How do other healers playstyles compare to resto druid?

[Deleted]

Hi everyone,

I have played resto druid for a number of years now and recently I've felt I need a change. In a complete change I went unholy DK and got it to 906 ilvl and have done high m+ with him. It's been a blast; but I miss healing honestly.

The problem is I'm out of the loop on other healers playstyles. I'm hoping that you kind folks could give me an insight into what the other healing classes play like in comparison to resto druid.

How they play in m+ and pug raid environments. So not progress as I don't raid anymore.

I have 40 AK so can level any of healers fast so I don't want that our Legos to be a consideration.

Thanks!

[RestoSpirit]

Hey,

I play all the healers expect for Monk (not sure why but I never connected with the fantasy and pandaren in general). Restodruid is crazy good when your hots get time to do their job, so in pugs where people tend to invite to many healers its not really fun. As for M+ Restodruid is still up there with Hpally. Hpally tends to deal a little bit better with the annoying affixes like grieves and has an immunity for the really high pushes to survive one-shot mechanics like xavius (DHT). Burst and Spothealing of pally is insane. I mean you pop those cooldowns and the grp is fulllife no matter what. That is really satisfying. In PUGs hpally are still very good since people have the misconception you NEED that hpally. Which is not the case for easy content.

Shaman is a very strong cooldown healer. Even with little gear (860-870) you can do +15 keys with a good group, your CDs just carry through the big pulls and your mastery kicks in on tankhealing/bossfights. With gear shaman deals with annoying affixes like grievious with ease. Throughput overall is okish in my book but the utility is insane compared to restodruid. You have so much cool stuff to play around with. Lots of different viable talents. Shamans weakness is defensive cooldowns, you can't just pop bear form and press frenzy if you mess up something. Most of the time you missplay you are pretty much dead. Overall very fun to play, you should consider a more crit/haste oriented build if you plan on pugging raids a lot, since mastery will suck with to many healers and low damage content. I enjoyed the crit heavy chainheal build a lot.

Priest is my favorite second healer (obviously maining the restodruid ). Let's talk about Holy first. Holy is nice for fresh content and inexperienced players since it is a lot more forgiving compared to disc. Holys strong side are very efficient spells like Serenity and Sanctify which really get out of control with tier-set. Your healcd is like a minitranq and you have a nice passive healing with PoM (taking piety and benediction). Overall you don't have a lot of buttons to press which makes playing holy somewhat easier compared to other healers. In m+ the class can easily do +15 but will struggle on the very high keys especially with affixes like quakening or volcanic where a lot of movement is needed and you can't just spam PoH in high damage situations.

Disc is the most fun I had in legion so far. Very cool class design especially with the 7.2.5 changes. Your burst healing is INSANE, its so much fun and very satisfying. You have a lot of different tools depending on your talent choices which makes M+ a blast with this class. Shadow covenent is one of these which comes in very handy as a spamable heal which can cover downtime of penance. T20 setbonus is okay, you really feel that in raids. Disc in PUGs can be rough since you get sniped a lot and since so much of your healing comes from burst you are often f*cked when that happens. Overall Disc is really nice to play especially since it is a Haste-healer like restodruid and you can do 6-7 of 10 GCDs on the move. The weakness of disc (if you would like to call it that way) is its difficulty. You need to plan very very far ahead and you need to know how much damage everything does. There is almost no room for errors and a thin safety net if there is one at all.

I hope this insight helps you, feel free to ask more specific questions or PM me.

Cheers
RestoSpirit

[Deleted]

Hey Restospirit,

That was a great read! Exactly the kind of information I hoped to get when I asked the question.

Personally, I've also never been tempted by monk. I've never even created a monk. My pally is 110 and decently geared but I find it terribly boring as I really enjoy AoE healing and having a lot of coverage. Priest is another one that I've just never really been interested in but wanted to keep an open mind. After reading your synopsis of the classes that hasn't changed.

The one I am leaning towards is Shaman. I've gone ahead and bought a bunch of crit/mastery gear to get me started. I also bought promises but I'm regretting that now as I'm not sure I'll have any real mana trouble with high crit build..

