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Koraa: We hope to tone down Lifebloom in WotLK
Published on August 6, 2008 by Phaelia 
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Beta tester Peppercorn is reporting a reduction to the +Healing coefficient of Lifebloom from Live to the Beta realms. Despite having Improved Tree of Life aura and Master Shapeshifter, his triple-stacked Lifebloom (Rank 1) is ticking for 80 fewer HPS than in Live. At the same time, he’s seeing noticeable improvements to Regrowth and Rejuvenation (due to the new talents). Beta tester Delphine goes on to comment that she’s observed a reduction from 0.52 to 0.44 or a 20% nerf to its coefficient. Developer Koraa responded to his inquiry with the following:
Yes, we have done some toning down of Lifebloom. Lifebloom was unintentionally buffed too much during Burning Crusade when we made the coefficient scaling work on the stack applications. This has caused a lot of problems with balance in the game. Druids are intended — as healers — to be able to dish out good throughput heals with very low efficiency, likewise Lifebloom is intended to be rather cheap and efficient, but not to the degree that it is today.
Compare how you healed in dungeons and raids pre-Burning Crusade to today. Before you used nearly every healing spell you had, today you just use Lifebloom and maybe your other HoTs just because they stack with Lifebloom. Not only is this boring to the player, but it pigeon holes the Druid to spamming Lifebloom on the tanks.
We hope to tone down Lifebloom and bring the Druids other healing spells up to speed in this expansion. Part of this is through changes to the Druid class, changes to other healing classes and through encounter design.
Just as a note — we did intend to change Lifebloom in the Burning Crusade (lower the coefficent), but we ended up delaying that so that we wouldn’t hurt the Druids viability in raiding. With Wrath, we’re introducing a new heal, a revamped Tree Form, and other mechanics to correctly balance things out.
The notion of dishing out “good throughput heals with very low efficiency” (high HPS, low HPM) seems completely counter to the paradigm of a HoT-based class. The current incarnation of Tree of Life actually denies us access to our highest HPS heal, Healing Touch. Druids have never had a high throughput, low efficiency spell; not even Healing Touch qualifies due to its long casting time. Simply stated, HoTs are never going to be high throughput, low efficiency. Clearly there is a Resto Druid identity crisis among the developers right now.
It is clear that Blizzard is trying to push Restoration in a new direction in the expansion. With the addition of such spells as Nourish, Flourish, and talents like Gift of the Earthmother and Living Seed, we cannot expect to play the same way that we did before (nor should we want to). It’s also possible that they’ve realized that with the Gift of the Earthmother talent and Glyph of Lifebloom, we could possibly roll Lifebloom on 7 targets simultaneously (and no doubt wish to avoid the negative PR associated with the mass suicide of Resto Druids that would likely result).
But while they’re trying to push us in this new direction, I’m alarmed that Koraa — and vicariously the rest of the Development team — seems to think this was the direction intended all along. I’m worried what will happen if they decide that these new abilities are too strong and scale them back — without reversing the nerf to Lifebloom. And while it’s expected to change playstyle with the addition of new abilities, Druids already endured through a complete overhaul in TBC; remember spamming downranked Healing Touch and not using HoTs?
Before the change that allowed multiple stacks of Lifebloom to benefit from the +Healing coefficient, Druids were clearly underpowered. They simply couldn’t generate enough HPS in Tree of Life to keep up with the throughput of other similarly geared healers. Similarly, a nerf to Nourish because Developers realize Druids are intended to be a HoT-based class would put us back to where we are right now but with a 20% nerf to what is generally regarded as our best heal and the primary reason to bring a Druid to raids.
Koraa asserts that the +Healing coefficient on Lifebloom is currently too high, making the use of our other spells less desirable. However, Druids have to cast Lifebloom three times before establishing a full stack, then have to refresh it once every 7 seconds for a 187% +Healing coefficient. On the other hand, Shamans can spam Chain Heal with no ramp up time, have less to worry about in terms of targets or “losing” their stack, and get 150% coefficient (approximate). I am curious whether Blizzard is pushing Shamans in some new esoteric direction in an attempt to wean them away from Chain Heal in the same way they want to reduce our reliance upon Lifebloom.
I can understand that rolling Lifebloom on multiple targets is tedious and mind-numbing. I can also understand that allowing the +Healing coefficient to apply to multiple stacks of Lifebloom may have made it more powerful than was originally foreseen or intended. That being said, it isn’t as though we will no longer have to maintain Lifebloom stacks on tanks; we will simply do so with less efficiency.
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I am excited that BRK is back, though!
/cry I love you, ty for everything.
