Resto Druid picks up a few new talents in 10.1.7 and they're both very interesting. Let's dig in.
It's been quite a long time now since we were last able to summon treants as Resto. I'm very happy to have them back in their new form. Here's how they work.
- You get 3 Treant charges, they last 15 seconds and have a 20s recharge time. You can have multiple out at once.
- When summoned they'll immediately cast Prompte guérison on your target and during the same "GCD" cast Croissance sauvage (if you're talented into Wild Synthesis). They'll spend the rest of their duration spamming their own version of Nourrir on random injured allies. There's no priority for lowest health allies (known as smart healing).
- They cast their own versions of the spells and they don't benefit from any of our other talents. You won't get an extra treant wild growth target from Croissance sauvage améliorée, nor will their Prompte guérison target get a Soins du bosquet HoT and so forth. Note that the Nourish casts are functionally similar to the resto version and get triple benefit from our mastery and 9x benefit from hitting a target with Lifebloom (via Floraison harmonieuse).
- The Croissance sauvage they cast doesn't give you a mastery stack (so your heals won't do more on targets that have a "Tree Croissance sauvage") however the Tree Wild growth will benefit from any HoTs you have on the target.
- They are currently off the global cooldown, which means you can cast them at the same time as other spells. They do have a mini 0.25s cooldown on casting Grove Guardians again so it'll take you a second to get out all three if that's your strategy for a fight.
Thematically these are really fun, even if they're a little light on interaction with the rest of our kit. You're effectively just casting these whenever you need healing and it's the package that's interesting rather than the mechanics. Note that the Treant summon is actually targeted which means it's also an off-GCD spot heal on an ally of your choice. Expect it to heal for ~25-30k with decent gear. Remember that you can drop three of these within a second for a 75-100k total heal on a target - in addition to whichever of your own spells you're casting at the same time.
So, how strong are Grove Guardians?Resto Druid has some of the strongest tier 3 talents in the game, but our middle tier 2 section has some really weak stuff like
Reviviscence that we often take just for pathing. Grove Guardians has a small opportunity cost. If you can get 4-7% healing from them over a fight then you're quite happy. While they remain off the GCD, and I expect them to stay this way, this is an easy choice and they should match the incoming healing aura nerf. Let's look at some quick numbers:
- With decent gear a tree will cast a Prompte guérison, Croissance sauvage and 9-10 Nourrir casts (depending on your haste).
- These are a bit weaker than our versions of the spells, so you can expect about 250k raw healing from each Treant.
They're not going to revolutionize your healing but they justify the talent point investment and you'll get 13-14k raw HPS from the two points. You can drop them one at a time on rot, or all three at once to counter burst. Dropping them while you have a lot of other hots out will also supercharge their healing since their Nourish casts are getting triple benefit.
These are unique, powerful and an interesting addition to the spec.Takes the place of Draught of Deep Focus.I think Master Shapeshifter is a good addition to the tree, even if it doesn't see immediate play. It gives us an incentive to use more forms which is a positive and the numbers on it are at least reasonable (it's about a ~9% DPS increase single target) but it has a few keys issues that might make it a difficult immediate choice:
- It shares a choice node with Cycle de la vie et la mort. It's more single target damage than Circle but less overall damage through a dungeon. Circle can also be useful for short duration healing checks whereas Master Shapeshifter just saves you mana.
- Any possible raid use is hampered by Rashok's Molten Heart existing and taking care of most mana issues this tier.
- The current raid playstyle doesn't have a ton of spare GCDs to be casting Bear or Forme de félin for mana. This could change in future though. You also run into an issue where fights that allow a lot of downtime for forms are already fairly easy on mana.
Notably if you
Convoquer les esprits in
Forme de félin, every
Morsure féroce it casts will give you the full 10k mana. This is competitive enough that you can take it in Mythic+ if you want to trade a bit of AoE for a bit of single target damage, or if you don't enjoy
Cycle de la vie et la mort.
Other Changes
The rarely used
Étreinte du rêve talent is now a one pointer (down from two) and it's healing has been reduced by 20%. Now note here that it's 20% weaker than the old
two point investment. That means it's actually 60%
stronger than investing just one talent point in here previously. This is a particularly important change for
Photosynthèse pathing. In 10.1.5 we either had to take
Cycle de la vie et la mort, which is very strong but has some drawbacks, or Draught of Deep Focus which was functionally useless. While Circle will still be a good pick, we have another decent alternative now in
Étreinte du rêve.
-6% Healing
This is what they call an "aura nerf" (a 6% reduction to the healing of all of our spells). I guess you can consider this the price of the talent adjustments which are all very favorable. Grove Guardians are likely to see more changes before release but if the patch went live tomorrow we'd consider this package of changes a decent net buff - despite this aura nerf. This is maybe an opportunity though to take power out of the problematic Luxuriant Soil instead of the spec as a whole. That also wouldn't affect Mythic+ where Resto Druid is a bit less dominant than in raid.
Prospective 10.1.7 Talent Trees
Raid
You'll still have a few decisions to make here.
Floraison printanière and
Reforestation offer different healing strengths and can be swapped between.
Cycle de la vie et la mort will also continue to see some play as an alternative to the new one point
Étreinte du rêve.
Mythic+
In Mythic+ Grove Guardians remain strong but the alternatives (like
Floraison harmonieuse) are also better than they are in raid so the price is higher. Fortunately dropping 3 to counter a healing check is so strong that you'll happily include them in every build:
