"New" resto druid mastery... it didn't work the first time, why again?

[emni]

After reading the druid preview, best I can say is that I'm completely disenchanted.

The new mastery:

Mastery: Harmony
Your healing is increased by 12% (with Mastery from typical gear) for each of your Restoration heal over time effects on the target.

For those of you who haven't been around for a while, resto druids used to have this same mastery in patch 4.0.x and it used to be called Symbiosis. Yes, this was way before the time this name was used for the infamous multi-class spell. The mastery was changed not long after because it was in one word awful.

So what are the problems? The mastery rewards lack of triage. It rewards layering of hots, which basically means that if the whole raid drops low, the best mathematical way for you to pump out most healing is to cast Wild Growth and then Rejuv the same people. This means that you have to choose if you want to actually use your mastery and make your healing look competitive with other healers or forget all about it and actually save people's lives and spread your hots around. On the one plus side, this mastery is great for tank healing, however.

But why am I even trying to explain this? 2010 folks have already done enough explaining! So without further a due, let's take a trip to 5 years ago.

Ghostcrawler on why the mastery was eventually changed http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/295...nges-6-16-2011

We redesigned Restoration’s mastery because it was devalued in situations where druids did a lot of raid healing by HoT-ing different targets, especially in 25-player raids.

http://manaflask.com/guides/restorat...id-guide-4-0-1

Unfortunately the way restoration druids are now in 4.0.1 Mastery is really coming up short, being pretty much worthless compared to Haste and Crit. In essentials this means: Don't reforge into Mastery!!

This is because most of the time our job is to heal up the raid, and if you wild growth one group of people you would rejuvenate another so as not to heal some people only and ignore everyone else. This means that you will rarely proc the mastery increase while raid healing, and the only time it's beneficial at the moment is for tank healing.

If you are a druid that is normally assigned to fulltime tank healing (they do exist!), reforge all spirit -> mastery instead of haste/crit and take the tankheal spec mentioned above. This will make your tank healing way much more consistant, and on single target tank healing resto druids are definately able to keep up with all other classes.
However 9 times out of 10 resto druids these days are healing the raid damage so if you're focused on raidhealing then you shouldn't bother with mastery at all.

[Aranes]

Yep.. the same as changing the majority of (Prot) Warriors rage gain back to damage taken instead of a fixed amount gained trough abilities (which works perfectly).

Always a step backwards or just changing things for the sake of changing things....

[Kaiarra]

Always a step backwards or just changing things for the sake of changing things....

Feel kinda the same with Guardian, it's not that their new ideas seem bad per say, but I don't see why we're changing one thing that kinda works for another thing that kinda might work (and it obviously requires a tonne of rebalancing when you fuck around with every single tank spec). Might be better, might be worse, not like we can tell without viewing all the talents/more information.


The only thing I can conclude with on the 'new' Resto mastery is they wanted something more... restoish? Resto Druid = HoTs = mastery that's purely based on HoTs. I never really enjoyed the whole 'cast a non HoT to buff a HoT' mastery concept myself - sure it worked, but I didn't really think it was interesting or fit the spec that well. Not that I advocate the new one, which is just as boring as Feral/Guardians - wish they'd make them more interesting/put more effort in.

Sorta like how they've decided bears can't dodge so theyre going to fuck everything around until it sits pretty with some designers 'bears don't dodge' concept. I reckon someone just decided the Resto mastery should focus more on HoT spells.

I'm actually quite surprised they didn't end up doing something crazy like removing all direct heal spells from Resto (guess they're busy with Balance/Guardian, as Resto/Feral got almost no changes).

[emni]

I never really enjoyed the whole 'cast a non HoT to buff a HoT' mastery concept myself - sure it worked, but I didn't really think it was interesting or fit the spec that well.

I agree with that, but as someone who remembers the old days, trust me when I say that this new version of mastery is worse. And what's more it will be worse NOW than it was back then, because back then Wild Growth would hit the lowest HP targets, which meant that you could sort of get away with Rejuving them afterwards and getting some mileage out of your mastery. But now Wild Growth isn't smart any more and hits random damaged targets. This means that typically you won't be able to leverage the layering in a raid because half the Wild Growth hots will end up on targets who would get close to no benefit from subsequent Rejuvs.

More than that though, I feel almost shocked that nobody else has brought up this issue. It's like nobody remembers or... or all the people from back then have long since quit. Maybe I belong in a museum too.

[Super Kami Dende]

I guess we could just wait to see all the other Passives and Talents for Legion before assuming the sky is falling.

