5.3 Druid Neglect

[Purpleisbetter]

They're finally fightigh the absorb monster, as it seems.

Pala's mastery got nerfed a bit and trust me, not over yet.

As i said some time ago, nerfs to disc and hpals absorptions aren't over yet, disc mastery gonna get a further number tweaking (+direct healing potency - absorb potency); SS will see a cooldown increase (to 1.30min perhaps?).

H Pal can be trickier but imho they'll keep going with cheap fast solutions, so i predict some sort of limitations on what spells will be able to place their illuminated healing.

So, to me its just a matter of time, and while it would be cool to see more drastic measures before next raiding tier, i guess we just have to hope the 5.3 nerfs will be enough.

[Demolocklol]

A 2% bubble nerf won't be enough to effect resto druids in any way.

[Barkstard]

Resto druids are in a really bad place at the moment for a few reasons.

Firstly, ill be looking at mainly 10 man raiding.

Our raid utility is just rubbish. We bring stats buff but so do pallies. We can kinda dps, oh wait priests can do it WHILE healing. Oh wait I can dispel. Lol priest mass dispell. Oh I have barkskin. Oh so do pallies and priest just twice for pallies. Pally and priest are the go to healers in 10 man due to utility... Oh and shamans lack throughput... But still manage to beat druids on fights. Can feed mana to other healers and have awesome raid CDs. All druids can offer is movement healing which monks do better lol.

Now above is what I see as the main weakness of resto druid.

Talking healing numbers. Our throughput is actually good. Stronger then most.... But you could buff our throughput another 20% and it will still count for stuff all. It gives us more overhealing yay...

The absorbs are just too strong rather then we are too weak. A lot of the fights have downtimes for disc and pally to stack bubbles then burst hit and its all gets chewed up.

A 2% nerf when a pallies mastery does OVER 50% of their healing what a joke.

What I don't get is disc priests never had this problem untill they wanted to stop having tank and raid healers.

Not qqing but honestly druids are so far behind its getting sad.

[Arcanist]

Resto druids are in a really bad place at the moment for a few reasons.

Firstly, ill be looking at mainly 10 man raiding.

Our raid utility is just rubbish. We bring stats buff but so do pallies. We can kinda dps, oh wait priests can do it WHILE healing. Oh wait I can dispel. Lol priest mass dispell. Oh I have barkskin. Oh so do pallies and priest just twice for pallies. Pally and priest are the go to healers in 10 man due to utility... Oh and shamans lack throughput... But still manage to beat druids on fights. Can feed mana to other healers and have awesome raid CDs. All druids can offer is movement healing which monks do better lol.

Now above is what I see as the main weakness of resto druid.

Talking healing numbers. Our throughput is actually good. Stronger then most.... But you could buff our throughput another 20% and it will still count for stuff all. It gives us more overhealing yay...

The absorbs are just too strong rather then we are too weak. A lot of the fights have downtimes for disc and pally to stack bubbles then burst hit and its all gets chewed up.

A 2% nerf when a pallies mastery does OVER 50% of their healing what a joke.

What I don't get is disc priests never had this problem untill they wanted to stop having tank and raid healers.

Not qqing but honestly druids are so far behind its getting sad.

Your post is spot on.

If you can't beat them, join them! Am I right? If the resto druid population plummets then maybe we'll get some attention. But that will be difficult with all the stupid cheerleaders trying to jam square pegs into round holes, in a futile attempt to try and make things work. If I'm part of a team, I want to be as effective as possible, and if it means swapping to a holy paladin then I'll do that. Playing a resto druid just because you like the playstyle is selfish.

[Purpleisbetter]

I think Illuminated healing will receive a absorb per mastery point conversion nerf.

Or maybe its already like that in PTR, still, don't get surprised nor don't loose hopes, absorb nerfhammer just officially started.

[Souxlya]

Actually there is a simple solution to that problem (10 man perspective): we need fights with constant ticking AoE damage again. Imagine the current bosses, with their long dull phases (where Pala and Disc prepare their bubbles for the next burst), just doing 10k dps to every player in addition to current mechanics (except in burn phases). Shields would stop to be OP right away, because they won't be there when the big burst comes; instead they get eaten up by the damage all the time. It would also make "Wrath-style" hot healing viable again, which is what our class is still designed around.

