I see three possibilities.

1) Druids are simply overpowered, and most of this will be nerfed before even the Beta hits.
2) Blizzard is planning to reduce the number of healers necessary to raid, and so is strengthening healers accordingly.
3) Blizzard is planning on empowering healers a fair amount coupled with interesting changes to how they’re taxed in raids.

I find 1 the most likely, but at this point anyone would. It’s tough to say whether Druids are overpowered or Priests are underpowered until the Shaman and Paladin talents come to light. 2 is a possibility, given that there never seem to be enough healers for raiding without requiring someone who’d rather be doing something else to respec/roll an alt. 3 might also address the same problem as 2, making healing simply more interesting (like they’re trying to do with tanking) such that more players feel compelled to go at it.

All in all, I’m not holding my breath. I would be ecstatic if all these changes made it in, but this is the alpha. Chances are we’ll continue seeing drastic changes (or, if Blizzard manages to clamp down on the alpha leaks, walk face first into them when the beta’s released). What we see here will be as distant a memory as the original Mutilate talent.

http://wotlk.wikidot.com/spells-talents-professions#toc5
Tree of Life – “Shapeshift into the Tree of Life. While in this form your movement speed is reduced by 20% and you can only cast Swiftmend, Innervate, Nature’s Swiftness, Rebirth, Barkskin, Nourish, poison removing and healing over time spells, but the mana cost of these spells is reduced by 20%. Your heals also grant friendly targets your Bark’s Blessing, increasing healing done to them by 25% of your total Spirit. Bark’s Blessing lasts 8 sec.” (Restoration) [Changed in 3.0.1.8303]

The current Druid ToL talent is worded similarly, according to:
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/druid/talents.html

Neither of them specifically list the HoTs that are available. Considering Nourish is affected by HoTs on the target, it makes sense that its a ToL spell to me… Its sort of like a Regrowth, sorta. Non-instant, direct heal, with something to do with a HoT going on.
Nourish- “Heals a friendly target for 1550 to 1800. Heals for an additional 387.5 to 450 if Rejuvenation is on the target.”

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Its all pure speculation and opinion right now… but I believe that all new spells will be compatible with the new Druid Healing vision (ToL, HoTs, partial-HoT). And again, I sorta wonder if they did it all over again, with that vision in mind, would they remove HT? =)

According to…

http://wotlk.wikidot.com/spells-talents-professions

The druid talent tree linked has treeform as…

“Shapeshift into the tree of life. While in this form you can only cast Swiftmend, Innervate, nature’s Swiftness, Rebirth, Barkskin, Remove Curse, poison removing and healing over time spells, but the mana cost of these spells is reduced by 20%. In addition, all friendly party and raid targets within 40 yards have healing doen to them increased by 5%.”

http://war-tools.darlinganime.com/index.php?i=druid

I think this was changed since the last time I looked at it. It reworded to HoTs (instead of naming them specifically), and I could have sworn Nourish was in the list, but not Flourish. Treeform makes a lot more sense if both Nourish and HT are restricted, instead of HT and Flourish.

Oh hey, they reworked tree aura to increase healing taken by 5% (10% talented) on the ENTIRE raid within 40 yards. Thats umm, crazy good.

@MeanderingMind

Agreed. I don’t understand what they were thinking. Maybe trying to make resto druids what rogues are to DPS? Put out ridiculous amount of DPS (or HPS for druids), but are last dibs on raid slots since they don’t do anything but DPS.

I haven’t ran any numbers, nor would waste my time doing so for alpha talents. But for conversations sake I’m willing to bet I would roughly triple my throughput if talents went live with how they are now.

I like getting class buffs. I would really like having my class extend my skill instead of restrict it (Remember the days when triple stack lb didn’t get +heal bonus from 2nd and 3rd stack?). I really worry though, if all these buffs goes through, and other healers get similiar buffs, wouldn’t all the encounters be stupidly easy?

In sunwell if I miss a gcd, there is a good chance my assignment will die. This is going to get old on farm nights, but right now I’m on the edge of my seat the entire raid night. It forces me to become a better player to beat the encounter and that excites me. As it stands with the new talents, I could be incredibly lazy and have no issue beating the next progression boss.

