Confused about what gear is for resto and which is for balance after the changes to spellpower, spell hit, and spell crit? Guest author Graylo of Gray Matter graces our glen with a guide to gauge the gear guaranteed to gain glory and greatness! 
Ghostcrawler: Wild Growth May Receive 6-Second Cooldown
Published on November 7, 2008 by Phaelia 
Blue, Spells and Talents 
66 Comments
On Monday Ghostcrawler announced that Blizzard has both Circle of Healing and Wild Growth on their nerf-dar:
Circle of Healing and Wild Growth are definitely on our radar. This would be a good time to discuss them.
Our concern is that they are turning two classes with a large arsenal of healing spells into single-button healers. Meanwhile, ironically, the other two healing classes have fewer heals to use in the first place.
We have seen raid parses where 75 to 90% of a priest’s healing is through CoH. It’s a good spell, useful in a variety of situations. But I think you can understand our concern.
A Priest said to us the other day "Please nerf Circle of Healing so I can push another button!" He’s even thinking of going Disc.
This statement comes quickly on the heels of a statement Ghostcrawler made the day before that:
We decided rather than try to make CH a bad spell, we’d just leave in those new talents to get you to cast other spells once in awhile. The difference is we think you’ll still cast CH 90% of the time or whatever, but maybe that remaining 10% will require you to think a little differently about what to cast (and at least it’s not 100%).
I’m at a loss as to why it’s considered acceptable for one healer to be based 90% around a spell that requires an extraordinarily low amount of cognitive awareness but Druids were considered to be too dependent first upon Lifebloom (subsequently beaten soundly with the nerf bat), then potentially Regrowth (/mourn [Glyph of Regrowth]), and now upon Wild Growth. Blizzard clearly wants to encourage a diversity of spell selection among Priests and Druids and will nerf our various spells until they’re all equally handicapped!
The development team is apparently contemplating limiting the spell’s use by applying a 6-second cooldown:
Based on feedback from this forum, elsewhere and our own brainstorming, what we are thinking about right now is something like a 6 sec cooldown for Circle of Healing and Wild Growth.
We’re less concerned about Chain Heal, in part because it’s not instant, prevents movement, falls off with multiple targets, and is the spell that shamans are supposed to be hitting, while priests and druids have many other spells.
(In contrast to Lifebloom which must be consciously targeted, heals one person at a time, carries a heavy penalty if allowed to lapse, and must be maintained even if the target is at full health, leading to a large amount of overheal. Clearly, this spell needed to be nerfed!)
At 6 seconds, you would still want to use CoH/WG in the right situations (though hopefully not *every* time they are up), but you’d also want to use other spells during the cooldown. To be fair, a lot of priests and druids are asking to push other buttons.
This sounds like a potentially scary change because it has a lot of ramifications — one of the reasons we are mentioning it so early is to get feedback. We don’t want Resto shammies to push other healers out of raids. We would change some of the encounters knowing that CoH spam was no longer possible.
Druids asking to “push more buttons” have termites for brains. Asking to push more buttons is what got Lifebloom nerfed to begin with, and while I concede that maintaining a Lifebloom rotation on 3 or more targets was not my personal definition of fun, I have long advocated for focusing on mana regeneration so that Regrowth could be used more liberally. Not only was this more effective, but it was less tedious and, therefore, more fun.
Ghostcrawler goes on to discuss a few other nerfs that were considered:
We don’t like the stacking mana cost solution in this case, though we did talk about it a lot. We suspect that would actually lead us to the land of priests saying their mana regen sucks because they have to spam CoH to be competitive, and I’m not sure we can count on all you guys to be around to explain the logic when that happens.
We don’t want to just nerf the healing throughput on the spell because then it won’t be able to do its job. CoH was in this state before when Holy just ignored it.
A cast time might work, but the instant nature of both spells is part of what makes them so useful in emergencies.
We’re not crazy about reverting the smart heal aspect, though that is still on the table. Having too many spells that favor party over raid forces you back to having to worry a lot about your raid composition. "Oh, sorry hunter, we can’t bring you because we need another melee for our melee group or else CoH won’t reach you." PoH isn’t as big an issue, because honestly it’s just not such a big contribution to total healing. Though we could consider pushing it raid wide.
Cooldowns are a reality of a lot of damage rotations and they generally work as long as the system isn’t too complicated. You typically have the spell you really want to use in a given situation and then the others you fall back on when the favored spell is on cooldown.
I’m glad they eschewed these potential nerfs in favor of a cooldown. The idea of adding a cooldown or cast time to Wild Growth is amusing in the context of the recent change to Gift of the Earthmother so that it affects Wild Growth, allowing the spell to be “cast on more people faster.” I wonder if they will revert this change. (P.S. The cooldown on WG would make GotEM even less useful. Elune is apparently a person who takes her gifts back.)
Though to be honest, because of the nature of Wild Growth (an AoE HoT that tapers off over seven seconds), this nerf will affect us less than the same change to Circle of Healing, because while we could spam Wild Growth for the initially stronger ticks, it was considerably less efficient since it would frequently target the same people, overwriting the spell and invalidating the later ticks. This isn’t to say that I’m happy about the change, especially given the recent trend of nerfing every spell in our retinue to make them all similarly weak, but I’m less upset than I would be if I were a Priest.
Additional Reading
- Lume the Mad: Now is not the time to evaluate CoH and WG
Includes an encounter-by-encounter look at which spell(s) excel. Especially helpful for people who haven’t seen the dynamics of Black Temple or Sunwell Plateau (myself included). - Tree Bark Jacket: AoE Heals under Fire
Kheeva warns against CoH and WG to Chain Heal based on currently skewed Sunwell Plateau parses. - The Nyxes: Druids’ Moment in the Sun
Nyxilyn laments the fun that she feels will be lost if a 6-second cooldown is applied to Wild Growth.
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/cry I love you, ty for everything.
Interesting events. You’d think Bliz would see some of these problems before hand. Like how could they not see that a feral tank could be close to armor cap after naxx? They built the gear!? Hopefully resto druids come out of this better than they were before.
I agree with you completely and I am amazed at the inconsistencies with GC’s reasoning. Druids who complain about WG being a one-button boring slam are just plain stupid.
) and tons of time and mana to use them properly and creatively. I can’t believe the pursuit of topping the meters is so strong that people consciously give away the fun and diversity in the game for the sake of “I pwn every1″. And then they complain about it!!! And Blizzard listens!!! And we all get nerfed!!! Give me a break!!!
I actually did NOT pick WG in my build for lvl70, apparently against 90% of worldwide players – and instead enjoy a long rotation with a 9 sec Lifebloom. Raiding BT and SWP with this setup has been so much fun! I left AOE heals to priests and shamans and planned on picking up WG at lvl71 for 5- and 10-man raids.
Any druid who turned to WG spam in current raids should feel sorry for herself and turn away from a road they took. We have 6 healing spells (I leave Tranquility aside
Since I’ve been raiding BT and Sunwell I’ve been appalled at how stupid some of the “optimal” strategies are because of the prevalence of AOE heals. Look up the Eredar Twins “pillar humping” strategy, for example…. it’s just brainless, and clearly not what the game designers want players doing. (And not what I want raiding to degenerate to.)
AOE heals are out of hand, and need to be scaled back so that players aren’t forced into using them to the exclusion of almost everything else. Now – HUGE CAVEAT HERE – this probably entails (re-)designing encounters so that they aren’t so full of raid damage….. The whole reason players are encouraged to clump up in most fights is that the only way to handle the sheer amount of raid damage is to group up for AOE heals.
Karthiss last blog post..Crafting a Tanking UI
Nitpick: Elune =/= Earthmother
I can tell you, that if this 6 sec CD is added to WG, I won’t take it for my raid healing build. I’ll spec/gear for more crit, ignore some of deep resto, go into balance. At that point, shaman and their jebus beams can take the raid.
WG might make it into my 5-man build for an FIRE BAD! button.
Thanks for writing all these great posts.
But do you make the same comments on the WoW forums so that GhostCrawler can see them, or do people link to your posts on the forums? Do Blizzard employees subscribe to your feeds? If your great feedback isn’t seen by the developers, then that seems to be a waste when you can impact their thinking.
I don’t take the time to read the forums and count on people like you to bring forums discussions up.
I played a BM hunter and a resto druid, what’s wrong with pushing one button? You don’t need to change targets and get your timing right so why are people complaining :S
I must admit that right now I’m not sure what spell to use, and have gone both Feral and Balance.
Regrowth: too inefficient
HT: chews through mana
LB: nerfed, TO THE GROUND
Rejuv: does very little
WG: soon to go?
Beathoovens last blog post..Spanking Heroic MgT and Target Dummies
Regrowth is just too slow! Most of the time another healer has already healed the target with a shorter cast time spell before I can finish casting regrowth.
I’m at a complete loss for words. What they don’t seem to understand is that in a raiding situation we are always going to go use the spell that typically gives us the best healing per mana over time. The Druid class is a HoT based class, which means we are always going to use the most efficient heals. Nerfing spells to the ground like they are is just going to make healing less fun.
Amradorns last blog post..Old Naxx and AQ40
/cry
I’ve given up on playing as resto for a while till they get this all sorted out, because Im feeling so disheartened by the state of flux Druid healing is in. I wonder at the logic of what the devs are doing, ie, giving a lot of new stuff, then nerfing it heavily, then nerfing it again and again.
If the devs are not careful I will have completely given up my addiction by the time WotLK is released 
What the hell will they do without my $15AU a month hmm?
