As we have suggested, we have become concerned that mana regeneration is currently too powerful, especially for healers. We want players to have to keep an eye on mana. We don’t want you to go out of mana every fight, but running out of mana should be a very real risk for sloppy playing or attempting content that you aren’t yet ready for. When mana regeneration is trivial then certain parts of the game break down – classes that offer Replenishment are devalued, stats that offer mana regeneration are devalued, and spells that are efficient are neglected in preference to spells with high throughput.
Here are a list of changes you are likely to see in 3.1. They will be available to try out on the PTR. Mana regeneration is somewhat technical, so please bear with us.

• Regeneration while not casting (outside of the “five second rule”) will be decreased. We think that (1) the ability to cast heal over time spells and then sit back and (2) benefitting from a clearcasting proc that also gets you out of the five second rule both provide too much mana regeneration, even over short time periods.
• To make this change, we are reducing mana regeneration granted by Spirit across the board. However we are also boosting the effects of talents such as Meditation that increase regeneration while casting. The net result should be that your regeneration while casting will stay about the same, but your not-casting regeneration will be reduced. This change will have little impact on dps casters, since they are basically always casting.
• The specific talents and abilities being boosted are: Arcane Meditation, Improved Spirit Tap, Intensity, Mage Armor, Meditation, Pyromaniac and Spirit Tap. Yes this makes these “mandatory” talents even more mandatory, if such a thing is possible.
• Since paladins rely less on Spirit as a mana-regeneration stat, we have to address them in other ways. We don’t want to change Illumination or Replenishment. However, we are going to increase the healing penalty on Divine Plea from 20% to 50%. Divine Plea was originally intended to help Protection and Retribution paladins stay full on mana. It should be a decision for Holy paladins, not something that is automatically used every cooldown.
• In addition, we are also changing the way Spiritual Attunement works. In situations with a large amount of outgoing raid damage, as well as in PvP, this passive ability was responsible for more mana regeneration than we would like. We want to keep the necessary benefit it grants to tanking Protection paladins, while making it less powerful for Holy paladins in PvP or raid encounters with a lot of group damage.
• We are also taking a close look at clearcasting procs themselves. One likely outcome is to change them to an Innervate-like surge of mana so that the net benefit is the same, but healers won’t shift to out-of-casting regeneration so often.
• We balance around the assumption that even 10-player groups have someone offering Replenishment. To make this even easier on players we are likely to offer this ability to additional classes, as well as make sure that existing sources of Replenishment are more equitable.
• These changes are ultimately being done to bring the different healing classes more in line with each other as well as to give the encounter team more leeway when designing encounters, who can balance with these new mana regeneration numbers in mind. In a world with infinite healer mana, the only way to challenge healers is with increasingly insane amount of raid damage, so that global cooldowns become the limiting factor since mana fails to be. An example is the Eredar Twins in late Sunwell. We weren’t necessarily happy with that model, and this change hopefully allows us to move towards giving healing a more deliberate and thoughtful pace rather than frenetic spam.

These are some pretty extreme changes. My initial impressions:

• The mention of heals over time and clearcasting procs (Omen of Clarity) in the first point makes me feel like this nerf is being directly targeted at Druids, though it will likely impact our Spiritual Sisters, the Priest, as well. Despite the Paladin nerfs, it may end up as a relative buff to Paladins (and possibly Shamans) who don’t rely upon Spirit.
• So much for learning to dance the 5SR dance. An across the board nerf to mana regeneration outside the Five Second Rule makes trying to time your heals and rotations less valuable.
• Intensity and Intensity-like effects are being buffed, but only to keep regeneration inside the Five Second Rule relatively equal to the current value. At the same time, mana regeneration across the board is being reduced. As a Druid, the value of Spirit was based largely upon its effect on Innervate. This represents a substantial nerf to Spirit and a corresponding buff to the value of Intellect since Replenishment is not being changed (to avoid devaluing the classes that provide it).
• Expect to see more Balance Druids pursuing 3/3 Intensity to make up for the nerf to mana regen within the 5SR.
• As Innervate multiplies out of combat regeneration, this may represent a substantial nerf. If they successfully handicap mana regeneration, we may see a lot more Druids using the [Glyph of Innervate] for the boost when used on themselves moreso than the benefit granted when conveyed to another. I hope that Innervate not being listed among the talents and abilities being boosted is simply an oversight.
• /mourn [Darkmoon Card: Blue Dragon] (Okay, okay. I know it’s two expansions old. But we had such good times together! /sniff)
• The nerf to clearcasting effects means Omen of Clarity will no longer help you get outside the 5SR, though the benefits for doing so are going to so greatly de-emphasized that I don’t really see why such a change is needed.
• This probably hurts Druids more than other healers because our go-to heal, Regrowth, is so much more mana intensive than that of other classes. Expect to take HPM (and therefore Nourish) into consideration in the future.
• The reduction in value of Spirit will cause Restoration Druids to purposefully seek out more cloth armor, possibly those items whose regeneration comes in the form of MP5. Here is the current breakdown of 0-Resilience, 0-hit rating epics with spell power:
  • 12 leather epics without Spirit
  • 45 leather epics with Spirit
  • 27 cloth epics without Spirit
  • 66 cloth epics with Spirit

  I’m sure non-Spirit cloth casters won’t be big fans of this aspect of the change.

Overall, these changes are terrible for Druids. Both Spirit and Innervate are taking a big hit in usefulness, Omen of Clarity is being nerfed for mana users, a popular (if outdated) trinket is being made obsolete, and no other stat is being made more attractive to us to compensate (hello, crit and haste, I still hate you).

Additional Restoration Changes in 3.1

You can view the full list of Druid (and lesser classes) changes here, but here are the ones that will affect Restoration:

• Thorns and Nature’s Grasp can be cast in Tree of Life form.
• Replenish – to avoid confusion, this talent has been renamed “Revitalize.” It now also works with Wild Growth.

For some reason, I thought we could already cast Nature’s Grasp in Tree of Life. That’s a nice buff for handling accidental PvE aggro (but too long of a cooldown to be much of an improvement in PvP). Huzzah for finally being able to cast Thorns in Tree of Life. And here I was expecting to have to wait until the Emerald Dream expansion! I hate the name “Revitalize,” but I’m thrilled to see it added to the splash HoT of Wild Growth. This change, combined with the overall nerf to mana regeneration should make it a more attractive 3-point investment.

Want impressions from other Druids in the blogosphere? Check these out:

• Kalon from ThinkTank
• Karthis from Of Teeth and Claws
• Keeva from Tree Bark Jacket
• Sydera from World of Matticus

P.S. Given the above, who thinks I need to rename Phaelia to something beginning with a “K”? Khaelia? Ew.

With the release of Wrath, Blizzard attempted to de-trivialize mana regeneration by significantly decreasing the level-based coefficient from 0.009327 to 0.005575. Many players initially complained that they found mana regeneration a real struggle. Of course, this was before players had acquired much gear from Heroics or Naxxramas, and most quickly discovered that our mana regeneration was at least as manageable as it had been at the end of TBC. Exacerbating this issue, the Replenishment effect now provided by Shadow Priests, Retribution Paladins, and Survival Hunters made Intellect an incredibly desirable regeneration-based stat. As a result, many players can now significantly discount efficiency comparisions when deciding which spell to cast. Sound too good to be true? Blizzard thinks so, too:

We think mana regen is too trivial at the moment in PvE and just right or too difficult in PvP (depending on the class). Now part of that is because the content is easy. Part of it is because we’ve given players a lot of reasons to avoid having to worry about the FSR. Part of it is just generous talents (like Illumination). Part of it was the change to let Int scale regen to some degree. The whole package is something we’re looking at. Mana regen is supposed to be part of the game – you aren’t supposed to graduate out of it with enough gear.

We can probably assume that too-easy content won’t always be a factor, but what about the Five Second Rule? With the introduction of Lifebloom in TBC and its 1-2-3-4-5-6-CAST! mechanic, Restoration Druids didn’t really have the luxury of planning around the Five Second Rule. With the 3- and 1-second extensions provided by Nature’s Splendor and the optional [Glyph of Lifebloom] respectively, however, many Druids are once again able to steal a second or two of out-of-combat mana regeneration every now and again. Just look at how much you can do in one 10-second cycle and still get a “tick” of regeneration that’s outside the 5SR:

This is a lot more feasible (and a lot less tedious) than it would have been in TBC with 7-second Lifebloom and 2-4 tanks. While Priests have long been masters of taking advantage of the Five Second Rule, they aren’t limited as a Druid is by Lifebloom. The question is whether this type of micro-management would actually be enjoyable to the more time-constrained Druid. As Keeva highlights in her article Waxing Philosophic: Healer Squabbles, the amount of damage in an encounter is finite over time. This means that healers are essentially competing with one another to accomplish the same objective. Intentionally “opting out” of healing your raidmates for 5 out of every 10 seconds will do little to make you feel – or appear – useful.

Lhylee of Maelstrom (US) asks if it wouldn’t be simpler to scrap the whole idea of the Five Second Rule altogether and simplify the system across all healing classes:

Question: would not it be simpler for Devs, Class Designers and Boss Designers not to have to deal with the FSR, and rework the mana regen system and simplify it between healing classes? (I’ve never heard about a DPS class running oom anymore, as they did in Vanilla) Eventually change talents and values around it, and rework Spirit too to make it a more valuable stat for all classes? (why would warriors not put some Spirit to really boost their health regen?)

I find it interesting that Lhylee specifically says “healing classes” and not “mana-based classes.” The implication here is that mana regeneration being considered trivial is not necessarily an issue for DPS classes. The argument for this being the case generally centers around the idea that mana-based DPS needs to be able to compete with Energy-, Rage-, and Runic Power-based DPS, something that can’t happen if their DPS isn’t sustainable over long periods of time. Obviously, all healing classes are limited by mana.

Twiddling your thumbs waiting for your mana to regenerate while people fall around you (no doubt planning what bad words they’ll carve into your bark later) is frustrating. In TBC, healers could fall back upon Super Mana Potions, using them early and as often as possible to avoid falling into mana-starved, Lifebloom-maintenance-only mode. While I’m not saying I want to go back to chugging 3-4 mana potions per boss attempt, failing because I can’t sustain healing output isn’t fun. At the same time, it can be fun to plan your spell selection to avoid getting into a situation like the one described, and Druids have traditionally excelled in this area with our efficient heals over time.

On a separate thread entitled GC: Why should we be worried about mana?, Pointyend of Khaz Modan (US) asks about why mana management is considered so core to raid difficulty:

It’s challenging enough to be a healer just keeping people healed and watching all the GCDs.

Ghostcrawler responds:

I am sympathetic if you find healing too difficult. Many players do not and are clamoring for more of a challenge. There are many ways we challenge players in PvE, including complex encounters, short enrage timers and high damage. When mana management, or healing in general, are too easy then certain encounters become too easy. Furthermore, the game mechanics as designed don’t work — Spirit and mp5 become stats players aren’t interested in. Choosing efficiency vs. throughput is not a meaningful decision. Healers in general are marginalized because raids can get by with fewer of them.

[…]

We have structured the game in such a way that you can find a difficulty level you are comfortable with. Naxxramas is one of the easiest raids we have ever done. Malygos gets a little more difficult, and Sartharion with multiple drakes is fairly difficult. Going into the future we will keep adding even more challenging and hardcore encounters while still making sure players who just aren’t into that can still enter raids. The game has difficulty levels. If you are finding things so difficult that they aren’t fun then by definition you probably aren’t a cutting-edge raider. That’s cool. We want to make sure you still have plenty of interesting things you can do, even within a raiding environment.

Right now, it isn’t uncommon for a guild’s corps of 8-10 TBC healers to roll off for the 5-6 slots allotted to them in current content, and the problem only gets worse as a guild becomes more comfortable with the content in question. The seemingly obvious solution to this dilemma would be to increase the amount of damage done in a limited time frame so that you would need more healers to keep up with it. Huge, Hurtful Strike-esque hits to the tank run the risk of causing the raid to wipe to the RNG, leaving AoE splash damage the only alternative (that I can think of). However, Blizzard has stated they’re specifically trying to limit or reduce the amount of AoE healing necessary to avoid having to make all healers AoE-healing super stars (see also: Wild Growth, Circle of Healing, and [Glyph of Holy Light] nerfs).

While it’s not clear how to improve healer representation without nerfing mana regen, Replenishment seems to be an ability that may need to be nerfed because it scales so incredibly well. To quote Lhylee of Maelstrom (US) again:

Replenishment [returns] 0.25% of your max mana every second. So it is basically 1.25% of max mana as MP5 (easier to compare that way)

• Raid buffed, you can easily [reach] 22K mana in Naxx25
• 22,000 x 1.25 = 275 MP5 (315 MP5 at 25K mana) (scales)
• Improved BoW = 110 MP5 (fixed)
• Improved Mana Spring = 110 MP5 (group only) (fixed)

Replenishment is eclipsing other mana return effects so much so that boosting your mana pool through Intellect is frequently the preferred way to improve your mana regeneration. When asked about the strength of this ability, Ghostcrawler responded:

We consider Replenishment mandatory. What I mean by that is we assume that you have Replenishment available to your raid. It is technically possible to go without it, but you will need to overgear the instance or otherwise compensate for it in other ways.

That doesn’t mean we will or will not nerf Replenishment. But we don’t want it to feel optional (assuming you are in reasonably challenging content) and nerfing it too much might have that effect.

So it would appear that Replenishment is here to stay. That’s not a bad thing since it seems to be fulfilling its purpose of increasing the desirability of a couple of specs that sometimes had a hard time gaining legitimacy in TBC. Nonetheless, it needs its effectiveness toned down so that it stays in line with other similar effects.

And finally, I’d like to share this tidbit from the Why are priests considered a ‘hybrid’ class? thread:

I think you can make a good argument that the pendulum has swung back towards Spirit and away from MP5. I think long term the whole system is in need of an update or re-design, but this is not a 3.1 level task.

This is one of the reasons that I am not planning to revisit mana regeneration post-Wrath right now. I suspect/hope that the system that will replace our current one will:

• Make MP5 a more attractive stat to otherwise Spirit-based healers and/or make Spirit attractive to all mana users
• Make mana management an important part of healing to reward and encourage efficiency
• Simplify the mana regeneration formula so that gear comparisons are less tedious (and utilities like the 2.4 Mana Regen Calculator are unneeded)
• Co-incide with some or all of the healing overhaul

What are your opinions on the current state of mana regeneration? Do you think current content isn’t challenging because you have too much mana or that you have too much mana because the current content isn’t challenging?

1. Is any attention being given to how bad many Druids perceived Replenish? Maybe uping the returns of mana at the very least?

Yes, it is dreadful. Totally agree.

Replenish is pretty lackluster and doesn’t justify its 3-point expense. The returns are either negligible or unnecessary and Rejuvenation is an awkward healing spell to leverage in anything but a 5-man instance where you’re guaranteed to be the only healer. It also doesn’t have any hope of comparing to the awesomeness of Replenishment. Not that it necessarily should, but the effects are similar enough that the comparison will be drawn. » More on Replenish

2. Is any attention being given to how bad many Druids perceive Living Seed? Living Seed is very low on overall healing for 3 talent points mostly because it is based off crits, which outside Regrowth aren’t a Druid’s strong stat, it is over-heal the majority of the time.

I don’t think Seed is nearly as bad as Replenishment. We get caught in this cycle sometimes where a class says "I don’t want X stat" so we give them a talent that uses it and then the response is "now you are making me want a stat I don’t want." That’s overly pithy to describe the situation, but it does come up a lot.

That’s definitely overly pithy. Resto doesn’t value crit because our primary method of healing, heals over time, do not benefit from it. What crit we DO benefit from is easily achievable through Improved Regrowth, making stacking crit for our other direct heal(s) kind of silly.

3. Is any attention being give to how bad our PvP survivability is? We can’t stay in Tree if a warlock is around. We can’t CC if we are in Tree. If we aren’t in Tree we lose our armor and melee tear through us faster than if we are in it. Lifeblooms that cost about 1500 mana to stack to 3 are being wisped away by DKs without so much as a thought or bloom. The regen in what PvP gear is accessible to losing teams is terrible. The numbers show Resto Druids are the worst Healers in arena atm. Yes even worse than priests.

PvP survivability is not something we want to address on a class by class basis at this point. A lot of players feel they are dying too quickly. Going through all the talent trees to offer survivability doesn’t get at the root of this concern. As an aside, non-tanks often skip survivability talents anyway unless they are borderline OP in PvP. We are trying to bundle more of them with offensive effects.

Resto is definitely paying for its dominance in S2-S4 right now. I spend more time in Wisp Form than Elf Form in battlegrounds these days. If they buff Holy Paladins with Resto Druids and Holy and/or Discipline Priests, I’m going to be peeved.

4. Haste and Crit on our gear is pretty useless to us after a certain point. Once we reach the Haste softcap for raids, which is pretty low, we don’t need that anymore. Crit is also pretty situational as it will only really affect Nourish and we don’t get enough Crit on our gear for it to be a substantional boost to the spell. Perhaps Haste affecting Hot Ticks. Perhaps Crit affecting Hots – yeah i am dreaming on that one, but can u tell us why not?

Honestly, there is a technical limitation that prevents hots (and dots) from being able to crit. We are removing that limitation though, so who knows.

Haste and armor pen are things we put on lower level gear to make it lower level gear. Higher level gear will be more suitablly optimized.

–

I did not say your hots will just start critting in the next patch. I said we had the technology to do that if we think it is necessary. We would certainly have to nerf Resto in other ways to compensate for those higher healing numbers.

Critting HoTs is potentially promising though I have to disagree with the idea that we would need to be nerfed to make up for such a change. Tanks are the primary beneficiaries of our HoT ticks, and much of that healing is already overhealing (regardless of whether it displays as such on the meters). Providing a more sporadically beneficial health buffer shouldn’t necessitate a reduction of throughput in other areas.