PS: Killing Blow on our first Brutallus Kill!

A single Druid healer could stack not only Lifebloom on two tanks, but Rejuv and Regrowth as well (with a 2 second window every third cycle to spare!). Throw in a second Druid and not only do you have twice the healing, but Nourish gets twice the benefit from both Gift of the Earth Mother and its change. That’s a 72% bonus and half mana (20% Tree of Life + 30% from HoTs). A quick calculation assuming 2000 +healing and a 43% coefficient yields approximately 5000 healing done (172% * 110% {Gift of Nature} * 104% {Master Shapeshifter}. My Healing Touch doesn’t heal for that much!

So you can’t use Nourish often in that scenario, but one could easily imagine dropping Regrowth for Nourish to save mana. On a single tank, however, the potential HPS is absurd. Regrowth and Rejuv would coincide every sixth cycle to prevent Nourish from being cast, but the cycles immediately before and after would allow for two Nourishes, with the intervening three allowing one. 5-10k healing done in addition to Lifebloom, Rejuv and Regrowth? That’s without considering critical healing and Living Seed! How is this not absurdly overpowered?

You could probably have a Mage tank Gruul with that kind of healing.

Imagine two Tree Druids together with a Priest. You could theoretically stack 7-9 HoTs on a tank, making Nourish’s cost drop by an insane 35-45% in addition to the 20% from Tree of Life form. Granted, you’ll be spending lots of mana on HoTs, but that’s hardly the point.

In addition to this, Nourish heals an additional 12% per Druid HoT (excluding our AoE HoT). That’s an absurd 72% additional healing, and this is assuming a full Lifebloom stack only counts as one HoT!

If Nourish is our 1.5 second quick heal, it’ll have a healing coefficient of ~43%. (1550-1800 + 43% * 2000 +healing) * 172% * 110% {Gift of Nature} * 104% (Master Shapeshifter) = 4988 average healing done. My Healing Touch doesn’t currently heal for that much!

What’s more, it’s entirely feasible for two Druids to do this across two tanks. It’s mana intensive, to be sure, but with the shorter GCD you can Lifebloomx2, Rejuvx2, Regrowth, all in one cycle. Every third cycle Regrowth would be premature, and you could Nourish one of the tanks instead.

For a single tank it’s simply absurd. Every other cycle you won’t need to cast Rejuv, and two out of three cycles Regrowth won’t be needed. A single tank with two Full Lifebloom stacks, two Rejuvs, and two Regrowths is as close to invincible as it comes before you thrown in the Nourishes (Per Cycle: 0, 2, 1, 1, 1, 2, Repeat From 0).

Granted, the number of fights where damage is limited to the tank is small, but there’s plenty of room for raid heals in those cycles.

I just can’t imagine these changes going live, not unless Blizzard plans on giving some major buffs to the other healers. While we have yet to see what Paladins and Shaman will be getting, it’s already been brought up earlier that Priests aren’t getting anything near as potent.

I would love to keep these buffs, so I sincerely hope our other healing fellows have similarly awesome talents and skills to look forward to.

About Nature’s Swiftness. The current Shaman talent has the 10 second restriction -already-. The current Druid talent -does not-. Therefore it is not a change to the spell in general, not a change that will affect Druids AND Shamans….it is a change that will only affect Druids (since Shaman’s were already restricted).

Granted, we have no nature spells that take 10sec or more right now to test if its possible. Perhaps there is already a 10sec restriction coded, but its simply not stated because we have no potential to instantly cast a 10sec spell. However, the idea is that they would now need to add the restriction in the written description because Druids are getting a 10 second cast spell. And the only 10 second casts we know of are Rezzes and Teleports/Portals. So, that’s the hope… they are giving us a 10sec rez spell, pretty standard stuff…but they, understandably, don’t want it to be instant. (imagine…running away in an arena to get OOC, then instantly rezzing. The other team would not have any ability to interrupt the casting.)

((as stated by others, our 10second Moonglade Teleport spell is Arcane, and will not trigger on NS (it only does Nature spells).))