Currently my addiction to the game is taking a serious beating. Mostly this is because I am so disheartened by the extremity of the flux the developers are imposing on us resto druids. As a consequence im not raiding any more, my alts are very low, and so Im getting to take part in more of real life and Im liking it
Getting addicted to life again is not such a bad thing though.
Anyway I like how you keep pointing out that the logic the devs are using to explain what they are doing to druids resto spells doesn’t hold up. For instance, if one-button-mashing ( assuming that always happens, it didn’t with me) is wrong in the game why is it fine for shams?
I hope the developers see your thoughts Phae because they are very well spoken and well thought out.
I personally like to use WG just after a raid wide damage spike. I hit it two or three times to get something going on most of the raid then drop the usual hots to recover people to full health. This seems like reasonable usage to me, please be careful when you nurf it!
The spamming of this spell constantly can be prevented by making its cost too high to do that. Look at the regrowth spell from BC till 3.0.2 if you want an example of mana cost limiting a very powerful spell to situational usage. I hope blue isn’t seriously stuck on nerfing WB rather than making it mana inefficient to behaive in a way that blue wants to discourage. But if they are I hope to see a healed target debuff/mechanic that makes my WG miss players for the duration of the WG I’ve already cast on them, rather than locking the spell down. Basically removing the ability to refresh the HOT before it completes to avoid weak ticks and causes a diminishing return for spamming it as the more of the raid is debuffed.
Some suggestions that would make the six second business more bearable if they want to go through with it;
1) The spell is changed to affect more players, perhaps ten.
2) Increase the range for WG effect.
3) Add a preference for damaged players mechanic.
4) Increase the coefficient of the spell in reasonable proportion to cast time.
5) Adjust lifebloom to gain a buff from the wildgrowth hot.
p.s. lol
Wild Growth®
http://www.wildgrowth.com/
[insert nasty word]… what about if you need to heal multiple differently positioned groups.. are we supposed to assign healers to a certain group to WG/CoH? that’s insane.
I’d rather see them up the mana costs than a cooldown. (Plus, why the heck would you even spam it, it’s a HoT – you need click it once or twice depending on raid composition and then finish off with your other spells)
A far more obvious solution to this ‘problem’ (though the point about current data from SWP being skewed is a valid one) is to simply take out the frontloading of healing done by wild growth. If the first ticks aren’t any stronger than the rest that completely disincentivises reapplying WG before the duration has passed, while still allowing it to be used on more than 5 targets at once, as well as letting it continue to benefit from gift of the earthmother.
I disagree with your points on lifebloom though, it really needed to be brought in line with our other skills, though part of the motivation for the nerf was based around PvP as well of course. Don’t create a strawman argument, it makes you look bad.
@Phil: That is an interesting question!
@Fiord: I’m really looking forward to the 9-second Lifebloom rotations, though I imagine it’s going to take some getting used to.
I wouldn’t fault those who were spamming Wild Growth in raids, though. Naturally, people are going to do the thing that allows them to do the most effective healing. And right now, players are really like kids in a candy store with mana concerns practically non-existent and a greatly lessened need to monitor tank health. Oh well, at least it was fun (for some) while it lasted!
@Karthis: Well, it’s really only for a short while and it has the benefit of letting some people see content that they never would have otherwise. Content that’s essentially going to be obsolete in just a few more days. For instance, my guild finally killed Vashj and Kael last week. I’m sure that was really fun, even if it wasn’t accomplished by “traditional” means. I really liked an analogy someone used on my blog last month: this is like senior week in high school. All the hard work is over and now it’s time to clog the drains and flood the hal– er … chill out till graduation.
@The1Jeffy: Re: Earthmother: Oh, thank you for the correction. I just read about the Earthmother on WoWWiki. And if this is a Tauren talent, I’m certainly not getting it now!
@Riseyth: I wish that I could say that I do, but I already have a terrible time keeping up with the posts, comments, email, and other projects related to Resto4Life that I’m afraid that I don’t have any spare time to draw something like this up for the forums. I’m afraid that its current format wouldn’t be anywhere near suitable for that venue. I’m more than happy if you — or anyone else — should ever want to share what I’ve written, though.
@Beathooven: Is RG really that inefficient? Its base mana cost wasn’t increased and it’s up front healing wasn’t increased, right? And it’s going to have a baseline HoT of 27 seconds with Nature’s Splendor, along with a 20% bonus to its up front heal with the Glyph of Regrowth. Add to this its ability to proc Nature’s Grace and even a (non-borked) Living Seed, and it’s looking good to me.
@Marc: Regrowth is pretty fast at 2.0 seconds. I’m afraid I haven’t run into many problems getting it off before my target has been healed.
@Amradorn: I think our efficiency was something that really concerned them about a month ago. They complained that it simply wasn’t possible to run a Druid with a reasonable amount of Spirit out of mana. Almost immediately after that we saw mana costs increase on Lifebloom, the mana return property of GotEM removed, and the original nerf of Flourish to Wild Growth.
@Stillsong: Thanks for the kind words; I’m glad to hear that you’ve been enjoying some real life during your break. I’ve been on extended leave from raiding for several months now, too, but I’m looking forward to the release of Wrath so I can re-experience a lot of the content I enjoyed during beta. I think if you give it a try, you’re sure to get hooked again, nerfed Wild Growth or no!
@Arielore: Congratulations on making the 5000th comment on Resto4Life! I’ve been watching all day to see who it would be.
GC actually mentioned the possibility of making the cost of Wild Growth prohibitively high. His concern was that players would simply strive to stack more and more regen because spamming their AoE heal was the only way they perceived they could be competitive. Maybe this would be less of an issue for Druids, however, given the tapering nature of our HoT.
Of all your suggestions, I like the idea of buffing Lifebloom on the targets with WG the most. More spell synergy makes healing more interactive and interesting.
P.S. LOL @ WG Hair Product
@Kwast: I’m not sure if this is what you’re asking, but neither CoH or WG are group-limited any longer. Their limitations are based on proximity, though, so you still have to take into account positioning to some degree.
@Tarqon: The front-loaded aspect of WG is very important. If it were removed/smoothed out, the vast majority of the spell would go toward overhealing. A tapering HoT was actually the first nod we’ve received toward the idea that our HoTs are frequently overwritten by “set it and forget it” spells like Circle of Healing, Prayer of Mending, and Chain Heal. I really like that aspect of the spell personally.
Regarding Lifebloom, I am not sure how you feel that I was making a Strawman argument? The deveopers have said that Druids rely too much on Lifebloom and that it was the correct answer in every situation so it needed to be nerfed so that we’d want to use other spells instead. Then they turned around and said that Shamans are built around using Chain Heal and that they should essentially use it 90% of the time with the other 10% of the time for other spells based on their current situation. If one isn’t a problem, the other shouldn’t be. Many Druids were already mixing other spells into their rotations. The nerf just made our tedious task of supplying a health buffer to the tanks less effective, thus making Resto Druids as a whole less desirable since we do not fill the same niche as well as we once did.
I think what you all have to keep in mind is that we really aren’t sure what type of raid damage to expect in the expansion. From what I’ve read, Blizz wasn’t really pleased with how BC turned out as far as heavy raid damage is concerned. If future encounters have less raidwide damage, then there’s actually no need to nerf these spells.
I used Wild Growth pretty heavily at first but as I raid more and more I still find myself throwing spells more in this order lifebloom > regrowth > then wild growth. CoH seems to own a little hard right now, but I don’t think wild growth really needs the nerf, I could understand it if it did all the healing upfront rather then as a hot but as it stands now its not a big tool to me. Then again I’m used to having shamans and priests around who heal right over my wild growth anyways. The only time I really used wild growth heavily in the last couple of days was the bloodboil fight otherwise my meters are looking more like 50 Lifebloom / 20 Regrowth / 20 Wild Growth / 10 Rejuv. If they nerf it before lvl 71 I’m just gonna drop the spell and go for Splendor for the extra lifebloom tickage.
I am very confused by Blizzard’s logic.
I have been against CoH since 3.0.2 because, in the words of Hikikomori, you can merely target yourself, run in the middle of the raid, and smart heal everyone around you. On the other hand, Wild Regrowth actually takes a bit more skill since it is not a smart heal and stupidly targets players (sometimes the person furthest away), and is a HoT, so it usually does considerably less healing than CoH does in the first place since it’s usually outhealed by the direct healing of CoH. Shamans and Paladins pretty much spam one button, as previously stated *cough*.
I just don’t get it. Lifebloom was more complex than any of these spells given the fact that 1.) it did not smart heal, 2.) it needed to be maintained for maximum hps, and 3.) it was a single target heal. I can only imagine that the nerf was against PvP restoration druids, which again drives me up a wall as a PvE druid, since they could have merely taken away utility rather than smash our healing potential into the ground.
Concerning raid usage on a kill of KJ…
http://wowwebstats.com/ynt4inyoxjbyc?s=343960-401803&a=x2208f3d
If you check our guild’s WWS, I’m using approximately 1/3 Rejuv, 1/3 Regrowth, and 1/3 Wild Regrowth on the final boss fight in SWP and topped the healing chart.
http://wowwebstats.com/ynt4inyoxjbyc?s=343960-401803&a=x16cc5a0
However, this is our top priest spamming 93% CoH, and almost beating me out on healing.
Need I say more? Perhaps, I should throw these results out to the Blizzard forums, to prove that Wild Regrowth is fine the way that it is… NO MOAR NERFS PLZ.
What I meant is that there were a variety of reasons for the lifebloom nerf, and you’re picking out one, then comparing it to a class with completely diferent mechanics. That is a strawman.
