Resto got a ton of changes on the 11.1 PTR. At long last our problematic class tree has evolved into its beautiful final form. You still get to make some interesting choices but you should feel like you are fighting the tree much less. Your pathing nodes often bring value now instead of being completely dead like they sometimes were before. We also get a mini-revamp to our Mastery.
Druid Class Tree 3.0
The biggest change we're getting in 11.1 is a completely revamped class tree. It's definitely worth checking out the talent calculator to see how it all fits together but I want to go through some highlights and talk through how your tree might look in raid and in Mythic+.
Moonkin Form back - Mythic+ DPS Revamp
If you're not very interested in the DPS aspects of Resto Druid then feel free to skip over this section.
梟獸形態 was part of the tree for all of Dragonflight but was then removed in The War Within. Now we get it back, Flap and all. We'll discuss this further below but there's a real push to separate spell-based and cat-based gameplay this patch and giving
梟獸形態 back is part of trying to make spell-based DPS gameplay competitive. In Dragonflight
梟獸形態 was a bit of a trap talent since
獵豹形態 was always significantly more DPS. It gave the illusion of choice without the necessary tuning to make it a real one outside of often paddy AoE scenarios with
召集魂靈. There's a bit of a risk of that happening again. Let's look at the new DPS options in a bit more detail:
- 荒野之環 / 天國之環: This is a significant damage buff to either physical or magical spells.
- Many core damage spells either buffed or nerfed by 5-10%.
- 日炎術 is now one talent point for the full effect instead of two.
- All damage reduced by 20% (note though that you'll gain most of this back via the two Circle talents mentioned above).
The goal here is to offer two clear DPS playstyles and reduce the likelihood that you try and weave through both like current DPS playstyles. If they want to achieve that then
梟獸形態 could use a real stat from Lycara's since a DPS form offering a healing-only stat is problematic (your "balance" DoTs barely increase in damage when you swap forms!). It could also use a single target DPS increase since Cat-based DPS rotations do extremely good single target damage. You don't actually save that much time over a key by spamming
星火術 on 20 mob packs. Personally, Catweaving is such unique gameplay that I don't actually want Blizzard to push us away from it. It is by far the most interesting DPS rotation among healers.
The return of
梟獸形態 does also offer another
狂野衝鋒 option (situationally very good) and Flap also sees rare use.
Quality of Life & New Stuff
There's a bunch of quality of life in the new tree too including:
- 形態流轉 now includes 碎顱猛擊. This means you can interrupt in any form instead of being required to shift to 獵豹形態 first. A major win for especially pug Mythic+ groups. The one downside is that, in tandem with new talent , you might be encouraged to spam the off-GCD 碎顱猛擊 in raid too since it gives you 6% crit for free on a high uptime. Hopefully, that doesn't go live. The talent in general seems prone to encouraging bad gameplay patterns.
- New Talent: 共生關係. A very useful way to keep a squishy target alive by duplicating a portion of your large self healing to them. Think of it as a mini-聖光信標. Accessible and should be good in all content types. Unfortunately, it currently falls off on death which should be changed before the patch goes live. It's very irritating to reapply it every pull.
- Multiple great node movements across the tree. 鋼鐵毛皮 no longer a required pathing node, 百鍊本能 no longer a capstone so much easier to grab, fewer pathing nodes in general.
Sample Raid Build
Sample Mythic+ Build
Resto Mastery Revamp
Another major change for Resto Druid this upcoming patch is a revamp to our mastery. Mastery has always been a good stat but it was difficult to balance since your average HoT count in Mythic+ is always much higher than in raid. This is an attempt to fix that by having it start stronger and then diminish as you add HoTs to the target. This graph compares the two:
The first iteration of the change was only a buff at very low HoT counts but a recent build buffed it substantially and it should now be a net buff in most practical scenarios. This is quite an exciting change.
Tier Set Oddities
The Resto Druid tier set is interesting and should be fairly easy to understand. You get random HoTs through a fight and when they're consumed or expire the target gets one of our baseline HoTs, prioritizing
回春術. Unfortunately it's plagued by two key bugs:
- When 生命之花 blooms on target X, you yourself get the 保險！ buff instead of the target.
- 保險！ doesn't proc off Heal over Time effects which is problematic on a spec like Resto Druid - particularly given this is our specs tier set. This in combination with point one causes 80% of the 保險！ procs to simply go on ourselves. That significantly reduces the real value provided by the set. You can see how disastrous this is in this log:
