A Look Back at Restoration Druid in Dragonflight & War Within Wishlist - Editorial

wowhead.com:

With the sun setting on Dragonflight and The War Within on the horizon, our Restoration Druid Writer, Voulk, offers a retrospective highlighting Restoration's journey in Dragonflight and shares their hopes for the spec's next evolution with a War Within Wishlist.

Dragonflight Retrospectives & War Within Wishlists

The Resto Druid Journey through Dragonflight

Season 1: Early Mythic+ dominance and week 2 raid buffs

Resto Druid went live in a decent but not exceptional state. Our kit worked quite well and our talents were interesting but a small throughput buff wouldn't have been unwelcome. We got one, kind of. Week 2 of the season gave us a 5% healing buff and doubled the effective strength of the Luxuriant Soil talent. This might not seem all that relevant but this early decision actually had a big impact on how the rest of the expansion would go for Resto Druid. Our power coalesced around Rejuvenation and competitive alternative builds fell by the wayside. In 10.0.7 we got another buff in a revamp of our spec tree. This notably let us take Photosynthesis in a raid build which is a very nice buff to all HoTs out and a great complement to Luxurious Soil. We were overshadowed by Preservation Evoker but it was a decent tier to be a Druid. Vault also laid a lot of the foundation for the machines we would become one tier later.

In Mythic+ we were one of two healers that could handle early healing checks and did very well. These checks were nerfed constantly through the season and your healing choice ended up quite flexible by the end.

Season 2: 40 Rejuvs

The combination of Photosynthesis, 50% haste, Flourish, Luxuriant Soil and our season two 4pc bonus (even more HoT speed!) combined to make us a raid powerhouse. You