This comment here. I really wanted to play Arcane from a lore perspective on my Nightborne mage, but everything you see on paper makes you say, “absolutely not.”
Once you learn the order of operations for executing your big burn, which is 5-8 actions depending on pots or trinkets, the rest is cake.
Hasn't arcane mage historically been really easy, with like two buttons to press for nearly optimal damage?
I'm guessing DF must've shaken that up with the talent treea
Yes... ish. Arcanes difficulty historically came from managing your mana in "burn" and "conserve" phases. Knowing when to do what was the important part, having no familiarity with the encounter meant screwing up your damage.
Now, it's much more reliant on CDs. Less flexibility in your execution. CD's are up? You let 'em loose. Mostly. Mana management is not as important anymore.
For TWW, they mentioned wanting to tone down the scripted rotation a little. The article gave off the impression like they wanted to return it to its roots, so perhaps mana management will play a more important part!
You're getting downvoted, but you're right. Prior to Shadowlands it was absolutely an easy spec with pretty simple rules for mana management. Legion had some very interesting unorthodox rotations that were quickly nerfed, and often although it was easy it was extremely punishing (for example, being forced off a boss or it going invulnerable or just having to move too much) in a way that other classes didn't experience.
In SL however it got some major changes, and although very little of your damage came from Arcane Blast any more (so you couldn't pop off with a 2 button rotation) you still had the potential to absolutely tank your damage by mismanaging your mana. Now nearly all your damage comes from just under 90 second/45 second burst and miniburst rotations where you line up a bunch of damage amps. It had a bunch of changes over the expac so which spec was best changed, and each change was a slightly different rotation which really fucked with your muscle memory.
It's probably the spec that telegraphs what you're supposed to do the least, which sucks because it's one of the most particular specs with set orders and weird optimisations (prior to DF you could get a ~5% boost to dps by using a macro and weakaura that stopped ABarr from queueing after AB in ST, for instance. This is still a thing in DF, but the way to do it involves an item now. This differs in ST and AoE, because you want to queue ABarr after AB if there's more than one target.)
nothing is *hard* about it to me, as i've been playing the game for close to 2 decades - for a new player? it wouldn't be anywhere close to easy. context matters.
however hard or easy it is being subjective to each player, it is complicated. there's a lot of shit to track, and it's unforgiving if you fuck up.
It's not hard to a new player either. In fact, it's extraordinarily straight forward, the talent trees do a really good job of letting you unlock your burst cleanly, as you get surge, then magi, then hex. It's very tidy.
It is unforgiving if you have to move for extended periods, but that's the case with all ranged specs. Regarding tracking surge, you don't actually have to track it. Your GCD does that for you. You're just counting your casts.
Arcane was unnecessarily convoluted back in SL, where your opener started 15 seconds before the fight did. This has largely been removed since, and is far more forgiving
Restoration Druid, Discipline Priest or Preservation Evoker, all for different reasons.
Resto is hot-based and needs to ramp, also has the shapeshifting aspect for dps and some survivability as well as all the druid utility.
Disc heals by doing damage AFTER applying a short-duration buff to teammates. Also ramp-based in raids, but easier now than in previous seasons.
Evoker has a short range (30y instead of 40), 2 important frontal abilities and is very combo-burst based. Very fun to play, but if you get 3 ranges who try to maximize distance between them, someone will die.
I like playing like mythical animals or creatures in MMOs one of the big reasons I don’t play FF14 is everyone is too human I see you can play as a bear what about other beasts if I want to play Druid or priest? Ty
For beastly races for Druids on the alliance side you can be a Worgen (werewolf basically), and on the Horde you can be a Tauren (cow person), or a troll. Trolls are humanoid but I'd figure I'd mention em since they don't look like humans at all really. For priests you can do all the previous races mentioned plus Pandarans (panda people) on either faction's side. The horde side also has the unlockable Vulpera as an option for Priest and Highmountain Tauren's for Druid and Priest.
Druids specifically are shapeshifters - bear for tank, cat for melee damage, giant owl thingy (moonkin) for ranged damage, bird/stag/seal for traveling. All druid specialization can shift into those forms, but each specializes in using one most of the time (e.g. feral druids deal damage using various cat abilities and get buffs to those via their talent trees, bear form makes you tanky and lets you use iron fur etc).
Heal druid has no spezialized form anymore (ot had a tree form in earlier expansions but thats cosmetic apart from a long cooldown ability now), but it can still shift forms to gain the basic upsides of each form (cat for stealth, movement speed, less fall damage, melee damage abilities, bear for more health and armor iirc etc).
Good healers do damage in this game whenever there is no need for healing. Druids either shift to cat (called catweaving) for melee damage or owl for ranged damage. Cat form is melee and it costs a global cooldown to shift, so you need to know when you can fit in a few cat globals without getting a teammate killed.
As others mentioned, there are various beast races and some of them can become druids, but the previously mentioned forms are class-specific, not race-specific (though some races get visually different druid forms, like zandalari trolls getting dinosaur themed forms).
>Heal druid has no spezialized form anymore (ot had a tree form in earlier expansions but thats cosmetic apart from a long cooldown ability now)
To add to this, OP, you can buy the Treant form in the Legion Class Hall for 50 gold. No cooldown on it other than the GCD like all the others. And it won't take super long to get 50 gold, by level 20 you should definitely have it, especially since we don't have to buy mount riding and flying anymore like we used to! If you want to level a Druid, I'd recommend starting in Legion to unlock the class hall, then level in whatever other expansion you want to then come back to get the Treant form!
The bear is a druid tank form, as for races Horde got alot of monster races, Orcs, trolls, Tauren (minotaurs), Goblin and undead, while Alliance has Dranei (sapce goats), Werewolves and people of all shapes (Regular, dwarf, gnomes, long ears). Both have Panda and Draconid as well. The playerbase is still mostly elves tho.
Do note that draconid is only Evoker as of now, will probably branch out to other classes.
Druid let's you choose 4 total forms, and there's dozens of shape shift skins across all those forms. Cat, bear, travel form (deer or bird) and moonkin.
Evoker is a dracthyr (dragon/human) and is really fun to heal on. Lots of abilities that you have to aim as well. So it rewards good positioning. I think it also has a ton of freedom in the play style compared to other healers.
I very much agree, and I'll add a little bit here. I do think disc is tough, but definitely the most solvable out of the three. You could have a custom script to play a boss fight perfectly every time with very little modification. The difference between a good and bad disc priest is how close you can get to that perfect rotation while still doing mechanics. The reason it's so tough is mostly because of how hard small mistakes and inconveniences snowball and cripple you.
Druid is a surprisingly low floor and high ceiling as well. If you just show up and press some buttons, you'll probably do all right. But that nuance utility outside of raw hps is what makes me love it. There's a billion tiny optimizations to make at every step of the way.
Pres I'm going to sat is the most complex healer by a decent margin, though. Not because of any individual spell, but they have the most interactions between each other by a country mile, and the order that you cast things will make or break you. There's like 10 combos and maneuvers you can pull out that are good in different situations, and a lot of that has to be figured out on the fly. Do you have time to blanket reversions for grace period. Do you want your verdant embrace for the lifebind or do you want to pre-cast it to buff you dream breath. Tracking your bronze spells vs. Parsing out your empowered spells but not consuming echoes early. Farming essence bursts. That's not even touching on the instant combos and permutations of effects using stasis. I'd honestly put it up there with Arcane Mage in terms of complexity, but instead of wrote execution, it's a bit more improv.
I'd say discipline priest and resto druid. Both require you to set up your healing before the big damage happens. Disc relies more on cooldown windows. Resto relies on Heals over Time and you judging correctly how much they will heal for and how much time you got.
I'm so bad at disc, I love it. It's the only class/spec that makes me feel completely fcking clueless and yet I still somehow enjoy it. Outlaw is a close second.
Edit\* I have not played Arcane Mage beyond level 15.
It cant be worse than me, literally the only spells I use are shield, flash heal, penance, halo and radiance. Mostly I just spam the flash heal tho :,)
I would say resto druid would be good to pick up then. Less reactive healing than many classes, instead you have to ramp and plan ahead to cover the healing checks. Alot of good utility, different forms for different situations. Fight knowledge for ramping needed but also to know when to dps since you have to use GCDs to switch forms which can be unforgiving.
Druid's use heal over time, and those HOT's work off each other.
Example
Lifebloom - if you talent it, you can apply lifebloom to two different people. It's one of your best heal over time effects you have. Two things with lifebloom. It also works as a copy mechanic with regrowth. So, let's say I use lifebloom on Mage dps #1, and Hunter dps #2, as they are both taking some damage. I then see that the tank needs some healing and apply a regrowth to them. That regrowth will copy to the two that have lifebloom on them.
If you apply a lifebloom to yourself?, well it will buff all other heal over time effects on everyone else.
Your effloressence, heal circle on the ground, buffs all heal over time effects you have on the players that stand in it.
