Wrath of the Lich King made a number of fundamental changes to the game, many of which went through so many iterations that it can be difficult to get the facts. You can find a summary of these changes as related to the Restoration Druid in this extensive FAQ!
Blue: Nourish may be Affected by Wild Growth
Published on December 23, 2008 by Phaelia 
Blue, Spells and Talents 
17 Comments
Ghostcrawler announced yesterday that Nourish may get its 20% effectiveness increase from the HoT conferred by Wild Growth in an effort to make Nourish a more attractive raid heal. Bamft of Azshara (US) originally posed this suggestion in the Healing forums:
Subject: GC: Allow WG to count towards Nourish bonus?
I know I’d use the spell a lot more if I could WG a party and then tab/nourish them all off of that HoT. Just something to consider.
To which Ghostcrawler encouragingly responded:
Yeah, there is a good chance we’ll do this.
This change would mean that a Druid could better leverage Nourish by casting Wild Growth on her raid group, watching to see who had been hit with the HoT, and then patch heal whoever needed it with Nourish, effectively switching it over to the “tank heal” graphs of Direct Healing in Wrath. In this case, Regrowth would not get the +20% bonus from the [Glyph of Regrowth] which could make Nourish a more competitive option. This news comes hot on the heels of an earlier announcement that Blizzard will look to both increase talent-based benefits to Nourish and to add a Nourish-specific Glyph to help increase its viability relative to Regrowth:
We think there is some validity to the notion that Nourish is not propped up enough by talents. It will also be getting a glyph at some point.
Break out the tinsel and Winter Veil lights, everyone. We might have a new toy to play with soon! 
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That’s nice to hear, though really, we’ll just use either nourish or regrowth depending on which one is better HPS/efficiency, though Regrowth will always remain useful for it’s HoT.
Playing arenas the past few days have made it painfully clear to me that resto druids need something to compensate for the loss of feral charge though. Being terribly squishy and having burst outscale my healing is bad enough, but I’m really missing having another button to hit that lets me make a difference.
While I don’t oppose Blizz making Nourish better supported by talents and a glyph, I’m not too concerned about it either. As Phae’s great direct healing column demonstrated, Regrowth is a very powerful spell. I occassionaly use Nourish if Regrowth won’t get off in time. But honestly, I have no problem with Nourish being more of an off-spec heal for Balance and Feral druids.
Also, I’d rather not have them make a flash heal super powerful because I think this will only put us farther down the road of healer convergence. But maybe we’re inevitably going that direction.
I like Nourish, but I do agree it does seem kinda lame at its current incarnation. The only time I use Nourish right now is one of two situations: I don’t want to waste the mana of Regrowth or my target already has Regrowth on them (with >8 secs left).
I also agree with Albero about the direct heals. While it is nice we have something to use when “all hots are stacked up and our tanks is still be pwned!” but I don’t want to centralize the druids back into direct heal spells (eg: preBC). I like HoT healing.
@Tarqon: I’m pretty sure feral charge was moved specifically /cause/ of PvP. Which would imply there’s little to no chance you’ll see anything to compensate for its change. I never played heavy PvP so the change never affected me.
I just wanted you to know that i have been reading your blogs recently (past month or so) and i have truly learned A LOT about resto healing as a tree from this blog. As an up and coming resto druid, i always refer here to see if there is any new news, tips, tricks, hints, Anything really. Im only level 51 but hopefully will be 80 soon. Is there any hints or tricks you can help me with while i level. I am leveling as a feral so i am getting mostly feral gear at this moment. Im hoping by level 65 i can switch over and start getting resto stuff and play as a moonkin rather than feral. Or should i wait till 70 and collect that stuff then? from 70-80 speaking.
Thanks A Lot! And keep up the great work!
-Experience ( Solidfury ) server Malygos
Oohh thats exciting!
Interesting… Currently, my use for Nourish is limited to a top-off when my HoTs are already ticking and my Swiftmend is in cooldown (that is a glyphed Swiftmend, so my HoTs continue to tick). Wild Growth, I still haven’t fully integrated into my lineup (ie, to the point of auto-pilot on it), although I’m trying, it IS a useful minor splash damage to the melee group spell. I dont think the coming CD will effect me too badly on that. ::fingers crossed::
But as with everything before, I’m not going to get too excited until I see it in its final form and get to work with it. That Swiftmend Glyph? Best thing they’ve given us so far, in my opinion…
and btw, Experience, I know exactly what you mean. Fine bloggers like Phae had a lot to do with me becoming a good druid healer, in addition to a couple of fine restos on my own server.
Another point about Nourish… I’m even hesitating whether to put it out there since the more we talk about it the sooner the fix.. But the Soul Preserver trinket is currently bugged and it’s mana-cancelling ability is not removed by Nourish. So once a minute or so when it procs I spam Nourish for 15 secs (and hit WG at the very end – for 6 mana cost). This effectively puts you for 10 sec out of 5SR with ehhm… miniinnervate should I say? Let that LB stack expire. We’ll get it back.
