With the release of Wrath of the Lich King looming on the “soon” horizon, many players find themselves looking for ways to keep themselves busy. Here are 12 steps to ensure you’re as prepared as possible for stepping foot on the shores of Northrend. (Hint: buy warm boots)
I seriously need to work on my title for these types of posts. Of course, I guess you know exactly what you’re getting into if you clicked through!
Balance
Talents
- Earth and Moon (Tier 10) changed so your Wrath and Starfire spells have a 100% chance to apply the Earth and Moon effect. It now also increases your spell damage by 1/2/3/4/5%. (Previously had a 20/40/60/80/100% chance to apply the Earth and Moon Effect)
- Eclipse (Tier 9) changed so when you critically hit with Starfire, you have a 33/66/100% chance of increasing damage done by Wrath by 10%. (Previously 20/40/60% chance)
- Improved Moonkin Aura (Tier 7) gives 3% spell haste for all ranks and now you gain 5/10/15% of your spirit as additional spell damage.
- Improved Faerie Fire (Tier 7) increases your critical strike chance against targets afflicted with Faerie Fire by 1/2/3%.
- Nature’s Splendor (Tier 3) changed to – When you cast Moonfire, Insect Swarm, Rejuvenation, Regrowth or Lifebloom you have a 33/66/100% chance to increase it’s duration by 3 sec.
Overall, some excellent changes to Balance. Still no bloat reduction yet, though, and the improvement to Eclipse certainly isn’t making things easier:
- The change to Earth and Moon is really nice and means that Balance Druids will be able to apply the 13% increase to damage taken much more quickly. The additional spell damage is also awesome, of course.
- Eclipse is obviously an improvement.
- The percentage haste granted by Improved Moonkin Aura used to ramp up with the number of points invested (1/2/3%), and the spell damage based on Spirit is, in my opinion, a fantastic change since it means Blizzard won’t have to design separate Moonkin and Tree leather (though we still don’t benefit from spell crit as much as we do from other stats).
- Improved Faerie Fire formerly only affected the chance to hit the target with spells but has also been given a self-only buff to spell crit against the target. This gives Moonkin a better reason to pick up this spell again.
- Nature’s Splendor has been changed once again. If you remember, it was originally a scaling, percentage-based increase to duration (10/20/30%) and was then changed to a constant increase of 1/2/3 seconds. The change so that each point increases the chance of increasing the duration of your spells is probably going to make having just 1 or 2 points in the ability annoying when it comes to maintaining a Lifebloom stack. It also no longer affects Flourish (renamed in this build to Wild Growth). /cry
» Read Graylo’s impressions of the Balance changes
Feral
Skills
- Shred – Effects which increase Bleed damage also increase Shred damage.
- Maul – Effects which increase Bleed damage also increase Maul damage.
- Bash now interrupts spell casts for 3 sec.
- Barkskin is now usable in all forms.
Talents
- Berserk (Tier 11) no longer causes your Mangle (Bear) and Maul attacks to hit up to 3 targets
- Predatory Instincts (Tier 8 ) reduces the damage taken by area of effect attacks by 3/6/9/12/15%. (Previously increased your chance to avoid them)
- Protector of the Pack (Tier 8 ) damage reduction is now at 3% for each party member across all ranks.
- Improved Leader of the Pack (Tier 7) – In addition, you gain 4% of your maximum mana when you benefit from Improved Leader of the Pack heal.
- Feral Charge (Cat) (Tier 5) – Causes you to leap behind an enemy, dazing them for 3 sec. 30 second cooldown.
- Faerie Fire (Feral) (Tier 3) now deals damage and causes extra threat while in bear form.
- Brutal Impact (Tier 2) now reduces the cooldown of bash by 15/30 sec in addition to its previous effect.
Glyphs
- Glyph of Swipe has been removed.
- Glyph of Maul has been added – Your Maul ability now hits 1 additional target.
Finally, we see some of the changes they’ve been working on to help Ferals:
- While not reclassified as bleeds themselves (they aren’t DoTs), Shred and Maul will benefit from talents and abilities that cause bleed damage to increase. More damage/threat is always good, right?
- The two changes to Bash will no doubt be helpful in PvP (interrupts spellcasting and gains a reduced cooldown from Brutal Impact).
- From earlier blue posts this week, we knew that Barkskin would be usable in Dire Bear Form and you can read more about this change over at Unbearably HoT.
- A Bear can now forego spending three points in Protector of the Pack and just pick up the first one to get all 12% of the damage reduction (losing out on the additional 40% attack power increase). I don’t really know enough to say whether that will be desirable, but it does make the talent a little more flexible and less mandatory to max out.
- The mana regeneration change to Improved Leader of the Pack was also expected. Thankfully, it’s based on maximum mana rather than base mana. As Currant points out, Ferals will still have to be mindful not to shift out without enough mana to shift back in since the effect obviously fades when in caster form.
- The additional threat from Feral Faerie Fire is a nice change, though I’m not sure if the damage it deals is so that it does come with increased threat or just to keep it from being used to build threat on mobs that are crowd controlled.
I don’t understand what was changed about Feral Charge (Cat). I believe that it has always dazed for 3 seconds.Edit: Apparently it now causes you to land facing your target rather than facing away from them. (Thanks, Kalon!)- I was sad to see the Glyph of Swipe removed, but it’s nice that Bears can make their Maul ability multi-target if they want to. Of course, using the Glyph of Maul would limit a Bear to using only Mangle and Lacerate for building threat with a mob standing beside one or more mobs that are crowd-controlled.
» Read Runycat’s impressions of the Feral changes
Restoration
Skills
- Gift of the Wild now affects the whole raid.
- Lifebloom healing reduced. Mana cost increased. (Check Skill list for details)
Talents
- Flourish renamed Wild Growth.
