Monday 12 September 2011

Resto Class Feedback

The blues have requested some class feedback, and we are happy to oblige! I left some feedback for Resto, which you can see at this link here: Resto Class Feedback. Many 'Likes' are appreciated as it will hopefully help it get looked at by the blues! You can also find some good Bear feedback posts by Reesi and Arielle of The Inconspicuous Bear which I'm sure they'd appreciate you hitting 'Like' as well! Click for: Reesi's feedback and click for: Arielle's Feedback. As Reesi noted on her forums, If you agree with any of the ideas for notable posts, don't just say you agree and nothing else - Respond with the same answer. The only way we'll get attention to any feedback is if it's repeated again and again.


More (proper) posts are in the work so stay tuned! :D

ETA: Including my feedback:

Focus: 
PVE Heroic Progression Raiding Content; primarily Resto.

What are your biggest quality-of-life issues?
Target swapping for Lifebloomx3 stacks on quick-taunt Tank fights (Ragnaros heroic and normal a perfect example) can be frustrating - I can either maintain the 3stack on the non-tanking tank in anticipation of the upcoming tank swap, or I have to spend 3 globals simply reapplying my Lifebloom stack to the new tank. If there was some way to move the 3 stack as a whole between tanks, that would be great. Perhaps LB may need to be reevaluated some, perhaps making the 3stack amount (or even 2 stack) the set amount for just a single application, as it can now only be on one target (then in tree form it would be spreadable over many people as usual). Ideas!

As others suggested earlier, a cosmetic perma tree of life would be nice (affected also by treant glyph or no glyph), perhaps only usable out of combat or something to negate confusion in pvp but allow for some fun /dancing and such around town.

What makes playing your class more fun?
I love everything about druids and especially healing. I feel like we’re in a great spot right now - our throughput is competitive (all of the classes throughput is relatively even by this point in the xpac), our Tranq is now a nice raid cooldown (even if it not a damage reduction one), and we have to make good use of all our spells and it feels like all of our spells are valuable. 

Mana management is fun and, despite misconceptions, still a challenge (when not drastically overgearing content) to do well. I really love the importance of Int to our mana management and being able to make careful choices about secondary stats and managing cooldowns and mana throughout a fight to manage our mana well. 

The Tree of Life cooldown has ended up being a lot of fun and useful, even if I do still miss being able to hop around as a tree in my downtime. It's really fun being able to pop it as a healing cooldown or even as a DPS cooldown on certain fights (alysra burnout, sinestra eggs, etc) or as a sort of mana cd when covering the raid with LB to conserve mana instead of rejuvs.

What makes playing your class less fun?
I still wish we had some damage reduction component. While we’re strong both in tank and raid healing now, for tanks at least we’re very behind in not having any sort of damage reduction. We don’t have an Inspiration reduced damage type talent and no damage reduction type cooldown (such as Hand of Sacrifice or Pain Suppression). Our healing output is strong and the ToL cooldown is really excellent and fun, it just feels like our only option is always to just heal harder, rather than being able to ever mitigate damage in some way.

I also feel our talent tree is a little bloated still, and talents like Living Seed, Blessing of the Grove, and Nature’s Bounty are all a bit lackluster atm. They’re not hugely strong talents in themselves (tho the unlinking from Efflo was a good change) and taking points in any of them doesn’t feel hugely valuable. The reduced nourish cast of NB is alright, though if primarily spreading Rejuvs just to reduce the cast for nourish spam is wasteful of mana and GCDs. It seems more like a 'good, I'm raid healing, and as I'm doing that I can also go to do a quick top up and LB refresh on my tank with the quick Nourish'; which is useful, but if the goal was to help more direct Nourish use it seems a bit roundabout to try to achieve that.

The Nature’s Cure talent I think should be looked at as well - as healers are the only role who can dispel magic off of friendly targets, I think this ability should be granted by choosing the Resto tree (and same for resto/holy for sham/pally) like the priest’s holy and disc specs. It seems a bit of a waste of a talent point for druids pallies and shaman to have to spec to get the magic dispel. While it’s not always necessary, there are several crucial fights where it’s extremely important to pick it up, and even 5man heroics pretty much require dispels.

How do you feel about your “rotation”? 
I think the current healing model for druids is really excellent. We can and should use all our spells, and they’re all valuable. Good druids especially will use all their direct and hot heals and maintain their Harmony proc.

What’s on your wish list for your class?
(see above answers, but quick list below:
-Easier LBx3 swaps for quick tank swap situations.
-A damage reduction talent (a la Inspiration) or cooldown (a la hand of sac) would be great.
-Improvement/revamp of lackluster talents Living Seed, BotG, Nature's Bounty.
-Genesis swapped with Nature's Grace in the Balance tree would be a nice change to pick that up, as it's often dropped for mana saving talents.
-Magic dispel part of Resto specialisation (untalented).
-Cosmetic tree of life/treant, perhaps while out of combat only.

What spells do you use the least?
Think I use all my spells ^.^

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