), in comparison to a mastery build where you will have 3-5 HoT stacks on all players (5-7 on-tanks), is just odd. Cultivation essentially doubles your rejuv healing (slightly less, though with the extra mastery stacks it evens up) continuously during any AOE mechanic, with no CD, and adds another free mastery stack for all spot healing. And cultivation only requires someone to dip to 60% to reset the duration, in reality this happens far more than people think for a player that even looks "OK" at 80-100%, dipping to 60% and back up happens often in the 6 second duration when many mechanics hit for 30-40%+.

And the mechanic you noted don't even make sense in that context... For instance Scorps are purely a throughput mechanic, not a one-shot mechanic. If we were talking Arcway or the last boss of BRH, OK, but that becomes a binary issue of group comp, mitigation, and mainly chain stuns (including pounces). You don't heal through one-shots, you stun, mitigate, or CC. Whenever throughput is needed, cultivation is the clear winner.

The only 15+ clears so far used cultivation for a reason.....

What I am saying is that whenever I have tried to use Cultivation in Mythic+, it ends up doing at best 3-4% of my total healing, and overall healing actively feels more difficult/throughput constrained than just taking SoTF instead for that one SoTF WG burst every 30 seconds. Sure, Cultivation is more theoretical throughput, but it feels like you need to get yourself in a shitty position to begin with for it to start kicking in, and it still overall feels slow to me. It very well could be that I don't have the mastery itemization on gear to support getting the best out of that type of build, and it could also be a play style/preference difference. I immediately switched to Cultivation by default the first few times attempting higher keystones, but just didn't like the results.

I also don't necessarily get the argument that "SoTF is suboptimal without Prosperity". That just isn't really true, and it's perfectly fine to do CW + SoTF if that's what works better for you. It just makes SoTF more difficult to use, but in a 5 man situation where there is always stuff to heal on difficult trash pulls (and no other healer to interfere), or even in a raid situation where there is always damage to be healed (possibly Dragons or Cenarius), the only thing you really lose from not having Prosperity with SoTF is about 17% fewer SoTF uses. If you need that extra single target/tank burst/triage to be successful, I don't understand why you would argue it's not viable, especially when you're the one railing against the nature of "inflexible talent builds" that you perceive everyone else as pushing.

[Cheze]

total healing is such a silly way to look at m+ performance, though. I don't give a shit what mechanic winds up doing my general maintenance healing, because getting low-danger targets from 70-100% health is easily accomplished with rejuv/germinaton.

what we're actually concerned about in m+ is, when the tank and/or (frequently and) other group members are taking spike damage, how do we quickly manufacture enough throughput to raise their health high enough to survive the next spike? Cultivation is most of the time what's going to best help you do that since: 1) you already have a rejuv on anybody you remotely think will take damage 2) cultivation does not use any GCDs to activate, leaving you free to rejuv others, spam regrowth, whatever and 3) is available all the time, while sotf>WG is available only every ~25s (if you also take prosperity, which has its own tradeoffs.)

the free mastery stack is also obviously not reflected in cultivation's meter total, but results in at least 12-15% additional free healing on any target taking damage of any significance.

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I mean, cat pounces are a perfect example of why cultivation is better than WG: they will hit one target, you don't (probably) know who it is, and that person will need a large amount of healing on short notice to wipe the debuff off. Sotf>WG helps you not at all in this situation, since you don't want to wind it up just to heal one person and even if you did, it'd be less effective than just regrowth/rejuving them.

cultivation though: cultivation will give you more extra healing than WG when they dip, an additional mastery stack, and lets you use the time you would have spent casting WG to regrowth>HT (or swiftmend) them. Not using sotf also lets you keep swiftmend in your pocket as an emergency top-off for these situations, as opposed to having to use it rotationally.

