Patch 3.02 for Restoration Druids, part 2: New abilities and talents
New abilities:
Revive. Yes. It is, indeed, an out of combat resurrection for Druids. There, there. Don't weep. You can go ahead and let that idiot DPSer you pugged for your 5-man run die pulling aggro over and over again. No longer will you have to struggle to keep this person up while they inadvertently tank half the instance just because you're sick of having to wait 5 minutes for them to run back. Let them die. You can rez them. Or not. Not everyone knows we have this yet. Shhhh.
New talents:
Master Shapeshifter. Worth it? Possibly, but if you want or have to skip it, it's not game-breaking. As people have pointed out on Eliah's 3.02 changes for ferals comment thread, you get less out of Master Shapeshifter per point than it presently appears, because the talent requires an investment of 3 points in Natural Shapeshifter, which is far from being a necessary PvE talent (and even less so now that you're not required to shift out of Tree of Life in order to decurse or move at normal speed). So it's essentially a 4% boost to your healing for 5 points, not 2. With that said, it's not terribly difficult to accommodate this talent even in a build at 70, if for no other reason than having to pick up 5 talents in the second tier of the resto tree. Naturalist is still designed for ferals, you'll probably pick up 3/3 Subtlety, leaving you to have to invest at least 2 points in Natural Shapeshifter, so...yeah. This may come down to the usual early resto-tree game of "Which Useless Talent Is Less Useless?"
Living Seed. I've toyed with this a lot in the beta and it has its uses, but it has one major weakess; Druids, who are still very much reliant on HoT's and Spirit-based gear, are very unlikely to have the amount of crit needed to make this a truly useful general talent. Nourish (which you'll get at 80), Swiftmend, and Healing Touch are all reliant on a resto Druid's abysmal crit rate, so you are most likely to get the Living Seed effect while using a talented Regrowth, which should subsequently have a 55-65% crit rate (more, obviously, if you have a crit buff from elsewhere in the raid). Essentially, you HAVE to be using Regrowth regularly in order to make Living Seed worth taking. My opinion? This talent is going to depend an awful lot on what your healing assignments are in raids, or if you do primarily 5-man healing. If you raid-heal most of the time, Living Seed is probably a waste; Regrowth is a lot better and more mana efficient than it used to be but it is far from being your most efficient spell for mopping up raid damage. Moreover, Living Seed will be wasted on any raid member who's not getting hit. If you tank-heal most of the time, Living Seed might be worth it; it's essentially a free heal, and 30% of a critical-strike Regrowth will probably be somewhere in the region of 1,500 to 2,000 with decent gear (you will also want Glyph of Regrowth for this kind of healing; see below). I would also say the same about 5-man healing as you can't rely on another healer in the group to assist on either tank or group damage.
Replenish. Interestingly, this is a version of the 2-piece bonus on the old Druid Tier 3, Dreamwalker. I don't know whether this stacks with the Replenishment buff discussed above for mana users, but you're almost certainly going to be running Rejuvenation on your tanks.
Improved Tree of Life. The armor bonus is...um. I really don't know what to think. Tree of Life is essentially worthless in most forms of PvP due to Warlocks' Banish, so I'm not sure if that was really intended to be a PvP buff or included just because they couldn't figure out what else to put there. Even assuming you're not facing a Warlock, being in Tree of Life means no Cyclone or Entangling Roots, so frankly this talent still doesn't make that much sense for PvP. If you have enough Spirit on your gear to make the bonus to spellpower worth it, you might want this for PvE purposes, but I would not be surprised if they wind up overhauling the talent.
GIft of the Earthmother. This...is...huge. This is why you want to be so far down the Resto tree. It is essentially 20% haste on two spells (Lifebloom and Rejuvenation) that you'll be using a lot, although at the very expensive price of 5 full talents. You'll have half the raid Hotted-up before the Priest next to you has even put down his soda. With that said, this talent has been changed a LOT and used to include a version of Replenish, so I wouldn't be surprised to see Blizz continue to tinker with it. There's also problems down the line for resto Druids if +haste continues to be itemized on spellpower gear clearly meant for healers. The global cooldown can never be reduced to less than 1 second, which means that most of the +haste you'll get on gear past a certain point is going to be completely wasted on two of our most-used spells. This is not a problem from Blizzard's perspective if they're serious about getting us to use as many healing spells in our arsenal as possible, but it's food for thought. Oh, and this talent works very, very well in conjunction with Glyph of Lifebloom, by the way. More on this in a moment.
Wild Growth. This is another talent on the beta that's been buffed, nerfed, buffed, nerfed, buffed, nerfed, and buffed again. Blizzard has previously said they intended it to function in much the same way that the Priest's Circle of Healing does, and I'm not one to turn down an AoE HoT. You'll definitely find it situationally useful no matter where you are, as it's also programmed to be a "smart" HoT, i.e. if there are more than 5 people in range who've taken damage, it will automatically heal the people who need it most.