[Kaiarra]

I agree with that, but as someone who remembers the old days, trust me when I say that this new version of mastery is worse. And what's more it will be worse NOW than it was back then, because back then Wild Growth would hit the lowest HP targets, which meant that you could sort of get away with Rejuving them afterwards and getting some mileage out of your mastery. But now Wild Growth isn't smart any more and hits random damaged targets. This means that typically you won't be able to leverage the layering in a raid because half the Wild Growth hots will end up on targets who would get close to no benefit from subsequent Rejuvs.

More than that though, I feel almost shocked that nobody else has brought up this issue. It's like nobody remembers or... or all the people from back then have long since quit. Maybe I belong in a museum too.

Oh I agree, was chatting with one of our healers earlier and saying it pretty much sounded like a nerf. I'm hoping that they all might be placeholders myself, they're just mindnumbingly dull.

+ hp/healing taken
+ bleed dmg
+ x% heal per HoT on target

/yawn

Would it kill them to add something at least a bit more imaginative.

[emni]

I guess we could just wait to see all the other Passives and Talents for Legion before assuming the sky is falling.

I'm not saying the sky is falling. I'm saying I've been there, done that, it didn't work, and I don't understand why we have to do it again. Maybe it's time for people like me who remember these things to give way for new people who didn't have to fight those battles and who can realize the shortcomings of such mechanics on their own.

[TheMeat420]

I guess we could just wait to see all the other Passives and Talents for Legion before assuming the sky is falling.

So true. I either se cry babies or people enjoying changes on each class forum. The people enjoying it are waiting for more info. The cry babies are thinking this is it. Remember, there are no more major glyphs. There will be tons of new stuff to choose from in your class tiers. Then you've got your weapon thats upgradable.

Stop the crying all. It's so unnecessary.

*Cry during beta if your still unhappy. All your doing now is getting more and more people upset for no reason

[emni]

So true. I either se cry babies or people enjoying changes on each class forum. The people enjoying it are waiting for more info. The cry babies are thinking this is it. Remember, there are no more major glyphs. There will be tons of new stuff to choose from in your class tiers. Then you've got your weapon thats upgradable.

Stop the crying all. It's so unnecessary.

Where am I crying? I'm simply asking why we have to reuse an old mechanic that didn't work the first time. What kind of talent would make this better without turning it into a passive? The devs themselves said last time it wasn't working. Are they crybabies too?

[Rizendragon]

I guess we could just wait to see all the other Passives and Talents for Legion before assuming the sky is falling.

I would say this for this particular item. The start of Cataclysm was a time where every class was given very strong raid healing. In Legion they're scaling back the raid healing for everyone. I do agree that this mastery choice is a bit curious, and depending on the talents and passives is high on the list of possible changes.

[TheMeat420]

Where am I crying? I'm simply asking why we have to reuse an old mechanic that didn't work the first time. What kind of talent would make this better without turning it into a passive? The devs themselves said last time it wasn't working. Are they crybabies too?

I never said I was speaking directly to you emni

[Rizendragon]

Where am I crying? I'm simply asking why we have to reuse an old mechanic that didn't work the first time. What kind of talent would make this better without turning it into a passive? The devs themselves said last time it wasn't working. Are they crybabies too?

The entire class design team has turned over since Cataclysm. Chilton is J Allen Brack, Hazzikostas is Chilton, and GC's role has been split into several other positions.

Edit - What I mean by this is that different people design in different ways and have different ideas.

[Deleted]

Would it kill them to add something at least a bit more imaginative.

Here, I disagree. I think their goal for Mastery is that it is:

- very easy to understand, even for a casual player
- you gain its benefit by just following the basic rotation/doing your thing
- is somehow thematically tied to the spec

Thus, they keep it simple. Mastery is just a stat. Do you expect crit to be innovative and interesting? Haste - is it boring, or not?

They have many better tools to introduce complexity into a spec's rotations, these are: talents (blah blah, I feel like a Blizz parrot repeating it again, but that doesn't make it any less true), tier bonuses (which can shift playstyles a bit), specific trinkets (like the HFC class trink), and in Legion - the Artifact, which will give you 2-3 active abilities and a lot of passives on its own.

The masteries they propose do their jobs in general. Cats, who are bleed-based, get +bleed. Affli locks get +dot damage. Tanks get +block or +healing received or +dodge or whatever they arbitrarily chose to be the "gimmick" for each spec. It is easy, can be explained to a new player in one sentence and fullfills the above mentioned goals. The only thing is that it might be a bit underwhelming, but what if you get some way to rapidly blanket the raid with a weak hot to just proc mastery? E.g. your shroom explosion leaves a hot, or you get a hot 2min cooldown that basically just Rejuvs the whole raid? You don't know, you won't know (until we get a playable beta with at least an early lineup of talents and Artifact powers put in).

An example from my class: Affliction locks seem to get a burst aoe attack from their weapon, on a medium cd. Neat! And it changes things quite a bit as far as the spec is concerned...