[Sprucelee]

What I am saying is that whenever I have tried to use Cultivation in Mythic+, it ends up doing at best 3-4% of my total healing, and overall healing actively feels more difficult/throughput constrained than just taking SoTF instead for that one SoTF WG burst every 30 seconds. Sure, Cultivation is more theoretical throughput, but it feels like you need to get yourself in a shitty position to begin with for it to start kicking in, and it still overall feels slow to me. It very well could be that I don't have the mastery itemization on gear to support getting the best out of that type of build, and it could also be a play style/preference difference. I immediately switched to Cultivation by default the first few times attempting higher keystones, but just didn't like the results.

I also don't necessarily get the argument that "SoTF is suboptimal without Prosperity". That just isn't really true, and it's perfectly fine to do CW + SoTF if that's what works better for you. It just makes SoTF more difficult to use, but in a 5 man situation where there is always stuff to heal on difficult trash pulls (and no other healer to interfere), or even in a raid situation where there is always damage to be healed (possibly Dragons or Cenarius), the only thing you really lose from not having Prosperity with SoTF is about 17% fewer SoTF uses. If you need that extra single target/tank burst/triage to be successful, I don't understand why you would argue it's not viable, especially when you're the one railing against the nature of "inflexible talent builds" that you perceive everyone else as pushing.

Mythic+ is has much less variability than raiding since you are solo healing (your role is always the same), have an entirely different mana management system, and are much longer, which means they end up averaging out to similar healing demands. And in the case of Druids, mastery is so strong that the CW/Cult/Germ build just ends up being far more consistent. Flourish/Stonebark are the only serious variables I see.

SotF healing looks like a sine wave, and is not that strong on single focused targets, it is not what you want over a 20-30 minutes of chain puling with very high and consistent demands. A cultivation stack is not much worse than a SotF rejuv... if you went that route, but has no CD. A SotF WG has very little applicability IME, and the few times there is AOE damage across all 5 players, cult is also strong.

And if Cult makes up that % of your healing it must be lower Mythic+, certainly not what I have been seeing. In anything but 6+ or more I spend 75% of my time DPSing anyway. And that is when I used SotF, basically I mostly used it with flourish to allow DPS up-time.. not because it was particularly strong at healing dungeons, just the least healing GCDs possible to keep the group up in light-moderate damage.

[Tiberria]

And if Cult makes up that % of your healing it must be lower Mythic+, certainly not what I have been seeing. In anything but 6+ or more I spend 75% of my time DPSing anyway. And that is when I used SotF, basically I mostly used it with flourish to allow DPS up-time.. not because it was particularly strong at healing dungeons, just the least healing GCDs possible to keep the group up in light-moderate damage.

Nope, I have regularly seen Mythic 7+ runs where Cultivation is only equating to 3-4% of my healing. It could be lack of mastery, or it could just be something that works better for some healers and some group setups than it does for others.

[Tiberria]

I also just did a +9 Nelth's Lair and +10 Halls of Valor tonight, and Cultivation did a total of 3.4% of my total healing across those runs - less than the Spirit Fragment trinket and less than the stupid absorb shield neck. I remain very dubious of the value of it relative to SoTF.

[Tomali]

I also just did a +9 Nelth's Lair and +10 Halls of Valor tonight, and Cultivation did a total of 3.4% of my total healing across those runs - less than the Spirit Fragment trinket and less than the stupid absorb shield neck. I remain very dubious of the value of it relative to SoTF.

That healing doesn't count for the extra mastery stack on the other heals going off, which is why Cult is so strong. It adds healing where it matters most, which is when people are low without spending a GCD. How efficiently you can heal people from 80-100% isn't important.

[Tiberria]

That healing doesn't count for the extra mastery stack on the other heals going off, which is why Cult is so strong. It adds healing where it matters most, which is when people are low without spending a GCD. How efficiently you can heal people from 80-100% isn't important.