- Wild Growth (Tier 11) – Heals up to 5 friendly party or raid members within 15 yards of the target for 350 over 7 sec. The amount healed is applied quickly at first, and slows down as the Wild Growth reaches its full duration.
- Gift of the Earthmother (Tier 10) changed to reduce the base global cooldown of your Rejuvenation and Lifebloom spells by 4/8/12/16/20%.
- Tree of Life (Tier 9) increases healing received by 6%. (Previously 3%).
- Improved Tree of Life (Tier 9) now increases your healing spell power by 5/10/15% of your spirit while in Tree of Life Form. (Previously reduced the mana cost by 5/10/15%)
Earlier this week, Ghostcrawler indicated that the endless mana of Restoration Druids was considered an issue:
We are still playing with deep Resto a little. One of the concerns (for us, though probably not you!) is that with all the tree talents and some decent Spirit that druids never run out of mana.
On the other hand, we’re having trouble getting Resto druids to ever run out of mana.
In an effort to redress this "problem," the base mana cost of Lifebloom is being increased from 10 to 14%, an increase of 40%. The base amount healed by the HoT portion is simultaneously being reduced from 462 to 371, ostensibly to increase the use of other spells to make up the difference. I haven’t had the chance to test the coefficient, yet, but it sounds like it’s been reduced, as well, for a decrease to total healing of 25%. This is, by far, the largest nerf to the spell we’ve seen.
Flourish has been replaced with a spell called Wild Growth. I say "replaced" rather than "renamed" because, while the core mechanic hasn’t changed (an AoE HoT that tapers off over time), the numbers are drastically different:
- Wild Growth costs 35% base mana, up from the 32% of Flourish
- Wild Growth heals for 1085 over 7 seconds, down from the 4410 of Flourish
- Wild Growth is not affected by Nature’s Splendor (Flourish was)
- Wild Growth has a 15 yard radius, down from the 20 yard radius of Flourish (40 yard range)
Beta Tester Naois is reporting that the ticks from this spell have dropped off as follows:
Before: 893, 893, 893, 1216, 1108, 1000, 893, 785, 678, 570 = 8929 Total
After: 439, 411, 383, 355, 326, 299, 271 = 2484 Total
 |
| Flourish even got a name nerf. |
If you multiply the final amount healed by the new Wild Growth by 5 targets, you end up with a value that’s probably pretty close to what you’d expect a maximum rank Healing Touch critical to heal for… for essentially the same mana cost. Of course, a Healing Touch is a targeted spell that doesn’t have the potential to tick away ineffectually the same way that HoTs do. Compare this new spell to Circle of Healing which costs less mana and does all of its healing up front. This nerf is way, way too extreme, and Wild Growth will probably be skipped over by a lot of Druids.
They’ve removed the mana refund portion of Gift of the Earthmother (causes your Healing Touch and Nourish spells to refund 5% of their base cost for each healing over time effect on the target) while increasing the GCD reduction portion from 10% to 20%. This means at 5 points, it will reduce the global cooldown of Rejuvenation and Lifebloom from 1.5 to 1.2 seconds. This is, of course, down from its original value of 0.5 seconds (that also included the mana reduction). This talent is now officially in the "worthless" category. Save those 5 points and put them into something useful.
Both Tree of Life and Improved Devotion Aura are being boosted from 3% to 6% which is a very nice change. Every raid will want one or the other present (but there’s no reason to bring two Restoration Druids which is their stated intent). At the same time, the 15% mana reduction on HoTs bonus from 3/3 Improved Tree of Life is being replaced with a talent to convert 15% Spirit into Spell Power. This directly parallels the change being made to Improved Moonkin Aura. I’m happy to have more reason to stack Spirit (though I was never convinced we wouldn’t want to because Intensity is so valuable), but I’m really concerned that they’ve gone way overboard with the mana efficiency nerfs to Restoration Druids.
Yes, Restoration Druids were exceptionally mana efficient. That was intended, however, to offset the fact that a large portion of what HoTs heal for is often ineffectual. To make things even more difficult to test, Omen of Clarity is bugged and proccing too frequently, making it difficult to get an idea of what kind of efficiency hit we’ve taken without dropping the skill altogether. Overall, the nerf to Flourish has gutted the skill that made healing in Wrath so much more fun for me than in TBC.
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I am excited that BRK is back, though!
/cry I love you, ty for everything.
Hep
The new thing feral charge (cat), I guess is that you land behind the target, although I can’t remember if it also did that in earlier builds.
The fact that the 2 top resto talents have become more or less useless is a complete fiasco. I at least will consider playing something different than resto druid. This smells too much of early TBC, where druids where next to useless and seeing that blizzard will continue with heavy aoe dam fights, I have to ask why bother?
/Balderun
Excellent use of M:tG card images!
I summon Force of Nature! Raaawrr…
<— was obsessed with Magic as a youth.
Joshs last blog post..WotLK: Buffs and Debuffs Changes
Damage on feral faerie fire is great. No need to walk up to CC’ed mobs and break them with your paw.
On Ptr Nature’s Splendor is only adding the +3 seconds on the cast of lifebloom and not on the refresh
Nice.
On the feral side, the Protector of the Pack’s tooltip is not correct, and you need the full 3 points to get 3% per party member.
Also, the feral charge – the big difference is that you now land behind the person and are automatically facing them. Before, you’d teleport behind them and then be facing the way you were when you teleported.
Kals last blog post..[Paladin] WotLK testing: the lack of int and you
Great, when the pre wotlk patch hits the live server, druids actually getting nerfed, while all other classes see an increase in their healing or dmg.
I honestly didn’t get the “new” Nature’s Splendor, didn’t get at all. So basically if you’ve two points on it, you have 66% chance to have a 10s LB, and if you have 3 your LB is automatically 10s long? The “on cast” got me lost… That’s a really bad tooltip – or I’m severely lacking caffeine.