[TheMeat420]

Here, I disagree. I think their goal for Mastery is that it is:

- very easy to understand, even for a casual player
- you gain its benefit by just following the basic rotation/doing your thing
- is somehow thematically tied to the spec

Thus, they keep it simple. Mastery is just a stat. Do you expect crit to be innovative and interesting? Haste - is it boring, or not?

They have many better tools to introduce complexity into a spec's rotations, these are: talents (blah blah, I feel like a Blizz parrot repeating it again, but that doesn't make it any less true), tier bonuses (which can shift playstyles a bit), specific trinkets (like the HFC class trink), and in Legion - the Artifact, which will give you 2-3 active abilities and a lot of passives on its own.

The masteries they propose do their jobs in general. Cats, who are bleed-based, get +bleed. Affli locks get +dot damage. Tanks get +block or +healing received or +dodge or whatever they arbitrarily chose to be the "gimmick" for each spec. It is easy, can be explained to a new player in one sentence and fullfills the above mentioned goals. The only thing is that it might be a bit underwhelming, but what if you get some way to rapidly blanket the raid with a weak hot to just proc mastery? E.g. your shroom explosion leaves a hot, or you get a hot 2min cooldown that basically just Rejuvs the whole raid? You don't know, you won't know (until we get a playable beta with at least an early lineup of talents and Artifact powers put in).

An example from my class: Affliction locks seem to get a burst aoe attack from their weapon, on a medium cd. Neat! And it changes things quite a bit as far as the spec is concerned...

You sir are on point!!

[Xendai]

If I'm remembering correctly, the new mastery isn't the same as the 4.0 one. Symbosis caused our heals to heal for more whenever one of our HoTs was already present on the target. You got a static benefit as long as the target already had a HoT. For this new one, our healing is increased by 12% (with Mastery from typical gear) for each of your Restoration heal over time effects on the target. And they confirmed on twitter that the first HoT cast would get 1x benefit.

It's very similar in style, but it should be much better than the 4.0 mastery.

[TheMeat420]

If I'm remembering correctly, the new mastery isn't the same as the 4.0 one. Symbosis caused our heals to heal for more whenever one of our HoTs is already present on the target. You got a static benefit as long as the target already had a HoT. For this new one, our healing is increased by 12% (with Mastery from typical gear) for each of your Restoration heal over time effects on the target. And they confirmed on twitter that the first HoT cast would get 1x benefit.

It's very similar in style, but it should be much better than the 4.0 mastery.

I totally agree. I'm excited to see the new tier options. Especially because major glyphs are gone. Tier choices will be game changers hopefully

[PosPosPos]

On the bright side, rdruid isn't the only spec getting back antiquated mechanics. Holy Paladins with conal Light of Dawn making its comeback, Elemental Shamans with EOverload probably going to blow people up with a single lucky crit proc, Resto Shamans with the overly punitive DR on Chain Heal, etc. among others.

[Rizendragon]

If I'm remembering correctly, the new mastery isn't the same as the 4.0 one. Symbosis caused our heals to heal for more whenever one of our HoTs was already present on the target. You got a static benefit as long as the target already had a HoT. For this new one, our healing is increased by 12% (with Mastery from typical gear) for each of your Restoration heal over time effects on the target. And they confirmed on twitter that the first HoT cast would get 1x benefit.

It's very similar in style, but it should be much better than the 4.0 mastery.

This is more what I was thinking, but I had no way to confirm it. The Resto Druid palystyle is about rolling hots on the raid. If anything when executed in this manner the spec should be quite strong.

- - - Updated - - -

On the bright side, rdruid isn't the only spec getting back antiquated mechanics. Holy Paladins with conal Light of Dawn making its comeback, Elemental Shamans with EOverload probably going to blow people up with a single lucky crit proc, Resto Shamans with the overly punitive DR on Chain Heal, etc. among others.

I LOVED the original LoD. No HoPo, original LoD and being switched back to more single target heals is right up my alley for Holy Pally healing. Definitely fits my playstyle.

[Smag]

- Make it 1% not 10%.
- Sum of all hots on all targets.
...
- Profit

You're healing, putting hots on everyone that NEEDS them, and then, when shit hits the fan, you push Tranq and get 20% (or how many players you've got in the raid) heal boost on top of what you get from regular hots. To think of it, it might be too OP. Maybe even 0.5% base.

[Mormolyce]

I never really saw the problem with it in the first place.

End of the day, mastery is just another stat and if they don't like the playstyle it encourages there are a lot of levers they can pull.

So what are the problems? The mastery rewards lack of triage. It rewards layering of hots, which basically means that if the whole raid drops low, the best mathematical way for you to pump out most healing is to cast Wild Growth and then Rejuv the same people.

Then don't build for Mastery if you want a triage playstyle.