This would have a negative effect but the other way around. All fights would be based around hots, making resto druids kings, followed by riptide shamans. I don't have an issue with absorbs themselves, or hots, even overhealing hots. I just don't like that absorbs get to be be instant heal snipers, now I know resto druids pretty much sniped heals back in the day, but we can't compare with an instant 0.0001 second heal (instant due to being an absrob). At least hots still have to tick!

I also don't think it would stop shields from being OP, I think it would just stop them from perm instant sniping from hots. This would make placing absorbs meaningful, actually using them to reduced damage then to cause no damage at all to be taken at prior to the absorb limit.

[l33t]

Actually, we have a simple solution to this problem. Absorb components of healing must die! And I'm really serious. Absorbs are ruining the game for non-absorb healers for third expansion in a row. And freaking GC can say shit about HPS being not a measure of a healer throughput in a raid all he want, but since world logs rankings are based on HPS, this is complete bullshit and lie.

[Souxlya]

freaking GC can say shit about HPS being not a measure of a healer throughput in a raid all he want, but since world logs rankings are based on HPS, this is complete bullshit and lie.

World of Logs is a great tool, but anyone who knows much about ranks can tell you that more often then not they are just inflated. Not all of them, but a fair amount. Always take rankings with a grain of salt, look more at what all players did, then at the number and the ranker.

The fact of the matter his, Priests and Pallies have a much stronger toolkit then druids, mostly for tank healing. Couple this with disc being able to do a lot of damage and we with our 2 min Barkskin and overhealing lifebloom don't accomplish much. Even our very strong raid cd is crappy (hear me out), having to channel a spell for 8 seconds, not being able to move (unless you have shaman), plus some ramp up time from the HoT is total bull.

Shamans drop tide and spirit link totem, all instant and don't require anymore thought. Same with Barrier, Aura Mastery and Revival. Although healing Tide is the best comparison to tranqu. Biggest of all, the rest of the healers can continue to heal for the 8 seconds we are a stick in the mud.

[dystroiz]

Baseline Tree form could be an awesome CD balance

[Phoon]

Getting Blizzards attention on druids might be good although asking for too much could turn us into mages which I personally would not like to see happen.
My only suggestion if Blizzard would read this at any point would be for Balance druids as I am bias on the well being of them is this:

While in Solar Eclipse you can cast Starfire on the move, also while in Lunar Eclipse you can cast Wrath on the move.

What does this do for PvE?
Gives us filler dps while we're in heavy movement phases or at most 1-2 casts while re-positioning ourselves. It will not be affected by our Mastery other than t15 4 piece bonus.

What does this do for PvP?
With the recent nerf to Solar Beam coming in 5.3 what else do we really bring to RBG teams or Arena teams? Symbiosis comes to mind but is it really all that worth it unless it becomes multi-target. Highly unlikely. With this change we will be able to stay deadly at range with our current 4 piece pvp bonus allowing us to switch from eclipses easily.

Any thoughts on this would be good to grab attention and all in good fun to see what people think of the idea.

[Bonsaii]

How to help balance movement not suck. Build in the PvP 4 set. Let us move with AC. The changes for gaining eclipse energy are nice too.

[Deleted]

Attempting to make Treants viable is enough for me.

---------- Post added 2013-04-17 at 11:20 AM ----------

While in Solar Eclipse you can cast Starfire on the move, also while in Lunar Eclipse you can cast Wrath on the move.

This would be awesome.

[thumbwarriordx]

Actually there is a simple solution to that problem (10 man perspective): we need fights with constant ticking AoE damage again.

Sounds like absorb shields need a built in decay mechanic. The problem is the way they allow healers who have access to them to essentially stockpile healing time before any damage goes out. That's a good mechanic, but it turns out it's too good. If every shield decayed over its duration, that would effectively put a floating cap on potential raid damage absorbed at once, without diminishing the potency of shields triggered during raid damage phases.
Shields would partially act as if the raid were taking damage, but be more effective when the raid actually is taking damage, and be less of a way for priests and pallies to essentially precast loads of heals that go off on demand.

[kendro1200]

Actually, we have a simple solution to this problem. Absorb components of healing must die! And I'm really serious. Absorbs are ruining the game for non-absorb healers for third expansion in a row. And freaking GC can say shit about HPS being not a measure of a healer throughput in a raid all he want, but since world logs rankings are based on HPS, this is complete bullshit and lie.

It's not even rankings, it's the fact that absorbs remove a huge chunk of the pie available for everyone to heal.