And Phae, are you still picking Wild Growth? I wasn’t impressed by Flourish, and the “new” one sounds pretty weak right now.
I’m truly, truly, truly shocked, disappointed and frustrated with the resto changes. Usually I’m very upbeat and looking for the silver lining in any change but I just have nothing constructive to say. Wow. Just – Wow.
/sigh… Just when you thought we were actually going to be able to be doing some cool, new, innovative thing. The change to Flourish is pretty much completely unacceptable. Compared to COH, it’s now a complete joke. The nerf to lifebloom takes us back a few months ago to the debacle of the attempt to nerf it on the basis of PVP. Now we seem to be stuck at the intersection of “Well, you have too much mana so we’re going to reduce the amount of healing you do while making it cost more mana” and Stupid streets. This will push us back into the horrible box we were in at the beginning of BC. It will make us secondary healers at best and unnecessary at worst considering the buff from Improved Devotion Aura.
In reality, I see the majority of the problem here stemming from Blizzard’s attempt to consolidate classes in order to alleviate the need to bring specific classes and specs to a raid and making it more “friend friendly.” What they have done though, is create multiple classes that are giant mana batteries while giving similar spells to everyone (i.e. flash heal to druids in terms of nourish or glyph of healing touch and CoH to druids in terms of Flourish / Wild Growth, etc…). Everyone remember the giant green blob argument made about druids and OOC rez? Now they’ve made EVERYone a giant green glob by making half of the classes almost identical in their roles and abilities. It just so happens that druids, being a mana efficient class as it is via talents and such, are showing the problem of having too much mana. However, it’s all part of a larger problem in my opinion. Yet, Blizzard has put themselves in a catch 22. They have made us really mana efficient but then gave everyone mana restorative abilitis (outside of shadow priests). To nerf not only our mana efficiency but our overall heal output as well to try and fix the problem is NOT a solution. It inevitably makes us gimpy while putting a band-aid on a larger issue.
<– is going to be a Moonkin in Wrath, and then Dire Bear. At least if these changes persist. ‘Nuff said.
.
Seriously, how often has LB been nerfed in the last six months? And they’re still at it
Nice use of the MtG artwork
And the changes are really really going to be a pain to any dps/druid combo that’s trying to make it big in 2v2 before Wrath hits.
Beathoovens last blog post..Blizzard should do Genetics, aka Hunchbacked Hobo’s Decapitator
You got the FF change wrong, Phae. It is in addition to the spell hit bonus, not instead of it.
As stated by a blue poster (http://blue.mmo-champion.com/2/9957009423-re-balance–gc-or-koraa.html ), they wanted to add some personal advantages to talents that give raid-buffs. This was done because otherwise only one per class in a raid would have to take this talents and all others could leave them out and still have the benefits.
Abiess last blog post..Big Druid Changes in Build 8885
I agree for the most part Phae. Gift of the Earth Mother is very lackluster right now. If they are worried about the mana efficiency, then they should have the HoT count affect Direct heals some other way (splash healing to nearby friendlies, more healing per HoT on target, etc.). I think it will change some more, but they are probably unsure of how to do so just yet, if they are concerned about our mana efficiency.
I’m perhaps a tad more optimistic on Flourish/Wild Growth. The initial talented ability will be achievable at lvl 60 and should be rank 1. There should be a rank 2 (lvl 70) and 3 (lvl 80) as well. Are we talking about rank 2 or 3 here, or only Rank 1 (where the smaller amount of healing is still very impressive, perhaps even a little overpowered)? I suppose you could be discussing both, since what you list as official changes shows a different value than when you compare Wild Growth with Flourish.
@ Hokuto- I can’t say for certain, but I BELIEVE that what that means is that each time you cast a HoT spell (excluding Wild Growth) you have x% chance of it lasting longer. With 3 points, it should last that extra 3 seconds every time. They changed it because (I’m guesing) having 1 or 2 points (previously increasing the duration of every HoT and DoT by 1 second per talent point)invested in the talent is totally worthless for every spell except Lifebloom (and Flourish R.I.P.), because every other HoT and DoT we have only heals/damages every 3 seconds (I believe this is staying the same).
Arguably, the previous version could give a slight edge for getting more healing out of Rejuvination or Regrowth through Swiftmend after the last tic has actually occurred, but I doubt that Blizzard wants that level of micromanagement out of players. So instead, they have changed it to a percent chance for longer duration. The problem is that no one wants just a chance of Lifebloom lasting longer. It either needs to last longer or not, or you might just lose your mind trying to maintain stacked Lifeblooms that randomly change in duration.
I’d just like to point out, in reference to the Balance changes, that the 3% spell hit part of Improved Faerie Fire has not been removed, and the new spell crit to caster part is in addition to its previous effect.
For Resto, I can see where the devs are coming from, but these changes do seem like they’ve gone a bit far… did Resto really have that much mana regen?
I would actually think the nerfs were neccessary, we WERE just so overpowered. On the live server I could outheal anything in a duel and never run out of mana in any raid without the use of mana pots(Except Kaz ‘rogal made me chain pot, but i was still last to explode!). And im not totaly depressed about the change to flourish/wild growth, I would now think of it as a HoTish chain heal, without the lighting beams and with an explosion of leaves and ribbons in your face. And the big change with the new constant mana pool also pretty much makes restos infinite mana already. We healed Outland without flourish/wild growth, and we can prolly survive these nerfs
On the beta, granted we were in pvp gear, but we were ridiculously mana efficient. Flourish was too good, and on multiple targets better than lifebloom on occasion. We healed like fiends and Nourish was completely useless when specced resto.
