A Look Back at Restoration Druid in Dragonflight & War Within Wishlist - Editorial

Live Posted 2024/01/24 at 7:57 AM by Voulk

Our Guide Writers have reviewed their specs throughout Dragonflight and share wishlists of what they'd like to see in the War Within. Check out all of our released editorials below.

Dragonflight Retrospectives & War Within Wishlists

Blood DKFrost DKUnholy DK

Havoc DHVengeance DH

Balance DruidFeral DruidGuardian Druid
Restoration Druid

Augmentation EvokerDevastation EvokerPreservation Evoker

BM HunterMM HunterSurvival Hunter

Arcane MageFire MageFrost Mage
Brewmaster Monk
Mistweaver MonkWindwalker Monk

Holy PaladinProtection PaladinRetribution Paladin

Discipline Priest
Holy PriestShadow Priest

Assassination RogueOutlaw RogueSubtlety Rogue

Elemental ShamanEnhancement Shaman
Restoration Shaman

Affliction WarlockDemonology WarlockDestruction Warlock

The Resto Druid Journey through DragonflightSeason 1: Early Mythic+ dominance and week 2 raid buffskind ofLuxuriant SoilRejuvenationPhotosynthesisSeason 2: 40 RejuvsPhotosynthesisFlourishLuxuriant SoilFlourishRejuvenationRegrowthGrove GuardiansSeason 3: The Fall of the House of FlourishLuxuriant SoilFlourishGrove GuardiansCat FormGrove GuardiansCat FormDruid TalentsRising Light, Falling Night a six point investmenttwosometimesoneImproved SunfireImproved SunfireSunfireMoonfireSunfireMoonfireIronfurIronfurThick HideUndertuned Spec Nodes

Nourish. It's telling that even in a raid with single target healing checks, this still wasn't close to viable. Competing against Grove Guardians makes it even worse comparatively.

Power of the Archdruid. Our third tier is extremely competitive which leaves Power of the Archdruid looking fairly poor by comparison. It could fit in as an easier to play version of some talents around it if it were slightly stronger.

Invigorate. Invigorate has a lot of anti-synergy with other resto druid abilities that prevent you really making a case for it anywhere. If you extend the Invigorated HoT with Flourish or a similar effect it'll just stop working. You can't get very creative with it.

Were Tier Sets a Success?

2pc: Rejuvenation, Lifebloom, Wild Growth, Efflorescence and Tranquility have a 10% increased crit chance.
4pc: Efflo crits increase the healing of your next Wild Growth by 5%, stacking up to 5 times. Lifebloom crits reduce the cooldown of Nature's Swiftness by 2s.

2pc: Rejuvenation and Lifebloom healing increased by 10%. Regrowth heal over time increased by 50%.
4pc: Flourish increases your HoT tick rate by 40% for an additional 16 seconds after it ends.

Rejuvenation

2pc: You and your Grove Guardians Nourish now heal 2 additional allies at 40% effectiveness.
4pc: Consuming Clearcasting now causes Regrowth to also cast Nourish on a nearby ally at 200% effectiveness.

Grove Guardiansshould notGrove GuardiansThe Blurring of the Resto Druid NicheFlourishFlourishManaRegrowthDragonflight HighlightsThe Rise of CatHealing SarkarethEarly Grove GuardiansGrove GuardiansSmall amounts of borrowed powerThe War Within

A deeper look at mana economy across the board.

A more powerful Flourish button to improve ramp payoff.

A smaller focus on Grove Guardians. They're great in small doses, not big ones.

A look at tertiaries to reduce the amount of power they provide considering their rarity and ability to warp your gearing.

Hero TalentsGrove GuardiansGrove GuardiansCat Form

Comment by KnewOneSo true VoulkComment by TastelikelemonSeason 2 resto druid was a playstyle with which i had extreme amounts of fun to decimate our healing team :D It was quite interesting to play with, as you had moments of heavy mana spending to spread as much as hots as you can pre-Flourish in to following mana "regeneration-preservation mode" as your Regrowths were fully free to low cost for a long time , after which you build up again and hope that Convoke will proc another Flourish which was providing massive amounts of healing with enough mana to satisfy our needs. The current playstyle of resto druid is extremely sad and unrewarding in raiding environment , especially this tier where the other healers are handling the dmg patterns/adds healing way better than us , on top of that the mana issues and the tier set thats mostly useful in M+ makes this spec extremely unappealing to play with atm. I hope next season they address the issues that spec have atm , changes to Luxuriant Soil back to 3% or Abundance back to 20 , buff to Flourish making it once again more appealing , buffing the Grove Guardians in to their initial state or boost to Liveliness talent so the hots are increased by 10% /5%atm/ or overall faster ticking hots , literally any of those changes gona make big improvement towards the right direction.Comment by TectonI've been a resto Druid since the game launched, great write up of the current state of the class.