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@Sheshonk…

Flourish “Heals friendly party or raid members within 10 yards of the target for 665 over 7 sec. The healing is applied quickly at first, and slows down as the Flourish reaches its full duration.”

Tree of Life “While in this form you can only cast Swiftmend, Innervate, Nature’s Swiftness, Rebirth, Barkskin, Remove Curse, Nourish, poison removing, and healing over time spells, but the mana cost of these spells is reduced by $5420s3%.”

Given the description of Flourish, I would say it is a HoT, which are included in Tree of Life form abilities. I know, Flourish is not specified, but neither are Lifebloom, Rejuvenation and Regrowth. Unless you pulled that information from somewhere I’m not aware of?

To me it feels as though they redefine the role of the Restoration Druid in Burning Crusade. They really fleshed out a whole new angle that may not have been so deeply considered pre-BC: HoT based healing. Seeing that we can make HoT healing viable and useful, they’re going to keep that as our focus, and every new healing spell will fit in with HoTs and work in ToL (or so I hope!) However, we have that old HT spell still there. They can’t really take something away that we’ve had from day one…but it doesn’t fit in with the new Druid. So they simply restrict it from ToL form, thus maintaining the focus they have given us and letting us keep HT for emergency use. Basically, if they had to do it all over again, knowing what they know now about Druid healing…would they have given us HT? I don’t really think so… I admit this is pure speculation, but to me it explains the motives of Blizzard designers. ((And if they did “do it all over again” they would have had to give us a decent replacement for HT…healing without it would be very difficult below level 70!))

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Interestingly, Revive is not listed under ToL….but it doesn’t really matter since Revive is OOC, we don’t need to worry about the consequences shifting out and back. =)

As for the Nature’s Swiftness change, I very much doubt it means anything to Druids. The exact same spell is used in the Shaman tree and the new condition being added could be something to do with new Shaman talents perhaps.

I’m not terribly excited about Druid changes, I’m sick of looking like a tree in raids and no matter how many shiny epics I collect I’ll always look like a tree.
:/

Remember, just because they are in an alpha doesn’t mean they will go live. It is quite possible that they have several ideas of how to reach thier goal for the spec and are just trying them all out before they make a choice.

This is why there is no reason to get excited about this info. We have know clue how real it is and even if it is 100% real we have no way of knowing if it will make it into the release. I would look at this purely as possiblities.

Priests gain an additonal 10% clearcast, so that would allow them to uprank more often, but with the coh cd, it seems like they will only be taken for their imba “save your life” 51 point talent, even with divine hymn.

Nobody knows what sham’s and pali’s are going to get, but currently they are the beloved healers because they increase rDPS. If resto druids put out such a ridiculously high amount of healing, then you could potentially replace 2 healers for 1 resto druid and a DPS, making them the indirect best choice to up rDPS. However, if pali and sham get healing throughput buffs comparable to resto druids, then we’re going to be stuck at the same place that we were before…playing second fiddle to heal classes that actually have legitimate raid buffs.

The motw buff is great, but since its so low in the resto tree balance druids can pick it up with no problem. If imp moonkin aura remains even at a fraction of its power you will always see a boomkin in the raid. The only other buff resto druids have to rDPS is Replenish, but let me remind you all that the hot actually has to tick (can’t be used on people top’ed off) and rejuv has a 3sec tick. It’s not going to be enough.

I love the addition of nourish, flourish, indoor roots, and occ rez. So much so in fact I’ll probably stick with my druid when expansion comes out, even though I leveled up a shaman to 70 preparing for expansion. I just can’t help but be dissapointed in the fact we are getting buffs to our allready awesome heal throughput and are completely skipped over in the rDPS department.

Maybe bliz is trying to make it so encounters require less overall healers so there is room for an addtional class, the deathknight in 25 man raids. /shrug

PS: Does anyone else have absolutely no idea what the focus is on breaking treeform? They are restriting both heal touch (big tank heal) and flourish (aoe heal) from tree. So to drop treeform you think you would do it to fufill a single role, but uh…thats not the case. I realize that if you could flourish in tree you have the potential of getting ToL aura on the entire raid and that could be somewhat imba, but it doesn’t feel like the right solution to restrict flourish in treeform, instead the ToL buff not go off.