While I’ll wait till Wrath to really comment on this, that second paragraph from Koraa is very much blown out of proportion. Using only “Lifebloom and maybe your other HoTs” is, get this, 3/4 of our healing spells, not counting swiftmend. Yes, we don’t tend to use HT that much. Part of the reason is because it’s slow, part of the reason is because Blizzard disabled it in tree form and tree’s benefits outweighed using HT commonly, and part of the reason is because we didn’t have time to due to lifebloom. And we do use swiftmend, despite what people seem to think.
I’m not really concerned about the change – after all, 7 lifeblooms on 10 man content seems pretty absurd. I just don’t like how that was said :p This just in, Shamans have their bread and butter heal too, and I also hope they’re pushing them away from WWSs of 95% chain heal. Talk about overusing a spell and lifebloom doesn’t even compare~
Well all is not bad e.i. Healing Touch wil be usable in treeform in WotLK, not that it will get used much more than it is today (it will still be a terrible spell).
I’ve actually begon hating lifebloom, simply because because it is limited how fun it is throw that spell continously. And there are situations where it doesn’t do the job. High warlord najentus the first boss in bt for instance it is better to throw regrowth at people after the 8.5 k hp aoe damage. Illidan: healing flames and parasites begining with regrowth and the stacking other lifebloom produce more healing than just lifebloom, and keep people alive (have done approx. 790k effective healing (1k hps) on Illidan).
Personally I’m looking forward to having an arsenal of healing spells/ability, instead of just one button healing. And yes I could do without the nerf to Life bloom.
It remains to be seen what role the resto druid will have in WotLK, and how the balance will be between druids and other classes, but also the balance of talent and gear. In my oppion druids will have a raid spot in the future, because we will bring something to the table which most likely will be versatility e.i. there will no role which we will be bad at in WotLK.
So let us take a step back and wait and see what will be the case after the release.
ps: isn’t the lifebloom coefficient 157% or is my memory lacking?
/Balderun
Just a small thought… but Blizzard posters do sometimes jumble their wordage
When he says ‘low efficiency’ I have a feeling that he mixed his expressions, and what he actually MEANT to say was the exact opposite, namely ‘low cost’ or ‘high efficiency’ (take your pick!). Because, as everyone knows, the central point of Druid healing IS the extreme efficiency with which we can mop up small damage at extremely low mana cost. We can’t handle the massive spikes of damage, but that’s the price we pay for the efficiency with which we can handle the smaller amounts.
Even if we ignore Lifebloom, the various tweaks and changes since tBC came out have pointed towards emphasising the efficiency of tree healing. Reduced mana costs, better mana regen (admittedly, that applies to all healers
)
Updating the in-combat mana regen to 30% rather than 15 (again, to match priests, but the point is, they didn’t HAVE to do that if they thought we were too efficient)
Regrowth cost reduction (personally, that used to be used as rarely as Healing Touch… until they reduced the mana cost – now for the amount it heals, it’s really a very efficient spell)
And as a final point if they didn’t want Druid healers to be mana-efficient, the tree bonus wouldn’t reduce HoT costs by 20% ;P
I could be wrong… I really hope not… but… *branches crossed* I think he meant to say ‘low cost’ rather than ‘low efficiency’.
This makes me sad. As a sapling, I’m still enjoying throwing lifebloom around a great deal. I really enjoy the 4-GCD constraint, it makes healing much more interesting. I don’t understand resto druids who say they’re sick of rolling HOTs, make a paladin or shaman!
Having said that… LB is so good right now, it can tolerate a nerf. I’ve healed with a priest a lot, and 1-2 times with a paladin. Druid healing is currently extremely powerful and efficient compared to either. It’s also pretty flexible compared to paladins and shaman. It only falls down a bit when one person is taking ALL the damage, or you need SM too often.
With a group heal, 1s LB etc, I doubt we’ll really be hurting. Arguably healers are a bit too specialised right now, they seem to want to give all healers some capability in all areas so it’s a strong/weak comparison not a strong/none.
LB nerfs still make me sad ;-;
(I agree with Laeraneth btw, Koraa most likely tragically misspoke)
“we could possibly roll Lifebloom on 7 targets simultaneously (and no doubt wish to avoid the negative PR associated with the mass suicide of Resto Druids that would likely result)”
Are you kidding? My finest hour was when I put on some haste gear in Mount Hyjal and kept up 4 LB stacks for something like 30 minutes. 3200 HPS, I was #1 on the charts by a mile \o/
I use MT-specific macros. I resisted for a long time because it’s so inelegant, but it makes life so much easier.
