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Mailbag: Patch 3.0.2
Published on October 17, 2008 by Phaelia 
Community, Mailbag, Patches 
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Visitors have been sharing their healing experiences since the release of Patch 3.0.2. Here are just a few:
Andurial of Alleria (US) writes in:
I thought I would give you a bit of preliminary data on 3.0 raiding (with more to come after tomorrow’s BT raid). Although my guild had intended to raid yesterday, Alleria was in the toilet so that didn’t happen. However, we did throw together a ZA tonight to check out how our numbers were doing. I have to say, it was mightily impressive. The place was in the bag with 24 minutes left on the bear timer though of course there is no longer any bear to be had. [My spec is] an 8/0/53 build including Wild Growth. We were running with myself and a Discipline Priest (as apparently Disc is now where it’s at for priests who can let go of their CoH teddy bear that they cling to). As it turned out he and I were neck and neck on healing through most of the instance.
Instantly, I could tell a difference in HPS with it jumping up to about 1300 instantly and going as high as 1900!. Running with a Shadow Priest and Ret Paladin, there were no mana issues at all (which was incredibly comforting) that were not solved with an Innervate during a particularly daring set of pulls going up to the Lynx boss (including pulling the entire Lynx room and boss at the same time). Amazingly we never wiped, only lost one player to the Lynx’s cleave and Wild Growth actually came out shining. Now, here’s the thing. It is a fundamental change in play style. Lifebloom which used to do between 60-70% of my healing was now down to a roughly equal 35% with Wild Growth with Wild Growth passing on some fights like the Lynx or Dragonhawk. I also was using HT a bit (with the Glyph) for some quick throughput heals while HoTs were ticking. All in all, I’m not hyperventilating like I thought I would be, but it’s going to take some getting used to. I’ll let you know how it goes in a 25-man real raid environment after tomorrow and Friday.
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| Image credit to Eggo |
Metrogon commented on An Early Thanksgiving:
I ran my first raid since the patch tonight on Mount Hyjal. Usually the druid healers (including myself) way dominate the other classes on overall (trash) healing meters. Tonight, however, I and the other Druid were at the bottom. At first analysis it seems that the other healing classes got a larger boost than druids from the patch. I used to feel useful in that instance especially, but after tonight I feel like they could replace me with a Paladin of less skill and still turn out better.
Am I doomed to respec to Moonkin to become comparably useful again in a raid? Or am I just suffering from "learn2play_again" issues and will eventually catch up to the other classes as my skills with the new spells increase?
Keeva responded to Metrogon’s concerns on An Early Thanksgiving:
I wouldn’t worry about it too much at the moment, Metrogon… post 3.0 mobs have less health, they’re hitting for less, and there’s so much mana regen flying around that our healers were just spamming constantly (not best practice, but they were like kids in a candy store and I couldn’t very well tell them to heal less). To quote one of the priests though:
“I don’t normally spam like I did last night. With the changes to CoH, the changes to PoM, the free flash heals (awesome LOL), and whenever I dispelled someone it heals them, I was just going nuts to see what my best HPS would be.”
So basically he was going nuts, spamming everything he possibly could – I think he got something like 4000hps at one point. We can’t possibly compete with that, especially on trash. I felt wholly superfluous on Hyjal trash to the point where I stood and tweaked my mods for most of it rather than wasting my time trying to squeeze any heals in. I wasn’t missed.
Understandably, it all made me feel a bit slighted. A few days ago, I was a superstar healer in my guild; last night.. I could barely get any heals in, and even rolling Lifebloom seemed to contributing very little.
I tried not to let it get to me too much though. I think that once we get into the expansion and mana becomes a little more of an issue, when other healers won’t be able to go nuts and spam constantly, things will be a little more balanced. When we go back to having actual assignments rather than “snipe heal anyone with a health deficit yay” and/or spam group heals constantly to “win” on the meters, we will be back up towards the top of the list for effective healing.
I’d like to hear YOUR stories of raiding and/or instancing. Is Wild Growth as hawt as I’ve heard? Is anyone toying with Nature’s Splendor instead? (Sadly, I have none of my own experiences to share, yet, as I only just got my UI configured this morning!)
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I am excited that BRK is back, though!
With leveling Inscription, battling server problems, running to help a friend tame a Core Hounds in MC, running around all of Azeroth trying to check off Achievements for Exploration (not to mention giving love to every critter I pass), AND trying to sleep, work, and run a household, I’ve found no time yet to test my healing out. I am sincerely looking forward to it greatly. The few heals I have tossed have not seemed to be of any major improvement.
However, I do have one question. When I went to respec it looked like Wild Growth had not been “rebuffed” as promised. Now it was my understanding that many of the changes made recently did not make it into the patch and will be put in shortly, so I was not really concerned. Was Wild Growth one of those…or am I mistaken, and the Wild Growth that we have access to now is indeed the rebuffed Wild Growth? I’d love to spec into it, but I hesitated to do so thinking that it would not be of much use until it was stronger. If any of you fine folks could clarify that for me…I’d be obliged.
On the whole, I have felt severely over-whelmed so far..too much sensory overload…and frustration with perma-lag. I’ve given little thought to my spec, and I expect it will change more than once over the next few weeks until I find my happy place again.
I can understand why healers are bored. On a lot of fights I don’t have the time to get a decent rotation going even to DPS. I imagine that for healing it’s worse.
The one funny thing I will share is that we were all suprised at who had the most healing in raid for most of the fights. It wasn’t a Druid, shammy, or Pally.
It was a priest but he was Shadow. We ended up putting him in the tank group and didn’t have an issue the entire night. It is clear why they are about to nerf VE.
Graylos last blog post..Gray Matter Linked on WoW Insider
I had two different experiences, on patch night my raid went into Sunwell, we trounced the place and I managed to be around number 4 on the healing meters which for this raid was better than normal because of our abundance of Shaman and their silly string. I didn’t run out of mana once, and Wild Growth was meh.
Then on Wednesday I went into BT with another group I run with, far less Shaman in this group. I was normally around 3 or 4 on the healing meters, and this time I was down around 7, and I was having all kinds of issues with mana. I found a good use for Wild Growth, and used it more frequently and dare I say even liked the spell.
I think it’s still hard to say what is going to happen, they are hot fixing things, and the current nerf to raids is making things seem a lot easier than they used to be…I am looking forward to Wrath.
The funny thing is it probably helps me in healing since I am not the best lifebloomer in my guild. I could maybe roll a lifebloom on three people and throw one out there on occasion on a mage/squishy but never really did the rolling bloom thing that well.
One thing to remember with Resto Druid healing now is lifebloom is not supposed to be the only thing we do anymore. I think the better resto healers will have more problems adjusting since rolling lifeblooms was our job pre-patch. Those of us who did not roll as well or threw out other spells since “darn it why are they on my bar then if I can’t use them” will have less difficulty adjusting.
My Rejuv and Regrowth are both impressive and Wild Growth has been very nice as well. I can’t really talk much about what they each ticked for becuase 10/15 and 10/16 my ToL form was giving a 300% bonus to heals. (I read a blue that said this was fixed last night) I suspected something wasn’t right when my Wild Growth was ticking for +1500 on the 5 people it was healing.(but it made me giddy when I saw those numbers) I knew Blizzard would take away the godlike 300% bonus but it was fun for a couple of days.
I was a part of a semi-pug Rage Winterchill raid the night before the patch. I actually felt the same as Keeva, unable to get a heal in edgewise save in those random “ZOMG THE TANK TOOK A SPIKE” moments.
Later tonight I’ll be solo healing a Karazhan run. That should give me ample opportunity to explore the wonders of Wild Growth.
MeanderingMinds last blog post..Guwuh?
The great scale of healers seems to be out of balance I’m not sure if 10 more levels and gear with better stats will fix the scale with the current build. Now if hot fixes happen then maybe.. but what the hell was the beta for?
Might be Im hoping that Wotlk would bring sunshine, rainbows and magical unicorn powers back into wow. I like healing instances when I can get a group , damn furry warrior friends who should be tanks so I can get some gear, but no you spend all day in bg’s being a douche bag then asking for my vortex’s for a red belt of battle ass hat… *drinks more tea*
I’m an old school priest but 2.5 years of hitting greater heal I needed a change, so I rolled a pally (misttake) then I did a shammy (mistake2) and now Ive got a cute cowgirl all black and white with a zheava mount for matching effect. I figured if any healing class would be different it’s druids. What I’m liking about my druid right now is having the cc’s. Hotting has been fun at times, not that challenging but a change of pace. What I’m hating is waiting in the lfg system and resto spec kitty/balance questing.
Living seed: is ok, has a nice flavor to it but is it worth 3 point?.. Im not sure if the healing happens before damage is take or after.
replenish: has the possibly to be sexy as hell but it low proc rate, spot in the tree and only working with on hot makes it suck. I rejuvenate my warrior friend wait for a proc… wait for it wait for it.. omg 4 rage but hes not in combate that so that rage goes poofs. Chain procc have been rare. would like to see this work with Wild growth and regrowth.
Wild growth: I think it need more work .Its not bad, it fun, it needs some more range to it.
and 80 is the real test but I’m not in beta so I cant. This is just how I feel at the moment and I know things will change for better or worse
I think the issue is do HoT have a place in wow any more?
do we need a buffer with no crushing blows and huge hp pools and no downranking?
I got crushed on the meters on a MH run trying traditional LB/Rejuv tactics. Losing my HoT timers on Grid and random 1k lag spikes didn’t help very much either. Personally I’m not terribly worried because it’s totally meaningless right now. Me and the other resto just spammed each other with Wild Growth for giggles anyway. Good times!
Did heroic botanica with 3 ret paladins, a protection warrior and myself. We were chain-pulling AOE-killing and ending every fight with full mana and full health.
Personally, I’d like it if Wildgrowth did more ‘upfront’ healing with a weaker HoT to help with splash damage but it’s by far making my life easier than before.
I’d argue that the no downranking means we need efficient damage buffering more than ever, since arguably those direct heals should be used to maximum efficiency. However, it IS hard to tell anything at this point. Our characters are no longer balanced around the content they are currently facing. Everyone (or almost, if you prefer) is technically “overpowered”. Right now, burst damage and healing are ruling the roost because fights aren’t lasting long enough or being difficult enough for efficiency to have a real showing or value. The same thing happened for many players with the patch prior to TBC.
Things will change. Mobs will begin hitting harder. Tank threat output *might* even become an issue again (this seems difficult to believe at this point). The “ZOMG BURST” damage/healing that’s making such a strong showing right now (just as it did at the beginning of TBC), will probably slide back a few notches when mana efficiency, threat, and scaling begin to rear their ugly heads again as issues. This is just a very oppurtune time for everyone to scratch those “to do’s” off their respective lists, before the zerg rush to level 80, and the new raids.
In a month, very few will care about how balanced things are between the classes at lvl 70, just as almost no one cares how balanced they are at lvl 60 now.
Yggdrasil- I’d argue that the no downranking means we need efficient damage buffering more than ever, since arguably those direct heals should be used to maximum efficiency. However, it IS hard to tell anything at this point
It is hard to tell anything at this point but with haste and other healers talents getting buffed. I see a lot of wasted ticks mostly when grouped with priest. It feels like we are bring cluster bombs to knife fights right now, I’d rather have a fair fight.
I did choose to leave Wild Growth to 71 and got the 11/0/50 build, and I do love the longer time on the HoTs, it gives you such relaxation while healing. That is not what I expected for just 2 more seconds, but you can really feel the difference. Lifebloom is ticking for less (20-25% less) on my triple stack, but I think the bloom is as good, if not better than before. Regrowth feels about the same, and Rejuv is ticking for more than it did before.
We rocked through Kara last night, scaling back from our normal ZA just to test the waters with all the changes. Recount wasn’t working, but I’m sure our resto shammy blew me away, I dont think he stopped casting once. Our Priest started dpsing for lack of anything else to do. But I never had mana issues and bosses went down in truly record times.
The funny thing for me as resto was this morning when I went to solo farm the flaming Abyssals south of Ogri’la for the alch recipe they are supposed to drop. I was a killing machine! One moonfire, followed by 3 starfires, mob dead, loot, HoT yourself a bit and move on to the next, and never did I drop below 90% mana, even when I had 3 on me at once…
I have 2 theories for the improved damage and survivability on resto build:
1) Blizz is building our egos so they can uber-deflate them when LK comes out.
2) We NEED to be this good just to survive LK.
and it honestly wouldnt surprise me if it were both.
I did a Heroic Shadow Labs last night with a Balance druid, Arms warrior, Prot warrior, and Affliction warlock. Mana regen seemed fine. Just anecdotally speaking, I didn’t feel my healing to be worse than before, but I’m not sure how much better, if any, we are. One thing I would add that I haven’t seen mentioned yet: the new Shadowmeld. Definitely a huge bonus for the night elf druids. I found it to work quite well when the heals pulled off the occasional add.
It’s probably too soon to get any impressions from the new talents and spells, as the game’s right now balanced around lv80 – that explains why any ret pally can kill me in 5s.
But so far, seems that healing will be even more around, face-rolling AoE oriented, and I’m feeling more useful on my surv hunter than on my druid. That’s bad.