Could you go more in depth into your experience with Shaman in M+ and pug environments? I've always enjoyed the large toolset of Shaman but have been put off it in the past due to the stacked dependent nature of Shaman. What challenges have you faced playing Shaman in M+ compared to resto druid?

Thanks

[kooz]

I play both druid and shaman, druid is main, they are now quite similarly geared around 920+. With druid at high mastery level prehots will keep your group up while with some affixes you can even catweave doing good dps almost as high as hpal, you can also go tree or moc for some affixes, with ib and lego belt there's no worry with any pug tank. Shaman can contribute less dps in 5man but as mentioned has lots of raid cds (but no tank cd) plus it has aoe stun and interrupt, shaman is not as immobile as many might think, with graceful spirit and tidewalker traits, you can heal on the go quite often, with the right build single heal everybody in no time.

[saradonin]

[...] Disc in PUGs can be rough since you get sniped a lot and since so much of your healing comes from burst you are often f*cked when that happens. [...]

Personally I found it to be the other way around - with 7.2.5 changes Disc has superquick burst with way shorter preparation time than before the patch and he/she is the one ninjaing the heals, especially when the damage income is timed by boss abilities. I co-heal with very skilled Disc (quite often parsing at 95-99%) every day and sometimes it looks like this: burst damage incoming, I pre-hot, get ready to WG/Ghanir, start casting WG fraction of a second before damage comes in .... but before the end of the cast everyone is already topped and unless damage was very high WG is wasted on overheal. I think it's very underrated and misuderstood spec and truth be told most of them suck. What can screw Disc in PUGs might be the unpredictable, hectic damage taken by people not doing mechanics.

[...]Personally, I've also never been tempted by monk. I've never even created a monk. [...]

Playing MW Monk is way more fun now than it ever was IMO. It's not a one-trick pony anymore (i.e. Uplift spamming back in WoD) and can do both spot and raid healing efficiently. One thing I don't like about MW is the artifact ability, which is potentially extremely strong for tank damage spikes, but the absurdly long cast time just kills it for me. It's a pretty decent choice for M+ as well due to high mobility, AoE stun in short cooldown and versatile talent choices (gotta love Zen Pulse while rushing through big trash pack).

Shaman on the other hand is a complete opposite of Druid. You can slack around half of the fight, just keeping Rain down and throwing Riptide here and there, but when the shit goes down and group is barely alive you pop up cd's and save the raid from a wipe.

[RestoSpirit]

Could you go more in depth into your experience with Shaman in M+ and pug environments? I've always enjoyed the large toolset of Shaman but have been put off it in the past due to the stacked dependent nature of Shaman. What challenges have you faced playing Shaman in M+ compared to resto druid?

Hey,

well Shaman is not as mobile as druid which you will certainly feel on some fights. As for m+ I have struggled with tankhealing a little on the shaman, since you really need to predict and precast the heals to keep the tank alive on high keys or bolstering. Druid is somewhat easy to play here since you just keep hots running on the tank and he/she will do the rest. Missing Vortex a lot on shaman, since its harder to stack trash. I don't have Velens on my shaman which is a great oh shit button if one of the targets get very high damage (e.g. Pelter in NL). I feel like shaman has worse throughput which you feel on Bursting-weeks, but might just be my gear. Can heal 8-9 stacks of bursting with ease on my druid, while on my shaman I had trouble healing 6-7 stacks.

Cheers
RestoSpirit

[darii]

I've only mythic raided on 2 healers so far. Resto druids, and holy paladins. I like the constant raid healing of resto druids, being able to keep the ENTIRE raid alive with a few major cooldowns on your own, however when I play my resto, I miss the burst healing of my holy paladin. getting that 6.5 million crit and taking a mythic geared bear tank from 20% to full always feels so good. I can't really say resto burst heals are amazing outside of EoG & flouish (tranq too, but that's more sustained then burst) but I really do enjoy the power behind a holy paladin if that's your interest. + I NEVER have mana problems on a hpal haha