On the other hand, there is something to be said for not pressing the same key sequence for hours…
Juries last blog post..Surreal Game Design is no more?
one way to think of it is they don’t want wrath druids to be stuck doing the exact same thing they are doing now… but that is too high minded. they probably just want to nerf it for whatever reason they like to nerf stuff.
but in comparing it to shaman, don’t forget that shaman can’t move. every single heal they have has a cast time. that is a major limitation.
my suggestion: introduce lifeshock, which would be a initial heal + hot like regrowth, but instant cast, 6 second timer, 20 yard range. same as any other shaman shock.
I’d wait till Wrath before we worry too much. From what I’ve seen, I think the prime role for a druid will be:
1x 3-stack Lifebloom on MT
1x Rejuv on MT
Remainder of time using Nourish and Regrowth to remove raid health deficits.
What it will create is a more fluid healing style than bindfourbuttonsrollface. We’ll not be pushed into the “All you do is lifebloom” area, and we’ll be more effective at group (Flourish) healing, and spot (Nourish/Regrowth), while still being able to keep a steady MT healing output (Lifebloom/Rejuv/Regrowth).
I for one am happy with it.
Two of my friends are currently in Beta, one has a Kara geared resto druid, aprox 1550 +heal, (main is a warrior), the other is a T5 priest at 2200 +heal. Both numbers are in live, I still don’t understand the conversion to the spell power dispite their feable attempts at explaining it.
They are reporting that Neravan, (druid), is healing just as well in their current gear as Tallarin, (priest). This is dispite the major gear gap.
This tells me one of two things, either priests are broken, or the changes to druids have moved in a direction to buff their healing dispite the apperance of nerfs.
Actually, HT is castable in ToL form in Wrath.
I’m quite positive Koraa misspoke on the efficiency point, because we have spells that have a variety of conditions in Wrath. Nourish has high throughput and low efficiency if no HoTs are running on the target, but it has high throughput and moderate efficiency if you’re also rolling HoTs on the target. Swiftmend is still very efficient. HT has high throughput and high efficiency, especially now that it can be used in ToL form, but with the caveat that it is the longest cast heal in the game. Regrowth is still moderately efficient, as well.
The real issue is that lifebloom was ridiculously efficient. To the point where I’m maybe down only 5K mana at the end of a 6 minute fight just rolling lifeblooms without chugging potions. And when I chug potions, I am pretty much perpetually topped. Tack on gift of the earthmother in fights where six people are taking a nice stream of predictable damage and druids would outdo any other healer in those situations. BY FAR. I’d probably be able to outheal a shaman on RoS by maybe 50% if they applied these talent changes and didn’t nerf lifebloom.
And yet, while LB will be healing for less, we’ll be incorporating an additional spell or *two* into our rotation. So the nerf we’re receiving (which is *not* a flat 20%, by the way, but dependent on your amount of +healing) is countered the buffs we’re receiving to the spells we can use between rotations or the simple fact that we can roll more. And even with the nerf, we’d still do more healing with lifebloom than we can now if it’s optimal to roll on more targets than we’re currently capable to roll on.
If you want me to put one spell into perspective for Wrath, consider regrowth. Instead of critting for 3100 as it does for me now, it crits for upwards of 4400 on a fresh transfer to Wrath. That’s a 40% buff to the front-end heal. Where the scalability is what has held the spell back in TBC and caused CH to far surpass it post-T4 content, this new scalability, combined with living seed, will change things completely. It is becoming unparalleled in terms of healing isolated targets. *And* it’s still going to be efficient. Even with the change to ToL, it’ll be more efficient than it is now.
But it’s not like we have mana problems in the first place. Only human priests can match our regen on a basic level. And our heals are more efficient than theirs, putting us on a higher level. Even with the change to ToL, our spells will still be more efficient.
So I definitely think Koraa misspoke.
Lumes last blog post..Kil’jaeden to 25%… Finally; Summer Woes for Everyone
nerf shamans. they’re the only class that can consistently outheal my resto druid in raids. nerf them hard.
@Nilianil: You make a good point; until this point, all we’ve had access to were HoTs. Of course it’s all we’ve used. ^_^
@Balderun: I don’t think we’ll be using Healing Touch more often than we do now, unless some didn’t use it with Nature’s Swiftness because they didn’t want to spend the additional mana and GCD to shift back into Tree of Life. I’ve always been a big proponent of adding more Regrowth to your healing retinue, partially because it’s often more effective than Lifebloom (as with the cases you describe) and partially because … well … Lifebloom spam is boring. ^_^
Re: The coefficient, it actually depends. With full talents, I think I found it something like 2.05 (test). Which, now that I think about it, does seem a bit um … excessive.
@Laereneth: I hope you’re correct and that Koraa did misspeak, but I also would prefer to think Druids are more than a “heal little bits of damage for a little mana.” If that’s the case, we should just turn into bandage trees!
