Resto in 7.2.5

[Purpleisbetter]

Yeah all those logs were with the shoulders on.

Shoulders makes reju healing disproportional, it should "look better" once the shoulders reign is over.

[RestoSpirit]

Hey,

this will be a long post and mostly my opinion from PTR-testing and watching some of the ToS-fights on youtube. I will talk about my view on the new set and the new legendaries and how I think this will play out in ToS.

In 7.2.5 we will lose some of the rDruids strong side. rDruid have little utility so we need that extra throughput to be viable. We have the strongest singletarget heal due to mastery for consistent damage (e.g. Tank-healing) and we have sustainable very strong groupheal. The T19 setboni supported both of them (altough the singletarget heal with a big tradeoff). You had the 4k mastery 2p on WG which is very nice cause you could control it, there is no RNG. You could even cast WG to enhance singletarget healing (probably noone did in raids since you want to save your mana, but it was great for 5mans). And the 4p with a big RNG factor but solid bonushealing from something you would already do during high damage phases -> prehotting the raid. The 4p became insane with germ + shoulders for a solid 7-10% throughput increase. I really liked that, not because of the numbers but because it played to our strong side. It's a solid throughput gain for AOE healing and has a little RNG factor to balance it out. For once blizzard did everything right, yeah they went a bit crazy with the numbers but rdruid SHOULD be VERY VERY GOOD at AOE healing and we SHOULD have setboni that support this.

The T20 2p is just complete garbage, it's so bad and stupid I don't even know where to start. First of all it is no or VERY little throughput gain. It enhances an ability we don't want to have -> Spothealing. Take the 2p alone we would just try to snipe any low target with it to reduce the cooldown as much as possible. Which takes away the niche from other healers.

Healer design is at the moment and should be for future patches about niches. Paladin has INSANE spothealing for up to 3 targets. Shaman has great utility and a very good progressmastery. Monk and Druid are very strong grouphealer while having good mobility (though being honest monks are taken for their niche AOE CD and their ability to reset bosses saving time and ressources during progression). The monk external is somewhat unique in the fact its an absorb. Disc priest have very high AOE burst healing and bring half a Dps to the fight. Holypriests are very versatile, they can switch talents and gear to enhance SThealing or grouphealing, whichever is needed, while providing a niche in that they can die once a fight (very nice for fights like ticho).

While we get some stupid spothealing 2p, paladin will get a boost to his AOE healing. WHY would you do this Blizzard? We already concluded that "bring the player not the class" failed in the sense that not every class should be capable of everything. There has to be stuff unique to every single one of the classes, you should be promoting niches way more. At the same time balance stuff with talentchoices. CW is a very nice tool for tankhealing and should be good for 5mans, but on the other hand there should be an option which increases raidhealing. So that taking CW comes with a big tradeoff. At the same time it garantees that druid as group- or raidhealer can actually do some solid ST healing for 5mans.

Enough ranting about the bad 2p, let's look at the new 4p. The first iterration of it was a 400% increase to your efflo healing for 8sec via swiftment, which was interesting. You would have Efflo up anyway (at least good druids do, I tend to fail on this part) and timing your swiftment in a way that you will get some solid RAIDHEALING, which btw decreases the value of the 2p even more. It took planing and knowledge of the encounter to maximize it. Now with the new iterration its just a flat 50%+ increase to efflo healing. It has a 15sec duration and you will use swiftment on cooldown to keep the buff going. Not only is it boring now since it takes absoluty no planing, it too (like the 2p) takes healing from other niches. Shamans healing rain and the monk 3 people heal are niches that like our efflo will be thrown at the meele camp most of the time. In combination they all have a small profit from it, if you buff one of them the other niches become more inefficient. Instead the 4p should enhance our niche which is sustainable HIGH AOE healing (the old 4p was way closer to that...).

I really like the concept of legendaries in that they give devs more options for cool synergies and maybe more talentchoices. They can be designed to fill a completly different niche in the healersetup but with a big tradeoff which is good. Legendaries should be a careful choice for each fight.

I was really excited when I first heard about the ring that will give you a talent until... I found out it's SotF.
Again: WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT BLIZZARD?! NO ONE PLAYS SoTF!
I checked the top 10 parses for every encounter in Nighthold. Not ONE rdruid playing sotf and no one will if you force it on us!
The ring should give a talent that is played all the time so it frees up 2 other options which we usually would'nt play cause they can't compete. Giving us cultivation or germination baseline would be way more interesting, cause we would have the choice which of the "bad" talents we would take.

Now you force us to decide between a good legendary and a talent we usually would not play and the really interesting part: Sotf works in combination with swiftment, so does the new 4p. We now have to choose which one we want to use, since you will use swiftment on CD for the new 4p (the old 400% iterration would have worked better here) or we take the ring and can't have the 50% uptime on 4p since we want to save our swiftment to line it with WG. Sorry but that's just some serious bulls*it design, and leads me to the conclusion that devs don't play the game.