The fix is not in official 3.0.8 patch notes – although it may get fixed undocumented. Until then – I can gem all SP…
(I have to add that I did run OOM in Naxx beforehand.. just a testimony to my rather overaggressive healing and the fact that my 10-man partner is a discipline priest so I’m the principal AOE healer).
Call me cynical, but I’m not holding my breath – I’ll wait to see what they actually end up doing before I get excited. They had so long to make Nourish great, ignored most of what people told them, and instead went with advice from “a few skilled druids” that Nourish is fantastic, don’t change it. Hmph. I’m reserving judgment until I see the final product isn’t a dud.
Still waiting on a buff to Replenish, too!
Happy holidays Phae & Mr Phae!
Keevas last blog post..Sartharion +3 down
Caaaaaaaaareful Phae :p I keep running across more of your posts on the WoW forums. The forums are dangerous – Keep it up and you’ll slowly turn into a bitter little shell of a druid who hates everyone and everything. I speak from experience; It’s too late for me, run while you still can!!
I’m more interested in the talent/glyph changes to Nourish if any come out. Honestly, I don’t think giving it the additional bonus with Wild Growth will do much at all in fixing why the spell isn’t getting much use. Talents along with a glyph could end up going a long way with the spell, though. Some suggested that Nourish could refresh all your HoTs, which I think is quite tad over the top, but I wouldn’t mind it adding a couple of ticks onto Rejuvenation. It sorta turns into a mini-regrowth like that, though, which I don’t care for at all :p Make Nourish consume a Wild Growth on a target, swiftmending it? I don’t know, I’m just brainstorming, but I do like the idea of ‘nourishing your HoTs’ in some way as another poster put it, but it might be a pretty difficult thing to balance.
They’ve probably got something else in mind. I’m just glad the spell is getting looked at.
Would it be so horrible to just give Nourish the T7 4 set bonus as a standard? That would boost it’s significantly and make it a lot more appealing. Then they can update the set bonuses for the T7 gear, which are a joke to begin with.
In my view, Nourish should have had a healing bonus for each Hot you have on a target from the get go. Then they wouldn’t be having to add talents and glyphs to boost it.
I don’t care what they do to nourish give me my hots back. More and more lately my druid feels like an alien not the class I admired so much in vanilla and rerolled before BC in order to throw my green blobs everywhere. I miss my old game of rolling hots like spinning plates, not the regrowth whack-a-mole we have now.
How to make this so? Give lifebloom some more guts again would be the dream, give us another fast ticking hot would make me happy, make haste effect the hot tick interval would also help.
The change from an unglyphed 3.0.2 Nourish to a glyphed new and improved Nourish would have to be very significant in order for Nourish to be used as a raid heal.
That is to say that the changes would have to be so extreme that I doubt that the other healing classes would stand for it.
Pookiess last blog post..And now for something completely different
Finally. I wrote a simulation program to compare nourish to glyphed regrowth for tanks and Regrowth always came out ahead no matter what spell power, or crit you could feasibly have. I actually don’t even like using direct heals, but it looks like thats the direction blizz is taking us.
I don’t think the wildgrowth nerf is going to be too big of a deal. If you were using it as a tank hot then shame on you, lol. The only time where I will cry is that boss in naxx where u only have 3 seconds to heal. Wild growth was amazing for that fight.
I think it would be interesting for newbies to post a “How to heal as a druid WOTLK style” where you examine each spells usefullness, pros, cons, numbers, and what rotation is good. For example, I always hit rejuv first on the tank (in case i need to swiftmend), followed by regrowth and then 3 lifeblooms. Since I use the regrowth glyph I never use nourish (as i don’t have the 4 t7 pieces yet).
Thanks for the update!
oh and definitely they need to fix lifebloom. I miss it a lot. I agree with Camel. I rerolled to play a resto druid because of Hots…….
Phaelia, I’m trying to get Blizzard to fix a druid bug. There’s an issue where you can’t overwrite various druid spells, like rejuvenation or entangling roots randomly. You get the error message “A more powerful spell is already active”. It doesn’t seem to be trinket or proc related, I’ve tested that out quite a few times. I’ve only seen it happen on Rejuv and entangling roots, but someone else said they saw it on Regrowth too. Anyway, it is a mess to not be able to refresh your own spell before it drops.
I’ve posted this on the bugs forum but it seems destined to be lost and buried under the onslaught of postings there. So any visibility you might be able to bring to this issue, to get them to fix it, would be appreciated!
Bug thread:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=13909295852&sid=1
mmmm how to make it useful
heal more for each hot on the target?
turn it into an instant cast (with a cooldown)?
make use of all the talents healing touch does?
Stll I have to say I have more fun lately healing on my druid than tanking
it’s a slap on the face that they removed all our tanking gear but still left spellpower plate in place.
about “A more powerful spell is already active”
I hate this message. It’s caused by changing spell power. Just shapeshift into ToL, put put rejuv on yourself, shapeshift back and try to update. You’ll get it.