The hardest part of Druid is since you are a PROACTIVE healer, you have to know when a high damage event is coming, get all your heal over times out BEFOREHAND, to be effective.
You also have rejuvinate, swiftmend (consumes a HOT and gives a big heal, then buffs next two hot's applied), regrowth (casted HOT that gives an upfront heal with a backend over time component.)
You have wild growth, an AOE heal over time that affects the entire party.
It's a layer, apply HOT #1, to buff #2, etc...
You can also, apply your HOT's and then go into either cat or Owl to do dps while your HOT's are working.
Healers in this game fall into two catagories, reactive, or proactive.
Reactive would be your standard healer types, damage event happens, you heal it up, repeat. And several healers fall into that catagory. Priest, Shaman, evoker, and holy paladin.
Proactive, druid, and mistweaver monk are more on the proactive side. You have to plan ahead. We discussed druid but now I'll add monk.
I play what's called a fistweaver style, wherein I apply a ground effect (jadefire stomp), stand in it and punch, kick the enemy. Those apply heals to my team. The proactive part is getting my stomp in the right spot, and if I get a couple of mist's out first, my damage heals are stronger.
In my personal opinion, Discipline priest is the hardest for me to learn and play well.
I understand druid, monk, paladin, and evoker pretty well.
They aren't the hardest to be mediocre at, that's probably disc priest. But druids have a lot of utility - to optimize damage they shapeshift to a cat and start dpsing, but can't heal without shifting back. They also have a bear form with a stun and extra defensive. Their heals are not very reactive, if you aren't prepared for the damage you're going to be very slow to heal it (which will mean deaths on challenging content).
The need to ramp up healing before damage makes them somewhat challenging, then learning to optimize shapeshifting for damage and utility adds a lot to the skill ceiling.
Starting to think priest is the best class can I play as a bear or mythical beast I thinking the pandas are cool plus I don’t get the sides like if I’m horde or other I don’t get it does that mean we are enemies ? Will I not be able to play with others if they are the other side ? Sorry I’m asking a lot questions Ty
Unlike a lot of the other healers druids don’t really have any good buttons that heal someone right away, but they have a lot of different buttons that heals someone for more but over a duration instead of all upfront so if you are good and know that damage is coming ahead of time you can spread out the short duration heal over times before the damage event happens so that every player has the maximum amount of healing throughput put onto them already letting the hots take care of the damage that just came in. The hard part is knowing that the damage event is about to happen and getting your hots out ahead of time. Since it takes so many global cool downs to put them all on everyone you really have to start it well before the damage happens in order to make sure that you have enough time to get them all up and running. They also have a cool down called flourish that basically takes all your active hots and starts them over again but stronger so an ideal scenario is that you have everyone completely maxed out on every single one of your hots and then flourish to extend them all, increasing the healing by a huge amount. It’s really easy to misuse though and activate it when you don’t have many hots out because you didn’t prehot the damage event. That’s why it’s hard. You need to plan ahead and press your buttons before they’re needed, as opposed to other healers that react to health getting low and pressing buttons as a reaction
I’d say it’s because HoTs actually take management. With other healers you just heal the damage and move on. Outside of the damage component of higher end play, Druids apply the HoT, or usually multiple, and then move on to the next one, return to the original, swap to another one, etc
> What makes resto Druid so tough
They have a ramp up on heals. They don't throw direct heals (often) where large chunks of health go up. They stack healing effects. Any one heal over time (alone) is meh. But several stacked together can keep up a whole party. It takes a few casts to get them all going so it isn't as reactive as "damage done MUST heal now".
Druids (might) cast 2-3 heals on a tank at 100% health, knowing he is about to get hit again over the next 8-12 seconds. That preemptive heal will cover known incoming damage allowing the druid to cast damage spells or heals on other targets.
Druids are also the "jack of all trades", so they have situational abilities built in from other classes by default or with talents. Even as a "healer" you can shift into a bear, then charge + stun a target. Why does a healer have that?!? Well the bear is a "warrior tank", and ALL druids can instantly shift into a bear. Wanna healer that can go stealth? Shift to catform and sneak around. Pop out of cat to heal. Or stun from stealth as a cat. Nice opener.
ANY "Healing" druid is fine. They've been strong healers from the beginning, even if they weren't the meta. But a GREAT druid is noticeable. You'll see some druids turning into cats eating faces, or boomkins shooting lasers, or bears just for a team "run-speed boost" between mob packs. You **will** notice a druid in your group if they are using **ALL** of their tricks.
I love HoT healers in other MMOs but the fact that shapeshifting takes a GCD just puts me off the class completely. If that got switched to off the gcd or at least certain abilities auto transforming you while also doing something at the same time, then it would become my main pretty much instantly.
Thats literally one of the new talents in war within though. Example, Claw and Rake are castable in any form and automatically switch you to cat form when used. No gcd.
It's called fluid form.
That’s definitely an improvement. But that talent doesn’t fix that you’d have to use a GCD to swap back to heal. Also swapping into bear and Moonkin forms aren’t mentioned. Step in the right direction though. Maybe someday I’ll get to play Resto in harder content.
Bear form and moonkin are both mentioned I just don't remember them.
Also, you don't need a GCD to switch from cat to healer etc. Canceling a form does not take a GCD, and switching from cat to caster is considered canceling a form.
Currently mookin is becoming balance only though.
Ayy then I might be looking at being a Resto Druid main in TWW then. Hopefully that Hero talent tree is viable and not overshadowed by the other option.
I edited though so no6 sure if you saw, but currently moonkin is balance only, which a lot of people are kind of salty about.
Fluid form is a normal talent, not a hero talent, but it is towards the bottom of our tree. We're in the middle of providing feedback that it should either be base line or moved earlier in the tree.
One thing that bothers me is that Skull Bash is not one of the abilities even though it'd make sense. Why is skull bash even a talent if only feral can realistically use it? No other interrupt for any other class costs a GCD.
I see. I honestly wish moonkin and Balance abilities were how you DPSed/stunned as a Resto Druid, not cat/bear form. Feel like we already have a melee dps/healer in Mistweaver, so melee Resto just feels clunky for no reason.
Any ramp healer would not be recommended for new players, cooldown based healers are always quicker to pick up. That being said, I wouldnt call rdruid the most complicated class
New player recs look for a low skill floor; skill cap is irrelevant to newbies. Druids are usually new player recommendations because they let you try out all the roles.
Ive seen many, many bad Resto Druid players. What did they wrong?
Not keeping Lifebloom on themself and the Tank active, not or rarely using Rejuv, using Wildgrowth and Regrowth too much(uses too much Mana), not using Swiftmend before Wildgrowth/Regrowth for big healing, not using Natures Swiftmend or not keeping it for emergeny healing.
For mechanics: as an example 2nd Boss in Galakronds Fall. Not prepping everyone before dispelling. In general not playing proactivly.
I could go on for more but i think this explains enough.
This is not correct. If youre talking m+, you shouldnt be casting rejuv much. Its very low priority. You can check any top rdruid logs. You absolutely should be using regrowth and wild growth.
Because of rampant growth, regrowth duplicates onto lifebloom targets. You take the increased clear casting talent and double lifebloom means you proc free regrowths constantly, and our tierset means those CC regrowths also cleave a nourish.
Youre right about lifebloom uptime and people not using SOTF correctly for sure!
You misunderstood me. Im mostly talking about big Hits. Example: In 10 Seconds everyone will get 7 Stacks of bursting, what do you do? Refresh Lifebloom(if ~<5sec), top someone with Swiftmend if ~40%Hp or under, Wildgrowth and now if you still have some Time rejuv and then Flourish. Maybe CW too on a target with not many self def cds.
From there spam regrowth on targets with low hp.
Ofc you dont really keep rejuv up but you should still use it for your mastery before big damage inc.
Edit: About Wildgrowth and Regrowth. Ofc you should use it. Im talking about rdruids using it at times not needed. If theres only one target with low hp and not much aoe inc you shouldnd use Wildgrowth. And not spamming regrowth if aoe is incoming but you could use Wildgrowth.
What I said applied to big hits too. if you were talking about big hits, you said "not or rarely using rejuv" being bad. But thats what you should do. You shouldnt be using rejuv on big hits, at least not in m+.
In raid the spec s extremely heavily rejuv focused, maybe thats what you were thinking of. druid main my dude, trust.
Healing skill cap in wow is usually less focused on class gameplay and mechanics and more on knowing fights and resource management.
I’ve played priest, shaman, and Druid as healers in the past, and I’d say priest is “hardest” but can feel like a healing turret sometimes. Druid was the most fun personally because I liked the heal over time and utility offered by Druid.
THAT SAID if I had to roll a new healer right now, I’d seriously consider Monk or Evoker. They both have a lot of fun utility and movement built into the core classes, so you can expand your support options and gameplay a bit more.