One thing that Blizzard needs to consider hough is that if they make the top of the resto tree suck any more than it does now, people are going to say screw it, and just put teir points in balance instead, where they could get 3% spell haste and int based spellpower and mana regen for their points. I’m actually quite happy with Gift of the Earthmother, though it’s very steep at five points, but I won’t be taking it if Wild Growth is nerfed.
What angers me the most is how knee jerk all of this is. I love playing my druid in my wonderful casual guild, and I can top the healing meters with any spell I choose to use right now because we are short on healers. Lifebloom, Rejuv, Regrowth and Wildgrowth. I can use only one of them and put out very respectable numbers for an entire instance. Among these only Wild Growth is new. When people get something new they play with it. As soon as the patch went live I entered AV and did 700,000 healing with only spamming Wild Growth. That doesn’t make it the only spell I have worth casting right now, it makes it the spell I have the most fun casting right now.
I almost never use regrowth in favor of pure HoTs, but today my guild wanted to do Kara and I was the only healer. We were doing 3 pulls at a time to see how fast we could get it done. I was hard pressed to keep up with incoming damage for once and of course Wild Growth was my most used heal. Almost 23% of my total healing, and I had to compensate for spike damage by spamming regrowth on the tank for 18% of my total healing. Rejuv was 16% and Lifebloom was about 14% because I didn’t have time to keep a stack going and keep all the rabies infected dps alive. The spell is not the be all end all of druid healing, it is just a fun spell that people want to try out to see what it is capable of.
If Wild Growth does end up being the best spell ever then they might want to add some mana cost to it. People use heals for a few reasons based on a situation. Healing Per Cast, Healing Per Second and Healing Per Mana. Right now Wild Growth is awesome on HPS and HPC, but it is not awesome on HPM. The numbers I saw showed it at just over 12 healing per mana when you are hitting five targets while Lifebloom and Rejuv are close to 20 Healing per mana. Lifebloom has better HPS and Rejuv has better Healing per Cast.
All these spells make Druids a very fun and dynamic healer, and nerfing something because “People use it too much” this early in the changes is just plain ignorant, and it scares me.
I fully agree that given the current encounters and ae spells something has to be changed. In a 25 man raid, you just need to press one button, you don’t even have to think whom to heal because the spell will choose the right targets itself. Where is the challenge, where is the fun (at least for those that don’t define fun as being on top of the heal meter)? But a 6 sec cd is just boring.
But what I am disappointed of is the lack of ideas at blizzard. A 6 second cd. Is that all they can imagine? What about making things a bit more complex? Maybe cut the amout of healing of WG in half, but triple it if there is also one of your other hots on that unit. Or have WG boost the heal amount of your other hots. That would mean that spamming only WG is useless. Or any other of the many possibilities that there are. Something that makes things more difficult but also interesting again.
Hi everyone,
Phae i’m a big fan of your site, it’s always a great source of information, and i must admit i read it every day with great pleasure.
Today, for the first time i completly disagree with your point of view concerning the WG nerf, and i don’t like it because it makes me feel like a bad druid… :/
Since the patch introducing the new talents and all, i’ve been raiding intensivly with my guild (Hyjal, BT and thanks to the nerf , we’ve been able to defeat the first boss of sw and do a few tries on brutalus)
I’m the Healing officier by the way, so i kinda know how to assign healers on any given fight up to brutalus.
My conclusion are as follows:
> Spamming WG is really boring , compared to the fun i had when i had the possibility to use other spells. (notes that i use the word “possibility” on purpose, of course i can use other spells but )–>
> Spamming WG is by the time i write this, the best way to heal. All other spells are useless (except maybe for the HT healing touch to fill the gasps if the tank take damage eventualy…)
> Spamming WG totaly negates the role of paladins and shammies. And i must say that they are really concerned about their purpose comes the expansion.
*You can replace WG with CoH in the previous statements*
I don’t want to spam my most usefull spell for one year of raiding in wotlk.
Up to now , i was spamming LB, but it was not the same. I loved it, i had to keep my stacks up, on multiple tanks, and use largely Regrowth on the raid.
It was fun. Spamming WG mindlessly is not. It’s a smart heal and even a blind guy could end up 1st on recount with this “strategy”…
As a healing officer, i can’t stand that pallys and shammies , (and even my disc priest) feel they are useless. I was hoping for more competition and synergy comes WOTLK.
I’ll be more than happy if they had the 6 second cooldown to WG and CoH, i think it will be more fair.
Nevertheless, their will have to be some compensation to this loss, maybe buff up lifebloom the way it was, and most probably change Gift of the Earthmother.
Just the point of view of a druid who feels lonely and sad. Call me stupid if you want, but WG needs to be toned down, for the sake of fairness and fun.
Edit : i’m french so i may have maid a few mistakes, or maybe you don’t understand what i mean. I’m sorry if it’s the case , i tried to be as clear as possible :s
I agree with Amorino above
WG/CoH healing is boring in a raid environment.
However I fear what’ll happen for our 5 man healing with a WG cooldown…
@Phae:
I’m not restricting my argument to the current content, so the whole “it’s senior week” doesn’t really apply. In fact, I think you missed my entire point, so let me try again.
Given Naxx testing and current content (nerfed or not – that’s really irrelevant) the raid damage components of the fights were such that players were encouraged to spam nothing but AOE heals in many cases, and to maximize effectiveness, this meant clumping players up in a lot of cases. The result is/was some very degenerate raid “strategies”.
You can see the devs start to explain this point in the recent blue posts on MMO Champion: http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?topic=25381.0
Note that they’re talking about toning down CoH/WG *AND* nerfing the raid damage in encounters. You won’t be forced into needing the spell all the time, and when it is needed, the “nerfs” will be appropriate given what you’ll have to deal with.
Really, we’re still in the tuning phase, and a lot of classes have been on a rollercoaster ride with abilities fluctuating wildly. (Feral druids like myself have been watching as devs try to get our mitigation correct, and have mucked with it 3 times in a month, each an apparently nerf.)
Anyways, I’ve always advocated chilling out until we actually see how everything works in WotLK, and trust that the devs won’t be wildly wrong. Maybe they will be – and then it’ll get fixed…. but generally they do an admirable job of balancing a very complex game.
@Kwast:
“[insert nasty word]… what about if you need to heal multiple differently positioned groups.. are we supposed to assign healers to a certain group to WG/CoH? that’s insane.”
Uhm – yes…. that’s what’s done now on some encounters…. and no, it’s not insane – it’s strategy.
Karthiss last blog post..Crafting a Tanking UI
I honestly don’t really see the point of a cooldown on Wild Growth. I don’t see when it would be useful to spam it so much that a cooldown would prevent it from being overpowered.
The way it works makes it likely to target the same people over and over again when maybe adding a LB or Rejuv to the ticking WG would yield better results.
The few times I used it in raids it was overwritten by a shaman’s Chain Heal anyway (or CoH more rarely) so it’s still not what I’d consider my most powerful spell.
In five man situation it’s nice to have but I still don’t go around spamming it. The mana cost already prevents that from happening. Most of the times when I needed to fall back on it was because someone didn’t do their job correctly in some speed-run heroic or other. Come Wrath, speed-runs through places will be put off the schedule and we’re going to get back to CC-ing and assisting the tank.
In a configuration where the CC do their thing and the tank is the only one receiving the hurt, Wild Growth isn’t much use either.
I suppose I’m failing to see the obvious somehow, but whether or not Wild Growth gets to get a cooldown I don’t think will affect us much. To me it’s a mere annoyance rather than a real handicap.
As always Phae, a wonderful post on a timely topic. I found myself reading it again this morning and laughing/crying over your cartoon.
Absolutely no need for me to post on this topic. I agree with you! I just wish they’d tell us what druids are supposed to be basing our rotations on in Wrath–if it’s not Lifebloom, Regrowth, or Wild Growth, what is it? I get itchy when I don’t know what the maximum-performance rotation is supposed to be.
@Amorino
Let me disagree with you. Spamming WG all the time on a 5-10 minute fight is not affordable and not optimal. Those who do it nowadays are the same people who spammed LB and the same people that will spam whatever is next on the list just because they do not wish to use their other spells. Getting 5-6 casts every minute is not spamming (that is like 10 seconds out of 60). Especially on Kalecgos I found it awfully ineffective.. Yes, under the right circumstances it pumps out more HPS than our other spells, but it serves only one purpose – light raid damage. Raid healers would always get better numbers on the healing meters.
WG is the tool with which to be efficient raid healers, along with glyphed HT.
LB, RG, Rejuvenation, Swiftmend and Nourish are our single target heals, making us good enough for keeping a tank alive.
Shamans and paladins don’t have this choice. Or have not learned how to complete the roles unusual to their class pre-patch. This is the idea of Blizzard, to not make the next damn SWP-ish raid a place where you stack 3 shamans, 3 CoHs and 1 whatever (usually druid or a paladin and that just because there weren’t more shamans/CoH priests). I guess the healadins got the short end of the stick again, even though I’ve seen some with quite nice raid-wide output.. It’s all in the player skills, I presume.
The fact that your druids are playing around with the new toy on nerfed fights and (logically) getting high numbers (at the same time, stealing the assignment of someone else – the shamans, I presume).. Well, that is that. The fact that you are not using anything but WG.. well, you might wanna feel like a bad druid. /buttslap
Your points, one by one..
“> Spamming WG is really boring , compared to the fun i had when i had the possibility to use other spells.”
You still need to keep a stack of Lifebloom on the MT, 800 HPS at a 5 minute fight is over 200k healing. Also, it is the best way to go through silences, of all healing classes, this and a Rejuvenation ready to be Swiftmended at the end of the silence. You still need to use Regrowth/glyphed HT for spot heals. Or you just let a paladin/priest do that for you while you are getting bored with your WG button? Well, then that paladin/priest ain’t useless. They just get low numbers because of doing their job. Also, if the healers are spread thin across the raid, you need to help with tank heals – Regrowth.
What did we have before? LB, Rejuvenation on MT, Regrowth for MT and spot heals. We get two new spells (if counting glyphed HT). Pigeonholing yourself into spamming a spell that should take no more than 3-5 seconds of GCD once in a while is self-limitation, not game design one.
“> Spamming WG is by the time i write this, the best way to heal. All other spells are useless (except maybe for the HT healing touch to fill the gasps if the tank take damage eventualy…)”
Repeating myself, but WG is only for light raid damage. Are you going to MT heal with WG? Of course that Regrowth or Rejuvenation will be less efficient in raid healing than an AoE raid healing spell! What do you think priests use? CoH once or twice to get a grasp of the picture and Flash of Light the ones that still miss health. Shamans? CH CH CH! Paladins? Oh damn, I don’t have a spell for that.
And the tank WILL be taking damage in WotLK. It is your choice if you are gonna be MT healer or raid healer. Both positions don’t require a large arsenal of spells; being able to switch at need is what makes healing as a druid/priest funner than shamans/paladins. If you want paladins feeling useful, assign your druids to raid heals. If you want shamans feeling useful, put the druids on the tanks. They will do a better job than us cause they are SPECIALIZED for it. Only reason it looks like we can do their job as good is because of the nerf. Check your overhealing and you will see.
“> Spamming WG totaly negates the role of paladins and shammies. And i must say that they are really concerned about their purpose comes the expansion.”
Repeating myself again? Damn, I am just tired. >_< Hit exalted with Netherwing, Ironforge and Gnomeregan Exiles and got myself at 48 mounts. I will PvP my way to one and go to AQ40 and cheat my way for the Albino Drake! What was my point again? Ah yes.
Shamans and paladins will still do their respective jobs better than priests/druids once WotLK raiding starts. Priests/druids are universal healers.
I personally think that many druids get those amazing results in raids not because of WG in itself, but because of them being used to react faster, pro-actively. When I talked with a new shaman to our guild (I fill in the “healing officer” position when there are no smarthats to ridicule the inexperieced with healing meters) that his reaction time was kinda slow, he just went ahead and told me “I am not casting before they start missing 1000 HP”. I was stupified for a good 10 seconds. “Not casting before they take some damage? What.. Wait, something is telling me this makes sense but why does it feel so wrong?” Druids are used to start casting almost the moment the tank pulls, stack their Lifebloom and Rejuvenation and get ready with a Regrowth or Swiftmend while they try to “feel” the damage input on the tank. This starts with 5-mans and goes on till the toughest raids. We have an insane sixth sense for timing, GCD, future damage because of our HoTs. And suddenly, we get a spell, a HoT at that, which is awesome because we can employ our previously attained skills with an HPS similar to CoH and CH. And, man, do we blow them off the radar! I PuGed with some of the best healers on my server (Cairne is quite a young one, started this March, so we had only one guild to kill Illidan before patch) and me and the other druid would cast WG and enjoy good 1-2 ticks before the first CoH would hit and by the time CHs topped the raid off, we had a 4-5 ticks worth of effective healing. We ended up on top, with WG being high-40, low-50% for each of us, LB sitting at good 20-something percent, I had glyphed HT inbetween the two and the other tree – Regrowth. Really, didn’t heal with ALL my spells, but the glyphed HT button was easier for me to reach than Regrowth (guess other way around for the other druid) and I have never been a strong Swiftmender, always keeping it “just in case” that rarely comes.
So, what if I just spammed WG? One, I would go oom faster. Two, if I kept spamming it after the first 2-3 applies, CH and CoH would have just overwritten it, thus not providing further healing, from a useful or healing meter perspective. Instead, I used those GCDs to top off people who were further behind on health (/rw DON’T STAND IN THE FIRE!). I kept my Lifebloom ticking faithfully, making the paladin’s job easier and providing me with some extra numbers on the meters (mind you, even with a full stack of HoTs, we can no longer top a tank, we need either to Regrowth them or give the job to someone else).
Can you “win the meters” with WG spam? Only if you are faster than your raid healing brothers. But that’s only fair, isn’t it? Mind you, raid healers will always fare better on those damn meters. That’s why I keep a handful of faithful priests and paladins for tank healing duties always handy. I take the job myself most of the times and let the kiddies play with WG, CoH, CH.
Can you “do your job” with WG spam? Only if your job is raid healing. Which is logical, right? An AoE healing spell for AoE damage.
Can you fulfil other positions? Hell yeah! And that’s what’s fun. Not this or that spell, because there will be always one spell that is best for situation X, and another for situation Y.
Oh damn, and about my thought on the change to WG and CoH.. I don’t care about it as far as I can fill in raid healing duties at whim. I don’t want to be given versatility, then being robbed off it and after all the promises for all-across-the-board healing tools, I still hear the dreaded “OMFG, we can’t raid, not enough shamans/priests!” while 2-3 druids are standing at the stone hoping to get a shot. 6 second CD… that is like 2 CHs from each shaman in the raid before you can redo it. Well, what is the use then? It will give us healing meter points, but as far as raid survivability goes, just a drop in the sea. Thus, druids stuck on single target healing, with an occasional WG. Thus, back to old days. Oh, and don’t forget that paladins are still the best single target healers.
All those who say “hooray for nerf, WG is boring”.. No, it is not. It is fun cause it gives you the feeling of godliness, that you can do it all, at the same time. While your HoTs are healing the tank and your WG the raid, you can spot heal whoever needs attention. Druids are all over the place, picking from a deep box full of spells. That someone ended with just one flavour of ice cream, stuck with it and got bored with it, is not a reason to ban ice cream.
Why do people think druids need such a bad nerf? Honestly, I feel 100% for that little comic. I was already a little sad about the way healing was, really just hoping that our HoT’s scale up more then anything else and praying for no direct healing. (I like being the “HoT” healer) But I’m sure Blizzard is just out there trying to take even more our of uniqueness away… -shakes fist- Threaten me all you want! Not dropping my druid now!
Resto4Life or go home!
Sophis last blog post..115 Runs + Sethekk Halls = Anzu
@Phaelia; I know how WG works, and proximity is exactly the issue; if you have a melee group and a caster group 30yds further away (and in whatever party they may be), you will have to cast WG twice to be able to heal the raid.
@Karthis; I know it’s strategy (a strategy they wanted to get rid of even by giving every healer the same abilities), and if a encounter calls for that I wouldn’t mind arranging my healers in that way.
But the point is that raid damage induces chaos, and crosshealing is not a luxury there, and with chaos you’re bound to screw up rotations and casts. If some rogue is running away for some reason while you want to heal the melee group, the proximity feature of WG will just make me heal 1 player while I wanted to heal the melee group.
Healers should be able to screw up at least once Without deaths because of some annoying cooldown. Let me just run out of mana because of it, that’s my problem.
I honestly just do not relate to people who spam CoH/WG, and after so long awaiting a nice AoE healing spell in order to be able to help CoH priests, I hate it that its going to be beaten up to a pulp by Blizzard’s devs because of something I never did.
Seriously. It pisses me off.
So, what bothers me is that both CoH and Wild Growth are spells that are choices to take. Granted, Wild Growth is more of a choice that is much more appealing to druids than say, the holy priest. I play both a healing priest (when I don’t spec her shadow for kicks), as well as a resto druid. The druid took up Wild Growth because it was something I could use situationaly and that is about how much I use it. I still toss rotations and have fun micromanaging my HoTs much like the DoTs on my affliction warlock.
However, the priest is usually specced differently. I prefer taking a discipline approach to pick up Improved Divine Spirit. This leaves me awfully short on talents, and CoH is usually skipped over in favor of an extra raid buff that actually ups my healing as well as mana regen over a longer period of time.
Both spells are actually not the same. CoH is a single heal on an entire party within a certain range. Wild Growth actually affects raid members, which can actually be more targeted towards that melee group right at the boss. It is not (at least to me) not meant to be that spammable, but like CoH, is situational. Not that it can be spammed by those half watching a good movie on TV while raiding. (WTF would they be doing that?)
In both cases, both spells are slightly mana intensive. I mean slightly, as in back in the days pre-boss nerf, I was CoH only for one fight: and that was Hex Lord. Our first downing of him required a good 2man Innervate rotation, the first usually going twice, tossing Shadowfiend and potting like crazy. I had high mana regen and over 2200 healing, but we just didn’t have all the uber dps we have now.
Yet, like the comic showed, why can Shamans chain heal still? Maybe they could remove CoH from some of the buffing mechanics in the holy tree (like Spiritual Guidance) and take away the extra buffing from GotEM for Wild Growth. The six second cooldown may not work well later on. It all depends on the bosses that we have yet to face.
Sorry if it’s a little ranty…it’s just the first time I have heard about this. Just wow..
Out of Topic: Uhm, just wanted to say great show on WoWInsider Phael, I certainly hope they’ll move away from the whack-a-mole thing they have going on as you say :p
Your comic strip speaks truths. =_=
If they destroy my WG, I will be a very sad tree.
it’s interesting to note, that even though WG is nice, i dunno about other people, but it still isn’t a new “mainstay” in my rotation. Between all the other things they put into the resto tree, i now enjoy a multitude of healing capabilities, regrowth, a wonder 1 sec HT, rejuve, a few other things. WG is nice, but there is no way i hit it every single second. It’s nice, but not the new bread and butter of my healing.