Honestly, what they should be doing is start making boss mechanics that go straight through paladin and priest absorbs. It's a simple fix that will give shamans and druids the opportunity to heal everyone up.

[Demolocklol]

Would be neat to see some changes to tranquility in the form of a healing tide. Maybe something along the lines of ''Summons a powerful treant that heals 5 nearby lowest health party or raid targets within 40 yards with Tranquility every 2 sec for 8 sec.

[Phoon]

It's not even rankings, it's the fact that absorbs remove a huge chunk of the pie available for everyone to heal.

Honestly, what they should be doing is start making boss mechanics that go straight through paladin and priest absorbs. It's a simple fix that will give shamans and druids the opportunity to heal everyone up.

I agree, something so drastic as l33t said of killing absorption healing would be a huge overhaul for the game. If there were mechanics rendering asborbs near to/useless than I would see it being a great fight. Even if it were added as a Heroic mechanic it would make the shaman/druid/monk experience so much more enjoyable than it is now. Great idea and I would like to see it implemented.

[Backdoc77]

What would you really want to change?
I feel like we are in a pretty good spot right now.

Please don't say things that are false. We are no where near a "good spot" right now. If you don't believe me just check the healing parses for the last 60 days over at world of logs (Rdruids are at the bottom). And if you still don't believe me, check out the top ten ranks for each tot encounter at raidbots (of the 120 spots, there are 6 Rdruids).

With that said, I believe the problem is that the good devs are working on Titan. We are left with Ghostfailer and his math challenged crew.

[hulkgor]

Absolutely agree with the OP. Druids, and in specific Balance Druids, are one of the most ignored, left out and neglected class in the game. Maybe due to the nature of the players not whining like maniacs on the boards, or simply due to a low amount of balance druids in comparison to other classes, we are just left to the side.

If you read the class reviews for 5.2 ( http://wow.mmosite.com/news/2013-03-...ws_part1.shtml ), Balance PvE doesn't have a single word included apart from "tuning", whilst other classes seem to have a bigger concern from their part.

Our movement dps is horrible. We don't have sustained AoE (and we do so not moving through eclipse and dropping NG), our 4pc bonus is just sad whilst other have amazing bonuses. Nature's Vigil was nerfed into oblivion due to it's use on PvP by ferals....

hell, why even continue ranting. That's just Balance, because Resto Druid is just outshined by everyone else, some guilds already(and for a while now) just benching them.

oh well.

[thumbwarriordx]

Balance Druids got their secondary resource before everyone else, save Rogues and DKs. This was because of neglectful class design to be sure, but I feel like things have changed since BC and early Wrath.
Blizzard adopted new design philosophies that actually encourage them to balance classes and specs, bring the player not the class and soforth. Splitting the specializations the way they eventually did only opens up more opportunities to tune specs without impacting others one way or the other.
Blizzard is doing better than ever, at the very least they're trying. It's what is keeping WoW alive while newer, flashier MMOs seem to come out every year.
Eclipse is now the most convoluted of secondary resources, but it is an interesting mechanic.

Druids don't get less love, 4 specs just mean there's less love to go around.
Absorbs are a runaway mechanic, like so many others in WoWs history. I know blizzard, and it'll take longer than you think to fix anything really big like this.

[primalfears]

Absolutely agree with the OP. Druids, and in specific Balance Druids, are one of the most ignored, left out and neglected class in the game. Maybe due to the nature of the players not whining like maniacs on the boards, or simply due to a low amount of balance druids in comparison to other classes, we are just left to the side.

If you read the class reviews for 5.2 ( http://wow.mmosite.com/news/2013-03-...ws_part1.shtml ), Balance PvE doesn't have a single word included apart from "tuning", whilst other classes seem to have a bigger concern from their part.

Our movement dps is horrible. We don't have sustained AoE (and we do so not moving through eclipse and dropping NG), our 4pc bonus is just sad whilst other have amazing bonuses. Nature's Vigil was nerfed into oblivion due to it's use on PvP by ferals....

hell, why even continue ranting. That's just Balance, because Resto Druid is just outshined by everyone else, some guilds already(and for a while now) just benching them.

oh well.

I Main a boomkin and i feel we are in a great spot currently the one of if not the best Single target caster. our 2-4 add cleave is amazing the one thing i would like blizzard to do is give us a lil bit better movement dps or just take away other classes movement dps to bring them on par with us.