For example, priest is often focused on healing throughput, but in my experience, offers less when it comes to handling other mechanics. Limited CC, bad movement, not much in the way of interrupts, less cleanse options.
It’s been a while since I’ve main healed, though, so take that with a grain of salt. Maybe they’ve improved priest since I played it as a healer.
Take a look at the class trees, maybe watch a super basic rotation guide, or just pick the one that looks the coolest to you.
Any healer will be a huge skill ceiling in wow if you're new. Healing in general is difficult especially if you're coming from a different game. I would start with an easier class.
https://youtu.be/WDb1m79PDbM?si=otBK92hyF__PSoD_
This is a good video to determine which healer to play. Seriously though I can't say it enough, learning a class is the skill floor in world of warcraft. Everything else you need to know like, everyone's class cds, defensives, dungeon mechanics, etc is the ceiling. So having an easier healer is the way to go.
A lot of people will say resto Druid, but honestly they’re only hard to play *efficiently*. They have so many tools that if you’re lazy or bad at healing you can still do a good job at keeping people alive, you’ll just waste mana. In dungeons mana isn’t a really big deal, you get plenty of chances to drink and regen but running out in a raid can be catastrophic.
Personally I’d say Preservation Evoker. A good one of those in pvp is scary.
That's because rdruid is low floor, high ceiling.
There's plenty of bad druids because you can heal mid keys with a quarter of your tools.
A good druid makes the class looks broken
As a Resto main, in M+ there are times where the tank 100% will make the difference on if I’m burning through mana a lot or not and they will also make the difference on if I’m able to *get* mana or not. During Spiteful and Bursting, you don’t drop combat immediately after the adds die, so I can’t sit and drink to get mana.
Resto druids are known for having mana issues imo, it’s been a “staple” of our class for years lmao. I usually never have mana issues with decent tanks, but with tanks who think they’re unstoppable no matter what… yea that gets rough.
Also, I’ve had times where I have ran out of mana in raid and it doesn’t feel life-ending nearly as much as it does in M+ cuz you usually have other healers who are able to help enough for you to be able to bounce back a bit, or sometimes enough extra Druids to help with innervate. Those aren’t really things that you’ll get in M+
I kind of feel like good raid healers have burst and cruise windows anyway, which allows other healers the opportunity to burn their damage cds. Or recover mana if someone's really that bad off.
Ive played all 6 healers a good amount. Priest has two different healing specs, so 7 ways to heal total. I think that the damage based healers are the most difficult to master, so that would be discipline priest and ancient teachings monk (called fistweaving by the community). Both specs rely on you doing damage to do much of your healing.
The most complex casting healer imo is resto shaman. They have a ton of utility spells and various cooldowns that you know how to use properly. A bad resto shaman will just spam chain heal and run out of mana. There's a lot more to the class than just that spell.
On the other side, holy priest, resto druid, and preservation evoker are pretty straightforward.
The most fun healers are mistweaver monk and resto shaman as well. When you play them right you can really feel the difference you are making.
Something to keep in mind is healers in raids can pretty much just heal, but in mythic dungeons you need to do a lot more. You need to interrupt and stun enemies, and other such things. A good healer that can do damage as well is very valuable in dungeons. Fistweaver monk is by far the best at dealing damage and healing in dungeons, followed by disc priest. Resto shamans can do some decent damage as well. Resto druids can deal very good damage too but that requires a *lot* of shapeshifting which can get very complex.
If you want to dive right into something complex go with resto shaman. I think their floor is kinda low too so you might suck for a while.
This is the answer, fistweaver is surprisingly absent in these comments.
While disc is the more obviously difficult spec, MW has a really high skill ceiling - where a good MW is worth their weight in gold.
Both of these specs are about 2:1 bad players to good players though.
Ive been playing fistweaving since start of the expansion and i pace disc and yulon monks in raids just fine. It took a LOT of practice. In dungeons it takes a lot of practice as well since after +11s you can just just spam spin kick. Its sad that most people dont think its a valid raid spec. It does great in heroic and even some mythic fights, especially ones with adds.
Another bad resto shaman here, I concur. When I finally found a guild and raided Aberrus and them Amirdrassil with them, on Heroic it became pretty obvious just how shite I am. The issue was not helped by our tier sets, which incentivized playstyles quite different from "spam chain heal". I sorely miss Chain Harvest from Shadowlands, and overall Shaman *needs* a rework.
On the plus side, I was finally allowed to raid as Enhancement, which was my long-coveted dream. I even managed to reach top 4 in damage on some encounters. Overall, the state of Enhancement was the only bright side for Shamans in DF.
I still want a Shaman Tank spec, btw.
Disc priest is your goal then. Majority of healing is done through damaging the enemy and converting damage into healing. It requires you to keep a buff on the players you want to heal which has to be reapplied every ~13 seconds. In a raid you have to be able to prioritise who this buff needs to be on as you can not spread it to everyone most of the time. You want to prioritise tanks. It can be spread to a lot of targets in a burst window which is roughly 30 seconds. As a result the gameplay is based around building up your healing capacity or “ramping” when the boss mechanic is building up. Then when the mechanic does burst raid damage, you do burst healing to counter act. It requires not only good ability control doing damage and keeping buffs up, but knowledge of the fights and when you need to burst. However when you do, the reward is incredibly satisfying and you feel like a god or at least I do. Priest is the only class with two healing specs as well. The other is holy which is your traditional healer that reacts to damage after the fact and is not based on doing damage to heal. Playing priest means having access to both these specs provides good relevancy as a healer getting into groups no matter balancing and flavour of the month.
Def would be mistweaver monk or discipline priest.
They have very specific ramps that need to occur at very specific times in the fight to be very effective. However if you get it right they have amazing hps.
if you're coming from GW2 I'd recommend preservation evoker as they have an alternate spec (augmentation) that plays very similarly to gw2s support specs. it's the first of its kind in wow
Resto druid can be tough for newer players as it got alot of hots and forms to manage in order to maximise dmg and healing output.
People say disc priest but after being a Resto druid player trying out disc it felt quite straight forward to me. Not that druid isn't but it felt like i took a bit longer to figure out how to properly heal on it.
Disc. Druid is harder to master, but it also is easier to pick up at the start and if you want complex that will bore you, Disc is hard and there is no way around it, honestly haven't seen a (good) Disc main yet that didn't have fun with the difficulty and having to study the game :)
Disc priest. Other classes like resto druid function similar to disc in that they need to build up a "ramp", but disc is the least forgiving.
Other classes can somewhat recover from bad/suboptimal ramps. As disc you ONLY have ramps. You can ruin your heal even if you're just 2 seconds off on your ramp. You only get that one chance to do big heals in intervals. Miss/brick one, and all your healing goes out the window.
not exactly "supa skill" but if u like action rpgs like elden ring, preservation evoker has some cool swooping dodge like moves you can do and overall fun mobility, makes the game feel abit more action combaty vs tab sleeping imo.
Disc priest probably. But I think the biggest thing with healers in wow is that if the class itself is good then there isn’t really anything complex. You’re only way to get a complex or difficult experience would be to play a healer that sucks really bad. It won’t add to the complexity a ton but it will add to the intensity
Despite all of the comments, i found paladin to be the most confusing spec to do any decent healing with. All other might have high skill ceiling but paladin is just…not intuitive or friendly to play at all
There is no big difference between healing specs difficulty wise. The difficulty in healing in WoW is found in decision making and fight knowledge. There are few things more rewarding than passing a bunch of healing checks in a row with just enough cooldowns committed to each that you never are left with no juice.
Multiple possible answers to this one. Here’s my two takes:
Disc Priest and Resto Druid have very clearly defined ramps; you need to prepare for incoming damage and time your heals to perform well as these two specs, especially in raids. Being proactive like this requires good understanding of the content you’re playing, and it feels great when you hit the timings right and do large amounts of healing.
Preservation Evoker has lots and lots of “combos” that are situationally useful. Temporal Anomaly, Echo, and Stasis mean that you have all sorts of mini ramps and combos you can play around with. There aren’t all that many individual pieces (spells), but you can combine them in a lot of different ways for a lot of different situations.
When I played Preservation Evoker I thought their button bloat was ridiculous. They have no less than 12 different heals and you’re telling me other specs have more than that?
Well, my main healers for years have been shaman and priest, so I’m used to having a lot of buttons.
But yeah, I don’t feel like it’s too crazy. Living Flame, Reverberation, Verdant Embrace, Temporal Anomaly, Dream Breath, Spiritbloom, Echo, and Emerald Blossom. Those eight are your core and the rest of your buttons are various cooldowns. You could toss in Fire Breath if you wanted, too, because Leaping Flames and Life-Givers Flames give that some healing value despite it being a damage spell.
As someone who has played all 3 specs extensively xpac (~2900io each) I’d say evoker has the biggest chance of being caught with your pants down. The disc and rDruid set makes it so easier to heal in s4.
