Resto - BFA Changes

[Tiberria]

Here is what we know so far from today's build, and the previous build.

- Healing Touch - removed
- Living Seed - removed
- 40 +Crit effect on Regrowth - removed
- Tranquility changed to have HoT scaling, where every subsequent tick heals for more than the initial tick.
- Tranquility loses casting while moving (they have said there are no plans to enable that).
- Displacer Beast - removed and replaced with Tiger's Dash (discussed at length in other thread).
- Stonebark and Germination are swapping places in the talent tree
- Flourish is reworked to essentially combine the current effects of Essence of G'Hanir and Flourish into a single ability with a 90 second CD and 8 second duration
- Abundance is reworked with the removal of Healing Touch. It now gives 6% Crit and 6% mana reduction to Regrowth per active Rejuv.


What are people's thoughts on these changes. Here are mine.
- I think they are removing too many spells overall from a spec that already has a reputation of being simpler than other specs. Healing Touch is gone. If you want to keep Germination and want to use Tiger's Dash, you lose 3 more things that are currently buttons (EoG, Flourish, and Displacer Beast). I think cutting us down to just 1 single target direct heal (especially when every other healer is keeping two) just makes our toolkit too bare, and it feels like another rotational spell needs to be put in there.
- The talent changes effectively limit your options/pigeon hole you into a raiding spec or a Mythic+ spec. Assuming Cultivation remains the go to talent like it is in Legion, if you want to keep Germination (which you will 100% have to in 5 mans at least), you basically are stuck with no cooldowns other than Tranq. If you want to have access to a major personal throughput CD in raids, you lose the spot healing/debuff healing flexibility of having Germination. It feels like it just limits your toolkit/options and makes the spec too straightforward.
- The benefit is that you at least will be able to have either Spring Blossoms or Inner Peace in raids with no sacrifice. However, those are both passive talents that lack any real play style to them, so it doesn't really fill the gap.
- The new Abundance probably becomes a go to 5 man and PvP talent, but is going to remain close to a dead talent in raiding. The number of Rejuvs that you will have to have out to make it worthwhile, with the other GCDs that need to be spent on LB, WG, SM, Efflo, etc., is going to leave very little time to take advantage of using buffed Regrowth heavily.
- I strongly suspect that the raid build will be CW/Cult/Spring Blossoms/Flourish, and the M+ build will be Abundance/Cult/Stonebark/Germination

[Rhokz]

change germination with stonebark again ... and im fine with these changes....

[Corroc]

The tranq while moving is going to be big. It essentially means you cant use tranq as emergency heal since you have to predict movement before using it.

[Deleted]

The tranq while moving is going to be big. It essentially means you cant use tranq as emergency heal since you have to predict movement before using it.

You mean like it was the last 12years? Having a huge raid CD should come with some form of drawback. I’m fine with having to preplan tranq as long as its a stronger cd than lets say shaman HTT.

[Tehterokkar]

It is still far too early to make assumptions.

Artifacts being removed makes some talent options better by a lot. It's so difficult to predict what will be good, especially with no tuning being done and changes are purely mechanical and this is the 2nd build of alpha and we have no access to it even to test these in action.

That being said, I'm glad Healing touch is going, Regrowth is a much better option since HT is rarely used and doesn't give a HoT that adds another mastery stack.

[Weissrolf]

So even more concentration on hitting that single Rejuv button.

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You mean like it was the last 12years? Having a huge raid CD should come with some form of drawback. I’m fine with having to preplan tranq as long as its a stronger cd than lets say shaman HTT.

The big difference being that this new Tranq gets stronger by time. So your first ticks will be weak and then you may have to move.

Or does it not channel its ticks anymore, but change to a one-time cast?

[Nevcairiel]

Losing Healing Touch isn't a big deal, you barely ever cast that anyway - and they made Regrowth cheaper as well (and increased its base and HoT healing to compensate for the crit loss). Without Regrowth crits, Living Seed was also strongly devalued, so that going isn't a huge loss either.

Tranquility seems to return to its former glory, we've had it as a stacking HoT before (in Cata and MoP at least, gone in WoD, not sure when it was introduced), and imho that worked quite well. You have to pre-cast it a bit more then one might be used to from Legion, but it fits well with the Resto style. And it might mean it scales on its own with Mastery as well.

[stormgust]

Here is what we know so far from today's build, and the previous build.

