Don’t worry the 5% pvp buff to healing will fix it >.>
Here’s an interesting infodump from US forums
Look at the bottom of Dwelknarr’s post on the comparison of damage output amongst healers, unsurprisingly resto druid is at the bottom at almost half the potential of the top performers.
Who would have guessed that SUNFIRE contributed to a significant amount of damage? Well, not only are your talent choices naturally gravitating towards SKULL BASH and other CAT talents to synergize with WILDSTALKER, but also three bottom branches of the the talent tree appear too attractive to pass so you’ll have to skip BALANCE talents entirely.
The 20% FLAT NERF to damage in hopes of encouraging the druid player to pick a side; spell damage or physical didn’t achieve the wanted result and never will, with these talent trees at least. You’re starving with energy in cat form, PRIMAL FURY is quit costly to access when you consider the relatively low uptime in your shapeshift form - so the 25%+ from CIRCLE OF THE WILD does not compensate enough.
You can avoid the “one trick pony” playstyle and take a little bit of everything; from BEAR spells for survivability to BALANCE filler in case you go MASTER SHAPESHIFTER - you’ll just have to replace some passives you used to pick before the patch with other ones; at the cost of skipping SKULL BASH and the very useful bottom right of the GENERAL TREE.
Playing a master all build doesn’t come without its own cost of losing different UTILITY and your damage output will increase only by a tiny amount so it is a poor trade over the “meta” choice of talents.
What resto druid needs is much better talent tree design with stronger buffs to a single SUB-SPECIALIZATION of choice (spell or physical) to discourage this degenerate and overcomplicated (DOT oriented with frequent shifting) playstyle that worked so well since Dragonflight, which Blizzard is actively trying to kill.
This is achievable by putting more power into WRATH/STARFIRE and SHRED/SWIPE/AUTOATTACK(?) - the damage which requires single form commitment which won’t keep ticking like spell dots or bleeds. Undoubtedly for this to work, energy regeneration in cat form would needs a significant increase as well, otherwise players will keep shifting to re-apply MOONFIRE/SUNFIRE while the resource passively refreshes in the background. If you buff energy regen, players could also be disincentivized to use MAGIC as filler because shifting forms would mean energy resource spilling over the cap.
Another thought - cat attacks for resto don’t even need to cost energy as is the case with SWIPE for bears as an example. Tuning is much easier to achieve without the resource factor. Just look at the no COST and CDR BASED damage toolkit of MISTWEAVER MONK which doesn’t even need to concern himself with MULTIDOTTING.
The main problem of druids, aside from many bugs and poor tuning, is healing and damage dealing feeling like two completely disjointed activities. This is no longer a problem for DISC, HOLY PAL and MW who are all superior in design and much more enjoyable to play in this modern game where healers are no longer imagined as bots who stare at the raid frames of their team for 90% of the time.