That being the case they totally knee jerked this reaction. In BC endgame you generally had enough regen on your gear you could start socketing for +heal. Without access to end game spirit/mp5 levels its impossible to gage just how big of a hit this really is to raiding but it does seem like it is pretty damn painful.
It would seem that we’re still regrowth spammers, the glyph that gives regrowth a 50% bonus to targets with the rregrowth hot on them can be really nice i hope it stays around.
So now that top end talents have been nerfed so hard what’s stopping me doing a 28/0/43 build getting dreamstate and being more mana efficient and MT healy than before? Granted you miss one point in improved tree and miss out on the gimmicks of replenish and living seed but from what I can tell from my experience in the ptr there’ll be enough mana flooding around from ret pallies, spriests and hunters that replenish isn’t all that usefull and living seed is likely to get overhealed anyway.
On the Tree efficiency, I can only imagine they went overboard with the initial nerfs because Restoration efficiency was shoved under their noses and they had not previously forseen or tested it.
As such, like they did with a lot of classes before, they nerf it to the ground to get a baseline reading, and then un-nerf things to end up somewhere in the middle on acceptable ground.
Yes, this means that the 25% healing reduction may still end up a 12.5% healing reduction, and there will be nerfs. But, I also think that after testing in the next patch a lot of changes with mana/healing efficiency will be reverted.
Natarumahs last blog post..Beta build 8962 talent changes
The thing about excessive efficiency in our heals is something probably all of us had guessed.. I imagined myself with my current gear with 3.0 talents and thought, what the hell am I supposed to do with all that mana?
By the way, I haven’t followed last changes thoroughly but last time I checked they stopped making Wound Poison stack. Sure it was reducing heals by 50% instead, but it would still be an opportunity to ha-ha at rogues after all. As both a tree and a subtlety rogue I’m divided about this though :/
I think this is not correct:
Beta Tester Naois is reporting that the ticks from this spell have dropped off as follows:
Before: 893, 893, 893, 1216, 1108, 1000, 893, 785, 678, 570 = 8929 Total
After: 439, 411, 383, 355, 326, 299, 271 = 2484 Total
Before it does 10 ticks and after 7.
“The after” every tick the value goes down… with 28.
“Before” first 3 ticks is the same.. then higher then going down with about 108.
I think before it should be like :
Before: 1216, 1108, 1000, 893, 785, 678, 570 = 6250 Total
I dont know how to use my skill points now.. if they are trying to get us oom… then using only regrowth is not a option…
I saw a blue post yesterday that stated Flourish was healing as much in its first tick as CoH. I can get why they would nerf that, but whacking it 75%+ seems too extreme.
I have the same reaction to the LB change. It probably does need to eat more mana, but I don’t understand why they’d hit its healing done at the same time. LB is arguably too -efficient-, but I wouldn’t say it’s too -powerful-.
That said, I expect further changes to come. Early this morning they announced upcoming changes to Feral centered around improving Berserk, including making Feral Faerie Fire baseline. (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=10043226143&sid=2000&pageNo=3#48) Pretty significant stuff, and I bet we will see Resto changes on a similar scale.
ciskos last blog post..Battleground Strategies
@Balderun: Ohhhh… that makes sense. I guess they finally decided to scrap the Warrior ability, Heroic Leap, because they couldn’t get it to stop doing stupid things like throw you to the bottom of the ocean or onto a ledge you couldn’t get back off of.
@Josh: I was not obsessed with Magic, but I did hang out in my high school math teacher’s classroom, and he played Magic with his students. ^^
@Thalium: That’s a great point. Great utiility to give to Bears.
@Kal: Oh really … that’s lame (about Protector of the Pack). >.< @Repsa J: I can't imagine they will leave things the way they are.
@Hokuto: Yeah, I'm not sure how it's SUPPOSED to work with Lifebloom stacking. It should never refresh a 10 sec stack so that it becomes 7 seconds. I am not sure THEY know how it's supposed to work, either, since it's apparently bugged right now.
In its current incarnation, I will probably drop Wild Growth once I'm not doing 5-mans any more. PTUI!
@Zaira: I admit that Flourish was probably a bit overdone, but this change is just silly.
@Andurial: Great insight. I am also worried that Resto Druids will return to their early TBC undesirability, but I have to hold out hope that Blizzard will be able to tell that they've gone overboard. As you say, HoT-based healers NEED to be mana efficient. So much of our healing is "wasted" that we couldn't afford to spend the normal budget on it. They say they couldn't believe how efficient we ended up being, but I have to wonder what they THOUGHT was going to happen when they a) added an additional 15% mana redux on IToL and b) made Moonglow so easy to acquire.
@Beathooven: You aren't the only Druid considering respeccing. Bell of 4Haelz was complaining to me this morning that she's considering going 4Boomz (or 4Haetz) in the expansion.
@Abies: Ohhhhhhh, okay. Thank you for the correction on Faerie Fire.
@Yggdrasil: I'm actually talking about Rank 4 of Wild Growth (http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=53251).
@Frogs: Thank you for the info. I’ve corrected the post.
@Tiagantar: I do agree that our mana efficiency was too high. I think they took things too far, though, so far that I’m not looking forward to the 3.0.2 patch because I don’t even like any of our new stuff anymore (except Revive and the cool stuff in Balance that I <3). I’m dreading the nerf to the Glyph of Regrowth. T_T
@Joxxer: I agree that the reduction to Flourish was necessary. I think a 50% nerf would have been more appropriate than 75%. It’s being compared to Circle of Healing which is a) instant and b) a 41-point talent. It should clearly be BETTER than Circle of Healing, and it isn’t.
@Camel: If there’s as much mana flowing as you say, why would you want to go all the way down to Dreamstate? You could probably get away with putting more points into Restoration.