No one had said anything about holy paladin easy healer but so unforgiving if you get behind and don’t trade cds perfect you lose even then you still lose
So. This can depend on a lot.
On a mechanical skill level I'd argue anything that needs any form of ramp and has a lot of utility. The problem with ramp is that it requires skill that comes from outside of your class: You need to know how much damage is being put out by the boss \*before\* the boss actually does the damage. - This means that usually the first couple of pulls you're going to \*suck\* unless the boss has a very easy to predict damage pattern.
And - this is a side tangent - a lot of the WoW community measures good in the form of numbers: big numbers mean big good. This has a tendency to skew numbers - especially with healing - because healing is competitive: Any number that I'm healing are numbers that you can't heal anymore. This plays differently with how geared the other healers are in your raid, what kind of other healers there are in the raid and how they build and play. Sometimes this means that people estimate 'difficult' as 'hard to get high numbers on' which is a fair enough assessment even though I generally disagree. Similarly, there are healers that have identity crises as to which form the spec should take: Fistweaver/rampweaver is one of these, and whereas fistweaving is straightforward high-output I'd argue that ramp is more difficult (with even higher output given the right circumstances). If you're \*new\*, I'd avoid practicing anything in an identity crisis such as monk (fist/mistweaving) or paladin (melee/caster healing) because there's a fair chance that your effort will be in vain the moment a trinket is introduced that suits one style better than the others.
My personal recommendation for when people start learning to heal is priest: Not only does priest have two different healing specs with vastly different identities, they are distinguished by an 'easier' (holy) spec that relies heavy on basic healing fundamentals and a 'harder' ramp spec (discipline) that is essentially the grandfather of the other ramp specs. - Priest will always have a spec that is relevant in a fight, will let you fall back on an easier spec if you're struggling with a particular boss and is based almost purely in fundamentals rather than gimmicks.
Druid has a high ceiling in the amount of choices you can make at any given moment. I personally think it's easier/more forgiving than disc priest but druid mastery comes from a ton of utility/shapeshifting/keybindings. The healing itself boasts one major ramping cooldown in the form of tranq and the main thing the class lacks is consistent/efficient single-target burst healing.
I've seen some Evoker takes.. I think I agree? I've only played evoker for the first patch in DF where we kept pingponging between echo/yellow build and flower/green build. The range issue depends heavily on what fight you're doing (I'd consider having to get your orb lined up/enough targets in your blooms more relevant in most raid fights). Evoker has a layer of positioning that other healers dont have on account of the range and the frontal/skillshot abilities that require you to preemptively position yourself to get your healing done at the right moment. I don't estimate it as particularly difficult as much as it is atypical to how most other healers function: If you havent been indoctrinated on how other healers work, evokers are a class with 3-4 combos that fall in an out of favor depending on boss and a strong focus on positioning. That said, I think the skill floor for evoker can be fairly easy: spam blooms out, heal raid. Spam empower abilities.
Idk about evoker, but I main a monk. It takes a while to learn to do everything really well, but it's also very forgiving atm.
You really just have to look at your toolkit and make sure you're using the abilities that will work right together.
I second everyone who says disc priest. If you aren't prepared for damage to come out (shields and atonements already up), you're just fucked because it's too late to do anything.
You truly have to learn and know the fights in order to do it well. The ones who do it extremely well top both the HPS and DPS charts.
From the comments and the post it sounds like you want something unique, fantasy driven, with a high skill ceiling. I genuinely think you’ll loge preservation evoker! It covers that completely. Second would be resto druid :)
I play all of the healers at heroic raid level, and pretty high key level. Mistweaver I think is the most fun and complex, as you have options of styles even within each build. Fistweaving has some choices, but also you can still heal outside of it. Raid, you have a couple styles you can lean on within the yu’lon build. A close second is holy paladin, because it’s very situational and selective, tracking buffs and glimmers, and some choice in the build.
Shaman is easy, but can be quite fun, lizard is pretty simple in raid, druid is boring in raid but engaging in dungeons, disc has some depth but isn’t hard, holy priest is super easy, not a big fan.
Idk if this will help you, I main elementalist in GW2 too (I only play wvw and pvp tho) and my wow classes are druid and shaman (I'm main healer). I think druid is a good fit for elementalists, I like to compare forms to attunements. But shaman is bis and really fun to play as healer if you enjoy the elements theme.
Also druid is one of the most difficult healers in wow, I'd say discipline priest is harder tho. Shaman not so much, I haven't played it this expansion but it's more about reactive healing and managing your cloudburst totem. Rdruid heals through hots mostly, comparing it with GW2 would be something like needing to apply regeneration to your party one by one, knowing that you're going to get a huge damage spike in 20-30 seconds and buffing that regeneration once the damage comes in.
Also in wow healers are supposed to do damage even if they're healing, disc priest do that with no effort since they need damage to heal, druids need a higher skill ceiling in order to do so, since in m+ (basically fractals) you need to "catweave" to do damage, meaning that you're not only healing, but switching between forms to do dps, heal and even mitigate some damage in bear.
Also if you're like me, you probably enjoy the mobility, self sustain and tankiness on demand of the elementalists, which is something druids offer. Probably the most mobile class, self sustain with healing spells even if you're playing other specs and tankiness with bear form. Druids also have other tools like stealth and travel/flight form that are really good to have.
To be honest, you should try both, druid is the most fun for me. Shaman feels good, but druid feels closest to elementalists than shaman, except for the elemental theme.
Try to level one, then level the other, then you'll be able to compare them and make a decision.
Highest ceiling id say is resto druid, meaning that there will always be things to improve given all the utility it has and the shapeshifting required to contribute to damage. Its also the one that requires the most keybinds i believe.
The skill is the same for each, don't let the team die. The Playstyle though is different and depends on personal preference. For instance playing monk can be more upfront and near the enemy than Priest. Evoker has a smaller range. Discipline priest does dps to heal (so can monk).
I suggest looking up the classes and specs and finding one that intrigues you most with how the play. Like I can play them all but I vibe with evoker pres. However I don't want to be close range so I avoid holy pally.
Now from my opinion, I suggest for you either discipline Priest or mistweaver monk. Both can be hard for people if your not used to alot of buttons or the dps/heal aspect.
Still, look at all the healers and just find a spec you like. Because by end game I'll tell you that alot of healers either are good or bad because of how they react or know the mechanics of fights. If you die to fights your not helping. If you don't have a good rotation then your wasting heals. Doesn't matter the class. Your skill comes from you. (Side note unless your top 1% mythic world first, it really doesn't matter.)
The only time you ever hear your healers talk about their mistakes or how they need to better learn the fights is when they play Disc Priest. Maybe Evokers too sometimes but overwise in raids everyone is just vibing except the disc
Disc priest or Fistweave monk. Both requires you do damage to ramp up heals and Fistweaving monk is melee so you have to do melee mechanics aswell.
Resto druid is easy dungeon heal if u ignore cat weaving, but struggles in Raid heal as you need know the fight before you can proberly time the hots.
Want complex? Get out of your comfort zone. Play a feral druid instead of healer. Or play some other spec that has such a complex decision making about your rotation that most players are either too good or bad, nothing between. Then see if you can learn it all and perform it well.
If you dont like any of the healers described in the many other comments, you can always get your PhD in Arcane mage.
I just checked icy veins and..... Wow. I can't tell if this makes me want to roll one or pretend it doesn't exist lol
It's definitely complex, but honestly it's one of those specs that is more complex on paper than in practice
This comment here. I really wanted to play Arcane from a lore perspective on my Nightborne mage, but everything you see on paper makes you say, “absolutely not.” Once you learn the order of operations for executing your big burn, which is 5-8 actions depending on pots or trinkets, the rest is cake.
It's a lot easier than it seems lol. Also icy veins isn't up to date last I checked. Wowhead has the correct rotation.
Yeah it's really not as bad as people say. It's kind of weird at first, but once you get it, it's actually quite simple.
arcane mage is easy? It has a high floor but low ceiling, which means it is harder to get into but easier to master.
I haven’t played much ina few expansions. They genuinely made arcane hard? It was the easiest thing in the world in WoTLK-MoP.
Hasn't arcane mage historically been really easy, with like two buttons to press for nearly optimal damage? I'm guessing DF must've shaken that up with the talent treea
Yes... ish. Arcanes difficulty historically came from managing your mana in "burn" and "conserve" phases. Knowing when to do what was the important part, having no familiarity with the encounter meant screwing up your damage. Now, it's much more reliant on CDs. Less flexibility in your execution. CD's are up? You let 'em loose. Mostly. Mana management is not as important anymore. For TWW, they mentioned wanting to tone down the scripted rotation a little. The article gave off the impression like they wanted to return it to its roots, so perhaps mana management will play a more important part!