I’m a friendly tree in a T6 guild (Archi and Illidan down pre-nerf but nothing in Sunwell), who was pushing 2600+ heals when fully buffed while in the tank group on 2.4. I’ve tried two specs to feel out how useful they would be to me. In BT this week, I was a sort of hybrid tank/heal build (8/0/53 speccing for moonglow and living seed) and didn’t feel useful at all in my usual job of “Keep hots up on the tank and spam lifebloom and regrowth like a mad woman on the raid.” While the other tree in our raid was mostly spamming WG all night and beat me on heals, despite my marginally superior gear.
Last night in Hyjal, I rocked a tank heal build (11/0/50 http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=0VG0zZZf0furuxiuVhs) with the healing touch glyph, and kept lifebloom/rejuv/regrowth hots ticking on the tanks while using the 1.5s healing touch to fill in tank health and do raid heals. I didn’t have significant mana issues due to replenishment and the short times on the fights — Archimonde went down in something like five minutes? I think Kaz’rogal got two marks off — and generally speaking, I felt far more useful and my healing throughput improved. There’s still a lot of room for tank+raid spamming, but the dramatically boosted efficacy of COH along with the incredible buffs to shamans and paladins means that lifebloom is no longer viable at all for raid heals. Where they used to tick off, now they are over-written very fast. I had to use the glyphed lifebloom to be able to land raid heals at all.
The other druid in our raid went the opposite way and focused on raid heals with Wild Growth, and also had a good showing, but was asked to not waste his time on the tanks. All of it has left me feeling like, generally speaking, there are two solid niches for raiding trees in the next few weeks, but tank and raid heals are no longer as overlappable as they once were, as an assignment.
My overall impression of this week’s raiding is that healing is more fun for me now that I’m no longer metronome-based as far as lifebloom lifebloom regrowth lifebloom cycles. It’ll definitely take time for me to learn to maximize my output with longer hot and mixed cast times thrown in. Also, healing touch is, for the moment, feeling like a very viable spell to me. I’ve topped 6k HT crits on a 1.5-second cast. It’s by far the strongest flash heal currently in game, as best I can tell, and that gives it a very solid niche for tank healing at the moment.
I did a MH run with a friendly guild and dare I say, I sucked. Bad. In my first runs of it (I am a relatively new player, started the end of March 2008), I used to dominate the human camp fights, usually ending at 10% above the rest. This time, I was happy being 4th at the wipe at the second boss we had (some of the guys decided that standing next to the Infernals’ tank was a good idea and it went kabookie after that), and it was just because I survived till the end (and, to be honest, was having a blast keeping both tanks up for a minute – go, boss nerf!) Me and the other tree were at the bottom, and our number 2 was a ret pally. I didn’t really notice any change to the healing “rotation” of the shammies and priests (/faceroll much?). By the way, I forgot to put WG on my actionbar. >_<
I really hope in some miraculous way those things will change, with all our skills getting just 1-2 new ranks and the bosses going really hard on us. But I don’t believe in mana efficiency problems. Blizz gave too many ways for people to raid-regen. They should either fix that or, well, number last on the healing meters, here I come!
Currently, I am farming IF and Gnome rep in the spare time our tanks go OMFGLETSDOHMGTINCHAINPULLS! Which is quite entertaining, actually, healing all the “new” tanks in Heroics, no CC and all.
I feel like I haven’t quite figured out how to heal up to my full potential again, but as far as meters go they’re so screwed up I don’t feel too bad about being at the bottom. Shadow priests and ret pallies were outhealing several of the real healers in Hyjal/Sunwell, including me. But I had my usual job of Burn healing on Brtuallus and it was smoother than usual, so my personal healing hasn’t gotten any worse…it’s probably just a question of balance right now.
A lot of things are way out of balance right now so it will be hard to tell how we stack up against other healers untill we all hit the level 80 raids.
I also am not ready to give up big fat NS+HT yet, so I haven’t tried the new HT glyph. If it turns out that it’s THE way to heal at 80, I’ll worry about it then.
well – the new patch is amazing!!
I chose the Nature’s Grace spec with no Wild Growth and NO GoE. Still, there is so much time between refreshing LB stacks, that I seriously was at loss what to do with this time.
We smashed most of MH and BT – and (not that I care, but I was actually interested to see how the lifebloom nerf hit me) I waaaay outdid both the ChainHeal-spamming shaman and our COH priest!!
http://wowwebstats.com/jg143y44liy3m if you are interested in details
I certainly do not need to compete with them by using Wild Growth – it can wait until I’m level 71.
The major change I notice is that obviously LB is contributing much less to my healing than Rejuvenation and Regrowth (although still tops them).