The Incarnation Head legendary looked pretty promising until we got the final chance and duration. The chance is just way to low to justify it against one of the strong legendaries. The duration had the right intend: 12sec means we will get a buffed WG but it did not consider that good players will want to fill every GCD. For lagtolerance we would have to wait for the WG coming up instead of filling with an extra reju.

Truetalk is, it's gonna be sh*t. Healers hate RNG especially if they have the choice to use something with less or no RNG. Incarnation can be INSANE here if you get it just at the perfect moment of high damage or it can be completly useless (pretty much the same for all of the Head legendaries for healers). Instead the legendary should either be on use, stacking or on a different spell. I will talk about each of the options:
a) on use:
On use would probably be too good or to bad depending on how long the duration would be and it would be to close to the ring design-wise. It would give us ultimate control and the legendary would be used on fights where you have high AOE burst healing to do, heavily dependent on the CD of the legendary as well.
b) stacking:
It should need 4 WG casts to procc the tree, would give you a little more control but although a little less freedom with your WG. You could combine the first too, which would be my preferred choice. You would have to stack it up to 4 with 4 WG casts and get an "on use"-button to finally procc the tree.
c) different spell:
WG is somewhat situational since you don't want to spam it like Hpriests spam their PoM. I think the legendary could be way stronger if it would come with a tradeoff. E.g. you would have to use barkskin (your defensive CD) to procc the Tree (an "offensive" CD). That would give the legendary a natural cooldown and you could even reduce the duration to 8-10 sec (-> one WG cast per use). Controlwise that would be great, and you have that tradeoff to "waste" a def-CD.

Yeah it's a long post and I thank you for reading it. Hopefully it will lead to a discussion to improve the class we all love so much.

Cheers
RestoSpirit

[Deleted]

I was really excited when I first heard about the ring that will give you a talent until... I found out it's SotF.
Again: WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT BLIZZARD?! NO ONE PLAYS SoTF!
I checked the top 10 parses for every encounter in Nighthold. Not ONE rdruid playing sotf and no one will if you force it on us!

boy is you serious

[Runzlikegirl]

no and even if so what relevance would that have
what

Been out of town and just coming back to this post.

Glad to see its got some real discussion going, sadly I think Blizzard has the opinion we are over powered right now and think these bonuses will bring us in line, sadly its the current bonuses that are making it overpowered.

As far as your post saying "what" over my monk statement TreeQT, please read all the notes, they are receiving spellpower buffs and mana cost reductions on most spells, as well as other tweeks, monks will be stout.

I myself will probably be on a Paladin or Priest, sadly. I love my damn druid.

[roi]

Flat 4% heal nerf from that hidden "core passive" aura in the latest PTR changes. 4p t20 buffed again though, 200% efflo heal increase for 10 seconds.

[Deleted]

Well the 4% flat nerf is a big hit. It was looking like we were going to be in the middle of the pack of healers and now it might lean towards the bottom. Without our strong healing output we are nothing.

[roi]

lol, druids will still be #1-2, maybe on par with holy priests now. In NH, 80/100 top heal rankings are druids. 4% nerf is justified.

[Glorious Leader]

Flat 4% heal nerf from that hidden "core passive" aura in the latest PTR changes. 4p t20 buffed again though, 200% efflo heal increase for 10 seconds.

The description is so fucking stupid. Having a passive that's a detriment to your ability to do your job kinda fucking sucks. Are other healers so blessed?

[roi]

They introduced these auras a few patches ago, makes balancing on PTR easier, instead of changing this or that spell, they just adjust everything at once. I think every spec has it? Look at http://ptr.wowhead.com/spells/min-le...:108;0:50001:0.

So the answer to your question is: yes. It's just a balancing tool, it's nothing unique, simply allows blizzard to easily change a spec without having to consider individual talents and shit, as literally everything is affected just as much.

[beaver1024]

Why nerf core druid abilities when it is the shoulder legendary and the T19 4 piece that are the culprits? Nerf the gear? What you don't have the gear because you don't raid or RNG haven't gifted you with the shoulders? So suck eggs then?

[theburned]

Why nerf core druid abilities when it is the shoulder legendary and the T19 4 piece that are the culprits? Nerf the gear? What you don't have the gear because you don't raid or RNG haven't gifted you with the shoulders? So suck eggs then?

shoulders already got nerfed, cult got nerfed aswell, as it was one of the culprits, and druids are still seem to be on the rather strong side on ptr, hence they were nerfed.

[Rici]

I don't get your points... atm resto druids in raids are ahead of every other healer by ~ 20-30% in hps.
A 4% nerf will do nothing about the situation where (heal) druids will dominate rankings, rosters and pvp leaderboards.

