What is going on with Resto Mastery: Harmony?

Classes Druid
1

Something weird is going on. Not sure if it is attempted bugfix or a complete redesign as over the past few days I have swapped around some gear pieces, but not enough to drop from 24% mastery as the tooltip is currently showing around 12%.

Technically 12% is what appears to be the actual increase for the first HOT ever since the patch (according to multiple reports here on the forum), but with this new reworked scaling and diminishing returns on any additional stacks of Harmony, it’s quite a nerf to the before-patch state when the tooltip was showing ~8% flat scaling for each additional.

It feels bad and mathematically it looks like a big nerf to overall bonus healing.

Wasn’t the whole point of the rework to frontload some of the healing bonus and have it stack less with subsequent HOTs, in order to help with spot-healing and reduce the need to juggle 10 different modifiers in order to top someone off quickly?

Previously it would look like 8+8+8+8=32% final bonus (I’m using mastery value from my gear as an example).

After rework it was supposed to look something like 24+6+4+1% and further diminishing.

In practice it is now adjusted to 12+less+less+by the time of 4th stack, no more bonus.

If I’m not wrong, resto has close to 9 or 10 different HOTs, which is a massive nerf once you reach 5th stack of Harmony. 1 lifebloom alone can count for 3 stacks; 2 rejuvs, 2 efflo, 2 different wild growths (one from treants), cultivation, tranquility and even cenarion ward.

so if the base increase in healing is say 12%

for proof that something is broken you can easily test it out yourself

lifebloom talented to count as 3 stacks = only 8% increase to solo lifebloom ticks (no other modifiers)

lifebloom x3 + x1 rejuv (so 4 stacks) = increase of ~18% whereas before the patch, using same value of mastery from gear, cumulative bonus healing would be around ~32%

if you mix lifebloom x3 + regrowth the numbers don’t add quite right either, however with these four modifiers, regrowth’s heal over time effect gets increased by ~34% which is much more than I am seeing with the instant portion of the heal

2

I’ve reported this multiple times with a friend of mine.

Made a post here as well. Can’t get in touch with a gm to forward my frustrations.

We made multiple graphs as to show how it works more or less. With actual numbers and everything.

The conclusion we came to is one of the following:

First hot is already diminished by 25% (Already received the penalty), and the second hot got that diminishing stacked up by another 25%.

So say you my rejun blanket heals for 100.000 per tick, and with 2 hots goes for like 114000 for some reason. I have 30% mastery by the way.

The other chance is that we NEVER got the stated 45% bonus mastery effectiveness that was on the patch notes… and only appears that we have it in the UI.

The difference this makes (in both cases) is MASSIVE overall. Whether that’s the previous mastery or the one we should NORMALLY have.

I was very pumped to heal in blitz rbgs or even arenas but apparently blizzard enjoys having 65% of the healer population playing disco priests. While having the resto druids literally having a bugged and unworkable mastery.

Whoever came up with this mastery idea CLEARLY never tested it or even made any troubleshooting. THIS BUG IS ACTIVE SINCE PTR WHERE WE ALREADY REPORTED IT MULTIPLE TIMES!

3

this is programming bug they let first mastery diminishing from each hot to start counting before even first hot applies. So at first hot you already have two diminishes.
h ttps://imgur.com/a/tvq2kzj

4

At least it’s not a complete disaster in PVE, because rarely do you get a chance or feel the need to cover someone in so many stacks now that NPC burst damage had been “adjusted” to feel less frustrating.

However, it does not help at all with PVP where the burst damage from players is completely ridiculous and out of control and has not been tuned since the change to Mastery or patch launch. We have to remember that our primary strength is healing over time, not instant heals.

One other thing as I have mentioned is our HOTs already feel weak by themselves and the idea is to blanket someone with all heals in to help them survive. Specialization talent tree is filled with all these effects which on their own are completely useless, with only real value they had pre-patch being is that each one counted as a flat Harmony stack increase whereas now that value is SEVERELY DIMINISHED.

The class is not yet in full panic mode because of this but if left as is, we’ll start experiencing serious scaling problems and fall behind other classes in time for next season.

Also resto’s damage output (with consideration for possible shapeshift uptime in challenging content) is significantly behind that of disc priest and mistweaver, because their basic healing rotations include offensive spells. Looking at the stats, remaining healing specs of different classes (including holy priest) suffer from this problem as well.

5

You don’t understand… the mastery scaling is the reason why Resto druid is borderline unplayable in pvp at the moment.

With full hots and regrowth spam with abundance and all other modifiers I can maybe get 1mil regrowth’s in pvp. It’s beyond pathetic. It’s unplayable.

Resto druids have only healing throughput to survive. And currently we are behind disco priests and shamans. That should NEVER be the case, since the cooldowns of druids are far weaker in comparison.

6

I never said it was fully functional or enjoyable, I have only implied that very few players would have ever noticed mastery being bugged, considering how much superior in every aspect other two healers are (read: more popular)

And the druids playing PVE are not experiencing the full extent of the bug. Level 10 dungeons seem very manageable and not too stressful even with the diminished value in mind and gameplay in raids revolves around covering everyone in 2 stacks of rejuv and sniping low hp bars with sped-up crit regrowths so you’re likely not exceeding 5 harmony in total (which is around where according to redesign goal you “should” start seeing a heavily diminished heal bonus).

While you’re super busy looking at the raid frames as if you were playing classic version of the game from 20 years ago and barely finding any globals to use an offensive, two of the top healers are not only ahead of you in healing by a slight margin, but also being very useful by passively dealing a significant amount of damage.