@Natarumah: You may be right. The previous build was the “Priest Nerf” build, and I remember mentally ducking my head in the hopes they wouldn’t notice my awesome tree-ness. I was WRONG! Hopefully next patch will see some rebuffs to the Resto tree (and just plain buffs to Feral and Balance) the same way that Priests got some nice changes this time around.
@Ermengol: With all that mana, you can um … nuke things. And great point about the poisons no longer stacking. I hadn’t considered it from a nerf perspective.
@Thalosar: The reason there were more ticks before was that the spell used to be affected by Nature’s Splendor which added 3 seconds (or 3 more ticks) to the spell.
As a T6 raiding holy priest in BC, I was initially very bothered by Flourish healing more than CoH per tick and costing less mana, I’m sure you can understand that. But I agree, this nerf bat hit too hard. I think they should have increased thhe mana cost of LB like they did, but kept the healing the same.
As for flourish, a HoT outhealing the priest spamming his most powerful heal is just plain embarrassing. I’m a big renew nut, often 25-33% of my effective healing comes from Renew, so I know all about HoTs being wasted, but the fact is, it was overpowered. Now it’s underpowered. In my mind it should have been reduced by about 50%, healing for 70% of CoH on the first tick, 65% on the second, etc. This would allow both abilities to remain competitive and fun, as opposed to one being vastly superior to the other. The advantage of Flourish over CoH is that you can spam it on every group in the raid and everyone will get healed to some degree. CoH is limited to 5 players being spammed at a time. Granted, although powerful, spamming these new AoE smart heals is far from fun, take it from me as a BC CoH spammer. Fun for a while, but it gets old fast.
As for the 41 point versus 51 point arguments, I’ll trade you my 41+51 point talents for your 41+51 point talents.
CoH and Tree of Life form are vastly superior talents to the current 51 point priest/druid talents. Why isn’t Guardian Spirit as good as Tree of Life form?
On the plus side Lifeblood(Herbalism heal) Grows flowers around you when you cast and looks really cool.
I would agree entirely that a 50% reduction would have been the correct solution to Flourish/Wild Growth.
What’s really frustrating right now on the beta is that I need to spec out of OOC to gage mana efficiency and not see what OOC actually does for me. With the nerf to Replenish only yielding .25% mana per second things are a little different. There is NOT that much much mana flooding around.
I would predict when they fix OOC they’ll have people giving a more reasonable input as far as how druid mana efficiency goes. I still maintain the regrowth glyph upping it to 50% more if they have the regrowth hot is nice. It goes from 3000 and change and 5000 and change crit to 5-6K normal and 8-9K crit. That for 700 mana isn’t that bad honestly for level 80. The problem that I have is that we are a bit more blunt at healing. We can’t downrank Regrowths for spam, lifebloom is more costly and less exciting and won’t bloom as quick on spot heals with the 10 second length. The old Flourish gave me a soft handed approach to quickly healing a lot of light damage. Without it things get a TON more expensive. So we are back to really only being good at healing 1-4 targets ideally from what I see.
I don’t like where it pidgeon holes us and I don’t think our mana will be nearly as good as they think it’ll be after OOC is fixed.
Why are the devs worried about resto druids being too mana efficient? Are they doing anything to nerf pallies? Holy pallies are so mana efficient it’s just ridiculous.
gelaendes last blog post..Can I Get a HELL YEAAAH?!
That change to Improved Tree of Life is going to go great with this trinket dropping in the instances of the expansion.
And here we go again… New patch, more changes. Here’s the latest Nature’s Splendor:
“# Nature’s Splendor changed from 3 to 1 point. Now Increases the duration of your Moonfire, Insect Swarm, and Rejuvenation spells by 3 sec, your Regrowth spell by 6 sec, and your Lifebloom spell by 3 sec.”
Waaaaaay better and more clear to understand.
Okay so I don’t understand their reasoning for nerfing Flourish to the piece of junk it is now. They’re reasoning was “The first tick of Flourish ticks for as much as CoH does.”
My reasoning for keeping it is… “So?”
Druids have NO AoE heals, that aren’t on a million hour cooldown and are reliable. Priests now have 3 if they spec for it that aren’t on a cooldown. They each get Holy Nova (which also does damage), Circle of Healing (51 point talent) and Prayer of Healing. TWO of which are instant cast w/ no cooldown!!!!
Flourish was fine for druids and they should have let us have an overpowered move. They removed the one spell i was looking forward to.
I have yet again been reduced to lifebloom spamming and now with my nifty glyph i can healing touch spam as well too.
/QQ
@Thelyne: Technically we can get Tranquility on zero cooldown as well (at least on the PTR), but its not very practical.
As it stands wild growth is a waste of GCD though, unless your a fan of the animation there’s no situation its worth using in.
@Phae and anyone else: has anyone examined the PvP implications of these changes?
), but the viability of Tree of Life (armor and no movespeed penalty) will be very nice.
From my limited experience as resto, the nerfs to Lifebloom will be a hard hit (although admittedly Resto druids are probably the most OP class in 2v2 and 3v3… after all, that’s why I rolled one
Oh well, these changes should be far from final. I hope.
Beathoovens last blog post..Warning: Contents May Occur
I for one am not overly concerned with the changes to LB. Honestly as someone who’s been playing a resto druid for nearly 3 years now, in every instance the devs have created i’m sick of the LB, LB, LB, RJ, LB, LB, LB, SM, LB, LB, LB, …. AHHHHH!! LOL. I eventually changed my healing to be much more regrowth oriented when the changes came down in 2.3, and took alot of heat for it on my server (going 24/0/27 with 50% crit on regrowth, natures grace criting constantly, swiftmend and the occasional HOT) I find it very interesting that the devs are encouraging us more toward this kind of healing, and away from the HOTBOTs we have been for this entire expansion.