@Eldr: To many Druids, maintaining 4 stacks of Lifebloom is monotonous. I know I’ve built my entire UI around making this task less odious (even though it’s been rare for me to actually need to roll on 4). It’s also stressful because one misstep and the whole house of cards can come tumbling down, forcing you to start over at square one.
@Jurie: Haha – well, I recognize that 4x Lifebloom stacks will definitely skyrocket us to the top of the meters. ^_^ But it would also drive me crazy, especially for 30 minutes! I tried using MT-macros a couple of times, but I didn’t find I had room for them on my gamepad with all the other spells I like to have available. Instead I use Grid and GridDynamicLayout so that all my tanks are visible within an inch of vertical space on my screen. It’s much easier to monitor multiple LB stacks that way (though probably not as easy as MT macros).
@Thebitterfig: That’s true that Shamans can’t move, but I admit that I’ve been jealous of the seeming effortlessness with which they’re able to top healing throughput. It’s not uncommon to see 95% of a Shaman’s healing coming from Chain Heal.
@Brent: I foresee something similar, although I think Nourish/RG will be used on the MT more than the raid (because of certain talent synergies and the new Regrowth Glyph) and that we’re likely to use Flourish on the MT so that it helps keep up the surrounding melee. I am definitely excited about the changes to Druids so far. I’m just nervous when developers indicate they may not understand us.
@Knurd: I admit that I find the Priest/Druid comparison a little hard to swallow. Surely the Priest must be doing something wrong. That or Blizzard isn’t finished buffing them. There’s no way Priests should be so vastly inferior to Druids on average (obviously, certain encounters will favor a particular healing style).
@Lume: When I said “current incarnation” I meant the version that’s live currently, not the one in beta; sorry for the confusion. I meant to point out that a high throughput, low efficiency heal was something they didn’t desire for us when they locked us out of our highest HPS heal, even if it did have a long cast time.
When you mention the 40% buff to the front end heal of Regrowth, are you using the Glyph of Regrowth or is that not yet available? That’s just … my god.
The 20% nerf is a coefficient nerf (and is actually 18% – I just quickly estimated). The reduction on the amount healed would be less than 18% but approach 18% as your +Healing increases.
Also, you have a beta invite? I’m so jealous.
@Randy: Well, I don’t know if I’d want to see them “nerfed hard” but if the idea is to get us aways from relying on Lifebloom for 80%+ of our healing done, certainly something similar should be done about Shamans and their spell selection.
@Laeraneth “I think he meant to say ‘low cost’ rather than ‘low efficiency’.”
That’s how I read it too. It just didn’t make sense that he actually meant to describe druids as some kind of inefficient “burst” healers. Our defining healing charateristic (or “gimick”
) has always been HoTs; it’s what sets us apart from the other healing classes. To me, that would flow that we would be highly efficient put maybe lacking the raw power of some of the other classes.
That’s kinda what the early days of TBC was. The problem was that Lifebloom was a nice supplemental heal, it couldn’t keep the group alive alone and we had no good way to deal with burst damage. Then they buffed Lifebloom and it was less of an issue but we may be a bit overpowered because of it. I mean between that and the mana regen changes (which have been insane.. er.. I mean great) it hasn’t been that tough being a healing druid in endgame.
If they roll back Lifebloom but give us more burst handling tools, that sounds ok to me actually. The problem is that balance is a tricky thing and even if the intention is good it may end up making us cry if it isn’t balanced just right. We’ll see, I guess.
Well I’m a little dissapointed we got a nerf to one of our spells in expansion, while other classes are receiving buffs. Makes the nerf even more powerful.
With that being said, I do support the reason for the nerf, I want a more dynamic playstyle. As it stands right now you have 3 types of resto druids: morons who can’t keep triple stack up, average druids who can keep 4 gcd running, and rockstar druids who swiftmend/NS when needed and hot/regrowth the raid for maximum efficiency. Sadly, the difference between an average and rockstar druid is rather small. Why? Because triple stack lifebloom requires little to no thought and gives huge returns.
Before the buff to lifebloom where the 2nd and 3rd stacks gained +heal bonus, tree was not the druid heal spec. Instead, it was either dreamstate or moonglow/swiftmend which relied on using heal touch as the main heal. Back then there was a definite art to healing: getting in synch with boss swing attacks, cast canceling when you would overheal, and playing the 5 second rule. HoTs were still pretty nice and made up roughly 30-40% of my healing, but they were supplemental spells, not THE spell.
