Sunday, January 2, 2011

I like the new resto design

Druids love to hate the new design of restoration druids. For example:
Memo to angry boomchickens: Take a look at the resto community – they complained so much that Blizzard KILLED THEIR FORM (almost) ENTIRELY. Is that what you want? I didn’t think so. Go with the flow, take what your given, and Blizzard will show you love when they’re good and ready, AKA soon (trademark Blizzard, 2004-2010).

If you ask me, restoration druids got a tremendous overhaul and improvement in Cataclysm. Let me count some ways:
  1. The new form looks awesome. I never liked the rotten brocolli. It looks wimpy and silly, and generally not a character that is going to take down a dragon. Additionally, I like that you now see a little bit of your gear when you shift into tree form. I might even shift into tree forrm for some boss screenshots without everyone wondering which tree is Ohken.
  2. I like shapeshifting. I like how in lowbie dungeons when you are leveling, it can actually make sense to shift out of a dps form and heal a little. It can make sense to shift to bear and hold aggro for a few seconds. That mostly goes away in raids, the main exception being that bear tanks can switch to cat form to do a little bit more dps. Now there's a second exception: restoration druids shift like crazy. I love it.
  3. I like cooldowns. When approaching a difficult fight, one of the things a restoration druid does is decide when to use tree of life and tranquility. It adds an additional aspect to the fight.
  4. Healing touch is fast enough to be useful now. A three second cast is way too slow, but now it's two seconds base, and that's just fine.
  5. There's a good balance of healing spells for speed, throughput, and efficiency. For example, Rejuv and healing touch are efficient if and only if they don't overheal, but otherwise they'll run you out of mana fast.
  6. We can dps. I understand that pure dps classes should be the ones rocking the charts. However, it's reasonable that healers can do 20% of the damage a dps class does, and nowadays we can. People scoff at this, but think about a fight like Saurfang, where the soft enrage does exponentially more damage as the fight goes on. Or, just think how many first kills involve three raid members standing, or the enrage timer 5 seconds from going off. A little extra dps is nothing to scoff at.
I guess you could sum all this up by saying I like having decisions to make. How could anyone really want to go back to rejuv blanketing? Perhaps they just think the new design is too complicated?

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