I do like our new little tree buddies though, more interactivity (i.e. change their spell cast by what form we cast them in or something). It would be far better if they were applying Rejuv and I was doing the active healing than vice versa.Comment by PeacemoonBeen playing Resto Druid myself though the whole expansion (well since launch, but we're talking DF here), and it has been a great ride, however I'm not sure we've ended up in a better positon than we started, sadly. This is a great write up of how it went.

Flourish was a super fun talent and a big payoff - nerfing it to the ground really impacted the whole spec massively. The fact it is an optional choice node off to the side whilst being so core to the Restos playstyle is a design fault of Blizz - it should be front and centre.

Grove Guardians is turning Resto into a pet healer that I'm not overly comfortable with. We now in effect have better 'healing totems' than Shaman do. The pet's HoT doesn't affect our mastery (unless I'm mistaken, but I've tested it), and their healing is difficult to control. Being off the GCD is good, but it was just another button that I didn't want. Keeper of the Grove just looks like its going to double down on this.

Resto Druid has an insane amount of optional talents that most resto Druids don't take, at least in PvE. From Overgrowth to Verdant Infusion, Invigorate and Nourish. If even half of them were useful it would be a keybind nightmare.

Season 3 has been MANA hell, and actually been the worst season to play Resto. To find yourself at 40% mana when the boss is at 70% hp and realise you've done "too much" (without feeling like you've done much at all) is awful. Amalgam's Seventh Spine (trinket) is a huge for raid healing, for anyone reading this.

DPS-wise Resto druid is difficult, because you have to spend so many GCDs setting up your HoTs, you often don't get many to use for damage, which is why Nature's Vigil was so good, and why nerfing it was so sad. Compounded by the Flourish nerf so you can't extend the duration of your HoTs, and thereby give you more space to damage. And again because you're encouraged to use a GCD to ender cat/moonkin before you can even begin dpsing - most restos just stay in human form and do what they can.

The class tree is really bland too, and this is for all specs. Skull bash is very inaccessible. Skills like Sunfire require 2 talents when it should just be a baseline spell. Starsurge too - so many basic spells cluttering the top of the Druid tree, and telling that a lot of people skip all of the capstones. It is about time Convoke and Incarnation was moved to the class tree and not replicated in each spec.

What can I say that's good? The core spells, rejuv, lifebloom, regrowth, wild growth are all fun. The layering of HoTs with our mastery is still a nice mechanic. We can move and cast a lot, and if you can properly build up your HoTs in advance of a difficult segment, the payoff can be really impactful.
What Resto really needs is a dps ability that shifts them into moonkin or cat. Like starsurge shapeshifts you into moonkin when you cast it as part of the spell, you can switch into dps without needing to spend a GCD. Same with cat, some sort of feral lunge. Perhaps make RIP baseline (as it should be) and put that there.Comment by VinceVegaGood article. I very much agree. We went from... too much to oom with one patch.

I do not and probably never will enjoy the treants. It is boring hit and forget gamplay. New flourish feels like &*!@.

I played my resto druid since vanilla BWL... this is the first time i ever honestly thought about dropping the char. I feel... way to restricted.
Oom very fast. Cooldowns are very lackluster. Majority of healing coming from a talent that has no interaction with anything else...

Seriously who actullay enjoys the tree spam playstyle?

Mostly raid and a bit M+ btw. Cannot speak for PvPComment by maca134I hate treantsComment by MongYiiThe article on monk is gonna be like “it sucked for most of the expansion and the class almost died entirely”Comment by eurekalolIdk, I like my tree guys. Yes, they have their flaws - the lack of interaction with our mastery and do they provide too much healing out of our control? Perhaps. They're a fun addition and add spot healing (particularly the off GCD swiftmend) for M+ when it was sorely lacking (I found S2 to be a nightmare when it came to healing, I pretty much refused to do it). M+ is soooo much better thanks that on its own - and obviously the healing the trees provide helps significantly as well not to mention it facilitates catweaving in a way that feels a lot smoother than before.