For my money a 11/0/50 (L70 build) right now makes by far the most sense, especially with the massive nerf to Rampant Growth. With the longer life on our HOTs, and a Glyph of HT, a rotation of LB, Rejuv, HT, HT, HT, LB, SM, Rejuv, Regrowth, HT, LB (only now are u at your 3 stacks) HT, HT, HT etc… With the increased amount of Crit i think we’ll be seeing in mixed use gear, the viability of Living seed on top of a glyphed HT will equate to (fully talented) +/- 3400 Healing Touch in 1.5 seconds + 20% (for rough numbers) crit for 5200. Add to this @ 20% a Living Seed of 2600 and on a 60 cast sequence of HT in a 6 minute fight you’d see 163,200(non-crit) + 93,600 (Crit w/LS) = 256,800 total healed. The total actual cast time on these spells is 90 seconds (1.5×60) or a potential HPSC of 2,853, and a HPS of 713 over a 6 minute fight – JUST FROM HT. You’d burn +/- 26,400 mana. Add in some Lifeblooms, rejuv and regrowths to tick while you are casting HT, and you’d have outputs well in excess of 2,000 HPS. The major issue here would of course be mana efficiency, especially given the potions nerf, but given all of the mana regen mechanics and talents of other raiders, I don’t see this being as much of a problem, especially when adding in our innervate.
Bottom line – rather than fighting the new mechanics…maybe it’s time to go with the flow:).
I’ve always thought 24/0/27 (and variants) is nothing compared to ToL-based specs, and I’ve never been a lifebloom spammer myself. Regrowth was an underrated spell, and 2.3 just dissipated doubts about its great value, but it wasn’t enough to go up to Nature’s Grace just for that.
In my guild we just killed Mother Shahraz the other day for the first time (well, and Council \o/ ) and without the extra 25% mana ToL was giving to our 3 trees, wearing almost full SR gear, we wouldn’t have made it. We didn’t lack speed but mana. And same goes to Council, even with normal mana regen fight is too long, and you want to save innervate for CoH priests; again, healing speed not needed but efficiency. Until next patch.. leave fast heals to other classes!
Anyway, I’m now an even happier tree. We’ll be able to have both ToL and NG in the expansion!
I hear you about the mana regen – but instead of gemming for +healing, i’m able to spec mana regen – ie spirit and int – so that my mana regen, while casting is in the 400 range, with about 1,000 mp5 when not casting. As far as Mother, we have had her on farm for quite some time, and we killed her with me in the 24/0/27 spec. It’s not a matter of which is better or worse, but rather what your play style is. I’m a raid healer, not a tank hotter – though my hots actually tick for much more than most trees. Additionally, while nature’s grace is great, it’s not the only reason to spec into the balance tree. Specing into lunar guidance and moonglow are significant buffs to my resto spells – the mana savings of 9% in moonglow (3 points) is about 1/2 of the benefit from TOL, and the 25% spell power buff running of my int(for all spells, making me more versatile) from lunar guidance is about the same as the more limited TOL aura off my spi (though of course i have more spi than int).
I am more than capable of healing tanks – (I’m the mage & rogue healer for Council – yes, i handle both of them at the same time, we do the fight with 7 healers) and handle a bloodboil group on BB with just rolling regrowth, 1 stack of LB and 1 rejuv…
I am on the PTR right now, I wish I was in the beta, and some of the nerfs seam very harsh to me. But I am playing around with what I can right now to see if I can come up with something for level 70 when the patch comes out (my guild is still raiding every night and from what I hear that is rare now, since very one it not doing things because of wrath)
I have play tested (in heroics) and I have come up with this build http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?druid=00000000000000000000000000000230533312530522531053013010000000000000000000000000000
I can say I am not having problems with mana, but I can see if the fights were lasting longer I would end up with mana issues. But at the same time I am now having to consider innervation in heroics now. Still don’t use pots, but I think in a raid setting I might end up there. I still do alot of hots, keeping Lifebloom up, but I am cycling in Healing Touch now (with the glyph and 33 haste it is now a .98 second cast time) if the tank needs it, and regrowth for it higher crit rate.
Well, regarding it being a matter of play style, I disagree. One thing is doing better with a given method because that’s the one we’re more comfortable with, but assuming equal skills at both specs I believe there is a winner. Healing bonus from ToL aura affects 5 people, 4 of which are likely to take more damage that average if raid setup is half decent, while than coming from balance talents only affects those players the druid is healing (i.e. the ToL party will receive more than 20% of overall healing, while a sigle healer will hardly do more than that on the whole raid). Also, if your HoTs tick for more than those with 5/5 Empowered Rejuvenation it’s a matter of having better gear, not just gems or spec. Probably not for 10-man, but for 25-man raids I believe ToL is better.
About massive lifebloom rolling as a healing strategy, I’ve always been against that. Except on MH trash when 3 or 4xLB by some druid provide a great buffer for other healers, it’s as boring as stupid. Stacking HoTs on one or two tanks while healing the rest of the raid, be it preemptively or reactively, that’s the way; the more healers area sensitive to burst damage, the better.
And sorry for bringing once again the “ToL yes/ToL no” discussion, sometimes I can’t help myself
Getting back on topic, the good thing about the talent changes is that we won’t have to choose, because we’ll have both Moonglow and Nature’s Grace at hand. Now I wonder, did they ever change NG so it reduces global cooldown? If so, it would be even more useful (regrowth+swiftmend combos, living seed included).
By the way, when mentioning the potential excess of mana.. I didn’t think of Potion Sickness. I’ve only used mana potions in emergencies (“damn, I died just after using innervate!”) and SR encounters specially since 2.3, but I hope things don’t change much.
edit: I’ve noticed when I edit posts, linefeeds between paragraphs tend to disappear, so I have to insert two
Holy heck. I guess I’m not the only one really upset by these changes. You guys have been super talkative!