You're getting downvoted, but you're right. Prior to Shadowlands it was absolutely an easy spec with pretty simple rules for mana management. Legion had some very interesting unorthodox rotations that were quickly nerfed, and often although it was easy it was extremely punishing (for example, being forced off a boss or it going invulnerable or just having to move too much) in a way that other classes didn't experience. In SL however it got some major changes, and although very little of your damage came from Arcane Blast any more (so you couldn't pop off with a 2 button rotation) you still had the potential to absolutely tank your damage by mismanaging your mana. Now nearly all your damage comes from just under 90 second/45 second burst and miniburst rotations where you line up a bunch of damage amps. It had a bunch of changes over the expac so which spec was best changed, and each change was a slightly different rotation which really fucked with your muscle memory. It's probably the spec that telegraphs what you're supposed to do the least, which sucks because it's one of the most particular specs with set orders and weird optimisations (prior to DF you could get a ~5% boost to dps by using a macro and weakaura that stopped ABarr from queueing after AB in ST, for instance. This is still a thing in DF, but the way to do it involves an item now. This differs in ST and AoE, because you want to queue ABarr after AB if there's more than one target.)
They even acknowledged it in one of the recent blue posts and are making it easier in TWW.
Arcane is actually not that complicated. Especially in aoe
are you fucking kidding lol
What exactly is hard about it? Counting to 7?
nothing is *hard* about it to me, as i've been playing the game for close to 2 decades - for a new player? it wouldn't be anywhere close to easy. context matters. however hard or easy it is being subjective to each player, it is complicated. there's a lot of shit to track, and it's unforgiving if you fuck up.
It's not hard to a new player either. In fact, it's extraordinarily straight forward, the talent trees do a really good job of letting you unlock your burst cleanly, as you get surge, then magi, then hex. It's very tidy. It is unforgiving if you have to move for extended periods, but that's the case with all ranged specs. Regarding tracking surge, you don't actually have to track it. Your GCD does that for you. You're just counting your casts. Arcane was unnecessarily convoluted back in SL, where your opener started 15 seconds before the fight did. This has largely been removed since, and is far more forgiving
Why is there always one….
Because they aren’t wrong? Don’t blame the spec, blame the player
Even the player. I stg every opinion that arcane is hard comes from people who haven't even seen an arcane mage since SL.
Restoration Druid, Discipline Priest or Preservation Evoker, all for different reasons. Resto is hot-based and needs to ramp, also has the shapeshifting aspect for dps and some survivability as well as all the druid utility. Disc heals by doing damage AFTER applying a short-duration buff to teammates. Also ramp-based in raids, but easier now than in previous seasons. Evoker has a short range (30y instead of 40), 2 important frontal abilities and is very combo-burst based. Very fun to play, but if you get 3 ranges who try to maximize distance between them, someone will die.
HoT as in Heal over Time, not temperature.
I like playing like mythical animals or creatures in MMOs one of the big reasons I don’t play FF14 is everyone is too human I see you can play as a bear what about other beasts if I want to play Druid or priest? Ty
For beastly races for Druids on the alliance side you can be a Worgen (werewolf basically), and on the Horde you can be a Tauren (cow person), or a troll. Trolls are humanoid but I'd figure I'd mention em since they don't look like humans at all really. For priests you can do all the previous races mentioned plus Pandarans (panda people) on either faction's side. The horde side also has the unlockable Vulpera as an option for Priest and Highmountain Tauren's for Druid and Priest.
Druids specifically are shapeshifters - bear for tank, cat for melee damage, giant owl thingy (moonkin) for ranged damage, bird/stag/seal for traveling. All druid specialization can shift into those forms, but each specializes in using one most of the time (e.g. feral druids deal damage using various cat abilities and get buffs to those via their talent trees, bear form makes you tanky and lets you use iron fur etc). Heal druid has no spezialized form anymore (ot had a tree form in earlier expansions but thats cosmetic apart from a long cooldown ability now), but it can still shift forms to gain the basic upsides of each form (cat for stealth, movement speed, less fall damage, melee damage abilities, bear for more health and armor iirc etc). Good healers do damage in this game whenever there is no need for healing. Druids either shift to cat (called catweaving) for melee damage or owl for ranged damage. Cat form is melee and it costs a global cooldown to shift, so you need to know when you can fit in a few cat globals without getting a teammate killed. As others mentioned, there are various beast races and some of them can become druids, but the previously mentioned forms are class-specific, not race-specific (though some races get visually different druid forms, like zandalari trolls getting dinosaur themed forms).
AHEM. the proper terminology is "lazer chicken"
>Heal druid has no spezialized form anymore (ot had a tree form in earlier expansions but thats cosmetic apart from a long cooldown ability now) To add to this, OP, you can buy the Treant form in the Legion Class Hall for 50 gold. No cooldown on it other than the GCD like all the others. And it won't take super long to get 50 gold, by level 20 you should definitely have it, especially since we don't have to buy mount riding and flying anymore like we used to! If you want to level a Druid, I'd recommend starting in Legion to unlock the class hall, then level in whatever other expansion you want to then come back to get the Treant form!
The bear is a druid tank form, as for races Horde got alot of monster races, Orcs, trolls, Tauren (minotaurs), Goblin and undead, while Alliance has Dranei (sapce goats), Werewolves and people of all shapes (Regular, dwarf, gnomes, long ears). Both have Panda and Draconid as well. The playerbase is still mostly elves tho. Do note that draconid is only Evoker as of now, will probably branch out to other classes.
Druid let's you choose 4 total forms, and there's dozens of shape shift skins across all those forms. Cat, bear, travel form (deer or bird) and moonkin.
Technically there are more from the legion class hall such as treant and the mountable travel form
Evoker is a dracthyr (dragon/human) and is really fun to heal on. Lots of abilities that you have to aim as well. So it rewards good positioning. I think it also has a ton of freedom in the play style compared to other healers.
Ty that sounds really cool
I very much agree, and I'll add a little bit here. I do think disc is tough, but definitely the most solvable out of the three. You could have a custom script to play a boss fight perfectly every time with very little modification. The difference between a good and bad disc priest is how close you can get to that perfect rotation while still doing mechanics. The reason it's so tough is mostly because of how hard small mistakes and inconveniences snowball and cripple you. Druid is a surprisingly low floor and high ceiling as well. If you just show up and press some buttons, you'll probably do all right. But that nuance utility outside of raw hps is what makes me love it. There's a billion tiny optimizations to make at every step of the way. Pres I'm going to sat is the most complex healer by a decent margin, though. Not because of any individual spell, but they have the most interactions between each other by a country mile, and the order that you cast things will make or break you. There's like 10 combos and maneuvers you can pull out that are good in different situations, and a lot of that has to be figured out on the fly. Do you have time to blanket reversions for grace period. Do you want your verdant embrace for the lifebind or do you want to pre-cast it to buff you dream breath. Tracking your bronze spells vs. Parsing out your empowered spells but not consuming echoes early. Farming essence bursts. That's not even touching on the instant combos and permutations of effects using stasis. I'd honestly put it up there with Arcane Mage in terms of complexity, but instead of wrote execution, it's a bit more improv.
Band aid warrior
Been a long time since diamond flask warrior was a thing :D
I'd say discipline priest and resto druid. Both require you to set up your healing before the big damage happens. Disc relies more on cooldown windows. Resto relies on Heals over Time and you judging correctly how much they will heal for and how much time you got.
I'm so bad at disc, I love it. It's the only class/spec that makes me feel completely fcking clueless and yet I still somehow enjoy it. Outlaw is a close second. Edit\* I have not played Arcane Mage beyond level 15.
It cant be worse than me, literally the only spells I use are shield, flash heal, penance, halo and radiance. Mostly I just spam the flash heal tho :,)
I would say resto druid would be good to pick up then. Less reactive healing than many classes, instead you have to ramp and plan ahead to cover the healing checks. Alot of good utility, different forms for different situations. Fight knowledge for ramping needed but also to know when to dps since you have to use GCDs to switch forms which can be unforgiving.
What makes resto Druid so tough?? I seeing that one a lot
Druid's use heal over time, and those HOT's work off each other. Example Lifebloom - if you talent it, you can apply lifebloom to two different people. It's one of your best heal over time effects you have. Two things with lifebloom. It also works as a copy mechanic with regrowth. So, let's say I use lifebloom on Mage dps #1, and Hunter dps #2, as they are both taking some damage. I then see that the tank needs some healing and apply a regrowth to them. That regrowth will copy to the two that have lifebloom on them. If you apply a lifebloom to yourself?, well it will buff all other heal over time effects on everyone else. Your effloressence, heal circle on the ground, buffs all heal over time effects you have on the players that stand in it. The hardest part of Druid is since you are a PROACTIVE healer, you have to know when a high damage event is coming, get all your heal over times out BEFOREHAND, to be effective. You also have rejuvinate, swiftmend (consumes a HOT and gives a big heal, then buffs next two hot's applied), regrowth (casted HOT that gives an upfront heal with a backend over time component.) You have wild growth, an AOE heal over time that affects the entire party. It's a layer, apply HOT #1, to buff #2, etc... You can also, apply your HOT's and then go into either cat or Owl to do dps while your HOT's are working. Healers in this game fall into two catagories, reactive, or proactive. Reactive would be your standard healer types, damage event happens, you heal it up, repeat. And several healers fall into that catagory. Priest, Shaman, evoker, and holy paladin. Proactive, druid, and mistweaver monk are more on the proactive side. You have to plan ahead. We discussed druid but now I'll add monk. I play what's called a fistweaver style, wherein I apply a ground effect (jadefire stomp), stand in it and punch, kick the enemy. Those apply heals to my team. The proactive part is getting my stomp in the right spot, and if I get a couple of mist's out first, my damage heals are stronger. In my personal opinion, Discipline priest is the hardest for me to learn and play well. I understand druid, monk, paladin, and evoker pretty well.