The play style adjustments only took about 2-3 raids of healing to get used to it. I know heroic raid healing isn't the same difficulty as mythic (tbh I have little interest in mythic raiding), but I regularly parse in the 95-99% range. I'm capable of 2-3 healing most of H Amirdrassil with a raid size of about 26 people via rejuv blanketing and good ramping and having a lot of fun doing so! IMO the biggest downside right now is that mana issues are HORRENDOUS, especially in prolonged fights and require really precise (looking at you, Fyrakk). I'm forced to play Master Shapeshifter in those instances which feels really bad when it takes 2 GCDs to get net 2000 mana back (Moonkin + Wrath (which costs 500 mana)), so I need to figure out when *!@#s calm enough to go do some wrath spams, which sometimes is never, and affects my throughput since I can't take the 5% haste instead. I'm fine playing around mana, but being forced to run the BRH mana trinket and still being the only healer asking for freaking Innervates feels awful. Hopefully the recent tuning helps a bit, but some more changes are likely to be necessary.

Another issue is the class tree, totally agree with Voulk there. That thing is a mess and needs to be looked at again. The spec tree is mostly fine, but the bottom portion feels really heavy in terms of must-have talents in comparison to the top half, which I haven't found to be as much of an issue with other healers or non-healer specs I've tried (I have like 10 toons at 70, I've given most specs a good go!).Comment by DemesseJust make treants cast nourish on focus target and when target is full health, target lowest health in raid. The problem of DF S3 is that we are useless on dummy healing.Comment by Cyrus19I mean I personally like Grove Guardians and the Tier 3 set a lot. I've never wanted to play RDruid before because it was so HoT-Centric but I saw the Tier 3 set and decided to give it a shot this Tier.

3300 IO now. Enjoying it because it's way less HoTs to manage than previous iterations. Nourish clearcasting hits hard and can move a health bar fast. Grove Guardians are great for being able to other things and decided quickly how much healing you want to keep around to take care of stuff while you need to do something else without needing 7 GCDs to do it.

Fine as a once-off, but also a good reminder that Resto Druid is not and should not become a "pet spec".Comment by VekxniI like the grove guardians and the more nature/forest focus for RDruid. I've always felt Balance and to some degree Resto haven't really leaned enough into their masters of the forest lore that makes Druid. I hope they keep Grove Guardians around and keep them relevant.Comment by TolajoI personally really enjoy summons and classes/specs that can summon multiple things, so I actually enjoy the Grove Guardians, but I did vastly prefer the previous tier and the Flourish playstyle, and am sad to see it gone. I'd love to see a marriage between the two, with having multiple Grove Guardians but having them benefit from a massive amount of Rejuvenations and FlourishComment by Tomi89I enjoy the treants!
Can't speak for everyone, but it's first time I enjoyed playing resto druid so much.

Can't agree, nor disagree with all the TWW section as we know very little about the spec for future expansion. There still might be some talents that will be reworked or even pushed as base spells instead of talents. In my oppinion, it's very soon to judge something we don't even know how's gonna work.Comment by reedwandBrilliantly written, thank you!
I thoroughly enjoyed reading that whilst sitting on a mug of tea and knodding along with your words. Season 2 was the height of enjoyment! And I know my fellow RestoDruids would testify to this fact, it was sheer devastation when Flourish was nerfed so heavily and then forced to use treants which like you said has zero synegy, and thats the saddest bit as I don't like it was a restoration druid looking at our tool kit thinking this would be perfect, whilst I love getting tier sets, the 4 set bonus I was not hungry for, I don't run a lot of keys I mainly raid so compared to S2 tier I felt really let down.

I have played Restoration druid since the start of WoW, never waivered and there have been some heavy hits, hard knocks and thrills and everything else so when you said: Fine as a once-off, but also a good reminder that Resto Druid is not and should not become a "pet spec"
Comment by reedwandGood article. I very much agree. We went from... too much to oom with one patch.

I do not and probably never will enjoy the treants. It is boring hit and forget gamplay. New flourish feels like &*!@.

I played my resto druid since vanilla BWL... this is the first time i ever honestly thought about dropping the char. I feel... way to restricted.
Oom very fast. Cooldowns are very lackluster. Majority of healing coming from a talent that has no interaction with anything else...

Seriously who actullay enjoys the tree spam playstyle?