@Amendar: Were it up to me, they would have reduced Flourish healing by 50% and only increased the mana cost by 50% of what they increased it by. Oh, who am I kidding. If it were up to me, they would have left us completely OP.
Alas, the poor AI of Flourish means that you *can’t* actually spam it on every group in the raid. From what I’ve read, the AI is pretty … dumb. You’d have to organize your raid’s configuration based on a single spell which seems pretty awkward (not like Chain Heal where the people who benefit are standing close together by default).
@Wynn: It DOES look really cool. I’m pretty jealous that’s a tradeskill-based effect and not something for Druids!
@Joxxer: Have you tried the RG Glyph yet? I haven’t had the time to log onto beta to look for one, yet. A lot of Druids are speculating that it’s simply too good to NOT get nerfed. In which case, I’m going to throw up my branches and spec for Critter Form.
@Geleande: Are they still? I was under the impression that their earlier Illumination was pretty effective, but I haven’t kept up with what’s happened to them in WotLK.
@Oni: Oh, that’s really cool!! I love it! But um … where’s it from?
@Hokuto: That is a HUGE improvement. Nature’s Splendor was really confusing to work with. And making it boost RG by 6 seconds is in-line with their policy of building the Tier Armor set bonuses (+6 sec on RG from 2-piece T5) into the class so you don’t have to hold onto those pieces.
@Thelyne: Flourish was really the one thing I was looking forward to, as well.
They’ve totally rained on my parade. And not in a pretty, Tranquility-esque fashion.
@Jut: We can? How is that? I was under the impression that Improved Tranquility reduced the cooldown of Tranquility to 5 min instead of 10?
@Beathooven: I haven’t looked at the PvP implications, no, as I’m staying out of Arenas in protest of Death Knights. ^_^ I imagine it’s going to be really painful in 2v2, though.
@Nairbren: I agree that LB LB LB RJ LB LB LB SM LB LB LB was really tedious. However, now it’s both tedious (albeit less so with longer duration) AND painfully expensive. I am honestly a bit tired of having my healing style completely reinvented every time they release an expansion. I don’t WANT to go back to a direct healer style of healing (even though I love Regrowth). Druids are supposed to be highly efficient HoT-based healers.
@Ermengol: I am really happy about being able to pick up Nature’s Grace. I’ve always found that to be a really FUN spell mechanic.
@Drun: Your build looks good, but I’ll probably be taking something with more points in Balance. That new stuff just looks like too much fun to pass up, even when the expansion is first released!
@Ermengol: “Stacking HoTs on one or two tanks while healing the rest of the raid, be it preemptively or reactively, that’s the way.” < This. And yes, Nature’s Grace does now affect the global cooldown.
On Ptr you can only still drink one pot per combat, new shadowmeld was letting me getting around this.
Phaelia I was thinking going into balance a bit too. I see 2 ways to go into balance, the one way would be work down to dream state, this would make one a very strong direct healer, but at the cost of some HoT stuff in the resto tree. The other way I was thinking was build in the balance tree down to the 3rd tier for the added heal per tick and increased time. But I ended up thinking of staying in the resto tree, yes my direct heals will not be as strong as a dream state resto build, or my hots might not be as strong as a “HoT Master”’s (term I think I will call them) HoTs. My heals will be still very good, and more rounded I will have to cycle all my heals in, instead of relying on HoT’s or Direct heals. My direct heals should be stronger then a HoT Master’s and my HoTs should be more useful for me then a dream state druid. This is the angle I am coming at it, but at the same time if I was a raid leader I would want all 3 types of druids healing in my raid, since all 3 are (IMHO) very good ways of going about it.
Considering these changes I will probably change my talents a bit, too. Even though I’m not very excited to have to focus more on HT, it seems as this will be neccessary.
So, right now I’m thinking of this build: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?druid=00000000000000000000000000000230533312430522531053013010532000100000000000000000000
When thinking of a glyphed HT, Natures Swiftness will no longer be very important and 3 points for natures grace are also not that important, if you don’t want to go deeper in the balance tree. But we’ll see how it will end up.
As a Druid and a priest I have to clear up some misconseptions here
In response to the post stating that priests have 3 aoe heals..
Hi. Holy nova blows. Its a *huge* mana hog and heals for a mediocore amount. Every raiding priest has skipped it as a talent, it isn’t good at all. As I use it to run friends through low level instances, I OOM really quick. Can’t imagine using this in a raiding enviroment unless I want to do aoe dps. Its healing ability only affects your own group.
Prayer of healing is a 3 sec cast and it isn’t a bad skill at all, though it once again only affects your own group. I typically find it more efficent to throw a hot on people if they arent in danger in between casted heals on the tank.
Circle of healing has a 6 second cool down in wrath. It is NOT spamable.
For a class that is supposed to be “the aoe healing spec”, holy is lackluster to me after the COH nerf.
—-
Anyway, Im really disappointed in both holy priest and resto druid talents in wrath. This Flourish nerf makes me a sad tree. Priest’s seems good in theory but it feels like it would be something much higher in the tree for what it does (from my raiding in live it didnt save the tank).
Really don’t know which to play first in wrath as they are both looking bad to me.
I get the feeling that flourish will still heal for more than priests coh in a raid enviroment though. Because it has no target cap and no cooldown. At least in my guild (we dont try to heal-snipe). But this nerf is way too much. I hope blizzard reconsiders.
RIP Flourish.
I’ve speced away from it. While I felt is was overpowered and needed toned down, where it is now is just depressing.
8982 is out and Resto’s got…
Restoration
* You can now cast Innervate while in Tree of Life form
Am I missing something?