Whenever I respec’ed tree for 1337 triple stack lifeblooms, I felt I gave up a large, fun aspect of the game, but remained tree to fufill my raid niche. I want to pound my head off the wall at times because counting to 4 is boring. I don’t even care if the person is taking damage or not, you have to pre-emptive heal with hots. If I had a chance to start things over again I would have played a priest during TBC. They have no “I Win” button, they have to be able to analyze the situation and know which spell to use when…all within a second or two time period.
Hopefully by by bringing the gcd down on lifebloom to 1s, opening up all resto spells in treeform, adding two new healing spells (Nourish and Flourish), and the addition of glyphs (HT Glyph is like an entirely new spell) it will create a more dynamic playstyle for resto druids. Will nerfing lifebloom change this at all? Doubtful, you triple stack the tanks and then you use remaining gcd on other spells. Nerfing lifebloom coef will not change the fact resto druids will triple stack the tank. It just hurts our raid viability.
‘Gimmick’ is such a bad word
‘Defining Characteristic’ is so much nicer!
And ‘Bandage Trees’… I can’t help but have an image of a poor tree being TP’ed by kids…
Anyway
I don’t know the intricacies of other healing classes besides my own in the deep end-game. But how do the efficiencies of current single-target healing throughput pan out? Speaking at my level… (Karazhan is about our limit sadly! Though Zul Aman isn’t out of reach
)
lost out on +300 worth last week! anyway…)
A single druid (ie, me) on a single target can keep a healthy 800 or so HP/s rolling in on a target purely using 3 GCD’s every 12 seconds, correct? (roughly around 1300 +healing at the moment… I keep rolling REALLY badly
Perhaps an easier way to measure it would be 9000-10000 HP over the 12 second range of Rejuvenation, refreshing the Lifebloom stack twice, and keeping Rejuvenation up.
How much mana does that cost? Be honest now ;P Frankly, I can keep that up all night long, and never run dry. And I’m far from excellently geared. I’d imagine the well geared among us can do the same with 15k and upwards in the same timespan.
First thing I noticed when the WotLK spells and talents and so on started to trickle out from Blizz HQ was how much the cost of Lifebloom went up, and how (relatively) little the amount the base spell healed increased. I wondered if it was something of a reaction to the extreme efficiency we can get with it now.
I’d say that Koraa’s post probably backs up that suspicion… I only hope they don’t go too far… I quite like Phae’s iconic image of the blob chanting lifebloom
On the plus side, as others have said, I’m finding the changes in general to look very appealing. They are trying very hard to give us more viability beyond HoT maintenance, while still rewarding us for being vigilent and keeping them rolling without fail.
It’s a nice reward both for the diligent healer, and for the begginers, who might baulk at the prospect of trying to keep something as critical as a 3 stack of lifebloom rolling on 4+ people at once
Well, druids scale the best with +Heal. Not only because of coef, but also because with such a low MPS requirement you can push all of your iLvl into +heal and ignore mana regen.
Anyhow to give an idea how coef lineup…
Druid Tribloom = 205%
Sham Chain Heal = 162%
Priest GHeal = 114%
Pali HL = 80%
Pali FoL = 48%
In addition to having the best coef, I really need to drive home the low MPS requirement. Other classes have to downrank to keep consistant HPS, which means additional loss of heal coef.
This may seem somewhat imba, but considering when a majority of higher content’s damage is raid, not tank, its not that amazing. For instance, a majority of sunwell fights can be healed by a single pali and triple stack lifebloom. Since druids lack a group heal, they may scale the best, but not where they need to. Sham and Priests get the healing done where it actually needs to be.
We are getting an AoE heal in expansion, and depending on how it scales, will be greatly beneficial.
@Icyslush: The mana regeneration changes did make it so that, if we used Lifebloom alone, we practically couldn’t run ourselves out of mana. However, I tried to seize that opportunity to use the more expensive, less HPM efficient Regrowth which made a big difference for me personally on trash fights where Shamans had previously been the indisputable kings. So, in a way, they’ve already sort of been pushing us to use other spells. I guess with the increased mana cost and lower (relative) amounts healed, it will make even more sense to do so. My biggest concern is that it represents a reduction to our constant tank heals since it isn’t as though we’re going to stop using Lifebloom on them. Hurray for a reduced GCD, I guess. =)
@Sheshonk: WAHOO!! I’m a rock star! *Plays air guitar* *Swings hair around* *Falls off imaginary stage into throngs of adoring fans* Ow.
Nice analysis of the changes we saw in the expansion. I still remember having to explain to other Druids that they shouldn’t be stacking their Lifebloom because the second and third applications didn’t get the bonus from +Healing. O.o Scary times. I definitely agree (and hope) that we’re in for a much more dynamic healing style than we saw in WotLK, even if the Rock Star status is more common.