Mostly raid and a bit M+ btw. Cannot speak for PvPComment by WildnightshadeThank you for speaking to the mana economy issues in Raid this tier for R druid.

I raid with my resto druid and other healers; the resto druid raid mini game of mana management really sucks this tier.

My Wish List for Resto Druid:

Add Damage Reduction into our toolkit:
In SL there was the NF (Dreamweaver) tree talent of Chrysalis (10% of over healing received or done remains as a shield on the target up to 10% of the caster's health, lasting for 5 sec). That is a way to add in DR into our existing toolkit. R.Druid needs DR esp in Raid as that is missing from our toolkit.

Change Tranquility from a 8 sec channeled spell to a spell in which we can move and cast e.g. Legion Tranquility: so many raid encounters require movement. Resto Druid (and Holy Priest) have to channel tranquility and hymn; that is antiquated and punishing to those two specs.

Skull Bash is buried in the general druid tree: this is for M+, My interrupt is in the middle of my tree as opposed to my resto shaman's wind shear which is at the very top of my general talent tree.Comment by kyle123xyI prefer Grove Guardians to Flourish. They look cooler. Less need to set up, more independent. They are more thematic, WC3 druids always head treants and they've been in the WoW talents since vanilla, but Flourish is a Legion invention. They match Tree of Life to make me feel more nature themed. And, they are unique as a healing pet; no other healer has healing pets (unless you count shaman's totems).

Flourish, to me, feels like bloat. I'd rather have a passive that extends the duration of HotS, than press a button to do that same thing. This is the reason Resto has 30+ spells...

On that same note... Invigorate is also super dumb. It's basically a slightly different version of Swiftmend... when we could just get a second charge of Swiftmend instead.Comment by faeofwindI agree with just about everything in this write up, but I did want to state that I absolutely am in LOVE with the idea of the Grove Guardians. I think they could use a little adjustment, but I love them and I want my mini trees with me forever. I will also accept flowers. Singing sunflowers come to mind. <3

I generally start out encounters in tree form (Wish I could be in it permanently...just make it optional...give me a glyph? Please? Or ability like dracthyr to toggle back and forth automatically?) AHEM ,so anyway, the amount of times I have had people try to "save me" because the guardian is standing in bad and they see a tree and assume it must be me has been numerous and hilarious.

Also WTB tree form customization. Why wasn't this a thing? STOP MAKING ME SAD, BLIZZARD.

EDIT:
I meant to add that mana this season was infuriating and the buffs came WAY too late.
They also need to just not touch Flourish. Put it back and stop messing with it.
Sunfire can stay as a talent if they give me back Hurricane.Comment by TolajoI agree with just about everything in this write up, but I did want to state that I absolutely am in LOVE with the idea of the Grove Guardians. I think they could use a little adjustment, but I love them and I want my mini trees with me forever. I will also accept flowers. Singing sunflowers come to mind. <3

I generally start out encounters in tree form (Wish I could be in it permanently...just make it optional...give me a glyph? Please? Or ability like dracthyr to toggle back and forth automatically?) AHEM ,so anyway, the amount of times I have had people try to "save me" because the guardian is standing in bad and they see a tree and assume it must be me has been numerous and hilarious.

Also WTB tree form customization. Why wasn't this a thing? STOP MAKING ME SAD, BLIZZARD.

EDIT:
I meant to add that mana this season was infuriating and the buffs came WAY too late.
They also need to just not touch Flourish. Put it back and stop messing with it.
Sunfire can stay as a talent if they give me back Hurricane.Comment by 2391970Honestly I'm really sad at the state of resto druid in raid with the changes for S3. Though things feel great in ranked PvP and dungeons right now (in part design and tuning), the experience in raid is horrid. Even if our healing was doubled, I'd still hate it because this tree form / groove guardian focused design is deeply unpleasant compared to what was once the golden standard of raid healing experiences. It's sad to see that the design team took one of the best feeling raid healers and made it into one of the worst. I'd rather lose power than continue down this design path.

A couple design options I was mulling to help rDruid

Making Groove Guardians a choice node with flourish. This would allow for a choice between a afk/pet heal build and the classic ramps without giving the combination too much power.

The design team needs to give up on Nourish, it's been a dead talent/ability from its inception. No one likes it, no one wants it, stop trying to make it happen.

Scrap the current heroic talent tree for TWW. Try again.