Resto Druids and PvP (Specifically Arenas)
 

I rolled druid about 1.5 years ago (post 1.8), with the sole intention of being a healer. Having previously played a priest to 50, I found druid healing significantly different and tough to adapt to, but once I'd gotten used to it I found it equally powerful. At 60 I briefly and frustratingly experimented with Moonkin before going a 31 point Resto build. At this point in time, Resto was undoubtedly the most powerful druid tree for PvP in my opinion, with a few dots to whittle them down while you fairly easily healed and cc'd through any damage they could produce. With the introduction of Swiftmend, this was even more the case, with even naxx geared DPS classes struggling to beat me in duels. Enter TBC:

With the introduction of much higher stamina, higher damage and healing's comparitively small increases, things begin to change. In PvE, Lifebloom added a little to druid healing, which remained pretty equal to other healing classes. In PvP, however, I'm noticing some pretty large discrepancies arose. Take arenas for example; there's a few threads floating around about Tri-healing 5v5 teams that all seem to lack a Resto druid, complemented by their praising of all other healing classes. It just seems that where Resto druids used to have amazing survivability, they now almost completely lack it.

Paladins seem to be the undisputed kings of arenas at the moment, with a huge array of useful abilities. They have survivability in the form of bubble, plate, shields and -damage talents. On top of this they have hugely efficient and short heals, blessings, BoP, HoJ and defensive dispels. You would be hard pressed arguing against one of these being in any reasonable 5v5 team.

I don't claim to be any kind of expert in Shamans, but I know that they bring Earth Shield, mail, shields, NS and 1.5 second heals to the realm of survivability. On top of this they have a wide variety of group buffs, purge, poison/disease removal, useful shocks and the almighty heroism.

Next come Priests; though the PoM nerf did somewhat bring them backwards in terms of survivability, they still have it every 10 seconds, shields, renew, fear, 1.5 second heals and various annoying Disc talents. Add to this a large boost to stamina, shadow resistance, offensive and defensive dispels and you have a reasonable team member.

This brings me to Druids. Now I don't for a second doubt the power of ferals at the moment, but I don't think this should even come into the equation when considering heavy Resto talents and viability. In terms of survivability, Resto druids bring a huge instant heal, quite a few hots, Swiftmend, Barkskin, Bear and Travel Form. Aside from this they have innervate, abolish poison, roots, Cyclone and Bash.

While on paper this may seem somewhat comparable, the harsh reality that I've found is that once people decide to beat on me, I'm more or less finished. Where a pally can bubble, or a priest can shield, PoM and fear, or a shaman can Earth Shield, NS and spam heals, a druid can ns, switfmend, then go bear and wait to die more or less. 1v1 I realise that bash and cyclone come into the equation, as well as entangling roots. However, when 2 or more people begin to attack me, there is essentially nothing i can do to deter them. 3 second heals become far too slow, cooldowns can't come up fast enough and things like barkskin and bear form are just preventing the inevitable. It basically becomes a matter of praying that your hots will somehow outheal their damage, while hoping that your team is somehow killing their paladin/shaman/priest.

As for 1v1, I really couldn't say how other healing classes fair, but where I used to dot them down whilst healing myself, I've since lost one of the dots and have to face much improved stamina.

Aremas are where the problems really begin to rise. On top of the difficulty to heal under fire, you also have to face diminished CC times. This is a big part of the issue I think, in the past druids have avoided damage through CC and running away. This is in comparison to the shields and armour that other healing classes avoid damage through. But in arenas, CC lasts for far less time, especially with the already low cyclone. Moreover, whilst in Bear Form you are totally unable to heal your teammates, where all other healing classes are more able to heal while taking fire.

To me it seems just a bit like in the furor of feral and balance druids crying for increased viability, Resto got the short end of the stick. Please also remember that this doesn't at all apply to PvE healing. AS for solutions, the only thing i can think of is some sort of talent high up in the Resto tree that reduces both physical and magic damage taken for a certain period. 50% for 10 seconds or something. This would address the current issues of druid survivability hinging on forms that you can't heal in, or CC that isn't anywhere near as useful in arenas.

Has anyone else noticed this apparentl uselessness of a Resto druid in arenas/PvP, or is it just me getting bad/old/stupid, because it's honestly one of the few complaints I've ever heard about the druid class, and certainly the only one I've ever posted about.

Ps: Sorry if I rambled on a bit and avoided my point till later on in the post. Also sorry if i missed some spelling or punctuation mistakes - sort of in a rush to get to my lecture on time.

