View more than 30 screenshot submissions for the 2008 Arbor Day celebration, showing off the uniqueness of readers’ Tree of Life form and their enthusiasm about this annual holiday!
ToL Aura Change Buffs Some Spells, Nerfs Others
Published on August 29, 2008 by Phaelia 
Analysis, Obsolete, Spells and Talents 
10 Comments
Note: As the Tree of Life aura was subsequently increased to a 6% bonus, this post is no longer relevant.
As briefly mentioned and discussed in my previous post, Blue: Changes to Buffs and Debuffs, a significant change is being made to the way that Tree of Life aura will function in Wrath of the Lich King. It will no longer afford benefit based on the Druid’s total Spirit but instead will function in the same was as a Paladin’s Improved Devotion Aura, providing a flat 3% increased healing to the raid. Although it was stated that the values listed were considered maximally-talented, it remains unclear whether 3/3 Improved Tree of Life will be required to meet the 3% bonus or whether it will afford an additional .45% bonus. Either way, this change will affect all spells based on their +Healing coefficient (or their corresponding spell power coefficients).
The TBC Tree of Life aura was a flat +Healing bonus that scaled with Spirit. It’s value decreased as +Healing increased, assuming Spirit stayed constant. Assuming they increased at the same rate, the value stayed the same. The WotLK aura is a multiplicative bonus that will instead scale with +Healing.
To help better explain the significance of this change, let’s consider two spells called DirectHealage and Hawtness. At your current +healing, DirectHealage derives 25% of its total amount healed from +Healing while Hawtness derives 75%. If you were to boost your +Healing by 8%, DirectHealage would get a 25%*8% = 2% total boost. Hawtness, on the other hand, would get a 75%*8%=6% total boost. With the new aura, both spells would simply get 3%.
This means that spells with high coefficients (Lifebloom, Chain Heal) will be nerfed by this change while spells with lower coefficients (Nourish, Regrowth) will be buffed. We can use the following formula to determine how much Spirit would be required under the current Tree of Life aura (25% of Spirit converted to +Healing) to match the new aura’s bonus:
Spirit = 4 *(((+Healing * +Healing coefficient) + base healed) * aura bonus) / +Healing coefficient
By applying this formula to the 3% and possibly 3.45% auras and using numbers previously determined in Direct Heals in Wrath, we can graph these values of Spirit at increasing values of +Healing.
Assuming you have somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 Spirit and 2000 +Healing at the conclusion of TBC, this change represents a nerf to triple-stacked Lifebloom and Chain Heal – two spells with the highest +Healing coefficients – and a buff to both Nourish and Regrowth. Although the base amount healed is also a determining factor, you can generally expect heals with higher coefficients to have been reduced in effectiveness by this change while those with lower coefficients to have been increased.
10 Comments
Trackbacks
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
Can I assume then that us trees won’t have to greedily horde up spirit gear but instead could look into items with more mp5?
@Nurowyn: Not at all. As shown in several articles in my series on 2.4 Mana Regen, Spirit is a much better “bang for your buck” in terms of regeneration per itemization point. It’s benefit to Tree of Life aura was always ancillary to me.
I’m not 100% sure I like the current trend to Homogenize the classes. A Paladin and a Resto Druid bring different things to the table. Now both the Paladin and Resto Druid are going to start showing up to the pot luck sporting Abrosia Jello Salad.
Phaelia, your graphs are nice, but they don’t show the real nerf. 2000 +healing isn’t automatic at level 70, in fact I’m still working hard to get +1700 after being 70 for three months. However, within a few weeks of 70 I had over 400 spirit (self buffed). This change is really going to hurt us little trees.
I really hope they make major changes to the Improved ToL talent to make the aura useful again.
That was my first thought too Scott. You hit the nail on the head.
All in all the aura change should boost healing done since it will apply to the whole raid (assuming everyone in your range). So if you’re not healing your party only, the overall outcome should be better.
@Scott: It does seem like homogenization is the theme of the upcoming expansion. I can only hope that the new, non-passive abilities play substantively different than each other so that it still feels like you’re playing a unique class. From what I can tell, Druid healing right now feels incredibly dynamic and a lot more fun than in TBC. I’m dreading playing on live again because I’ll miss all these fun changes!
@Parin: You’re right; 2000 +Healing isn’t guaranteed at 70. However, you’ll certainly be there and beyond by level 80 which is when you’ll begin raiding. I tend to look at these sorts of changes with an eye toward raid content as we don’t stay 70-79 for very long in the grand scheme of things.
@Badma: That’s a very good point.
I’m looking at this, and at first I thought awesome.. an extra bit of healing I origionally thought the extra 15% would still be linked to spirit in which me sitting at around 750 spirit and 2500+ healing in raid was alright. And there always had seemed to be points kicking around for extra stuff in resto. It seems now however, that after looking at it for a bit only .45% increase seems so small even multiplied accross all the healers in the raid still wont increase healing as much as something like living seed may. Perhaps somethign to get as a bonus at 80.. but not until then.
PS first time actually posting here! love the site
.
@Aureai: Thanks for commenting! It’s great to hear from new people!
One thing to consider is that this change will actually be MORE positive assuming there is a greater amount of raid-wide damage to be handled (as opposed to many encounters in TBC where healing was primarily focused on 1-3 MTs who could all be grouped with a Tree). I think it’s safe to assume we’ll be seeing a lot of this type of “splash” damage with the introduction of spells like Beacon of Light and Flourish.