I recently gained access to the Alpha, and before I start this thread, I want to clarify that
most of my perspective comes from a M+ focused player.
TL;DR Restoration Druid currently feels like the clunkiest spec known to man, and I hope some of it can be resolved. As it stands, the spec ive been exclusively maining for 6 years may not be my main anymore.
What happened?
In Dragonflight, especially towards the end, we saw the introduction of Grove Guardians, and the S3 Tierset bonus. Both of these things drastically increased resto druid’s reactivity in small-group content. It felt and still feels fluid, like you have control, and encourages priority on certain aspects (primarily clearcasting procs and nourish) that historically are underwhelming and not worth even really thinking about. The class tree kind of stank but that’s being reworked in The War Within so, yay!
Going into the War Within, however, we’re losing a lot. I mean, a lot, a lot. I will list what we’re losing:
We’re losing (arguably) the best feeling tierset we’ve ever had for m+ content.
We’re losing adaptive swarm. (Not the most fun, but an interesting skill cap.)
We’re losing (for all practical purposes) Flourish.
We’re losing a lot of haste.
We’re losing astral influence for the purpose of catweaving.
We’re (with some theoretical talent builds for some keys) losing Ursol’s Vortex, Soothe, and Stampeding Roar.
We’re losing (I think most importantly) Grove Guardians purpose. Now on global, the entirety of the point of the button now feels completely null, and because of this, the spec now has an awkward clunk where it will feel awkward to press grove guardians, and practically discourages you from taking Wild Synthesis as a talent, because the throughput per global is so low. It’s purpose was that, disregarding the S3 Dragonflight Tierset, it was a passive, low throughput reactive button, but it was OFF GCD, which increased the skill cap, and just FELT. GOOD.
If the GCD for Grove Guardians wasn’t added, I probably wouldn’t even have been writing this post. New expansions bring new changes and times change. It happens. But now the spec feels almost unplayable compared to it’s current retail version. And it makes me sad.
This is all disregarding the persistent and growing issues that resto druid currently faces that I worry might be limiting to skill expression, and adding to the general clunky feeling.
The spec, especially now with the Wildstalker talents, is completely dependant on RNG for throughput.
In Dragonflight, the throughput difference between photosynthesis procs, and no photosynthesis procs is very substantial. This will remain the case in The War Within. Except now, the Wildstalker hero talents (the theoretical small form content talent tree), simply takes what we had before (adaptive swarm), something we had relative control over, and turns it into complete RNG. For healing instead situations, I simply won’t know if I can or can’t heal the group through certain situations. That is not good. That is not fun. That is clunky, and worrisome.
Fluid Form feels just weird. Not bad, but weird. Druid has never had the ability to shift consistently like that into the form they want, and it could feel good, if it didn’t actively add even more keybinds to the spec. It feels unnatural to not have to press cat form to, well, use cat form abilities.
Call of the Elder Druid is just a poorly designed 1min cd. It encourages you to just not do damage at certain points because you could end up just wasting the proc. It feels clunky and bad and I hope it gets reworked. This has been a consistent problem with this talent since Shadowlands when it was a legendary power. There is a reason no one really used it. Dream of Cenarius doesn’t feel like it fits in with, historically, resto druid’s damage profile. Most of it’s damage comes from its dots, not Shred of Ferocious Bite.
The Class Tree changes are good! I’m happy with most of them. I’m skeptical of the ‘utility centre’ of the tree, but everything else seems to make sense and I think they are healthy changes.
Maybe a lot of this could be solved if Grove Guardians interacted with any of the bonuses from the Wildstalker talent tree, at the very least proccing Symbiotic Blooms, but it doesn’t.
I understand I am just one person, and in the very small minority in terms of playerbase already (cringe world first key pusher yada yada), but at the end of the day I want to enjoy playing the game, as the spec I want and am good at. As it stands I’m worried I won’t be able to do that.
Please at the very least, take Grove Guardians back off the GCD.
