The druid resto tree: she's not broken, she's just a baby

Though I've been trying to keep myself spoiler free when it comes to the story of Cataclysm, one thing I have not denied myself is news on the mechanics of the game and how those will be changing. New spells, changes to the professions, changes to the stats, etc--I have been keeping up with all of these changes, mostly because I want to be prepared when Cataclysm drops to make the best decisions and not spend my time undoing or regretting a bad decision I made due to lack of information. It was only through the reflection brought on by this news hunt that I decided that my inevitable Worgen alt would be a rogue (Before that choice, I had considered a mage, warrior, and hunter, but it was upon reviewing the talents and ability distributions, as well as the abilities themselves, and some personal reflection on why I enjoy playing my druid, that I decided on the rogue.)

But there is a darker side to that news hunt, and that darker side is that we see classes in the middle of the great balancing act that is game design. We grow attached to abilities or talents that never make it to the live servers, or we languish in worry as we see that our class just isn't doing well in the design process. That latter point is affecting us resto druids on the beta right now. The comments I've seen from druids on the beta trying out resto healing consistently say that it needs work, and now the math has shown that our mastery bonus is the worst thing since pre-nerf Oculus. It's fair to say that this isn't a good time for resto druids, and that has lead to a lot of worrying on the part of the druid community. Will it be fun to heal in Cataclysm? Will mastery, this new and exciting stat, be of any use to us? Will we all just roll/switch to shamans/priests/paladins when we find out that we can't really heal anymore?

I used to worry about these kinds of things, but I now realize that it's better to think of resto druids on the beta as a work in progress, rather than a broken class that Blizzard needs to fix. After all, we're going to go through quite a shift in game design when Cataclysm comes out, and with Blizzard actually trying to keep all of the classes balanced, it can't be easy designing us druids to fit that philosophy, so I'm happy to not cry foul until a week or two before the game ships.

Let me elaborate on that point about game balance. Back in the day (I'm a player who grew up during vanilla WoW but came of age in Burning Crusade), the game was much less balanced than it is now. Once upon a time, warriors were the class that could tank, and any class that could heal was expected to do so (they couldn't do much of anything else; the game just wasn't designed to support them doing so). To put it simply, Blizzard didn't really care all that much about the classes being on par with one another. This mentality allowed the classes to evolve in their own special way, since they Blizzard wasn't all that worried about balancing them, and each class gained a unique feel to it. However, as the expansions went on, Blizzard started to care more about class balance, to the point where Wrath of the Lich King has been the most successful class balance in WoW history.

Of course, by the time Wrath rolled around, the classes had all developed their own unique feel to how they play. We druids, for example, specialize in healing with HoTs (heal-over-time spells) and tanking by absorbing damage, rather than avoiding it (this was especially true in Burning Crusade). This worked fine in Wrath of the Lich King, where the rapid damage spikes of raid bosses and our HoTs somehow worked well to make us good healers without us being overpowered (to my knowledge). However, come Cataclysm, that damage model will change. When Cataclysm rolls around, damage will be much more consistent, and healing won't be a race to top off every player's health bar. Healing will be more about using the right spell at the right time than using your most powerful spell as quickly as possible. Because of this, players will spend more time with their health below the maximum.

In an environment like this, HoTs would have dominated. The biggest weakness of our HoTs right now is that players are likely to snipe our healing by healing a target to full health before our HoT has run its duration, leading to wasted mana (though that was never really an issue). In a world where players won't be healed to full health immediately after they take damage, this would not have been the case. Our HoTs would have been able to do much more healing than they can now simply because players will be at less-than-full health more often, giving our HoTs ridiculous mana efficiency. After all, their current mana costs are balanced around the idea of them not healing for the full amount because of other healers bringing our targets to full health almost immediately. If those mana costs stayed the same while HoTs were able to heal for much more, they would have been ridiculously mana-efficient.

Of course, in a world where mana is supposed to matter and where Blizzard wants us using most of our spells, this just couldn't be. They would need to balance us around the ridiculous efficiency of our HoT's, making our direct heals much less appealing and effectively gimping us when we needed to use them to add extra healing to our style, like when we are the only healers in a five-man or when we are tank healing and our HoTs aren't doing enough. We would have been stuck in a style reminiscent of Tree of Life healing circa early Burning Crusade, when Tree of Life limited us to casting heal over time spells, meaning we could never use our only pure direct heal at the time, Healing Touch. It was this limitation that lead to the creation of the Dreamstate build, which forewent Tree of Life in favor of buffing Healing Touch. This was a viable build in heroics, where our HoTs might not have been enough to heal everyone there, but it petered out in raiding once the efficiency of Tree of Life HoT healing was revealed.

But I digress. We have been a HoT-centric class ever since Burning Crusade, and that needs to change in Cataclysm for us to remain balanced with the four other healers. In order to do that, Blizzard needs to effectively rebuild the druid class from scratch, taking our old abilities and reworking them to fill new niches, allowing us to retain some of what makes us unique (our HoTs) while still allowing us to fit into their new philosophy of healing design without being overpowered. Blizzard really had to overhaul our class to make us fit into this new game design, so it doesn't surprise me that they haven't perfected us yet. And considering everything else they have to do on the beta, I'm going to be patient as I wait to see what they do to make us good again.

In other words, the druid's resto tree and resto playstyle as they stand in beta aren't a failure, or a disappointment, or a sign that Blizzard isn't giving the same level of attention to us as they are to the other classes; they're just an indication of just how much work Blizzard has to put into designing it. While all of the other trees started mature and didn't need to change too much, Blizzard had less to work with when it came to designing the resto tree, so our tree is, if you will, younger than the rest. It isn't broken; it's just a baby.