[All specs/General] WoD Alpha Notes for Druids

[Kazistrasz 216]

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/13423478/warlords-of-draenor%E2%84%A2-alpha-patch-notes-4-3-2014

 

Whole lot of stuff in there.

 

Lots of raid buff expansion, many CD's removed, and some other changes. No more Symbiosis.

 

Also, TALENTS!!!

 

They seem kinda lackluster for Resto... maybe that's just me. They'll probably change.

 

http://www.wowdb.com/talent-calculator-wod#s

Edited April 4, 2014 by Kazistrasz

[Krazyito 521]

70% SURIVAL INSITICT ON A 2MIN COOLDOWN, YES PLS TY.

[Enzyte 11]

Oh nooooooes, 

 

Symbiosis has been removed.

 

Other than that, I'm pretty satisfied with the changes so far. The Moment of Clarity talent looks cool, but It's like having a legendary-meta gem...

Edited April 4, 2014 by Enzyte

[Krazyito 521]

Except its only for cast time spells

[Paloro 39]

I'm 100% okay with the removal of symbiosis.  While it was nice to have in certain situations, it was a pain that only 1 target could receive the effect.

[Kazistrasz 216]

I personally love Symbiosis. But, to a degree, I feel like 20-man mythic will remove some of its use. A lot of times it's been used in 10-man settings for things like the extra roar on Malkorok or an extra interrupt in a rotation via Solar Beam to shamans. 

 

They're removing it because of it being most commonly used for defensive cooldowns. I'm kind of mad about this, because I almost always have deterrence from our hunter, and it saves my life constantly.

 

I'm okay with them wanting to remove the defensive cooldowns, but I'd rather they let us keep it and change the spells to be utility-based spells. Some of the defensives are imbalanced anyway (boomkins get a better version of Unending Resolve than the base warlock spell). Demonic Circle: Teleport can be nice for instant-positioning (like breaking prisons on Sha). Leap of Faith can save lives. Cleanse can be really nice if you don't have enough people able to remove diseases in a raid. Fear Ward could be useful if they designed a raid boss that could fear a tank. Mass Dispel can be incredibly useful. So on and so forth.

 

Keep it, but emphasize utility. Also, make it not so ridiculously buggy when trying to switch it or re-apply it.

[Paloro 39]

Sure, symbiosis had some great uses, but it also requires comp specific set-ups.  If I didn't have a warlock in my group, my dps would suffer because I couldn't target swap properly.  If I didn't have a priest on Lei-Shin, I couldn't soak the 2nd intermission static shock.

[Moonglen 4]

GG the actually fun, intriguing playstyle of Resto... No more instant WG, no more Innervate... Hooray being a rejuv whore... Sounds exhilarating =( 

[Kazistrasz 216]

Paloro, the design goal of Mythic and 20-man raiding is that they can assume at that size you have at least one of everything. Removes some of the "comp specific" part of that.

 

Moonglen, what is fun or intriguing about the current healing model as a resto druid?

 

Everything hits super hard in spikes, so you have to keep the raid topped off almost all the time. There are very few fights with simply constant damage where you aren't spending all of your time topped off. At the moment, with only a few exceptions in heroic content, you're either racing to get everyone up after something, which we are less efficient for doing due to HoTs vs. direct heals, or damage is light and other healers either absorb everything or go ahead and direct heal everyone when we put HoTs out.

 

Being a resto druid right now is invaluable when there's sustained, heavy damage, but otherwise garbage and full of heal sniping and overhealing.

 

Why do we need instant WG? Half the time we're using SotF for WG anyway right now. 1.5 seconds becomes closer to half a second with that. They're not taking it away. Not having Innervate will be fine, because we're now going to be balanced around having enough regen to compensate for not having it. We'll have an easier time judging how long until we're flat OoM without having to account for Innervate. Also, if you're not already using Rejuv as your biggest source of healing, you're doing it wrong.

 

We're going to THRIVE in a healing model where not being at full health most of time is the goal, just like we did in Cata.

Edited April 4, 2014 by Kazistrasz

[Tarazet 144]

The changes for Guardians make me believe that Haste will be a more important Rage generator than Critical Strike. It now reduces the GCD as well as the cooldown of Mangle, which becomes more important now that the cooldown of Mangle can't be reset, and we now only get 5 extra Rage from each critical strike. 

 

Meanwhile, the new Mastery is atrocious. It means that every other physical attack is going to be taken to the face with essentially no mitigation, which means unavoidable spike. Even the old Mastery, which was just an armor multiplier, was at least a reliable steady damage reduction, and it typically resulted in Druids taking less damage than any other tanks in heavy physical-damage fights. Besides that, we have a substantial hole to dig out of with the loss of our bonus to Haste and Critical Strike from gear, as well as Agility no longer granting increased critical strike chance. So I imagine that Guardians will continue to avoid Mastery on their gear like the plague.

 

That leaves the logical and likely stat priority as Haste > Crit > Mastery, and the attack priority will essentially be: maintain Faerie Fire (unless you have a plate DPS providing the Physical Vulnerability debuff) > Mangle > maintain Thrash bleed > spam Lacerate every GCD.

[Kazistrasz 216]

The changes for Guardians make me believe that Haste will be a more important Rage generator than Critical Strike. It now reduces the GCD as well as the cooldown of Mangle, which becomes more important now that the cooldown of Mangle can't be reset, and we now only get 5 extra Rage from each critical strike. 

 

Meanwhile, the new Mastery is atrocious. It means that every other physical attack is going to be taken to the face with essentially no mitigation, which means unavoidable spike. Even the old Mastery, which was just an armor multiplier, was at least a reliable steady damage reduction, and it typically resulted in Druids taking less damage than any other tanks in heavy physical-damage fights. Besides that, we have a substantial hole to dig out of with the loss of our bonus to Haste and Critical Strike from gear, as well as Agility no longer granting increased critical strike chance. So I imagine that Guardians will continue to avoid Mastery on their gear like the plague.

 

That leaves the logical and likely stat priority as Haste > Crit > Mastery, and the attack priority will essentially be: maintain Faerie Fire (unless you have a plate DPS providing the Physical Vulnerability debuff) > Mangle > maintain Thrash bleed > spam Lacerate every GCD.

 

The biggest weakness to guardians are their susceptibility to a string of bad RNG due to avoidance and inability to mitigate magic damage. The new mastery will combat the RNG-screw by taking chunks out of hits when they do happen, though it does nothing for magic damage.

 

I'd like to see them go back to something like the Cataclysm mastery, but make the shield absorb all forms of damage.

 

The relative values of haste and crit will not be determinable meaningfully until we get into beta where things are closer to being finally balanced. The odds of some part of everything we've read about new mechanics changing is pretty likely. Crits may only give 5 with the new mechanics, but it triggers when you dodge or crit with anything but a bleed. not saying it won't be devalued, but until we're in a reliably close to final version of WoD mechanics we can't say one way or the other with any certainty which stat will be the most valuable.