I hear ya. Right now I'm tank spec, but I spec resto for the arena (control of nature, feral charge, and the rest in resto, but no tree of lol). I feel really weak in the arena. Our HT is just begging to get counterspelled (or equivalent). HoTs can work against some teams, but get dispelled, or worse - spellstolen, against good teams. Things are at their worst against a good shaman or mage. Your choice is to get a HT interrupted or get your HoT dispelled or stolen. The best you can do in those situations is rely on your lifebloom bomb to hit for ~1k, which doesn't cut it againts 2k icelances and the like or 5k fireballs.

Then I realized that the most powerful thing I contribute to the group is cyclone. It's an awesome spell that can be abused in the arena, but I don't feel like that's enough...

Oh, tranquility is prety hot now for the arena, if you can afford the mana. it heals a lot now, although you can't always guarantee that they'll let you finish casting.

Here comes some of my visions of things to change.

-- Switch emp. ht with emp. rej. too free up 3 talent points.

-- Reduce barksins timers by 4. 30s cd and 5s lasting time. The lasting time could argue of but it's too loon CD atm.

-- Put some more survivability deep in the resto tree. I.e increased bear form or resists to root/ stun/ snare for travel form.

-- give frenzied regen +healing.


What I want to see is some utility talents in the resto tree like there is in balance (Nature's grace, Moonglow) or feral tree (HotW, Primal tenacity, Nurturing insticts). I can understand that blizzard wants to avoid exploits like the best tank has full resto specc so on and so forth. By putting talents deep in the resto tree and or giving the survivability to resto pvp set this can easaly be avoided.

Basically at the moment I feel like a liability to my team, as if I have to string together consistent brilliant performances before I can justify my spot. Perhaps an Improved Barkskin talent might prove useful, cutting down the cooldown and increasing the damage reduction. At the moment it just seems as if you can't be anything but feral without being a waste of space.

The problem I see is that blizzard painted the selves in to a corner with the new gear and talent speccs. How? Buy putting alot of Str/sta/int and +healing into the feral tree and gears. In my oppinion the feral gear are the best composed pvp gear there are atm. Good offence (str/ agi) with good defence (sta/ +healing)

There is also too many "must" have talents in the resto tree, because blizzard wants to seperate HoT users from HT users. If they had put i.e empowered HT in the same talent as emp. rej. there would of been alot more Trees running around.


One side of the problem here is that the most resto players play mainly PvE and are fine with pvp since they can jump kitten and fool around and the feral/ balance ones are content what they got. Not enough resto pvpers out here to make blizzard listen.

The most overpowered thing that druids bring to an arena team is cyclone. A friend joked to me about not underestimating the power of cyclone, and after fighting against it I agree.

Basically, just toggle and take turns cycloning whoever in the opposite team to avoid DR. You cannot dispell it, and you'll keep 1/5 of their team permanently shut down. As pure healers they might lack the raw throughput of the other classes, but cyclone more than makes up for it.

Cyclone really is quite ridiculous in the arena. You can basically lock one player completely out of the fight for 9-10 seconds (before DR renders them immune). In terms of actually HEALING, I would agree that you're going to be heavily heavily reliant on natures swiftness and regrowth/swiftmend and little else.

Oh, one other thing. My favorite PvP healing trinket for over 1 year, has been Wushoolay's Charm of Nature, the ZG trinket you get from the edge of madness. At level 70 it brings my healing touch cast time down to just a smidge over 2 seconds.

If you still have yours in the bank, consider dusting it off.

One question of mine is weather Subtly works on spellsteal or not. I seriously don't think blizzard would recognize spellsteal as a dispel ;/

These have always been problems in competitive PvP. 1v1 or PUGs with a buddy is a different game entirely.

You have to style your healing much differently than a paladin or a priest, or even a PvE druid. Heals come in big spikes from unexpected places. I always start my fights in stealth to remain untargettable, and appear mid-way through a big heal. Using LoS and kiting are your best friends, you can't play like a paladin/priest and make people ignore you while you pound out heals. Using HT, for obvious reasons, is usually a good way to get your friends killed. Efficiency is for other people. Make up for it by finding ways to drop out of combat and drink.

In terms of talents, a PvE resto spec isn't going to do the same thing for you as a PvP resto spec. Imp. Rejuv/Regrowth are quite key.