Offtopic:
I saw this and I thought of my resto druid sisters and brothers.
http://img509.imageshack.us/img509/9527/omnomnomux4.gif
I think I understand what going on druids are skilled player, so they feel it ok to nerf us over and over again, but shamans have no skill what so ever, so they need to protect the shamans free no skill raid spot.
I really don’t feel that this change is all that bad. As a druid lucky enough to experience all of Sunwell pre-nerf, I have to say that I didn’t have any trouble keeping up with raid damage without Wild Growth. Don’t get me wrong, it is a very nice tool to use as an emergency buffer for a few people before you can get some stronger HoTs up – I really don’t feel putting a 6 second cooldown on it will kill the spell.
I am sure that skilled druids have already learnt to use it sparingly and appropriately and found it more fun than the spam approach some have taken too. I can see the dev’s point of view though. Remember, they have been watching this at 80 too. The fact that druids and priests who spammed aoe heals appeared to be doing fairly well with no obvious penalties for constantly using the same spell was one of the factors that led to Shaman being considered one of the less effective and desired healers in the Beta. I do think we need to stop comparing ourselves to Shaman too. Devs have said they want them to use CH as their main spell while they have told us they would like to focus more on our range of spells, picking what is appropriate to the situation. It doesn’t mean Shaman require less skill to play, it doesn’t mean they want to nerf all our spells into the ground. It means we are different classes who behave differently.
Whilst it is not great to have the option to use it whenever we want/need WG taken away from us, I think overall it is a change we should be happy about or at least accept. We still have a lot of heals that we can use. Rejuvenation may even become one of the front runners if you have good communication and awareness between your healers what with the Naxx idol and T7 set bonus being focused on increasing it’s efficiency (that may just be because I am a huge fan of Rejuve and am really looking forward to using it with the Swiftmend glyph, though). Let us not forget that we will not be the only healer in a raid. There will be others to raid heal too and I am confident that WG on a 6sec CD will be enough with our other HoTs to deal with whatever we need to. The argument you cannot spam it in 5 mans is irrelevant, the CD will be finished before the first WG expires.
First time commenter, thanks Phae for a blog that is always a pleasure to read.
Hi there….the nerf is sad. I play a resto druid and I was so excited.
Quoting from the forums : Shaman Automagical (an Iconic name if there was one) from Mal’Ganis
“… but with the new talents affecting CH still remains King”
Why should (and I quote our host here) “a spell that requires an extraordinarily low amount of cognitive awareness” deserve in any way to be “King”? Is this the world of dumb-craft? The pejorative moniker “Brain Heal” is there for a reason…
Le sigh, this might be the straw that breaks my camel’s back… I’m going boomkin.
This nerf is a really bad news.
As “the” raid healer of my guild, it was a wonderful tool. Beyond that, it was really fun to use.
This spell was perfect to be dropped on the five groups of a raid 25 to start slowly healing after raid damages, giving some safety for the other healers ( priest / shamans ) to do their work a few seconds after, making the HOT useless or not ticking. What is the point of a 6 seconds cooldown, for this 51 pts talent of our tree?
It’s making us unable to cast it more than “one” time or “maybe” two during a raid damage period. The specific moment where WG is really needed is almost removed, what a limitation!
Why the hell or who the hell would only spam WG during a raid? I don’t see any fun or efficiency with this attitude.
I was happy to use it along with my other spells (Wild growth, Healing touch glyphed, rejuvenation / swiftmend, and lifebloom. ) , all of them with a different utility depending on the situation : single or multitarget, low or high amount to heal, what kind of other healer were there playing, mana management…
I hope blizzard choose another way than adding a CD to WG. Increase the mana cost, or maybe reduce the amount healed… *pray*
Great site, found it for the first time.^^
But i disagree with you. I would have loved to see them implement higher mana costs. SO that the issue of just spamming heals all over the raid or constant aoe healing becomes one of mana management. A CD wouldn’t make it more demanding or interesting and actually would hardly affect any even semi-concious of mana efficiency druid healer at all. Why use another wild growth when the first one didn’t even have time to tick through?oO
The whole reason for all those problems in my opinion is people fighting to easy fights compared to their equip (a general WoW problem but enforced by the 80 talents vs 70 mobs right now) and thus having to many healers with too much mana in raids.
I didn’t really get informed on resto druids for wotlk a lot since recently because i contemplated playing rerti paladin and played a warrior in beta.^^
But seeing all those incredible talents and skills now i long to try and heal a 10 char raid alone.^^ And i certainly won’t accept more than 2 healers in 10 or 5 healers in 25 char content as a raid leader anymore…they will eat a hefty L2P! if they complain.^^
Thanks again for your site i’ll make sure to visit more often.^^
I hope it isn’t considered bad manners to reply to a comment on someone elses post.^^
@Leyati:
You may have healed sunwell pre-nerf without those new tools but if blizzard does the right thing the raid instances in wotlk should be impossible or only being heavily overgeared without using all the new tools available to us.
Naxxramas 10 or 25 really can not be a measurement for the difficulties in the future. It was intended as an easy entrance to raiding and a nice flashback for longtime raiders. Which means its mechanical demands are so easy everyone gets lured by it into starting as a raider and the experienced raiders already know all the tactics by heart.
Ulduar will be much harder i hope just like Lady Vashj and Kael’thas were a first test of “skills”.^^
Long time reader and first time commenter, I think. I started off my druid life as feral (reading.. you guessed it, BBB) and turned to restore recently due to lack of healer in raid and your website has provided invaluable reading ever since.
Reason I love Druid? As you can see in my first paragraph, I have tanked MH/BT and I healed MH/BT/SW, though have not full clear SWP…. kinda stopped at Brutalus pre-nerf.. cock-blocker he was.
On Wild Growth potential change, I would like to hear more beta tester to make a comment. Is it that powerful still in level 80 contents? (I will find out soon as WOTLK hit, I will level druid to 80 first).
Not sure if GC is basing on purely what we seen in Live now. Because, its true, WG does rule the day as far as healing meter is concerned. I visited Kaelthas in TK just over weekend and give him the whooping he so deserved, and I topped the heal chart beating COH priests and CH shammies. And you guessed it, I used 85% WG, the rest is all the oh shit on dps-er that is dying. Tank healing is a non-issue, its keeping the dps-happy alive.
However “OP” (I don’t think it is) is WG in 70 now, we must evaluate it in end game (now 80).
The beauty of WOW is that it is so flexible it allows us to play in whatever style we wish (to a certain extend, and on encounter), so what if there are players that intend to spam 1 button, and what if the rest want to spam 2 buttons, so on, we should be allowed to do so. Doing so, shouldn’t tip the balance of the game of course, and I strongly disagree if someone tell me now WG tip that balance.
So if there are level 80 beta raiders reading this, please comment?
ok another day I am bored at work.
I have WG, but I can’t say I use it constantly. If I did, I’d make a pretty lousy healer – it comes in handy on melee if the tank is currently my target (like some bosses who like spamming an AoE – Hex Lord) and on myself when I’m near the casters. Usually its enough to top up the health bars so I can carry on healing the tank.
Without Lifebloom and the other spells in our arsenal, I don’t see how anyone could possibly heal well.
. Not using one button, anyway! (Unless of course, your on raid healing – even then you’d probably pop Rejuvenation!)
Gwyns last blog post..Weekend!
@phae
lucky 5k!
They could even make WG buff lifebloom by 8%.
@JKong
It was preatty nice in beta. When the whole raid takes a good smack spreading this around a bit sure feels like its helping. Sadly beta is done and we will have to wait for live wotlk to see how bad they are messing it up.
@archmera
I agree with you completely. It’s wonderful to be able to use our full array of healing spells if we want to, whack a bloom (or WG) is not very exciting. But it is going to be a lot of fun for a few months tweaking rotations and specs and arguing about the best ones.
Short Rant & swag numbers;
If they are worried that people are going to be “spamming their AoE heal as the only way they perceive they can be competitive” after the price of the spell goes prohibitively high to spam, blue needs to look up the word “prohibitively” in the dictionary. I also doubt peoples complaints “saying their mana regen sucks” because they can’t spam a spell that has had its mana cost adjusted specifically to prevent it from being spammed will matter anyway.
I think the dev issue with WB is that there was a serious underestimation of how well this spell would show up on the raid parses. This spell has low HPS and lots of targeting problems, but over its full duration with no cooldown and a lot of incoming aoe damage it really stands out in the logs. By itself it is hardly a one button fits all spell, but in combination with lifebloom, glyphed regrowth, etc it is preatty hot stuff as it stands.
If you are a WB freak doing seven second rotations you can easily keep 5 groups of WG up till your mana is gone (ie not long). In that seven second refresh window there will be the following ticks (5@T1, 5@T2, 4@T3, 3@T4, 2@T5, 1@T6, 1@T7) during the initial setup and (5@T1, 5@T2, 5@T3, 5@T4, 5@T5, 5@T6, 5@T7) on each subsequent rotation. Werebeef lvl80 with 1546 sp on the forums found ticks of; 644,606,569,532,495,457,420. So 12khp/7s on initial and 18.6khp/7s during sustained rotations for a potential average of 13.3khp/sec for a damaged raid. Post six second cooldown change there would only be (2@T1, 1@T2, 1@T3, 1@T4, 1@T5, 1@T6, 1@T7) ticks possible in any seven second window, or around 3.1khp/sec for one damaged group. The change we are talking about is around 76% reduction of the spells maximum potential healing throughput in a damaged 25 man raid.