@Laeraneth: You’re right that we can deliver a constant stream of HPS to multiple targets for a low mana cost. However, I think it’s important to note that much of that HPS is going to be wasted since it’s non-reactive (it’s ticking whether it’s needed or not). It’s susceptible to being overhealed or unnecessary. Obviously, we fare well enough on effective healing that it’s not that inefficient, but — at least until now — we haven’t been the “rock stars” of dealing with large damage spikes. Instead, we’ve helped prevent them, making other Healers’ jobs easier. In that way, we’re kind of like the support’s support! (Which I find to be pretty cool, but I can see how some might not like it.)
I think everyone should also look at some of the problems in design philosophy.
In Vanilla WOW there were 40 people in raids, and a healers job was either to watch a group (top them off) or most importantly focus healing on one of five tanks brought to a raid though the combination of hots (less important) and the ever famous cast-and-move-to-break-if-not-necessary healing touch.
Then they remove 15 people from the raid. Reduced the over all number of people to heal, and correspondingly changed our healing style.
The reason lifebloom stacking is so popular is that it is one of the ONLY ways we can maintain multi-target heals. We have no chain-heal, or circle of healing. Raid AoE healing is becoming more and more of an issue, as blizzard is initiating more raid-wide-AOE damge, meaning that multi-target healing is becoming a prime factor in current endgame design.
We have been given Flourish in LK, however it suffers from the same problems as our other heals (overwriting being a major factor). A chain-heal and a CoH that land will make our flourish cry as they provide instant healing and push our hot into overheal land.
The druid position hasn’t been one of ‘healer’ necessarily – but essentially damage mitigation. We don’t heal up the tank, but we cushion the little damage, and provide the 2-3 ticks of green necessary to buffer the big hits before all the FOL (aka flashlight) spam connects.
So to sum up my point: Lifebloom is necessary to give us something to stack against the shaman chain heal and CoH. As an endgame healer I cannot compete with those numbers in AoE fights, and consequently my raid brings one resto druid, and 2-3 priests and shamen for most encounters – even though it is probably more useful in other portions of the dungeons. In LK paladins are getting wicked crit shocks followed by instant Holy Light with hots to roll on every crit, meaning that single target will have us locked out pretty badly. Priests and Shammies aren’t shying away from their AOE heals (Shamen are getting 10% crit, AND secondary aoe heals on each crit to their Chain Heal). And this is supposed to be offset by Flourish, and our newly granted AoE capacity, and a LB nerf.
The design of dungeons and encounters isn’t changing as drastically as it did in BC so I’m worried that our healing is being adjusted in such a sudden direction will of course generate its own set of problems. If Flourish can offset/replace LB stacks, and open up new healing rotations, and give us something to do other than watch stacks – GREAT! I’m just concerned about sacrificing it without giving druids enough to justify us as a healer as opposed to say a priest, paladin or shaman.
@Brent: I agree with your statement brent. I for one usually only roll 3 stacks and keep additional hots up or throw spot hots / emergency heals on the rest of the raid. I find that it lowers my numbers on the charts, but clearly aids raid survivability. I DEFINITELY use alot of my buttons aside from LB.
@Lume: An excelent analasys. I’m glad to see a bit more of ‘this is how LB nerf fits inside the big picture’ instead of just ‘oh its an lb nerf ™’. Would you be so kind as to maybe throw some beta speculation on the sorts of rotations we might be seeing for raid healing for druids? Seeing what you wrote I’m starting to see that we’ll probably have very different iterations on heals between healing a single tank taking heavy damage (Morogrim Tidewalker), healing consistent raid-wide damage (Gurtogg/felmyst), and doing a hybridized mix of both (various trash such as the Fel Robots in Mr. T and Sunwell).
@Phae: You said you built your UI around stacking the blooms. Would you be so kind as to mayhap provide a UI pic / explanation / list of mods? I know I for one am always looking for ways to do some UI optimization, or sniffing for new and useful addons.
Also I am a fan of the carrot philosophy of class balance Phae mentioned. I’d rather see a buff to regrowth (weather it is in mana, or in healing) that encourages us to use it as a carrot-incentive than a punishment (nerf) to LB as the ’stick’ causing us not to use it.