- Healing Touch - removed

About time.

- Tranquility changed to have HoT scaling, where every subsequent tick heals for more than the initial tick.
- Tranquility loses casting while moving (they have said there are no plans to enable that).

Isn't that the pre-Legion version of tranquility?

- Displacer Beast - removed and replaced with Tiger's Dash (discussed at length in other thread).

Not fine with that, but we have a thread on it I guess.

- Stonebark and Germination are swapping places in the talent tree
- Flourish is reworked to essentially combine the current effects of Essence of G'Hanir and Flourish into a single ability with a 90 second CD and 8 second duration
- Abundance is reworked with the removal of Healing Touch. It now gives 6% Crit and 6% mana reduction to Regrowth per active Rejuv.

We hardly ever picked MoC in legion, why would there be any reason to pick it in BfA with these changes?

But anyway, I'll hold of with my judgement - just seems incredible odd, that all other healing specs seems to get more tools/utility added, whereas resto is being cut down so far.

[Deleted]

So even more concentration on hitting that single Rejuv button.

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The big difference being that this new Tranq gets stronger by time. So your first ticks will be weak and then you may have to move.

Or does it not channel its ticks anymore, but change to a one-time cast?

I’m pretty confident that they will keep it as a channel otherwise its just a Wild Groth on a longer CD that’s raidwide. The fact that it is a powerful HOT plays in well with the druid “hot till you drop” playstyle and assuming mastery is the same you could potentially get super crazy heals from it. Addressing what you said about having to move mid cast then that is what you had to do pre-legion and personally I don’t see it as a big issue. Even now I tend to forget that I can move with it so I still stand still when I cast it. People will get used to it. Yea it sucks but I get why they would do it.

Tbh I was expecting them to introduce it as a talent vs something else like maybe on the Germination row

[fallenangel-succ]

MoC is likely to change as you'll already get Abundance if you want to focus more on RG, and that provides you with a cost reduction. I would like it if they made that playstyle more viable actually, but the removal of LS hurts a lot.

[Tiberria]

You mean like it was the last 12years? Having a huge raid CD should come with some form of drawback. I’m fine with having to preplan tranq as long as its a stronger cd than lets say shaman HTT.

The 12 year notion is a fallacy. Tranq wasn't ever even tuned to be worth casting in a raid until Firelands in 2011 (prior to that it was your party only, etc.). For all 3 tiers in MoP, you could cast it while moving with Symbiosis-SWG. For the first tier of WoD, it would typically be lined up with Aspect of the Fox. For all of Legion, we had the artifact trait. Basically, in 7 out of the last 8 tiers going back 6 years, it's been a mobile CD.

The idea of it having a drawback doesn't work, when 4 of the other 5 healers have raid CDs that don't have any real movement limitations on them. I highly doubt they will tune it to be massively better than other raid CDs - it's just going to be mechanically inferior. And, while Holy Priests have the same issue, they've compensated them with a whole new freaking raid CD by talent that heals the entire raid for as much as Tranq and puts 2 stacks of PoM and Renew on everyone in range, AND an ability that gives the entire raid 20% of their mana every 5 minutes. The spec is going to be underwhelming if we don't get stuff of that magnitude.

- - - Updated - - -

MoC is likely to change as you'll already get Abundance if you want to focus more on RG, and that provides you with a cost reduction. I would like it if they made that playstyle more viable actually, but the removal of LS hurts a lot.

I actually don't think the Living Seed removal matters at all really. It was a passive ability that didn't affect gameplay, and they can replace that through tuning easily. It will likely just reduce our valuation of Crit relative to other stats.

[fallenangel-succ]

Certainly but removing LS right now is a 35% nerf to RG's throughput, and that's to a part that's less likely to overheal.

[Nevcairiel]

The 12 year notion is a fallacy. Tranq wasn't ever even tuned to be worth casting in a raid until Firelands in 2011 (prior to that it was your party only, etc.). For all 3 tiers in MoP, you could cast it while moving with Symbiosis-SWG. For the first tier of WoD, it would typically be lined up with Aspect of the Fox. For all of Legion, we had the artifact trait. Basically, in 7 out of the last 8 tiers going back 6 years, it's been a mobile CD

This has been discussed to death in an earlier thread already and is barely the reality. Most guilds didn't waste Aspect of the Fox on healing, but more likely DPSing in crucial phases, and having to rely on a specific other spec being present in MoP was hardly guaranteed. Lets try not to spread those misconceptions again. And even before raid-wide use, you still used those cooldowns - Healers were just split between the 5 groups to be able to use the various cooldowns effectively.