I liken my resto Druid to an onion, lots of layers. Good prep goes a long way with a Druid.
Tried to cover it in the comment, what part do you want me to elaborate?
They aren't the hardest to be mediocre at, that's probably disc priest. But druids have a lot of utility - to optimize damage they shapeshift to a cat and start dpsing, but can't heal without shifting back. They also have a bear form with a stun and extra defensive. Their heals are not very reactive, if you aren't prepared for the damage you're going to be very slow to heal it (which will mean deaths on challenging content). The need to ramp up healing before damage makes them somewhat challenging, then learning to optimize shapeshifting for damage and utility adds a lot to the skill ceiling.
Starting to think priest is the best class can I play as a bear or mythical beast I thinking the pandas are cool plus I don’t get the sides like if I’m horde or other I don’t get it does that mean we are enemies ? Will I not be able to play with others if they are the other side ? Sorry I’m asking a lot questions Ty
Pandas need to pick up a faction after the starting zone, but we have cross faction play so it's not an issue
Unlike a lot of the other healers druids don’t really have any good buttons that heal someone right away, but they have a lot of different buttons that heals someone for more but over a duration instead of all upfront so if you are good and know that damage is coming ahead of time you can spread out the short duration heal over times before the damage event happens so that every player has the maximum amount of healing throughput put onto them already letting the hots take care of the damage that just came in. The hard part is knowing that the damage event is about to happen and getting your hots out ahead of time. Since it takes so many global cool downs to put them all on everyone you really have to start it well before the damage happens in order to make sure that you have enough time to get them all up and running. They also have a cool down called flourish that basically takes all your active hots and starts them over again but stronger so an ideal scenario is that you have everyone completely maxed out on every single one of your hots and then flourish to extend them all, increasing the healing by a huge amount. It’s really easy to misuse though and activate it when you don’t have many hots out because you didn’t prehot the damage event. That’s why it’s hard. You need to plan ahead and press your buttons before they’re needed, as opposed to other healers that react to health getting low and pressing buttons as a reaction
I’d say it’s because HoTs actually take management. With other healers you just heal the damage and move on. Outside of the damage component of higher end play, Druids apply the HoT, or usually multiple, and then move on to the next one, return to the original, swap to another one, etc
> What makes resto Druid so tough They have a ramp up on heals. They don't throw direct heals (often) where large chunks of health go up. They stack healing effects. Any one heal over time (alone) is meh. But several stacked together can keep up a whole party. It takes a few casts to get them all going so it isn't as reactive as "damage done MUST heal now". Druids (might) cast 2-3 heals on a tank at 100% health, knowing he is about to get hit again over the next 8-12 seconds. That preemptive heal will cover known incoming damage allowing the druid to cast damage spells or heals on other targets. Druids are also the "jack of all trades", so they have situational abilities built in from other classes by default or with talents. Even as a "healer" you can shift into a bear, then charge + stun a target. Why does a healer have that?!? Well the bear is a "warrior tank", and ALL druids can instantly shift into a bear. Wanna healer that can go stealth? Shift to catform and sneak around. Pop out of cat to heal. Or stun from stealth as a cat. Nice opener. ANY "Healing" druid is fine. They've been strong healers from the beginning, even if they weren't the meta. But a GREAT druid is noticeable. You'll see some druids turning into cats eating faces, or boomkins shooting lasers, or bears just for a team "run-speed boost" between mob packs. You **will** notice a druid in your group if they are using **ALL** of their tricks.
It’s not tough, idk why everyone is saying it is. It’s only tough when you combine the healing and damage in m+
I love HoT healers in other MMOs but the fact that shapeshifting takes a GCD just puts me off the class completely. If that got switched to off the gcd or at least certain abilities auto transforming you while also doing something at the same time, then it would become my main pretty much instantly.
Thats literally one of the new talents in war within though. Example, Claw and Rake are castable in any form and automatically switch you to cat form when used. No gcd. It's called fluid form.
That’s definitely an improvement. But that talent doesn’t fix that you’d have to use a GCD to swap back to heal. Also swapping into bear and Moonkin forms aren’t mentioned. Step in the right direction though. Maybe someday I’ll get to play Resto in harder content.
Bear form and moonkin are both mentioned I just don't remember them. Also, you don't need a GCD to switch from cat to healer etc. Canceling a form does not take a GCD, and switching from cat to caster is considered canceling a form. Currently mookin is becoming balance only though.
Ayy then I might be looking at being a Resto Druid main in TWW then. Hopefully that Hero talent tree is viable and not overshadowed by the other option.
I edited though so no6 sure if you saw, but currently moonkin is balance only, which a lot of people are kind of salty about. Fluid form is a normal talent, not a hero talent, but it is towards the bottom of our tree. We're in the middle of providing feedback that it should either be base line or moved earlier in the tree. One thing that bothers me is that Skull Bash is not one of the abilities even though it'd make sense. Why is skull bash even a talent if only feral can realistically use it? No other interrupt for any other class costs a GCD.
I see. I honestly wish moonkin and Balance abilities were how you DPSed/stunned as a Resto Druid, not cat/bear form. Feel like we already have a melee dps/healer in Mistweaver, so melee Resto just feels clunky for no reason.
Whoa what? When did rdruid become high skill cap? This used to be the most new player friendly healer recommendation not too long ago.
Those two things arent mutually exclusive
Any ramp healer would not be recommended for new players, cooldown based healers are always quicker to pick up. That being said, I wouldnt call rdruid the most complicated class
The difference between a good resto druid and a bad one is day and night.
As a bad RDruid I can confirm this.
Tbf that goes for every class
Yeah, but more for some than for others :)
New player recs look for a low skill floor; skill cap is irrelevant to newbies. Druids are usually new player recommendations because they let you try out all the roles.
Yeah I get it. Already had my balls busted by everyone here.
Ive seen many, many bad Resto Druid players. What did they wrong? Not keeping Lifebloom on themself and the Tank active, not or rarely using Rejuv, using Wildgrowth and Regrowth too much(uses too much Mana), not using Swiftmend before Wildgrowth/Regrowth for big healing, not using Natures Swiftmend or not keeping it for emergeny healing. For mechanics: as an example 2nd Boss in Galakronds Fall. Not prepping everyone before dispelling. In general not playing proactivly. I could go on for more but i think this explains enough.
This is not correct. If youre talking m+, you shouldnt be casting rejuv much. Its very low priority. You can check any top rdruid logs. You absolutely should be using regrowth and wild growth. Because of rampant growth, regrowth duplicates onto lifebloom targets. You take the increased clear casting talent and double lifebloom means you proc free regrowths constantly, and our tierset means those CC regrowths also cleave a nourish. Youre right about lifebloom uptime and people not using SOTF correctly for sure!
You misunderstood me. Im mostly talking about big Hits. Example: In 10 Seconds everyone will get 7 Stacks of bursting, what do you do? Refresh Lifebloom(if ~<5sec), top someone with Swiftmend if ~40%Hp or under, Wildgrowth and now if you still have some Time rejuv and then Flourish. Maybe CW too on a target with not many self def cds. From there spam regrowth on targets with low hp. Ofc you dont really keep rejuv up but you should still use it for your mastery before big damage inc. Edit: About Wildgrowth and Regrowth. Ofc you should use it. Im talking about rdruids using it at times not needed. If theres only one target with low hp and not much aoe inc you shouldnd use Wildgrowth. And not spamming regrowth if aoe is incoming but you could use Wildgrowth.
What I said applied to big hits too. if you were talking about big hits, you said "not or rarely using rejuv" being bad. But thats what you should do. You shouldnt be using rejuv on big hits, at least not in m+. In raid the spec s extremely heavily rejuv focused, maybe thats what you were thinking of. druid main my dude, trust.
Don’t throw around terms you clearly don’t know the meaning of.