The spells poor targeting algorithm also trims a fairly large bit of efficiency from its use in any preemptive rotations. This targeting inefficiency is due to overlap refreshes, unharmed players getting the hot and complete misses when not enough people are in range of the splash. These are a bit chaotic in a real raid due to movement. But during raid wide aoe and cone burst damage (OH Shit moments?) this targeting issue is actually at its smallest due to the limited area where the damage is occurring. If you wg someone in these areas they are probably standing next to someone else who is also in that area and the splash actually heals more people.
Wild growth will still hopefully be a handy spell in the end. It will continue to pack a strong reactive healing punch when used against burst aoe damage in small groups. But healing through burst aoe across a full raid as a druid is going to take a big step back when WG gets its healing throughput reduced by a good seventy percent.
Oh well win some lose some.
Yeay! I love being a tree again. Played my resto druid for the first time in a month. We killed Archimonde today and I was second top healer, behind by only 0.8%
Now that I know I still have my mojo im a happy elm
I’m not really the most technical Druid around. I heal with what seems to work. I have one or two tactics, but I’ve not crunched numbers. I just do what feels like it’s working best, balancing speed over effectiveness. If I’m going oom too much my strategy isn’t working and I try a new rotation.
However, with the LB nerf and now the apparent WG nerf, healing is getting less and less appealing. It’s not because the numbers matter to me – like I said if it works it works, and I don’t even use Wild Growth that much. I’m just getting fed up of Blizz giving us shiny new abilities and then deciding, after they’ve gone into the live environment, to nerf them.
Making me want to spec t0nk if I’m truely honest
Rosilines last blog post..A new beginning?
I am seriously starting to think that blue posters and developers have absolutely no idea about the game they are talking about.
In a raid environment, everything comes down to Healing Assignments.
And I am not talking about the way healing is done after the huge nerf, but during actual progress raiding through new content.
Why would a druid spam wild regrowth if his assignment is to heal a tank that is getting cleaves? He would keep all 3-4 hots on the tank and fill in with a regrowth, a nourish or a healing touch.
If his assignment is to heal the raid, why would it be bad to spam wild regrowth and an occasional regrowth or nourish here and there to even out spikes?
On the other hand, shamans no matter what their assignment is, they will stack as much haste as they can and they will spam chain heal. And that is AT ALL TIMES.
Now I am wondering… Are Blizzard posters retarded or something?
They need to stop seeing issues everywhere and stop creating problems out of every stupid thought that comes to their little mind about druids.
The cartoon is nice Phae but does not represent the entire truth about druids. You also need a frame with the raid leader kicking the druid out of the raid cause he cannot pull enough healing in SW, just as a reminder of what happened when they introduced huge aoe damage.
Not to mention the actually huge itemization in haste, both in SWP and in WotLK which is practically useless for healing Druids but boosts the aoe heals of shamans and priest by more than 200%.
I actually have seen some of the down side of having unlimited Wild Growth and Circle of Healing. While I concede that folks are trying out the spell right now and trying to learn how it works best, and while I concede that right now we are practicing on NERFED instances…I have noticed that folks are being extremely reckless and silly by spamming that AOE heal button incessantly. I have been in raids lately where every healer is just spamming AOE heals willy-nilly while the tank is almost dead from needing a good strong direct heal. And it’s not like there is suddenly an over-abundance of Paladin Healers…they’re all Ret right now. So folks who need more concentrated heals are not getting it because no one wants to stop going nuts (trying to top one another on the healing meters) with AOE healing. AOE healing is great for splash healing, but all I see right now is every priest and druid using nothing but their AOE heal.
I’ve always been one of the top healers in my guild. Now, if I am not spamming the AOE heal button, I am being out-healed by about 5-to-1. Now, certainly I don’t worry too much about the Healing Meters, but they are telling me that folks are over-using AOE heals right now. For me, AOE healing has taken quite a bit of fun out 25-man raids. On the other hand, I also concede that the new AOE heals are not built for nerfed TBC dungeons. They are built with WotLK in mind. We may find that we really NEED those AOE heals and that nerfing them now is maybe premature. So while I personally dislike the overuse of AOE healing in TBC, I don’t think Blizzard should necessarily nerf them at this time. I think we need to get into WotLK dungeons and see how the AOE heals scale. If priests and druids continue to try out spam the other while watching the tanks die, then I definitely think a nerf is in order.
Glyphed and talented, HT is by far more OP than Wild Growth is, IMO. I’m not a theroycrafter, so I can’t give you numbers, but it feels like I’m a pally with hots, not necessarily what I want to be as a druid.
Be prepared to add another panel to that comic with HT being nerfed back to useless.
Resto4Life or Death.
disc priest is the new fun-to-play healer.
i always thought hybrids had it a little too good.
Healing hasn’t changed much in this game at all. Blizzard keeps on giving healers more tools more and more tools. Soon enough you’ll look in your tool box and find that you have 12 screw drivers and 4 hammers. You wont need any of those because the sledge hammer is the shed. Now you may only meed the small hammer for the job but using the sledge hammer is a lot more fun
And that’s the problem instead of evolving the reason to heal or why you use a spell. They keep giving you more and more tool making the other ones useless. I hate rogues but they did something right with them. Rogues have 2 parts to with the class mechanic energy and combo point. warriors even have rage and ability that require some combat event a dodge block or parry.
This leads to the next issue when healing combat it self. Blizzard went from giving healers something annoying like de-spelling and cursing to just upping the damage bosses did then to just a lot of aoe damage. Granted each time they made a knife fight they gave us a knife.
Now would some secondary system kill healing lets say you had to roll life bloom to build up something like combo points then when you had enough you could spend it on wild growth. would that work?
Would a healing spell only usable after your focus target dodged, parries or blocked kill healing?
Would that fix the problems with healing I don’t know.. would it add some twitch fun factor yes.
The other issue I have is healing is disconnected from combat. We really aren’t taken part in anything but whack-a-mole. Your not encouraged to dps when healing and its not like we could use those spells if we wanted to. All you really do is stand in a safe spot spamming 1-5 buttons.
But cool downs wont fix or make healing fun. And hell did the say “We want healing to be fun”.
In game I’m going to kill every crab it see and I’m going to go out of my way to bash some crabs tonight
@Sharlot
Spamming AoE heals is nothing new. It has been the bane of end-game TBC raids for druids and paladins where they have been allowed only one spot per raid, the rest taken by shamans and priests. People who are going nuts to top the meters despite their assignments are bad healers, not giving assignments is bad healing officering, end of story. It is not this spell or that that breaks the game, it is an imbalance between single-target damage and raid damage. If WG/CoH/CH are strong enough to keep the raid safe, that is boss mechanics they need to fix, not stealing a spell that is completely and utterly different than nukes and just gives another dimension to the capacity of a certain class’s skills. Rising the mana cost would end up into more stacking of mana regen, on gear and in raid. Putting a 6-sec cooldown would end up into just not being able to raid heal. Is all.
@Eggo
Try Warhammer. (I hear everybody gasping now >_<) There seems to be healing WoW-style, and healing through soul essences you collect by doing damage and one more thing that escapes my memory at the moment. But yeah, I generally agree, after just some months of raid healing, I find that healing went the way driving did for me. From something new and exciting you can’t stop talking about to a subconscious process that happens while you watch your other healers, the DPS, the tanks, shout raid warnings, reassign targets, think what you should cook for dinner tonight, etc.
P.S. Killing a crab and yelling “Damn Ghostcrawler!” would certainly make for a few laughs in SV next time. ^_^
My personal opinion is that Wild Growth is probably going to be nerfed because its Priest equivalent *needs* to be. Wild Grwoth isn’t a good “spam” spell. We know this. CoH on the other hand, is, even moreso than Chain Heal. CoH is 1 stop shopping. It almost makes all of the the other heals in a Priest’s inventory irrelevant.
However, if they nerf 1, then they’ll feel compelled to nerf the other. They see it as an issue of “balance and fairness” in my opinion. This may be a preemptive response to inevitable QQ. All in all, I’m really fine with the nerf, and I’m fine with Shaman’s CH not being nerfed, provided that our other abilities are balanced to compensate.
As it is, right now Druids are moving further and further to the back of the pack, it seems, in terms of healing. Lifebloom was fine, in my opinion, but was nerfed under the erroneous belief that, when presented legitimate alternatives, Druids would almost entirely continue to spam Lifebloom. The problem was NOT that we were spamming Lifebloom and ignoring other good heals, the problem was that Lifebloom was the only spell that kept us on par with other healers, everything else was too weak, too slow, or too inefficient. Now we are approaching a state of being superfluous as healers, “allowed” to tag along with a raid because we hung in there previously, and made decent contributions.
I don’t want Lifebloom returned to the state it was, necessarily (though it does need to be looked at again, in my opinion), but I do want *at least* 1 spell that is on par with the abilities of other healers, which is the opposite of the direction we are currently headed. The statement seems to be “we want you to use your entire assortment of really bad abilities” or “we want you to work twice as hard to do half as much as the Shaman who is hitting 1 button almost constantly”.
As a healer, I want to make a meaningful contribution to a raid. I want to feel as though I belong, and that I am at least as good a selection for my raid slot as any other healer, but I am worried that won’t happen for Druids.