I also had a problem deciding about the trinkets: between Hex Shrunken Head and Ashtongue Talisman of Equilibrium. I use so much Rejuvenation in BT/MH (due to widespread raid damage) that AToE practically buffs ALL my LB stacks with 112 SP. I would say that the buff is up ~75-80% of the time. I’d love to see math comparing it to Hex Shrunken Head, which obviously has a very different mechanics. So far I have been swapping them depending on fight (widespread raid damage vs. episodic surges of damage) – but with most boss fights running in the range of 2:30-3:00′ it is tough to decide sometimes.
Anyway – I think we are still the best healers in the game – at least at level 70 PvE!
Resto druids shine when content is harder, as that’s when hots have the chance to actually tick.
Raiding at 70 now is stupidly easy.
We dominate in naxx10/25, often beating other healers by a big margin.
Having both wild growth and nature’s splendor is a pretty big deal too
I’m a tree in a T6-level guild. I am typically the superstar healer. We hit up the last half of BT yesterday and, wow, things have changed with the patch. I did okay, still managing to eke out the #1 spot on the meters. However, all our good (i.e. equal experience and gear level) healers were right there with me. On the whole, this is a good thing since it will hopefully mean no marginalized healing classes. Also, the ability to do more than just roll HoTs continuously was very fun.
In the end, I settled on 3xLB on the (two) tanks with extra GCDs going to rejuv (which rocks with the glyph) and wild growth. In the end, it was about 33% each as far as healing done. I’m satisfied, and can’t wait to see how these abilities scale into Wrath.
@ Eggo- I’m not saying that it isn’t frustrating. I’m saying that it isn’t going to be very important at all, very soon. The skewed damage/healing output is just a symptom of being too big for what we are doing. Its just like gear: When you undergear content, you should gear yourself for mana regen and staying power, and be as efficient as possible; but when you (and your raid) outgear content, you see the best results through more bonus heal/spellpower, and less efficient use of abilities.
Druids specialize, by nature, in steady, consistent, and efficient healing. Its what we have been teaching ourselves to do for months, and it is what our class is designed around. Right now, the advantage has swung against that. I think Restoration Druids will be more than fine at level 80.
Oh something that I forgot to add to my post earlier! We’ve decided to bring fewer healers than typical to content. Even seven healers in hyjal feels like dramatic overkill now that aggro management is better and tanks are taking less damage. We did archi with eight and on our wipe, managed to heal through about seven independent soul charges and still burn him down to 30% before we got chain deaths. He died the attempt after with, I think, two deaths and no chains.
I agree with Werebeef. We excel at healing during times when healing is stressed, and right now, raiding is so easy that there’s virtually no healing to be done once the COH, CH, and BOL spamming is done.
agree with what everyone has said about content taking less healers now.
on 25/10 man naxx i love healing on my druid, LOVING IT. so glad i had the opportunity to do so because if i hadnt, id probably be freaking out now too. but really, when things even out and guilds realize the old standard of 7 or 8 healers per 25 man has become 5,6 maybe 7, then things will work themselves out.
basically. werebeef could not be more correct. super fun to be a druid at 80 imo
also, my recount is looking to be about 30% lb, 30% regrowth, 30% wildgrowth ~ rejuv
so we do use all our tools, (except nourish, of course)
I was heartbroken and downright embarrassed at my healing in BT on Wednesday night. Like everyone else, I watched myself (one of, if not THE best geared healer in the guild) plummet from #1 to #5-8. I agree that one of the reasons we are so terribad right now is there is just not enough damage going around. My co-healing officer and I have also decided to run with 2-3 less healers.
The tanks and DPS had a blast. The healers…? One guildie described the raid the best: “We healers were at the party, we were just stuck in the kitchen.”
On my blog I posted some preliminary data and a tentative plan to survive the end of BC, the link is listed below.
Aertimuss last blog post..3.0.2 HoTsTree Healing Rotation for a Single Main Tank
My guild went into Sunwell for the first time last night. It was a blast trying out Wild Growth in a new raid instance. Kalecgos was pretty easy and we got a couple attempts in on Bruttalis.
The first thing about Wild Growth is that it is damn hard to track. It allmost makes me want to get Grid, almost. Hopefully the author of Xperl will include Wild Growth in it’s HoT tracker at some point. >< I was allso pulling about 50-60% use of WG and about 35 ish on LB. For the most part i would keep LB and Rejuv up on the tank (or 2 LBs up) and spam WG, of course Sunwell has so much AOE that it was pretty mandatory. Going trough my head the entire night was “who has WG? hell if i know! just spam the mofo!” ><
At the end of the night it was pretty clear that Shammys dominated followed by the priests with the 3 druids we had tied and in the rear pretty much. However SW is very different in terms of healing style. I really didn’t see allot of people taking very serious damage though.
