Battle for Azeroth PTR Changes

Last changes 24 October. Commentary updated 10th November.

All current PTR changes for Resto will be compiled here. Any PTR notes that are already live in the game will be excluded.

Current PTR Patch: 8.1 (28202)

Spell Changes

• Wild Growth healing increased by 10%.
• Tranquility direct healing decreased by 10%. Tranquility heal over time decreased by 40%.
  • This is significant, but could be a good change overall if they offset it with buffs to our other spells. 10% to Wild Growth isn’t quite enough. This’ll hurt the Tranq -> Flourish combo more than your standard tranq. 
• Ursol’s Vortex is now learned at a lower level. It has not been removed from the spec. This appears to be faulty datamining on behalf of one site. We’ll now share it with Guardian druids.

Azerite Traits

• New Trait: Early Harvest. When Wild Growth expires it heals the target for 75 if they’re injured or reduces the cooldown of innervate by 1 second if they’re full health.
  • After recent PTR buffs the healing portion of Early Harvest is now strong but the innervate portion is effectively useless as there aren’t many situations where you’ll get an extra Innervate from it. It could definitely use some numbers tuning. 
• New Trait: Switch Hitter. An ability from your chosen affinity grants a bonus for 20 seconds.
  • The Starsurge proc is the only one of much interest and the two GCD cost of switching into Moonkin Form and casting Starsurge is too much to justify its use. 
• Autumn Leaves healing nerfed significantly. The trait now also increases the duration of Rejuvenation by 1 second. This portion of the spell doesn’t currently stack.
• Lively Spirit intellect gain nerfed but now restores 0.5% mana per spell cast.
  • This is about a 2% gain to our natural mana regen if cast on cooldown assuming you get about 8 spells in per innervate. This is a buff to Lively Spirit though it’s unlikely to propel it to the top of the 8.1 tier list.
• Emphemeral Recovery has been changed to a mana proc when you fall below 20% mana.
  • This doesn’t appear to be strong but we’ll wait for final numbers to come through.