@Jezzabell
I have completed TBC raids through Illidan (pre-nerf). I certainly understand that AOE healing is not new. However, what I have noticed is a no-holds-barred AOE-paloozah since the patch. Perhaps it is the nerfed content. Perhaps it is folks just being silly and running amok until the expansion. Perhaps the spells are OP an need a nerf. Time will tell which is which. All I know is that when I look at the breakdown of spells being cast in the raids that I have been in, I have seen AOE spells (both Druid and Priests) right at the top of the list…and not by a little–but by a lot. That seems a bit unbalanced. Will it continue to be unbalanced in WotLK? I don’t know, which is why I recommended the game designers hold off until the spell is being used in the new content.
Since the patch, I’ve been a bored tree. It’s kind of hard to use my skills when I have 3 priests spamming AOE healing. I don’t want to just join the club. But like I said, there isn’t a way to really determine what the life of a tree will be like in a week. If they DO nerf Wild Growth, I will take solace in the fact that Priests will also share in the nerf. Judging by the numbers in the raid that I have been CoH is so out of whack that something needs to be done.
I’m a resto druid. I raid with priests and others healer classes. When I look at the Recount data, the priests consistently spam CoH. They also have the most overhealing. CoH is meant for this.
Not all druids spam WG because it not an effective heal to spam. The people that actually analyze the situation and use the appropriate heal know this simple fact.
So why should a great heal be nerfed just because there are druids that do spam WG while not really thinking about what they are doing? When players like this participate in a raid, the raid pretty much fails due to wipes. You can’t keep a raid up with WG no matter how many times you push the button. Putting a 6 second CD on it totally defeats its usefulness. Groups are spread out and they all take damage at the same time, they need to be healed quickly and 6 seconds can pretty much mean certain doom.
So what to do? I tell the healers that I see spamming CoH and WG in raids that they aren’t really helping. The numbers speak the truth of this. During raids I take a close look at the recount data to see what is going on. If the raid is having problems not staying up and the tactical is correct, it’s most often the fault of poorly chosen heals. Correcting the problem during the raid is your only option.
So why is Blizz taking it upon themselves to ruin a great heal spell in the effort to make bad healers better healers and making good healers have more problems? WotLK raids will definitely be more difficult to those that cannot play their class. Catering to whiners and complainers with a completely flawed solution is not the answer here. The solution for those that spam WG: learn to heal and stop holding your raid/group back because you can’t make effective healing decisions in the heat of action.
Bliz, leave well enough alone with WG and move on.
I think warhammer did the right thing with evolving the typical classes into more action orientated archetype but I don’t care for the warhammer world and I’m not found of its art style. Wow for me has a cartoon quality in design color and lighting. Warhammer seem confused between cartoon and realism. They have nice textures of rock and brick then some toony orc with realistic over the top armor on him. Plus its gray and muted in color very depressing.
Ive been fighting for some healer changes since bwl when I played a priest. I’m just sad that with all the money wow generates and all the feed back we give they still say here is another healing spell put it on your bar. The game play hasn’t changed. What reward or risk do we have when we push a button in wow?
When I heal I don’t feel like I’m making a huge impact in a fight. When a spell lands I’m not say over vent ecstatically that I healed for 7000 because no one really cares. Plus I’m to busy looking at small bars change color to notice the amount it healed for. And none of this is new it was like that in MC all the way to BT. Hell I still use the same healing add-on for the most part.
Now don’t get me wrong I do like wow and healing in it. I just expect a bit more innovation out of blizzard. Dual speccing will be nice but it nothing more then a free repec when you think about it and we have been asking for that for year or two now. With the generalization of all the healing classes It would be nice to see some uniqueness come back into the game.
@Sharlot
So you want to say you have raided up to Illidan and you haven’t had priests and shamans top the meters by a lot with just AoE spells? I find that hard to believe. And yes, Blizzard said that the game is gonna be broken between patch and expansion. So post-patch healing is nowhere an objective person should look. I look at it this way. Currently, a 6sec CD would make me drop WG for balance talents. In WotLK when it will be even weaker, they’d better get a good laugh out of us.
@Vandenite
“So why is Blizz taking it upon themselves to ruin a great heal spell in the effort to make bad healers better healers and making good healers have more problems?”
Aye, exactly. Who are Blizz to tell me how to heal? If they want to, tho, they should go ahead and make a guide on how to perform so we get it straight. Not throw a spell expecting X results and changing everything so they get their Y results. This is not a new problem, AoE heals that is. And we certainly have healed without it. Just.. taking away a whole new role for druids hurts.
Just furthering my comment on wild Growth on the basis of sharing. I am not sure if you do it, you probably do, but just sharing.
Wild growth has its use in main tank healing too! When I am main tank healing on nasty boss, for example, 4th boss of MH.. (Azgalor? or Azrogal? lol I always confused with the name)… anyway on the 4th boss which silent, I typically stack 3 Lifebloom, put Reju, put Regrowth, refresh lifebloom, wild growth.
Doing so, put 4 HOTs on the Main Tank at a time, and it makes the silence part of the fight more trivial.
I do so on every single boss that hits hard and requires that much buffer.
I really feel Wild Growth is a good thing, nerfing it… it just make me a sad tree.
I kid you not when I say this:
I had a dream early this morning that I was a crab, in a stadium of crabs. Ghostcrawler was on the podium talking about healing touch being druids new heal as everything else was nerfed. All the other crabs where cheering and they had been hand picked to be there as they would not complain. I walked sideways up the podium to say no! lifebloom and regrowth where the way forward and another crab walked up before me and started giving a speach on healing touch, in his experience, being the best heal.
The healing touch idol dropped in kara for me a few days ago, maybe it is a sign?
Wise Foxs last blog post..EXPLORER!
@ wisefox
That is hilarious… but at the same time I hate the fact that Wild Growth is getting a 6 sec cooldown… Its a HoT… therefor it should not get one… bah!
Cuspers last blog post..WOLK – Thursday Nov 13th Release!
Hi Phae, long time reader and a very disconcerted resto druid. This is my first time posting.
I usually get taken into raid as a raid healer as we already have another resto druid who takes care of tanks. I already feel like resto druids were so limited in terms of the numbers taken to raids, a cooldown on our ‘effective’ raiding spell doesn’t really seem to help with that at all.
At first I was able to use lifebloom on people who were being hit, and if the damage continued I’d follow with a rejuv/regrowth and maybe a swiftmend while at the same time trying my best to maintain HoTs on the tank. Now with the bloom nerf, that is the spell that makes the least sense to use as a raid heal as I’d run out of mana so incredibly quickly.
What are my options?
Raid heal with Rejuv? It ticks after 3 seconds, how is that effective at all?
Regrowth, continuous spam on it? Is that the best I can do? In the time I heal one person a shaman can almost heal 3 people. I’ll agree, it can be fairly efficient at times.
Swiftmend. Sure, that’s highly effective, every 15 seconds or 13 seconds (as of now with some T6 gear). What would I do for the other 15?
Use a healing touch flash heal constantly? Yes, I’d better have innervate ready and be ready to run out of mana quickly.
So seriously, using Wild Growth without a cooldown can be effective. If you just sit there and spam it on people, yes, you’re probably doing something wrong. Druid healing consists of using all their tools. Yes, on certain fights where people are forced to settle in different groups, Wild Growth may seem effective, but really, its not the only thing we have.
I’m just so concerned that blizz is now managing to take away every single one of my efficient buffering raid heals. What would be the point of taking a second resto druid to a raid at all?!?
Until I see an improvement in our other HoTs, I just see us as a very limited class (and I hate saying that, I love being a resto druid).
I am both a Resto Shaman and a Resto Druid. Despite having druidic roots (har har) I feel a little ostracized by all the Chain Heal hate around here. Why can’t we be friends?
I’d like to dispel several misconceptions about Resto Shamans I’m seeing repeated here on a regular basis.
1. Chain Heal is brainless. This is incorrect, Chain Heal *was* brainless. In the Burning Crusade a Resto Shaman could indefinitely spam downranked Chain Heals without any thought or care so long as they could reasonably aim at clumps of people. However the removal of downranking, the preeminence of Spirit, and the high base mana of Shamans (highest of any healing class) mean that mana costs prohibit this brainless practice in Wrath of the Lich King.
Chain Heal remains the Shaman’s staple, but around it are built a number of mechanics vital to how a Resto Shaman functions. Riptide is a direct heal/HoT hybrid that also increases the effectiveness of Chain Heal. Tidal Waves, a significant boost to Healing Wave and Lesser Healing Wave, will proc only off of Chain Heal and Riptide. Earthliving Weapon is boosted greatly by being able to proc off of each jump of Chain Heal.
Chain Heal has been set into the earth as the foundation of Shaman healing. In the same way that Druids became extremely alarmed at only *the thought* of moving away from HoTs for more direct heals, pushing aside Chain Heal would be an ideological and mechanical nightmare.
2. Blizzard is applying a double standard with Shamans and Druids. This is also inaccurate. Blizzard is treating Druids and Shamans differently, yes, but the difference isn’t favoritism or malice but a fundamental necessity when dealing with utterly different healing classes. What Chain Heal means to Shamans is entirely different from what Wild Growth means to Druids. Because of that, Blizzard can’t treat them in the same manner.
So yes, Blizzard is acting differently toward Shamans and Druids, the same way you play a guitar or a piano in different ways. Complaining about how Blizzard is nerfing the Druid’s A key while leaving the Guitar’s A string untouched is, more often than not, overlooking the fundamentally different roles they play.
3. Druids have been continually nerfed, while Shaman have it good. This is most exemplified by the comic which, while humorous, is entirely inaccurate. From the outset of the beta Shaman were greeted with a 51 point talent that didn’t work, couldn’t possibly be balanced, and wasn’t fixed until Blizzard was well into wrapping up before the expansion’s release. Riptide, the replacement for Spirit Link, won’t even have proper graphics/effects until the first content patch. Many other talents were in similar straights. Tidal Waves was bugged through most of the Beta and ineffective, so too was Ancestral Awakening. In fact, the state and future of the Resto Shaman was precariously up in the air for more than the first half of the Beta.