I did my first build with 11 points in balance to include Nature’s Splendor. I’ll pickup Wild Growth at 71. I haven’t had any problems healing thus far and never even got close to going OOM. We did BT last night and things, other than the lag on Alleria, went well. Thus far the change from +healing bonus to +spell power seems ok. I don’t use HT much, though I do have the glyph. I prefer raid healing over MT healing. I like to drop lifebloom on lots of folks and just throw HoT’s all over the place.
I’m not going to lie – I was entirely disheartened the first week back. I went from being one of the 3 most effective healers in the raid to being almost dead last on the meters (behind the shadow priests and ret paladins by a mile) going for my regular tank healing.
Another Resto Druid (in contrast) came in the top two spots consistiently through Regrowth-on-raid-spam. I was horrified. I let it go for another two bosses in BT, and then, feeling extremely dirty, started Regrowth spamming on the raid. 2nd, behind a Paladin.
Again, tonight, in Sunwell – I’m disapointed. Rotations on two tanks with WG dropped on the melee/dmg takers as often as I could saw me in @ 6th.
I’ve glyphed my HT, I’m using Regrowth, but in order to look effective I’m reduced to green bar spamming like a Paladin – am I the only Druid here choking off a little panic?
…or am I jumping ahead of myself in terms of waiting for 80/wanting a dead niche back? Time will tell, I guess.
I went to Hyjal on dreamstate/HT (unglyphed) build, duck idol. On trash I hurricaned, on bosses MT heal. I had insane overheal, and accordingly low healing done. When some healers forgot that death and decay cause well… death, my numbers started to go up and the tank did not notice the steep decrease of healer population.
What was very interesting (and definatly worth including the mana regen calculator) was the “grape” buff. It was provided by a survivalist hunter (shadow priests can give it too), the effect is returning 0.25% of your maximum mana. Considering 10K mana it’s 25 mana every sec, 125MP5.
I’ve done a few things since the patch – a couple of heroics, a ZA, Vashj, and BT. In the smaller groups (5 and 10 mans) healing was a breeze and everything felt gimped – not surprising after the hp/damage reduction mobs got and after the threat/dps increases tanks and dps received.
Healing in the 25 man raids? Well, I agree with what Keeva said. The mana our priests and shamans have lets them do nothing but spam their heals to oblivion. Wild Growth shined on Bloodboil, though. Big surprise~
I’ve heard things are much different on beta, and I assume the game is being balanced around it. As said earlier, druids do well when our hots have time to tick, and right now no one’s really taking enough damage in BT for those HoTs to tick. Even if they are, it’s no problem because mana issues aren’t much of a concern for anyone. If fights last longer, though…we’re getting somewhere…
On council, around half our raid force got themselves killed. While I still didn’t see any huge mana issues, our priests eventually ran pretty low because they were simply used to spamming CoH by then, but with half the people dead, they weren’t getting as much mana returned. It doesn’t have much to do with the cost of spells – it’s that there’s so many energy gain mechanics going around that people can spam whatever they want. It should thankfully be different at 80 – Efficiency is my favorite thing about my druid, and I want it to matter more~
We ran SSC last night (we had never done anything above T4 before, but the new abilities are OP). Our resto druids were way, way out in front on the healing meters. The top resto druid did it through liberal use of Wild Growth and very little Lifeblooming. The second resto druid used a mix of Lifebloom and Wild Growth.
I’m sure that part of it was that the bosses weren’t hitting too hard, so single-target tank healing was not essential. Still, no one complained about their healing.
I see all these druids complaining about their healing taking a hit, and we didn’t see it in our raid. Maybe our pally and priest healers haven’t figured out their new rotations yet.
Dinaers last blog post..Impressions of post-patch play
I know in my heart that we’re outgeared and out-talented now, and things will be very different at 80.. but it is still very disheartening to go from #1 on the meters consistently to … absolute dead last! I felt the same as Aertimus – really embarrassed. I think a warlock beat me on one fight.. eep. Even though I know that it’s because everything is skewed at the moment, it still makes me want to slink off to a corner
I’m comforted though by comments like FB’s about 10/25 Naxx being a blast. Werebeef said it best – when the content is harder and our hots have a chance to actually tick, we’ll be back up towards the top of the meters again. We’ll get there… just have to stay positive for now. I’m glad that I’m not the only one feeling this way though, it’s comforting to know a bunch of others are feeling frustrated too.