@Zaira: I hope you didn’t feel that the six paragraphs above were intended as a “oh no it’s a Lifebloom nerf” … I tried to present multiple sides to the story and look at everything from a broader view than just “oh noos.” As much as it was tempting to post “OMG OMG THEYZ IZ NERFING OUR HOTS!” ^_^
As for the UI modifications, I mean using all of the addons I described in Grid: Thinking Within the Box(es), particularly GridStatusHoTs, GridStatusLifebloom, and Grid Dynamic Layout. I also keep my raid frames visually close to my action bars with the tanks aligned against them so that my eyes don’t have to travel far to reference my gamepad’s layout (mirrored by the way I’ve laid out my action bars). I use multi-colored counters to track time remaining and the number of stacks on each raidmate and mouseover healing + a gamepad to improve my response time and ability to roll multiple stacks at once. I’m already trying to decide how I will modify my Nostromo layout to include the new Nourish and Flourish abilities.
I don’t think you were being alarmist Phae! And I dare say the post and ensuing discussion has presented many of the angles and points (both pro and con) of the changes. I was just saying that the drastic changes from pre-BC to BC content and design philosophy prompted a massive change in our healing. I’m hoping that our healing undergoing a major redesign with the LB changes also provides us with new and interesting ways to handle problems rather than just a swat on the nose for healing the way we do currently.
Also thanks for the handy post link on Grid!
just wanted to chime in and say this discussion is awesome. i am a tree who still loves to toss all my lbs around but its not the ONLY spell i use in any raiding situation, i will go with the faith that koraa misspoke as well.
with a 70 resto sham and my main tree, i am still on the fence as to whos the main in wotlk, i like playing the druid more so i really want that to be the decision … things like this are discouraging and encouraging both, and lol , i hate change.
great dialog here though. love to read it
No glyph.
I had to chuckle a bit when I read the blue post about nerfing lifebloom, how they intended for us to be a high throughput healing class. Reason is, with several other trees in the guild, my heal spec of choice is the much maligned DS spec.
MT healing on Illidan for example, I maintain a triple stack of LB (yes, though not as potent as a tree’s, DS still does have hots hehe), spamming very high rank HT, and threading in an occasional Regrowth and Rejuv.
The chuckle was that with the DS spec being so misunderstood and even ridiculed, it sounds like it is actually in some sick twisted way much closer to how devs foresaw Druid healing! Now come on, you have to admit that is pretty funny!
sigh…
I’m disheartened by this. Here’s the thing that gets me, as stated above by others, why is it unacceptable for our class to favor 1 spell (which is not enough to heal on its own without other spells being cast) but the spells of other classes that they spam continuously are getting buffed to a point it seems they will ony need to use that 1 spell repeatedly, just as they have been already. Don’t get me wrong, I WANT to be a more versatile healer, but not at the expense of my effectiveness. I don’t want to do 8 times more work (and to keep in mind, maintaining multiple Lifebloom stacks while on the move is not easy, by any means)just to end up doing marginally better than what I was before, or to just pale in comparison to other healing classes.
I know I’m preaching to the choir, but this just sounds stupid to me that a core healing spell is being nerfed before we even begin because we might not use the other spells enough. It really doesn’t change anything in how I predicted I’d be healing typically in 5 mans or in raids, it just nerfs my ability to do it effectively. I won’t be using Lifebloom any less, I think, it’ll just be less effective now, which could be very bad.
I think most of the other classes won’t spam just one button actually. Paladins are moving to a more Holy-Shock+Instant HL healing style, with flash of light interspersed, and sped up HL’s with support hots – as opposed to the flash spam they were used to – AND a sacred shield rotation (plus emergency hand spells). Priests still have a bag of tricks, with more being added – from shields, quick heals, renews, stronger heals, guardians, and the king of AoE healing COH. Shammies did do mostly earthshield + chain heal … and I’m not seeing that change except for the encouragement to rotate Healing Wave and its Lesser variant with the speed increase from Tidal Waves. So overall healing looks like its going from ‘whack a healthbar’ to having some thought, rotation and skill behind it – possibly becoming more fun than rythmic spell rotation.
So it doesn’t seem like single-spell healing will be ‘the new hotness’ anymore, and we’re just being clipped by that bug albeit in a harsher manner than the other classes (who are getting talent, and new spell incentives as opposed to the dreaded NERF BAT).
Considering that druids were the first class out, we’re also the first class revised. Lets wait and see what happens on the first re-work to the others.
Well, nerf or no nerf lifebloom will continue to be the bread and butter spell for resto druids in the future. Lifebloom roling isn’t going to die.
I find all the new possibilities exciting and I am looking forward to healing in WotLK. However, what I sense from the above discussion is the aftermath of how under powered druids where at the begining of TBC. Druids are again fearful that they end up not raidviable as healers for WotLK.
On the other hand if we look at the difference between what we got from the change from vanilla to tbc wow and what we get now, I must say it looks ok. But, we all know that how designers think we are going to heal and how we actually end up healing may not be the same thing.
