Idea for a New Druid AA (replace apiculture?)

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Woot

Dalayan Adventurer
Wacky idea, but hear me out..

Give druids an AA that is something along the lines of the following:

Barkskin Healing (placeholder name) (3 levels)
- Direct heals cast by the Druid also apply a shield for (X / Y / Z)% of the damage healed. (Complete Heals excluded. Cascading Vim excluded.)

Druid direct heals are extremely weak especially compared to the only other major healer (Cleric) -- this would give druid direct heals a bit more strength, functionality, and synergy with cleric healing without treading on the Cleric's raw healing power. It would also make sense thematically, and make sense as a filler for how their kit works with HoTs. Druids already are a "thinking ahead" type of healer (pre-hotting and managing heals along with their hots) pre-shielding for big damage hits that are about to happen would also make sense for their playstyle as healers.

To go over the heals affected:
Chloroshock is extremely weak but their only quick long range single target heal. It's essentially useless unless it crits, making it unreliable and a gamble as to whether or not it will actually be helpful. Revitalize does mediocre healing and takes a long time to cast, making it difficult to utilize in conjunction with HoTs since both are slow casting (can be easily overwhelmed if you can't keep both the HoTs up and keep casting Revitalize). Circle of Vitality does decent group healing, but very slow cast time and not nearly as powerful as the cleric group heal.

A Druid can easily get overwhelmed if they don't have the time to both use direct heals and keep their HoTs up (all slow casting) at the same time unless they can use Cascading Vim to compensate, which is very situational and generally not reliable to use on a raid to heal a specific person. The direct heals granting a bit of shielding could give them a bit more leeway between casting their HoTs, and help their very weak direct heals get a bit more oomph.

Possible examples for shielding numbers are (10 / 20 / 40)% or (10 / 20 / 30)% let's say.

The Advanced Apiculture AA isn't particularly useful. It's only useful at all outdoors and marginally useful at that. Not really worth all the AAs to spend on it. Perhaps ditch it for making the extremely weak direct healing done by druids stronger and have more useful utility to help bring them a little bit closer to cleric healing via the side-utility of shielding, without treading on the direct healing power of clerics?


Crazy thought I know.. but just wanted to throw it out there.

Thanks!
 
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druid ancient/relic hots arent worth casting in general on raids, tank damage is spiky and hot tics are infrequent so it leads to a lot of overhealing done. Druids already have really strong tools for keeping tanks alive between hibernate and spirit link (idr what its called in SoD sorry). Druids already have arguably stronger single target throughput than shamans in a lot of situations, when shamans healing niche is single target tank healing. Plus it doesnt even consider the mechanical strength of damage absorbs / runes boosting a tanks EHP in a game where the #1 cause of tank deaths is getting 1-banged by a bad round.

the real issue is that hots cast slowly and tick too infrequently to regularly get full value when it comes to tank healing in raids. HoTs in exp kinda own though.
 
What do you mean by spirit link? Vim? Vim is great in groups when you have the luxury of short range limited target healing; it's really the primary saving grace that allows druids to be reliable healers at all in a grouping situation, but not so great (for the same use case) in raids because its healing is all over the place (don't get me wrong, it's great to just pump out some local raid healing to supplement healing on the entire raid --- but not for trying to keep up a tank the same way it is in a group situation), causing you to rely on Chloroshock / Revitalize which in and of themselves are not enough to keep a tank up who is really getting beaten on unless you also have your HoTs up. It's also really not enough to heal an individual group member who is suddenly getting beaten on.

Unfortunately HoTs + Revitalize are both very slow casting and by the time you catch up to be able to get HoTs up along with direct healing, the tank is dead already. Unless a druid has pre - set up their healing with hibernate + hots, they just can't pump enough healing out to keep a tank up on their own, as opposed to a cleric who can by themselves keep a tank up in most situations just by spamming heals. Additionally druids struggle in a group where individual people are losing a lot of health quickly. Unless hibernate is already up, if let's say a mob decides to go for a single caster in your group, revitalize is too slow to cast to prevent them from dieing and chloroshock barely leaves a dent in the health bar unless it crits (causing druids to be nearly useless as healers of a single group in fights that require long range healing)

Despite HoTs ticking at weird times and overhealing, they are still way more mana efficient than trying to spam chloroshock / revitalize on a tank to help keep the tank up (which also usually have similar overhealing issues unless healers happen to be extremely coordinated); HoTs can work along with hibernate and occasional direct heals thrown in to provide decent supplementary healing, saving a cleric mana / saving a tank as they get low health but in terms of by themselves healing a tank on a raid (even against trash) this sort of supplementary healing is kind of the most a druid can do on a tank without assistance from another healer.

Shamans are also in a weird place as "pseudo-pseudo healers" and deserve their own discussion for sure.

It's weird that Clerics are really the only reliable raid healer, and druids can work to heal a non-tank group but not nearly as well as a cleric, or are completely useless in certain situations particularly when one group member suddenly grabs aggro / gets adds on them and needs healing right away and hibernate isn't on your group to save them because you already cast it on the tank group, or when a fight is very spread out and you need to heal group members at too far a distance for anything but chloroshock.
 
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the druid equivalent in SoD is called Natural Balance and I couldnt remember the name of it, really good for instantly bringing a tanks HP up as long as the rest of the group is healthy.

Vim is another spell that isnt worth casting most of the time. Tanks are dying because ancient / relic hot simply arent worth the time / mana spent on them in a lot of raid situations, unless you're casting them during a period of no damage intake. While its true that on a lot of encounters a clerics have enough throughput to keep a tank up by themselves they arent capable of doing it without ooming early which is why you almost always assign multiple healers to a tank. Tank healing simply isnt a one man job in a lot of situations.

If one tick of relic hot gets wasted, relic hot is less mana efficient than revitalize. For ancient hot its 2 ticks. Even if a hot tick doesnt overheal its often not delaying or replacing the need for a direct heal on a tank thats taking high incoming damage or spiky damage. Hots have really good value when incoming damage is relatively low and predictable, which is just a damage profile that doesnt occur much when it comes to healing raid tanks.

Druid group heal sucks really bad but its still good enough for them to get away with solo healing caster group on a lot of encounters (spell ward OP). I'm not really familiar with many (if any) situations in this game where you're forced to quick heal your group to keep them alive because of the extra range but all the quick heals in this game are relatively bad because they're meant as a last resort and if you have to use them you're usually doing something wrong to begin with. Cleric quick heal is the least bad but still a spell you try to avoid using.

Druids have a pretty solid niche in raid healing atm. They arent meant to be as strong as clerics by design, because druids are arguably the strongest non-tank class for non-raid content by a pretty large margin. Utility from ports / track and the ability to DPS better than some dps classes in exp while also healing the group and providing a 40% boost to damage shield damage (damage shield does more than some dps classes do in exp).

TLDR is druid tank healing is fine and absorb shields built into healers are insanely strong mechanically (see disc priest in WoW for the last 12 years). cast revitalize more the spell owns

19 minute 30s zeshan kill, tank healing parse
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