IMO, druids have always been poor PvP healers compared to the other options. They lack a 1.5 second cast heal and useful instant cast abilities. When I say useful, I mean things that save you or others right now, not later. Swiftmend does not even count as instant because you have to have another HoT up before. You can't just hit it and save yourself. Barkskin is on too long of a cooldown for what it does. Priests have Martyrdom, Shamans have Eye of the Storm and Earth Shield, Paladins have Concentration Aura. Past this, these classes also have the ability to increase resistance to interrupts on top of all that, and resistance to other negative effects in their healing tree.

Going further, Shamans and Paladins have much higher armor, especially since they can use Shields. Priests have Inner Fire, and when it's up they have better armor. More instants, more damage mitigation, more get out of jail free cards = better healer. Taking it even further, all other classes gain more benefit per talent point spent in healing trees than druids.

I played my druid as a healer for a long time, but after being in the beta for burning crusade, I came to the realization that druid healing wasn't getting any better. I kept watching tree druids struggle to stay alive against one combatant, while one of the other healing classes was healing themselves and others teammates while under fire from 2-3 enemy players. Plus Tree of LOL is completely useless for PvP, or anything for that matter. When we started crunching numbers and proving that balance healed better than restoration, my days as a healing druid were over. I saw the attention that was being paid to feral and the way the new class mechanics were actually working. Good tanks have always been in the same short supply as good healers, so I made the switch. Now if tanking is taken away, I'm going to finish leveling my 45 paladin while I still have time to catch back up with everybody in progression.

So, if you play your druid like a priest in PvP, you're going to get wafflestomped. Should this be news?

Barkskin and anti-interrupt talents are, as a rule, generally garbage in PvP. If you're playing any half-decent team and getting hit it's going to hurt more than you can heal back in three or four seconds. Those nice, juicy, long-cast-time heals are also ripe for an interrupt. Any time you're the target and not in bear form already running away is generally when you're about to die. LOLtreeform is like agreeing to be perma-hamstrung/crippled before the match starts.

Regrowth + Swiftmend has the highest HPS in the game. Burst potential that exceeds that of anything short of LoH/NS. f you up your crit rate with regrowth to over 50%, it gets even better. Against a mediocre/terrible team, this is often more than enough to keep people up while being a solo healer. Against a good team, I wouldn't trust a druid with solo healing, either. But as a healer/CC-er/interrupter, oh yes please.

At 60, when imp regrowth healed for a significant amount of one's health pool, this may well have been the case, but it just isn't at 70 I find. In 10 levels you get 1 upgrade of regrowth, which adds about 500 healing tops to the direct heal - this is nothing compared to the damage upgrades that have been seen. My point is that in an environment where the numbers trying to kill you are greater than 1 and stuns are plentiful, hots just don't cut it. In 5v5 for instance, you can't LOS an entire team unless they're absolutely terrible and completely lack melee. As such, methods of healing that were previously quite effective, no longer are.


Ps: Any half decent group of 3/4 can drop you with ease before swiftmend comes off cooldown anyway.

I've seen many a priest spam flash heals with martyrdom up, same with shamans with earth shield or eye of the storm up while multiple DPSers are attacking them. Most classes with interrupts will agree that 1.5 seconds is too fast to interrupt, and most will complain that they attempt to interrupt those heals and lose their interrupt while failing to succeed at their goal. The healer just keeps spamming uninterrupted. Regrowth, even though it's only 0.5 seconds longer, is just long enough to get interrupted. The 2.0 seconds combined with only 70% chance to not be interrupted, combined with high mana cost makes it the best thing a druid has, but still a crappy heal.

I'm not saying that druids can't throw some match deciding heals, but not when they're the primary healer, or really even the secondary healer. Druids excel at being the 3rd healer, the one that nobody expects. At this point however, if you're not spec'd to DPS well your team may have trouble outputting the needed damage to win.

I think you're in to the one of the core problem of durids. Regrowth. I once in my early youth, beeing a lvl 33 Druid a post on the forums complaining that regrowth was a big waste. It's frist now that i really comprehend what that poster was trying to say. The fact that we're paying a huge load of mana for the looooongest HoT in the game. But since an under siege healing touch will:

A) take a year to cast or
B) get interrupted.

We're forced to waste mana on regrowth "overwrighting" existing regrowth HoT's. This would be a nice place to actually have a 3 stack noextra +healing HoT's. For me that would end up in (372+182+182=736 ) per tick, thats a bit overpowered... and with a 2 stack: (372+182=554) this seems more likely. An other way around would maybe be that if there already is a regrowth with more than x% left not to apply the hot and not "pay" any hot mana. But as I said earlier in the thread these ideas should be explicit for a resto druid.

[edit]
Thinking of it, having to reduce the mana cost for the HoT of regrowth would also solve a issue for Tree of Life