So, there is nothing to do but follow the beta testing and keep our fingers/branches/twigs cross (or hoofs if you are tauren like me). Personally I hope for a (even more) versatile class that continues to fun playing.
/Balderun
ps: is there plans for a preview of nourish/flourish on this blog that i’m really interested in.
From what I’ve seen, I think that Druids will actually be not only raid viable, but much wanted in the endgame. The thing is, I think that Trees can actually do different types of healing and play different roles depending on the fight, be it spamming direct heals via Nourish/Regrowth, spike mitigation via HoTs, raid healing, or +DPS (For DPS races) via Rejuv/Replenish, or a combination of all of the above.
And all 4 can really be done with the same talent spec, more or less. My same warning still applies, the amount of skill differential is going to increase substantially for healers come WotLK, with druids more than the other classes. I’m fully expecting battles where damage patters will change even more substantially during the fight.
@Zaira- That’s the thing, I felt our talent incentives were enough. You may be right though, other classes may get whacked down a bit in the final iteration, in which case, it will sting a little less. I just equate a nerf to Lifebloom by 20% to being approximately like telling a Rogue, “Your auto attacks now do 20% less damage. We gave you new stirkes. We didn’t want you using autoattack so much that you didn’t use the other abilities.” The rogue is still going to autoattack, and the new stirkes aren’t likely going to make up the loss in DPS.
This is kind of how I feel about this change to Lifebloom. Smart Druids are going to continue to use a triple stack of Lifebloom on the tank(s), but now they have to expend more mana in addition to the Lifebloom, Rejuv, and Regrowth they had stacked, in order to make up for the 20% of healing that is no longer there. You have to do more heals to do the same amount of healing. Perhaps the buff to Regrowth balances it out, but I find it unlikely, due to how the spells work.(Most of my Regrowh casts end up as overheal on the direct heal portion right now, I primarily use it for the extra HoT on the tank, or for an “oh poop” heal when a DPS is dying, where the HoT is usually wasted.)
I think this is a little blown out of proportion.
Lifebloom won’t be quite as good, but it’s not completely nerfed and useless. Even if it were to lose 20% of it’s total healing power it’s still an awesome healing spell. (Mine currently tick for 750 – I would still use it if it ticked at 500 honestly).
I’m pretty sure 3 stacks of lifebloom will still be used on tanks. I can’t see any healing changing too much except for the fact that there is nourish to actually count on and crits giving living seed allowing druids to have a little more choice in healing.
@Zaira: Oh, good.
And yeah, it looks like they really want to push us away from Lifebloom in the next expansion. Hopefully Nourish and Flourish will be more fun than spamming LB.
@FB: It appears that you (and others) were correct; Koraa’s later comments that follow up on her original post make it clear that she does understand the Druid’s role as a HoT-based healer (and not necessarily one designed for large, fast throughput). And don’t get discouraged from picking your Druid as your main in Wrath; I think the changes overall look like the class is going to be a lot more fun and dynamic to play.
@Meugly: I’m very curious about the state of a DS healer in the expansion. I think HT will mostly be eclipsed by Nourish, and Nourish is improved by HoTs … At the same time, Lunar Guidance is seeing a pretty substantial nerf, making ToL and its associated talents more attractive than before. Hopefully a DS Druid can still get her direct heal “fix” (supplemented by HoTs as you describe) with Nourish.
@Yggdrasil: I can’t say that I disagree. I rarely hope for someone else to be nerfed, but I really hope to see a reduction in the attractiveness of Chain Heal. That spell comprises even more of a Shaman’s total healing done than Lifebloom does of ours, and it requires a lot less thought.
@Zaira: Hmm, I wasn’t aware of “Tidal Waves” – that should help make their heal style more dynamic and kind of similar to that of a Druid (whose core “rotation” is comprised of Lifebloom and supplemented by other stuff that fits in between).
@Balderun: I’m not sure that I agree; I suspect that we’ll see Lifebloom relegated to tank healing (or healing a pre-designated target who’s going to be taking constant damage). It’s simply not efficient enough to keep up with all the crazy raid healing flying around in Wrath. I am planning to look at Nourish vs. Regrowth, but I haven’t decided how to approach Flourish, yet.
@Karmakin: An interesting perspective; Druids are becoming a hybridized healer sort of like Priests with an assortment of tools available. I’m probably not the only one contemplating using my second talent spec for an alternate healing spec. Okay, well maybe I am.
@Brian: Rolling Lifebloom will still be a good thing to do for tanks. However, it’s going to heal for less and cost a lot more. Already Lifebloom comprises less of my effective healing than does Regrowth on some fights. I’m just glad that GotEM will reduce the amount of time I have to spend maintaining a spell which is effectively a large health regeneration buff.