[Autumn]

I've mained resto for 10 years, and the spec has always performed well, however this tier, it seems to be lagging behind and I'm doing as much, if not more healing on my less geared priest or monk. I'm assuming that if they remove the "over-powered" tranquility while moving, they will buff other heals to compensate...

[Tiberria]

This has been discussed to death in an earlier thread already and is barely the reality. Most guilds didn't waste Aspect of the Fox on healing, but more likely DPSing in crucial phases, and having to rely on a specific other spec being present in MoP was hardly guaranteed. Lets try not to spread those misconceptions again. And even before raid-wide use, you still used those cooldowns - Healers were just split between the 5 groups to be able to use the various cooldowns effectively.

On fights where being able to use Tranq, DH, etc while moving was key to survival (Mythic Blackhand in particular), you absolutely would line up Fox with it. That only accounts for one tier. And, MoP Symbiosis didn't rely on one spec being present, you would get SWG from putting it on a Shaman of any spec, which you're virtually guaranteed to have in a 20 man raid. You're the one spreading misconceptions. For all intents and purposes, it's been a mobile CD in every tier except HFC in the last 6 years.

I also specifically recall that Tranq in WoTLK was not considered a spell worth casting/chaneling for 8 seconds over continuing to spam Rejuv/WG both because of the party restriction and because of the amount of healing it did wasn't at all strong. They ended up buffing it by something like 300% on top of making it raid wide when they turned it into an actual raid CD instead of a Vanilla anachronism in 4.2.

[Weissrolf]

Addressing what you said about having to move mid cast then that is what you had to do pre-legion and personally I don’t see it as a big issue.

And pre Legion Tranq started with weaker ticks and then got stronger the longer you stood still? In my memory the channels ticks were of equal strength, but I frankly don't remember too well. With equal strength ticks you can get through some useful ticks before you move (many people may be topped off already anyway). With stronger growing ticks you get seriously punished for moving mid-channel, because the earlier ticks are less powerful.

In the end it won't matter much, because players can just spam Rejuv all over the raid and still get good numbers. That remains to be my main criticism.

[Cheze]

losing mobile tranq doesn't seem like that big a deal tbh; there weren't very many situations where you really needed it in legion and most of those could probably be planned around

our only ST hardcast heal being regrowth seems a little weird when basically every other healer has the slow/efficient vs fast/inefficient tradeoff, and the fast/efficient utility is compromised by a lot of its heal being HoT. Be curious to see how it works out in m+, although the new abundance will help it more than the current version.

flourish/germination being a tradeoff will hurt but I guess it's something you have to think about now, as opposed to just automatically skipping stonebark.

[EliWallach]

Not clear what they're aiming for with healers this time around but these changes don't seem overly harsh. I would like to see some relief in the mana department as we seem to be gasping for air more than the other healers. And maybe a 2 second rejuv tick. My shaman however, 8 second CH CD? Holy shit. Maybe it's finally time to reroll priest.

[Tiberria]

Not clear what they're aiming for with healers this time around but these changes don't seem overly harsh. I would like to see some relief in the mana department as we seem to be gasping for air more than the other healers. And maybe a 2 second rejuv tick. My shaman however, 8 second CH CD? Holy shit. Maybe it's finally time to reroll priest.

I think the issue with the changes is they are reducing the depth/options of our gameplay. Having to choose between having EoG/Flourish vs having Germination means that you're locked into either having no throughput CD (outside of Tranq), or you're locked into a single Rejuv per target, giving you less options for how to handle healing damage patterns. I fear that the spec is going to end up feeling like it's missing something, similar to how speccing out of Germination on live just feels awkward and "feels bad" even if it numerically makes sense. I actually think Germination should be baseline; the spec just feels awkward without it.

The other issue is that they are seemingly adding tools and options to the toolkits of other healers, while flattening out the RDruid toolkit. If anything, I think RDruid already felt like one of the lower complexity healing spec, so I don't think dumbing it down further really is the right move.

[pointclickboom]

if tranquility is significantly stronger in exchange for having to stand still, i'm fine with it. also really hope they reverse the stonebark/germination swap because the flourish/essence of g'hanir combo seems too good to pass up