Druids, on the other hand, have had their own rollercoaster ride, but nothing nearly as frightening. When Wild Growth (then Flourish) was nerfed Druids grumbled but shifted points to Balance where useful talents were waiting for them. At worst the new Restoration talents were lackluster. While another potential nerf to Wild Growth nerf is saddening, Blizzard streamlined all the Balance points for us, buffed a number of our talents, and generally made us excellent healers. We, Resto Druids, never worried about our viability so much as whether a mechanic we liked was going to shape up to be important. Resto Shaman spent the majority of the Beta wondering if they were worth bringing even for their Bloodlust buffs, struggling with their mana issues, and faced with obsolescence in the face of their peers.
To some extent I exaggerate the differences, but given the demographics here I felt it was necessary to illustrate my point. Simply put: Resto Shaman are a different class with their own problems, and complaining about Chain Heal without acknowledging the issues they face is disingenuous.
MeanderingMinds last blog post..WRATH
@Mordekai: You’re certainly right. Blizzard has seemed to indicate that they want to reduce the overall amount of raid-wide damage from what we saw in TBC. Whether this reduction is from the ridiculous amount seen in SWP or the still exceptionally Shaman-friendly levels of Tempest Keep, it’s not clear.
@Norain: I’m not raiding yet, but for healing 5-mans at least, it’s Lifebloom + Rejuv then see if I get an OOC proc for a Regrowth. If not, I’ll stack another Lifebloom or two hoping for a free Regrowth. Any additional OOC procs while Regrowth is already up (and assuming none of my groupmates need a burst of healing) get spent on Wild Growth. I am really, really enjoying the level of strategy that OOC for heals introduces and have been surprised at how much fun it is to manage.
@Kitsu: Blizzard has acknowledged that Wild Growth is less of a problem than Circle of Healing, I think more because of it’s HoT component than it’s sometimes silly AI. I’m hopeful this means that if they DO nerf CoH, that the nerf applied to WG won’t be as signficant.
@Tarqon: I agree that Lifebloom and Chain Heal have different mechanics. Lifebloom is more difficult to use than Chain Heal but it was nerfed because of characteristics that the two spells have in common. And I hope that most Druids are already sinking 14 points into Balance. The stuff at the bottom (top?) of the Resto tree really sucks in comparison. It’s kind of sad that I’m more excited about the stuff in Balance than the top of my healing tree.
@Tielong: As much as I hesitate to admit (hopefully Blizzard doesn’t see this), WG does seem perhaps a little too inexpensive at around the same cost as Regrowth. Of course, I prefer to think that Regrowth is simply too expensive. *sniff* ^^
@Kohana: I really like the idea of giving WG a bonus based on the presence of HoTs, though cutting its amount healing done otherwise in half would make the spell as worthless as it was when no one was speccing for it. Perhaps a more modest reduction would serve the same purpose while still encouraging people to pick it up.
@Amorino and Luka: I certainly don’t mind that you disagree. Blizzard seems to think, however, that people won’t be able to continue spamming these spells (or there won’t be enough raid-wide damage to justify doing so) at level 80 raid content. I do think that WG being the best choice for all situations would lead to some VERY boring raiding and that something needs to be done to encourage switching things up, I just don’t think we know enough yet to say whether this is the case. I think we’re pretty much on the same page, though.
@Karthis: In my mind, if AOE heals are too desirable in Naxxramas, then Naxxramas needs to have its raid-wide damage reduced. Because watching a 6-second cooldown over and over is not very fun, either. From the link you’ve shared (thanks, by the way), it looks like they agree. If it isn’t necessary to spam WG/CoH every six seconds, it won’t be done. But I don’t relish the idea of content that makes me want to, either.
@Zamir: Since it doesn’t sound like you’re relying heavily on Wild Growth right now, you probably won’t be affected as much by this change. Maybe that’s a good thing!
@Sydera: Well, I think the maximum performance “rotation” (I use quotes because “rotation” is a term I’ve not heard applied to healing until very recently) is going to depend upon the role you wish to fulfill. It’s definitely something I wish to explore in an updated version of my direct heals post, hopefully some time after Turkey Day.
@Jezabell: While I think that there is likely a correlation between WG spammers and the former LB spammers, Lifebloom was never capable of putting out the numbers that WG can AND it took a lot more effort and tedium, so I can understand the concern if the spell were to become the end-all, be-all spell of Druid healing (which seems unlikely given its HoT component).
@Sophi: Keep the faith (in Elune).
@Kwast: Well, look on the bright side. Since you weren’t abusing it by spamming it, you may not notice the 6-second cooldown. Now, if they simultaneously decide to adjust the amount healed or the mana cost … =/
@Nianal: Do they show good movies on TV?
@Andrige: Thank you, sir!
@Cellere: I LOLed. OM NOM NOM!
@Drun: I do sometimes wonder why they don’t want Shamans to have more spells in their healing arsenal. I would be even more bored pressing Chain Heal 90% of the time than I was rotating Lifebloom on 3-4 targets (if not quite as spastic).
@Leyati: Unfortunately, healers have to compare themselves to each other as this the exact comparison that raid leaders are making when deciding upon raid composition. Maybe Shamans really were losing out too much on their desirability because of the potency of CoH/WG, but it sounds like it was the silly Priests complaining that might lead to this change. ^^
@Arranum: NoooOooooOOoo… come back! Take a picture for Turkey Day first, of course, but come back after!
@Wiz: Unless your raid is spread out into 5 clumps of 5 people, I don’t think that throwing it out 5 times isn’t going to accomplish what you describe (giving a raid-wide health “buffer”). Maybe I’m misunderstanding your description, though.
@Marus: Welcome to the site, and thank you for commenting! The problem with increasing the mana cost of Wild Growth could end up being that Druids would simply opt to stack mana regeneration over everything else. Because they would have to sacrifice other stats (such as spell power) to do this, it would tend to exacerbate the problem since our other, non WG spells would be even less effective. (P.S. It’s certainly not bad manners to respond to others’ comments.
)
@JKong: Thanks for commenting. Regarding your inquiry as to whether this is based solely on pre-WotLK content, it sounds like it was a decision based at least partially on what they saw on the beta servers for Naxx-level raiding.
@Gwynn and Arielore: I have nothing to add but that I agree with your assessment!
@Stillsong: Congratulations (belatedly) on your kill of Archie!
@Rosiline: It really isn’t very fun to be given lots of neat new toys (the GotEM change where it lost it’s mana reduction component, for instance) and then having them taken away. Such is often the nature of beta, however.
@Dimtauren: While I like your idea for the unseen, fifth frame of the comic, I don’t think I want to be that morbid. A tree chopped in half was bad enough!
@Sharlot: Interesting point about how much the tanks are suffering from AoE-frenzy!
@Tebh: Resto4Life/Resto2Death?
@Theother: I’ve heard next to nothing about playing a Disc Priest as a healer so far, though I did see a lot of hopping up and down and demands for viability in the beta …
@Eggo: It honestly sounds like Blizzard is beginning to worry about the number of spells available for healing. The problem is that we all feel shorted if we DON’T get a few new toys with each expansion. But this leads to situations like the introduction of Nourish, a spell that fulfills a role too similar to that of other spells already in our arsenal.
@Yggdrasil: ““We want you to work twice as hard to do half as much as the Shaman who is hitting 1 button almost constantly”.”
And there, in my mind, is the crux of the problem. Is it really fair for Shamans to do as much effective healing as everyone else with considerably less effort? It doesn’t seem fair. Which is why I’d like to see diversity of skills provided to all healers. On the other hand, it’s possible that the people who were attracted to Shamans in the first place enjoyed that playstyle (much as Druid healers love their HoTs), so is it really fair to change it considerably?
@Vandenite: I’m not sure that I think a 6-second cooldown on Wild Growth would necessarily ruin the spell, especially since it sounds like you’re using it intelligently (re: not spamming it). I’m more irritated by the fact that a nerf to Priests requested by Priests will likely end up falling over onto us as a result.
@Wise Fox: Wow … I thought MY dreams were weird!
Ghostcrawler Gumbo, anyone?
@Lemesca: Thank you for commenting! Since I’m in a guild that’s a bit further behind on the progression curve, being left out of raids has never been much of a concern before. But I understand that it’s been a serious issue at SWP-level progression where AoE is king. You’re right that neither Lifebloom or Rejuvenation are good choices for raid heals. I suppose that our best option for raid healing (other than a CD WG) will come down to that which is most sustainable but has a low enough casting time that it isn’t simply irrelevant given all the smart healing bouncing around. Sounds like a job for Excel to me!
@Meanderingmind: Thank you for weighing in with your dual perspective. Much appreciated. We most certainly CAN be friends and, in fact, several of my best in game friends are Shamans. (I know so because I’m the one who dabs at the drool on their chins during 25-man raids — KIDDING!)
I am very, very glad to hear that the Shaman’s healing repertoire is being expanded, though I suspect many would say the same thing about Druids and their lessened ability to rely almost exclusively upon Lifebloom. Re: Your point #3, it is true that Shamans have not been hit by nerf after nerf the way that Shamans have. Corrections to bugs and needed improvements are very different than nerfs, after all. All-in-all, though, you make some good points, and I certainly don’t want to promote cross-class hate with what was intended to be a humorous and lighthearted comic.