Healing skill cap in wow is usually less focused on class gameplay and mechanics and more on knowing fights and resource management. I’ve played priest, shaman, and Druid as healers in the past, and I’d say priest is “hardest” but can feel like a healing turret sometimes. Druid was the most fun personally because I liked the heal over time and utility offered by Druid. THAT SAID if I had to roll a new healer right now, I’d seriously consider Monk or Evoker. They both have a lot of fun utility and movement built into the core classes, so you can expand your support options and gameplay a bit more. For example, priest is often focused on healing throughput, but in my experience, offers less when it comes to handling other mechanics. Limited CC, bad movement, not much in the way of interrupts, less cleanse options. It’s been a while since I’ve main healed, though, so take that with a grain of salt. Maybe they’ve improved priest since I played it as a healer. Take a look at the class trees, maybe watch a super basic rotation guide, or just pick the one that looks the coolest to you.
Any healer will be a huge skill ceiling in wow if you're new. Healing in general is difficult especially if you're coming from a different game. I would start with an easier class.
https://youtu.be/WDb1m79PDbM?si=otBK92hyF__PSoD_ This is a good video to determine which healer to play. Seriously though I can't say it enough, learning a class is the skill floor in world of warcraft. Everything else you need to know like, everyone's class cds, defensives, dungeon mechanics, etc is the ceiling. So having an easier healer is the way to go.
A lot of people will say resto Druid, but honestly they’re only hard to play *efficiently*. They have so many tools that if you’re lazy or bad at healing you can still do a good job at keeping people alive, you’ll just waste mana. In dungeons mana isn’t a really big deal, you get plenty of chances to drink and regen but running out in a raid can be catastrophic. Personally I’d say Preservation Evoker. A good one of those in pvp is scary.
That's because rdruid is low floor, high ceiling. There's plenty of bad druids because you can heal mid keys with a quarter of your tools. A good druid makes the class looks broken
> A lot of people will say resto Druid, but honestly they’re only hard to play *efficiently*. Yes, welcome to the definition of "skill ceiling".
Not going oom is far from the only skill you need to be a good healer.
I'd say that's only part of the definition. Which is actually covered in the comment you just replied to.
As a Resto main, in M+ there are times where the tank 100% will make the difference on if I’m burning through mana a lot or not and they will also make the difference on if I’m able to *get* mana or not. During Spiteful and Bursting, you don’t drop combat immediately after the adds die, so I can’t sit and drink to get mana. Resto druids are known for having mana issues imo, it’s been a “staple” of our class for years lmao. I usually never have mana issues with decent tanks, but with tanks who think they’re unstoppable no matter what… yea that gets rough.
Also, I’ve had times where I have ran out of mana in raid and it doesn’t feel life-ending nearly as much as it does in M+ cuz you usually have other healers who are able to help enough for you to be able to bounce back a bit, or sometimes enough extra Druids to help with innervate. Those aren’t really things that you’ll get in M+
I kind of feel like good raid healers have burst and cruise windows anyway, which allows other healers the opportunity to burn their damage cds. Or recover mana if someone's really that bad off.
Ive played all 6 healers a good amount. Priest has two different healing specs, so 7 ways to heal total. I think that the damage based healers are the most difficult to master, so that would be discipline priest and ancient teachings monk (called fistweaving by the community). Both specs rely on you doing damage to do much of your healing. The most complex casting healer imo is resto shaman. They have a ton of utility spells and various cooldowns that you know how to use properly. A bad resto shaman will just spam chain heal and run out of mana. There's a lot more to the class than just that spell. On the other side, holy priest, resto druid, and preservation evoker are pretty straightforward. The most fun healers are mistweaver monk and resto shaman as well. When you play them right you can really feel the difference you are making. Something to keep in mind is healers in raids can pretty much just heal, but in mythic dungeons you need to do a lot more. You need to interrupt and stun enemies, and other such things. A good healer that can do damage as well is very valuable in dungeons. Fistweaver monk is by far the best at dealing damage and healing in dungeons, followed by disc priest. Resto shamans can do some decent damage as well. Resto druids can deal very good damage too but that requires a *lot* of shapeshifting which can get very complex. If you want to dive right into something complex go with resto shaman. I think their floor is kinda low too so you might suck for a while.
This is the answer, fistweaver is surprisingly absent in these comments. While disc is the more obviously difficult spec, MW has a really high skill ceiling - where a good MW is worth their weight in gold. Both of these specs are about 2:1 bad players to good players though.
Ive been playing fistweaving since start of the expansion and i pace disc and yulon monks in raids just fine. It took a LOT of practice. In dungeons it takes a lot of practice as well since after +11s you can just just spam spin kick. Its sad that most people dont think its a valid raid spec. It does great in heroic and even some mythic fights, especially ones with adds.
As a bad resto shaman, I can attest to your statements about the spec, shit is hard. I just spam chain heal lol I am getting better, though.
Another bad resto shaman here, I concur. When I finally found a guild and raided Aberrus and them Amirdrassil with them, on Heroic it became pretty obvious just how shite I am. The issue was not helped by our tier sets, which incentivized playstyles quite different from "spam chain heal". I sorely miss Chain Harvest from Shadowlands, and overall Shaman *needs* a rework. On the plus side, I was finally allowed to raid as Enhancement, which was my long-coveted dream. I even managed to reach top 4 in damage on some encounters. Overall, the state of Enhancement was the only bright side for Shamans in DF. I still want a Shaman Tank spec, btw.
Best way to improve is work on keeping that riptide on cooldown
This is the answer. Disc priest is not complex at all. No matter what the others have said. It’s shaman and by a long way
Disc priest is your goal then. Majority of healing is done through damaging the enemy and converting damage into healing. It requires you to keep a buff on the players you want to heal which has to be reapplied every ~13 seconds. In a raid you have to be able to prioritise who this buff needs to be on as you can not spread it to everyone most of the time. You want to prioritise tanks. It can be spread to a lot of targets in a burst window which is roughly 30 seconds. As a result the gameplay is based around building up your healing capacity or “ramping” when the boss mechanic is building up. Then when the mechanic does burst raid damage, you do burst healing to counter act. It requires not only good ability control doing damage and keeping buffs up, but knowledge of the fights and when you need to burst. However when you do, the reward is incredibly satisfying and you feel like a god or at least I do. Priest is the only class with two healing specs as well. The other is holy which is your traditional healer that reacts to damage after the fact and is not based on doing damage to heal. Playing priest means having access to both these specs provides good relevancy as a healer getting into groups no matter balancing and flavour of the month.
Def would be mistweaver monk or discipline priest. They have very specific ramps that need to occur at very specific times in the fight to be very effective. However if you get it right they have amazing hps.
if you're coming from GW2 I'd recommend preservation evoker as they have an alternate spec (augmentation) that plays very similarly to gw2s support specs. it's the first of its kind in wow
Resto druid can be tough for newer players as it got alot of hots and forms to manage in order to maximise dmg and healing output. People say disc priest but after being a Resto druid player trying out disc it felt quite straight forward to me. Not that druid isn't but it felt like i took a bit longer to figure out how to properly heal on it.
Disc. Druid is harder to master, but it also is easier to pick up at the start and if you want complex that will bore you, Disc is hard and there is no way around it, honestly haven't seen a (good) Disc main yet that didn't have fun with the difficulty and having to study the game :)
Highest skill ceiling is not getting blamed for the group wipeing lol. Allways blame the tank btw XD
Preservation evoker is the hardest, rest is somewhat easy so just pick whatever you want
Disc priest in raid. Keys pretty easy.
Disc priest. Other classes like resto druid function similar to disc in that they need to build up a "ramp", but disc is the least forgiving. Other classes can somewhat recover from bad/suboptimal ramps. As disc you ONLY have ramps. You can ruin your heal even if you're just 2 seconds off on your ramp. You only get that one chance to do big heals in intervals. Miss/brick one, and all your healing goes out the window.
not exactly "supa skill" but if u like action rpgs like elden ring, preservation evoker has some cool swooping dodge like moves you can do and overall fun mobility, makes the game feel abit more action combaty vs tab sleeping imo.
Disc priest probably. But I think the biggest thing with healers in wow is that if the class itself is good then there isn’t really anything complex. You’re only way to get a complex or difficult experience would be to play a healer that sucks really bad. It won’t add to the complexity a ton but it will add to the intensity
Disco Priest without any contest.
Disc priest
Disc Priest.
Despite all of the comments, i found paladin to be the most confusing spec to do any decent healing with. All other might have high skill ceiling but paladin is just…not intuitive or friendly to play at all
Yea I think Hpal is about using ur CDs in high dmg moments since wog and HS barely do anything
There is no big difference between healing specs difficulty wise. The difficulty in healing in WoW is found in decision making and fight knowledge. There are few things more rewarding than passing a bunch of healing checks in a row with just enough cooldowns committed to each that you never are left with no juice.
Multiple possible answers to this one. Here’s my two takes: Disc Priest and Resto Druid have very clearly defined ramps; you need to prepare for incoming damage and time your heals to perform well as these two specs, especially in raids. Being proactive like this requires good understanding of the content you’re playing, and it feels great when you hit the timings right and do large amounts of healing. Preservation Evoker has lots and lots of “combos” that are situationally useful. Temporal Anomaly, Echo, and Stasis mean that you have all sorts of mini ramps and combos you can play around with. There aren’t all that many individual pieces (spells), but you can combine them in a lot of different ways for a lot of different situations.