Can’t Say I’m not a little happy at some of the talent changes to ferals…well maybe more then a little..Like A LOT! But I am very sad that my favorite healy druid has been nerfed so horribly. I agree with Adurial they have seemed to lump everyone together and then when they noticed that druids were excelling they nerfed them in some of the worst ways possible. Its sad and makes me want to make my off spec Feral DPS which is sad cause I do enjoying healing…Guess I better work on leveling my priest ><
@Wynn: Ohhhhhhh … interesting! I wonder if that’s something they’ll be correcting.
@Drunn: I’ll probably be taking the second strategy you mention (taking enough in Balance to augment my HoTs). I just prefer the HoT-based style of healing so much now. I hope it’s still viable. ^_^
@Fl3x: With 5/5 Improved Regrowth, I think you’d be crazy not to pick up Nature’s Grace. The synergy between the two — especially if they leave the [Glyph of Regrowth] the way it is now — is just too good to pass up. I’m also not quite sure I’m ready to give up Nature’s Swiftness, though I admit you make a good point about the [Glyph of Healing Touch].
@Xiritree: Circle of Healing doesn’t currently have a cooldown in Wrath. It temporarily had a 6 second cooldown but the Priest community got really upset and it was repealed. Flourish has a target cap and terrible AI. Its HoT effect will be overwritten by everything and its dog.
@Amradorn: Yeah, I was wondering about that, too. I wasn’t aware of Innervate never not having worked in Tree of Life form.
@Abagoo: I guess you’ll be sticking with Feral in the expansion then.
While I admit that I had troubles at times healing some of the earlier TBC instances, much of those troubles were brought on by the fact that I would be either a) healing tanks that didn’t have nearly enough mitigation (or threat-output to make up for the mitigation…nothing irks me more than pulling off a tank by keeping him/her alive) or healing DPS that wouldn’t be paying attention to said threat-output (however good it might be) and collapsing, shocked, after the mobs turned and decided that they, in fact, preferred not to have balls of fire slung at their face (who knew?). Resto-healing was troublesome at times, but never, I feel, impossible for a druid to handle in a 5-man instance setting. Certain encounters were made easier by having a healer with the ability to efficiently mitigate damage without fear of any pushback, and others were more challenging to heal, but all of them were possible.
I don’t mind the idea of learning how to heal a certain way, in that regard, but at the same time, I do. I might be the odd one out in the world of resto druids in that I actually like managing my HoTs on multiple targets, rather than being a MT healer, but I like what damage mitigation a druid brings to a party/raid. Right now, I feel like we fill a specific niche, and we’re good at it, and that the changes being brought to us come the patch and expansion will result in the potential loss of some of our utility.
Yes, we’re mana-efficient, almost extremely so. On certain fights, all through the Sunwell, I can easily last the length without a Shadow Priest, sometimes not having to consume mana potions. But why is that a bad thing? That means that my Innervate is no longer a simple mana-regen infusion designated to myself, but will be guaranteed to be free for a healer. It also means that on certain fights, I can be outside of a Shadow Priest group and be fine for mana, allowing for another healer to get some benefit. I know that the Shadow Priest mana regeneration system is going to change, so that might no longer be the case, but I think it’s a seemingly valid point nonetheless.
I like being able to use each and every single GCD and not worry that I’ll run out of mana by doing so, and that my heals will serve their purpose in the end (rather than casting a “Flash Heal” wannabe only to have a large percentage of it overheal as a result of other healers ALSO healing the target in question).
Honestly, I don’t PVP much at all. But I wonder if the devs are worried about our mana-efficienvy from a PVP, and even more, an Arena perspective. In that sense, I could understand there being reasons for nerfing the potential of Lifebloom and such.
I’m happy that, I suppose, I’ll be better at 5-man healing now? But at the same time, I wonder what exactly my role will be in a raid. Right now I feel like I assist the other healers in maintaining the health of the raid while doubly assisting the healers in keeping the main tank alive. I don’t do it by myself; no healer does. I simply bring a different form of damage mitigation that allows others more time to react with theirs. I like this role. I guess in a way it’s simple, but I feel fulfilled by it. And while I like the idea of a more dynamic way to heal, I feel like, at least initially, the other healers in my raid will have to “discover” how to heal with each other again rather than have some basis of understanding and have to discover when our newer abilities are most optimally used.
@Elryse: I’d like to think that Druids will continue to be HoTs-based healers that run stacked Lifebloom, Rejuvenation, and Regrowth on 1-2 tanks. The new 10-second duration on Lifebloom is just going to make it that much easier to include additional spells in our “rotation”, including the improved Wild Growth spell. Many Druids who never healed back in the days of pre-BC Healing Touch are going to be surprised at how difficult it is to avoid overhealing, but it’s a skill that all healers learn in time, so I don’t think it will be so bad. In short, I’d like to think that our style of healing is going to become MORE dynamic, not less. I do hope, however, that we’ll end up with the mana regeneration to sustain it. I’ve also always loved being the mana efficient healing totem.
Thank you for the wonderful comments!
I think now that the patch went live, you should do a revision about Gift of the Earthmother. Tons of people like it, some others, like yourself, don’t. I can’t define myself exactly. People who like it says they can HoT the tank fast enough before it gets too many hits, and it’s wonderful for letting the party or raid alive since you can WL or LB everyone low in HP faster than before. Is that really that bad?
On the other hand, you can spend those 5 points on Improved Tranquility and Living Seed, for example. The former is a great group healing and can help a lot on tough situations, specially with 0 threat generation.
I really don’t know, I’m kinda lost now.
@Assis: I don’t think I need to do a revision about GotEM until Blizzard does. 0.3 seconds off the GCD of Lifebloom and Rejuvenation does not a good 5-point talent that deep in the tree make. Blech.
I do like Living Seed for its synergy with Improved Regrowth/Nature’s Grace for some super powerful healing delivered quickly.