I’m definitely enjoying Wild Growth, especially on Felmyst last night. My only wish is that the range be extended slightly (from the target). Sometimes I find I’m only hitting 2 people (granted, sometimes people need to L2stack). At the moment it’s not so bad, but later on when we have more mana constraints, I think it will be more important to make sure you hit your full 5 targets for maximum bang for your buck. I certainly don’t want/expect it to be a 40 yard range or anything, but a little bit more would be good. Perhaps a glyph extending the range by 5 yards?
Still having fun, definitely.. but anxiously awaiting the chance to start working to 80 and prove myself again!
Keevas last blog post..How to get 50 mounts before WotLK
We started on Felmyst tonight and Wild Growth is made for that aura. We stopped using CoH priests after the first attempt. Me and my fellow trees have been having WG tracking issues though. What does everyone else use? I assume Grid?
With all the server issues we’ve had on my server, nobody has really been running much of anything. My guild did pull off a kara though, and while the lifebloom nerf was a vast amount, I feel I could have solo heal’d the entire thing.
With 2k bonus healing before the patch (1066 spellpower now), a full lifebloom stack would tick nicely for roughly 838 every tick. Now I’m seeing 679 every tick. Despite the loss of HPS, my new talent spec makes my spells go off 30% quicker so throwing multiple lifeblooms out then hitting a wild growth out on top of it is really nothing.
I was really dismayed with the nerf to lifebloom but the new spells have added a level of excitement that wasn’t there before. I’m still top of the healing meter but at least now, the other healers in my guild are actually trying to beat me
My guild has downed Illy a few times pre-patch and now we have downed Brutallus with the insane nerfs of bosses and boost to all other classes. I would have to say that as druid healer, I was one of those LB rolling on tanks druids and I was good at it… Now I am trying to figure out a new rotation and I am having a little difficulty. I am glyphed for Rejuv and HT and I love the ‘flash heal’ I get from it. But I am still having difficulty with trying to figure out what type of healer I want to be.
And I run through mana like it is nobody’s business, especially during 5-mans. I used to be able to keep LBs up on a tank but now I cant as the mana cost has almost doubled and it ticks for less. So now what do you do there?
Zackoria – I am using grid and a new version of the GridStatusHots version of it… If you look on curse someone, I think Yang, fixed it and it works now for WG. I love it!
Wow, thank you all very much for the amazing feedback about your experiences since the release of 3.0.2! It sounds very much like a mixed bag of bad and good, with most feeling the pain of the HPS nerf to Lifebloom pretty acutely. This loss has caused some to rejoice who hated being chained to maintaining tedious LB rotations in much of TBC content. Overall, most seem to enjoy how much more dynamic our healing style seems, even with the Lifebloom nerf.
It seems like the excess of additional mana combined with shorter fights is definitely hitting Druids harder than most since other healers don’t have to curb their enthusiastic spam of AoE heals like Chain Heal and Circle of Healing. Most seem to be enjoying Wild Growth, to the point of it matching or surpassing the effective healing from Lifebloom. EVERYONE (that posts here) is enjoying Revive.
People disagree about how downranking will affect us. I think I’m in agreement with Yggdrasil that it could potentially make the HPS buffer from HoTs MORE important than before since many will withhold their larger heals for longer. Of course, this comes at the same time that our primary HPS delivery tool (Lifebloom) was signficantly nerfed so that’s pretty much one step forward, one step back. I’d love to see Rejuvenation converted to a HoT that ticks every second (with corresponding changes to Replenish and a 2/3 reduction in the amount it ticks for), but I doubt it will happen.
Many of you seem to think that this is NOT a good indication of how things will be at 80 and are just going with the flow of your guilds, enjoying the “senior week” of TBC (wonderful analogy, by the way).
It’s really, really hard to tell right now how things are, because it feels like nobody is taking serious damage! A couple of times in Hyjal I just started dropping hurricanes (no cooldown = love) on mobs, alternating with a rejuv or wild growth on the tank. And I’m fairly sure that the other healers mixed a lot more DPS into their rotation than they normally did.
Having said that, I went from consistently #1 or #2 on healing (depending on if the fight was particularly sweet to our shaman) to still #1 by a couple percentage points. Followed by one of our priests with our other resto druid in #3. We were all fairly close, though, I think I was at 15% heal, the priest at 13% and the other druid at 12%.
