[Resto] Harder to play and weaker than other healers?

[Puupi]

Our progress is now 15/16 HC 10 man. I'm a resto shaman and my healing partner has been a resto druid throughout the progress. The difference between resto shaman and a druid is quite small. Shaman has better cooldowns (healing tide > tranquillity, ascendance > tree of life+ nature's vigil), druids overall mana efficiency is higher (atleast when paired with shaman due to mana tide). When you are "normally" healing your tanks/raid, druid is slightly more efficient mana and hps wise. Shaman is more bursty and shaman needs to setup a majority of his heals. Druid is very mobile and stable. But when it comes to cooldowns, shaman beats druid hands down.

[Deathruler11]

thats not necessarily a good thing. what this says is that Druids can do well in the absence of a disc priest while using a very restrictive playstyle. Sadly this will probably only get worse if the next patch bonus to SOTF remains.

Yep thats basically what im saying.. druids dont have enough "burst" to beat the other healers to do more HPS than them, most our healin is over heals because of discs or just generally slow hots and stuff.

not jsut that, but also if anyone has a disc priest in the raid, just because of the way they work.. ur gonna do low HPS... doesnt mean u suck, just means the disc is helpin u kill that encounter easier. Disc does very very low overhealin compared to a druid and many other class's

[Karlzone]

How is rejuv tracking any different from riptide, lifebloom any different from earth shield, and swiftmend (15 sec cd) any different from unleash elements (also 15 sec cd)? Harmony tracking isn't really something you have to do, it just stays up from healing normally.

I'd say he wasn't giving it a real try.

Agreed. Howver tracking swiftmend is more like tracking healing stream totem.

[Cambria]

-snip-

Go through those but with every other healing spec. It's pretty laughable how much shit they have compared to us.

Druids have an extremely sad amount of choice and a very limited amount of stuff to keep track compared to everyone else.

[ichime]

I'm pretty sure most resto druids would be ok for the spec to become more complex if it meant being more on par with other healers in performance. Having a spec that's easy to pick up because of the lack of tools, but frustrating to play, again because of the lack of tools... well that's not really fun.

[Gurushockin]

Druid are weak atm, but in 5.2 I believe they are getting a little buff that should help.

[Dendrek]

I find the discussion about druids not having much to track a little disingenuous. I agree there's not much complexity to what we have to track, but we aren't just spam and forget, as many here are suggesting.

I have a power aura for: Wild Growth, Swiftmend, Nature's Swiftness, Lifebloom, Tranquility, Innervate, Omen of Clarity, Ironbark, and Tree of Life. I need my raid frames to keep track of Lifebloom, Rejuv, Regrowth, and Wild Growth. I need to watch boss timers (as any healer does) and I need to pay attention to group and even individual player positions for Wild Growth and Efflorescence.

I haven't played any other healer this expansion yet, so I can't really comment on how much they have to keep track of. But the reality is that the extra resources that they have to track can easily be tracked with Power Auras as well. (VERY easily). They don't actually need to know they have 3 holy power, for example, to use an ability that requires it. They could conceivably set up a PA that checks to see that they have 3HP and that the ability is off CD (if it has one) and only show the ability as being usable with both conditions are true. And this same argument applies to all healer abilities.

So it's fine if people want to argue differences is complexity, but don't pretend that druids are mindless spammers.

[Torty]

Sorry but I refuse to believe a healer which has 90% of it's healing constituted from 3 short cooldowns plus a passive effect is anywhere near the most difficult healing specialization in the game. Don't give me the "oh but I need to look at boss timers" because that's bullshit any decent healer does that.

Quite frankly though about resto you've said it yourself, resto is easy to play to a similar standard as other resto but in the current state of the game have fun out healing any old random who's went discipline because discipline is fucking impossible to mess up.

No character link yet? Continue with your retarded trolling elsewhere, please. Nothing to discuss here.

you can simplify any healer class to play it at a simple level

spam your mana efficient heal and forget about everything else buffs,debuffs,timers,etc.

The only difference is simplifying resto druid is how you heal in general: press WG/SM on cd, keep lifeblooms up, use clearcasts and rejuvs during free time. That's HOW you play the class most efficiently. If you don't cast wg/sm on cd or keep lifeblooms, your hps will get lower. It was hard to heal in t11 because of our mastery and somewhat harder than nowdays with 10 sec mastery, but at the moment you don't even need to track that, you always have 100% mastery uptime no matter what.

I'm just extremely annoyed at current resto druid state. We are basically an arcane mage version of healers, but doing fuck all hps and bringing no utility. I want harder mechanics and more rewarding/punishing gameplay.

Whether you agree or not, no need to flame someone. Infracted.

[Deathruler11]

I wouldnt say we bring no utility... we have burst dps during blood lust that can do around 5mil dmg, stampeding shouts, symbiosis is useful on a lot of fights, knock backs, ursoks vortex (sp), decent AOE spread healing... druids rly aint that bad as everyones makin out.

all id like to see is some better burst stacked up AOE healing - in other words, better mushrooms.. maybe in resto when u place 1 mushroom it auto places 3, that would be a nice buff... the sotf is a nice aoe buff will prob give us an extra WG tick... lower rejuv mana cost is also nice, but not insane as we'll probably drop the 2set we have now, meaning mana will basically be as it is now.

[Soullord]

I used to play other healer classes, Paladin (stuck at 85) , Shaman (stuck at 85) , Monk (37), and druid (90) even though I have not played my other healers this expansion I can speak for what I see on my druid do we need tools that we have not been provided yet yes, are we in such a state that we need to reroll no.

Someone once told me that resto druids are the best healer when no one is in risk of dying but is taking slow amounts of damage.

As for being the easiest healer yes you can spam wild growth and swiftmend and pull decent numbers when you are being lazy but the same could be said for a shaman
putting down healing rain and casting chain heal.

So yea for lazy playstyle Druids and Shaman are the easier classes to play but any healer class needs to pay tons of attentions to all their tools if they want to pull all the HPS their class is designed to do.