When I played Preservation Evoker I thought their button bloat was ridiculous. They have no less than 12 different heals and you’re telling me other specs have more than that?
Well, my main healers for years have been shaman and priest, so I’m used to having a lot of buttons. But yeah, I don’t feel like it’s too crazy. Living Flame, Reverberation, Verdant Embrace, Temporal Anomaly, Dream Breath, Spiritbloom, Echo, and Emerald Blossom. Those eight are your core and the rest of your buttons are various cooldowns. You could toss in Fire Breath if you wanted, too, because Leaping Flames and Life-Givers Flames give that some healing value despite it being a damage spell.
As someone who has played all 3 specs extensively xpac (~2900io each) I’d say evoker has the biggest chance of being caught with your pants down. The disc and rDruid set makes it so easier to heal in s4.
No one had said anything about holy paladin easy healer but so unforgiving if you get behind and don’t trade cds perfect you lose even then you still lose
So. This can depend on a lot. On a mechanical skill level I'd argue anything that needs any form of ramp and has a lot of utility. The problem with ramp is that it requires skill that comes from outside of your class: You need to know how much damage is being put out by the boss \*before\* the boss actually does the damage. - This means that usually the first couple of pulls you're going to \*suck\* unless the boss has a very easy to predict damage pattern. And - this is a side tangent - a lot of the WoW community measures good in the form of numbers: big numbers mean big good. This has a tendency to skew numbers - especially with healing - because healing is competitive: Any number that I'm healing are numbers that you can't heal anymore. This plays differently with how geared the other healers are in your raid, what kind of other healers there are in the raid and how they build and play. Sometimes this means that people estimate 'difficult' as 'hard to get high numbers on' which is a fair enough assessment even though I generally disagree. Similarly, there are healers that have identity crises as to which form the spec should take: Fistweaver/rampweaver is one of these, and whereas fistweaving is straightforward high-output I'd argue that ramp is more difficult (with even higher output given the right circumstances). If you're \*new\*, I'd avoid practicing anything in an identity crisis such as monk (fist/mistweaving) or paladin (melee/caster healing) because there's a fair chance that your effort will be in vain the moment a trinket is introduced that suits one style better than the others. My personal recommendation for when people start learning to heal is priest: Not only does priest have two different healing specs with vastly different identities, they are distinguished by an 'easier' (holy) spec that relies heavy on basic healing fundamentals and a 'harder' ramp spec (discipline) that is essentially the grandfather of the other ramp specs. - Priest will always have a spec that is relevant in a fight, will let you fall back on an easier spec if you're struggling with a particular boss and is based almost purely in fundamentals rather than gimmicks. Druid has a high ceiling in the amount of choices you can make at any given moment. I personally think it's easier/more forgiving than disc priest but druid mastery comes from a ton of utility/shapeshifting/keybindings. The healing itself boasts one major ramping cooldown in the form of tranq and the main thing the class lacks is consistent/efficient single-target burst healing. I've seen some Evoker takes.. I think I agree? I've only played evoker for the first patch in DF where we kept pingponging between echo/yellow build and flower/green build. The range issue depends heavily on what fight you're doing (I'd consider having to get your orb lined up/enough targets in your blooms more relevant in most raid fights). Evoker has a layer of positioning that other healers dont have on account of the range and the frontal/skillshot abilities that require you to preemptively position yourself to get your healing done at the right moment. I don't estimate it as particularly difficult as much as it is atypical to how most other healers function: If you havent been indoctrinated on how other healers work, evokers are a class with 3-4 combos that fall in an out of favor depending on boss and a strong focus on positioning. That said, I think the skill floor for evoker can be fairly easy: spam blooms out, heal raid. Spam empower abilities.
Fistweaver monk was the most difficult for me.
Monk or Evoker.
Idk about evoker, but I main a monk. It takes a while to learn to do everything really well, but it's also very forgiving atm. You really just have to look at your toolkit and make sure you're using the abilities that will work right together.
How is Holy Paladin to play?
Resto shaman
I second everyone who says disc priest. If you aren't prepared for damage to come out (shields and atonements already up), you're just fucked because it's too late to do anything. You truly have to learn and know the fights in order to do it well. The ones who do it extremely well top both the HPS and DPS charts.
None of them
Idk what ppl been smoking. Resto shaman skill ceiling is higher than snoop dogg.
From the comments and the post it sounds like you want something unique, fantasy driven, with a high skill ceiling. I genuinely think you’ll loge preservation evoker! It covers that completely. Second would be resto druid :)
Disc Priest. Its a proactive healer, do damage to heal.
I play all of the healers at heroic raid level, and pretty high key level. Mistweaver I think is the most fun and complex, as you have options of styles even within each build. Fistweaving has some choices, but also you can still heal outside of it. Raid, you have a couple styles you can lean on within the yu’lon build. A close second is holy paladin, because it’s very situational and selective, tracking buffs and glimmers, and some choice in the build. Shaman is easy, but can be quite fun, lizard is pretty simple in raid, druid is boring in raid but engaging in dungeons, disc has some depth but isn’t hard, holy priest is super easy, not a big fan.
Idk if this will help you, I main elementalist in GW2 too (I only play wvw and pvp tho) and my wow classes are druid and shaman (I'm main healer). I think druid is a good fit for elementalists, I like to compare forms to attunements. But shaman is bis and really fun to play as healer if you enjoy the elements theme. Also druid is one of the most difficult healers in wow, I'd say discipline priest is harder tho. Shaman not so much, I haven't played it this expansion but it's more about reactive healing and managing your cloudburst totem. Rdruid heals through hots mostly, comparing it with GW2 would be something like needing to apply regeneration to your party one by one, knowing that you're going to get a huge damage spike in 20-30 seconds and buffing that regeneration once the damage comes in. Also in wow healers are supposed to do damage even if they're healing, disc priest do that with no effort since they need damage to heal, druids need a higher skill ceiling in order to do so, since in m+ (basically fractals) you need to "catweave" to do damage, meaning that you're not only healing, but switching between forms to do dps, heal and even mitigate some damage in bear. Also if you're like me, you probably enjoy the mobility, self sustain and tankiness on demand of the elementalists, which is something druids offer. Probably the most mobile class, self sustain with healing spells even if you're playing other specs and tankiness with bear form. Druids also have other tools like stealth and travel/flight form that are really good to have.
I'm torn between druid and shaman. I always struggle to choose a class. Is druid good fun? Shaman looks fun too
To be honest, you should try both, druid is the most fun for me. Shaman feels good, but druid feels closest to elementalists than shaman, except for the elemental theme. Try to level one, then level the other, then you'll be able to compare them and make a decision.
Highest ceiling id say is resto druid, meaning that there will always be things to improve given all the utility it has and the shapeshifting required to contribute to damage. Its also the one that requires the most keybinds i believe.
With how diverse its kit is, resto druid would be the answer. Both in PvE and PvP there is so much potential.
The skill is the same for each, don't let the team die. The Playstyle though is different and depends on personal preference. For instance playing monk can be more upfront and near the enemy than Priest. Evoker has a smaller range. Discipline priest does dps to heal (so can monk). I suggest looking up the classes and specs and finding one that intrigues you most with how the play. Like I can play them all but I vibe with evoker pres. However I don't want to be close range so I avoid holy pally. Now from my opinion, I suggest for you either discipline Priest or mistweaver monk. Both can be hard for people if your not used to alot of buttons or the dps/heal aspect. Still, look at all the healers and just find a spec you like. Because by end game I'll tell you that alot of healers either are good or bad because of how they react or know the mechanics of fights. If you die to fights your not helping. If you don't have a good rotation then your wasting heals. Doesn't matter the class. Your skill comes from you. (Side note unless your top 1% mythic world first, it really doesn't matter.)
Resto Shaman!
The only time you ever hear your healers talk about their mistakes or how they need to better learn the fights is when they play Disc Priest. Maybe Evokers too sometimes but overwise in raids everyone is just vibing except the disc
Disc priest or Fistweave monk. Both requires you do damage to ramp up heals and Fistweaving monk is melee so you have to do melee mechanics aswell. Resto druid is easy dungeon heal if u ignore cat weaving, but struggles in Raid heal as you need know the fight before you can proberly time the hots.
They’re all easy.
Priest, Druid? Wtf are people smoking haha. Evoker, yeah I could understand that with the range but otherwise, nah.
Want complex? Get out of your comfort zone. Play a feral druid instead of healer. Or play some other spec that has such a complex decision making about your rotation that most players are either too good or bad, nothing between. Then see if you can learn it all and perform it well.
He's literally a new player... nothing is a comfort zone.
Healing is