That was in an 8/53 point build, going for Wild Growth and with nothing in HT. I picked up the rejuv glyph but not the healing touch one yet – I am not sure if I want to try to work it into the rotation, with regrowth being so strong. I really wish we had our regrowth glyph available.
Anyway, this is just to say that in healing T4 and T5 content as it stands, resto druid healing was solidly in the lead. My real concern was how weak our shaman healing was – the resto shaman that is normally competing with me for #1 was sixth or seventh in healing last night. I don’t know how much was rotation – he mentioned he’s not sure how to handle some of his changes yet and he’s still experimenting. I gotta say that Riptide SOUNDS awesome, but there wasn’t a lot of opportunity to use it.
In 5 mans, heroic sethekk (still no bird mount, sadness!) was cake to heal. The only deaths/wipe was when the main tank WOULD get controlled by totems and kill me. Darn his shiny DPS. Or maybe darn ours for slacking on totem killing because they were entranced with new spells and skills :p Anyway, wild growth was tremendous fun for healing splash damage. Omen of Clarity seems to proc a TON and I pretty much use a wild growth every time it does unless there’s no chance that anybody but the tank would take damage. Because hey, free is free.
Horseman was a joke and I ended up wrath-spamming and moonfiring with a rejuv on the tank oh, every 30 minutes or something :p Very fun.
But the main thing is, nothing feels real right now. The next 3 weeks are going to be fun, but I don’t think I’ll really know how healing stands until level 80. I’m much happier now than I thought I would be a few weeks ago.
Lifebloom is really not worth casting any longer, though. I no longer have it bound to the same key in order to try to break myself of the habit. I do tend to try to toss or stack it on the main tank, but it’s no longer my favorite raid heal.
Lifebloom was still doing the majority of my healing last night on M’uru, with Wild Growth a fairly close second. I won’t be retiring it just yet. But I never really used LB for raid healing, so where other people are feeling disappointed in that area, I’m not missing it. It’s still useful for what I always did – tank healing – so to me it probably feels like a much smaller nerf than my raid-healing counterparts.
It was very comforting to be back up to #1/#2 on the meters. I think it demonstrated clearly to me that in BT and Hyjal where we outgear the fights, other healers can afford to spam and not really stick to their jobs – which pushes us further down the meters. Your mileage will vary according to raid makeup, number of healers, etc. In harder content though, it appears that people have to be more careful with their GCDs and mana, which means they’re not encroaching so much on our territory (and I can finally squeeze some heals in!).
I was keeping LB & Rejuv on two tanks, plus throwing buffer heals on the groups near me, with the odd Swiftmend, Regrowth, NS/HT, and even Tranquility. I have my fingers firmly crossed that this is the kind of healing I’ll be doing in WotLK – maintaining HoTs on one or two tanks, and then throwing out those buffers to the raid (which will be easier when I can pick up Splendor). It was definitely a lot of fun to use pretty much everything in my arsenal in one fight – very refreshing after being so bored in BT/Hyjal.
Keevas last blog post..Twins, M’uru – back on top!
so BTW – does anybody know if we can Swiftmend-steal Riptide?
BECAUSE I’D LOVE TO!
Recount is pretty much bugged at the moment, it shows overhealing as effective healing. So if you see CoH priests and paladins healing at 3000-4000 HPS, have a deep breath and wait for WWS, it shows the real numbers – where we should still come at around #1-#3. If you sort the charts by raw healing done (you have to check that option) it should look like Recount basically. For several days I was also very depressed to see myself dropping to the bottom of the meters, but yesterday’s Sunwell raid (where we could use WWS again) reassured that trees are fine. Cheer up fellow trees.
I ALWAYS get pawned on healing meters by COH priests. I usually come on as 4th on healing meter sometimes 3rd (if we have no holy pally with us) who spams crap out of his flash heal and his flash heal glyph does a lot of healing too.
My cycling on tanks as following : Lifebloom, lifebloom, rejuv, lifebloom, regrowth, lifebloom x3, wild growth (there are 3 tanks in that group). Then I just try to spam lifebloom and rejuv on targets in raid that take most damage.
The other night in BT holy pally even beat COH priests he did 2400 healing! It was never like that pre patch. I think they are overpowered on healing. I also think Wild Growth needs a boost. If Blizz wanted us to heal and gave us a healing tree to choose between dps/tank then they should give us as many healing options as COH priests have. Making one or two classes superior to other healers is just dumb
@Fiord: No, we can’t use Swiftmend to steal Riptide. I believe it’s described as only working on Rejuvenation and Regrowth. Otherwise, we’d have been able to steal Renews and Lifebloom.