When looking at raid logs where people are using Cultivation on bosses that favor it (i.e. M Ursoc), you see Cultivation account for 8-12% of their healing done. I just would expect to see something similar in a 5 man if you are getting enough utilization to be worth using it.

[Tomali]

When looking at raid logs where people are using Cultivation on bosses that favor it (i.e. M Ursoc), you see Cultivation account for 8-12% of their healing done. I just would expect to see something similar in a 5 man if you are getting enough utilization to be worth using it.

Cultivation uptime should be a factor you need to look at. At 15% mastery, it makes your rejuv and potentially WG hit for 15% more.

[Deleted]

Guys can you suggest me the talent choice for Xavius normal.
I was going with my main talent choice Prosperity , SotF, Spring Blossom , Flourish but somehow I was not thinking this is the right build for this boss.
Thanks for tips.

[wakii]

I have followed your discussion about SotF vs Cultivation and even if I have done only M+10 so far no one is factor in the SotF + Regrowth mechanic. Not sure if I run with the wrong setup or whatever but having a 1.3 second heal that actually heal some by a good margin is worth a lot to me because I have always people that dropping low very fast and Cultivation + Reju wont get them up fast enough for the next hit. So for my taste SotF helps me to keep up with a lot of stuff that going on in M+. I will still try a Cultivation spec next M+10 today and share my thoughts.

[Deleted]

I have been trying out Abundance in my M+ build and it's been pretty good. It certainly makes sudden burst damage on low-health players less stressful to deal with which has been my greatest difficulty in dungeons. With just one Rejuv and an activated Cultivation the healing from HT is not insignificant. Considering you will almost always have 3-4 Rejuvs up at all times this is practically a passive 30% reduced cast time buff. The biggest downside is that those quick HTs eat away at your mana pool with a healthy appetite, though it can be offset with the Seventh Spine trinket. To make up for the loss of CW I use Stonebark to help keep the tank up in difficult situations. I don't see Flourish being all that useful unless paired with SotF'ed WGs or to double an active CW.

[Sprucelee]

I have followed your discussion about SotF vs Cultivation and even if I have done only M+10 so far no one is factor in the SotF + Regrowth mechanic. Not sure if I run with the wrong setup or whatever but having a 1.3 second heal that actually heal some by a good margin is worth a lot to me because I have always people that dropping low very fast and Cultivation + Reju wont get them up fast enough for the next hit. So for my taste SotF helps me to keep up with a lot of stuff that going on in M+. I will still try a Cultivation spec next M+10 today and share my thoughts.

Are you using a mastery build?

If so you have to leverage it, for me, at 23%, a target with rejuv, germ, cult, and WG are already basically at the same bonus as SotF+RG, if I cast two in a row, they are above at 115%. I could even throw CW on there for 138%, swap LB for 161% if someone has aggro etc..

Mastery is all about leveraging your HoTs for the bonus, you are right that on it's own SoTF+RG hits much harder than RG and is a strong tool, but the trick is making those mastery stacks work for you and cultivation is simply a 23% boost to your healing on any critical target (using my mastery %), much less the healing it does on it's own.

Both builds can work, and these concepts work for any mastery build regardless of talents, but I think there is a reason all the 15+ mythic dungeons so far used cultivation, it is just stronger and more consistent overall.

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When looking at raid logs where people are using Cultivation on bosses that favor it (i.e. M Ursoc), you see Cultivation account for 8-12% of their healing done. I just would expect to see something similar in a 5 man if you are getting enough utilization to be worth using it.

You really do not understand that it is simply a 20-25% healing boost to ALL your spells during any meaningful damage? Just looking at the "healing done" by cultivation in your personal logs is very simplistic, and shows a complete lack of understanding of mastery oriented healing in DGs.

Once you include the increase it does to ALL your spells (Germ, Rejuv, WG, and Cult itself), with the direct healing portion of cult, it's consistency makes the long CD of SoTF, only buffing a single spell cast, seem very lackluster by comparison in DGs.