[Deleted]

Why nerf core druid abilities when it is the shoulder legendary and the T19 4 piece that are the culprits? Nerf the gear? What you don't have the gear because you don't raid or RNG haven't gifted you with the shoulders? So suck eggs then?

they already nerfed those, and having an underwhelming tier bonus was already a big hit. ppl assume devs always know what they are doing, but its been proven many times in the past that they can be just clueless. it's not like the dmg meter, making a meter competition out of healing is stupid most of the time. shaman and paladin was and will always be op because of the unique healing and utility they give. Free tank healing, spirit link, both classes with the strongest cooldowns, I dont see the nerfs to those? frankly the healing style druid has it should have higher output for the same value in my opinion but whatever... I'll never understand how some classes get to be always op and nobody bats an eye but it's a riot when someone else performs a bit better :salt:

druids are still seem to be on the rather strong side on ptr, hence they were nerfed.

I mean do you just assume because "devs must know what they are doing" or do you have some kind of source to this, because I really dont think druid was so insane with all the changes that it needed a further 4%. also ptr isnt really the best indicator for overall performance, it would be just stupid to justify a flat nerf aura lol

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I don't get your points... atm resto druids in raids are ahead of every other healer by ~ 20-30% in hps.
A 4% nerf will do nothing about the situation where (heal) druids will dominate rankings, rosters and pvp leaderboards.

you dont seem to understand that shoulders were already nerfed and the t19 4p was basically out which was the whole reason for this

[Deleted]

All this crying and Druids are still going to be viable, and strong, you just aren't going to 'dominate the meters' like you're used too.

People are probably more upset that they're raids are going to realise they're not actually good healers, and only seem to have spots because their class was stupidly strong with T194set and Legendary shoulders.

Druids are still strong, dunno why people moan so much. Could be worse. Could be mistweavers who'll still sit bottom :^ )

[Deleted]

All this crying and Druids are still going to be viable, and strong, you just aren't going to 'dominate the meters' like you're used too.

People are probably more upset that they're raids are going to realise they're not actually good healers, and only seem to have spots because their class was stupidly strong with T194set and Legendary shoulders.

Druids are still strong, dunno why people moan so much. Could be worse. Could be mistweavers who'll still sit bottom :^ )

What people like you don't realize is that meters isn't what keeps people alive. The HoT-playstyle really needs to have higher output than other styles just for that simple reason.

[Floopa]

What people like you don't realize is that meters isn't what keeps people alive. The HoT-playstyle really needs to have higher output than other styles just for that simple reason.

good thing that a 4% nerf still means you are stronger than all your competition.

[Runzlikegirl]

All this crying and Druids are still going to be viable, and strong, you just aren't going to 'dominate the meters' like you're used too.

People are probably more upset that they're raids are going to realise they're not actually good healers, and only seem to have spots because their class was stupidly strong with T194set and Legendary shoulders.

Druids are still strong, dunno why people moan so much. Could be worse. Could be mistweavers who'll still sit bottom :^ )

Have you been watching patch notes? Another buff to mistweavers yesterday. They will not be bottom, tier and legs now synergies really well and they have buffed all abilities in some way.

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good thing that a 4% nerf still means you are stronger than all your competition.

Adding it up the loss of strong set pieces and a synergizing legendary means far more then 4%

[Tiberria]

shoulders already got nerfed, cult got nerfed aswell, as it was one of the culprits, and druids are still seem to be on the rather strong side on ptr, hence they were nerfed.

And how many of those PTR testing logs are from people who just character copied their live character over and raid tested with it, including the 4 pc T19 set bonus? I suspect the vast majority. The testing just scales the gear to the target ilvl, making any testing using T19 4pc characters invalid and inflated - probably by the order of 8-10%. PTR testing also tends to make high overhealing/high effective healing classes look better than they really will be on live, because people don't have a clue about tactics, take more damage, and usually test at a lower ilvl than most people will be at when actually progressing on it.

The problem with the whole thing is that the existing T19 4pc bonus is going to inflate our numbers during the heroic week, etc, and lead Blizzard to come to the conclusion that there's no problem. We will then slide off severely as everyone gets higher ilvl gear and new set bonuses. Honestly, they should have just nerfed the T19 bonuses by like 75% so our tuning doesn't get tied to that.

[kooz]

some might not recall, but everybody played SOTF at the start of EN, so it's not a new thing. Lego bracers around mainstream killing mythic cenarius used to be 2nd bis if you knew how to play them which is not a rocket science.- cw was often 3rd top heal with them. Shoulders kinda made it all boring rj spam icc style, and now druids are nerfed cuz of stupid shoulder logs.

[Deleted]

All this crying and Druids are still going to be viable, and strong, you just aren't going to 'dominate the meters' like you're used too.

People are probably more upset that they're raids are going to realise they're not actually good healers, and only seem to have spots because their class was stupidly strong with T194set and Legendary shoulders.

Druids are still strong, dunno why people moan so much. Could be worse. Could be mistweavers who'll still sit bottom :^ )

I dont think anybody is upset about the shoulder nerf. it was stupid and that is why you see the bloated numbers. nerfed it, done, it was gone anyway. the problem is the next to useless setbonus which single handedly crippled druid in brf for example, and generally decides the class "rankings" but whatever. after everything the 4% is just uncalled for. + they already nerfed culti. stacking nerfs is always a sign that they have no clue tbh, that's the reason we ended up with this nonsense shoulder buff last patch in the first place...