5. Poor Idol choices. Currently there is 1 for lifebloom and 1 for rejuv. Any hopes of getting more for other spells or perhaps less specific idols?

We will try and add more. Typically these need to go on vendors (though not always) since they are so spec specific (and therefore prone to causing frustration when they drop).

The idol choices in Wrath really, really stink. As Arenis points out, they only benefit Lifebloom (nerfed so badly that it’s only useful triple-stacked) or Rejuvenation (generally reserved for tanks). I’m worried that if they only put these items on token-based vendors, that we won’t get anything as cool as the [Idol of the Crescent Goddess] was in TBC. There’s a certain something extra special that can be given to items that are acquired from individual bosses that you don’t typically see from items that are token-purchased. Qwezar of Zangarmarsh (US) made a really good suggestion that these idols could be acquired through a token system similar to the tier tokens. This would allow one item to drop that was possibly redeemable by a Protection Paladin, Elemental Shaman, or Restoration Druid.

6. Why can’t we cast thorns in Tree Form?

We want druids to be shapeshifters so we constantly struggle with how much to allow them to do without shifting. Feral and Balance have a lot of the same questions.

This is another silly limitation. Expect to see Thorns duration increased to 30 minutes or Tree of Life able to cast it … in the Emerald Dream expansion.

7. We can’t Trees cast Barkskin while silences. Trees do have bark afterall.

If you have bark, then why do you need more? Seriously, this is something we are considering.

This would be a nice change but won’t affect me a ton since I currently have no plans to participate in Arenas.

8. Having more than 1 Tree in a Raid usually only happens if there is a lack of other healers. Any input on what can be done about Trees stacking better with eachother? Like a boost to Hots if another tree has one up on a target?

I am not finding this is a general rule (one tree per raid) except for groups that just tended to keep the same players they had in BC. Except for paladins with their weird buff stacking mechanics (something we are looking at) I do see plenty of concerns from all classes that there isn’t enough reason to bring more than one of them. Yet, that was kind of the point. All things being equal, we would prefer you to bring a diverse group (to avoid raid stacking and get everyone into the raids) but we don’t want to overly penalize you if you cannot for whatever reason.

I also haven’t experienced this personally. Given, my guild isn’t the type that necessarily min/maxxes its raid composition (nor is WotLK raid content such that this is necessary so far), but I don’t really feel any less effective if there’s a second Druid on board.

Overall, it was really nice to see some responses in the healer forum to something other than Priest whining, and I’m encouraged by the acknowledgement that Replenish is “dreadful.”

• Moonglow: This talent now also benefits Nourish.
• Nourish: Wild Growth applied to a target now increases the healing done by this spell by 20% like other heal over time effects.

This means that instead of spamming Regrowth as a raid heal, you’ll cast Wild Growth on the five raid members at lowest health (hopefully) and then apply Nourish to supplement the healing (WG will now grant a 20% throughput bonus). This not only gives Nourish a special niche (high HPM raid heal) but lessens the sting of the 6-second cooldown simultaneously being applied to Wild Growth. Also, it’s worth noting that, while Nourish remains the lowest option in terms of HPS, you’ll be using it on targets who are already getting healed over time by Wild Growth. A Regrowth bomb would likely just waste that HoT. I’m especially pleased about this new synergy and the idea that a Druid will “nourish” a “wild growth.”

Here are the revised HPM/HPS graphs for the new variations of Nourish. I’ll update the Direct Healing in Wrath article with these graphs (and updated observations) when these changes go live:

And, in case you missed them, here are all the other announced Druid-related changes in the upcoming patch:

• Aquatic Form is now available from druid trainers at level 16.
• Feral Attack Power: All weapons now have the potential to grant feral attack power based on their dps (as compared to the best superior-quality weapons available at level 60). Players will see their existing feral weapons grant roughly the same attack power as they did before (+/- 2 or so), but many new weapons will be options for the feral druid. Some feral weapons have had strength converted to attack power to be more appealing to other classes able to equip them. All druids will see the amount of feral attack power granted by an item in the item tooltip, if it grants any, but other players will not see that information.
• Remove Curse and Abolish Poison can now be used in Moonkin form.
• Genesis: Now works with Tranquility and Hurricane.
• Growl: Range increased to 30 yards.
• King of the Jungle – The Bear effect is now physical, and thus cannot be dispelled.
• Moonglow: This talent now also benefits Nourish.
• Nature’s Grace – Now also effects Revive.
• Nourish: Wild Growth applied to a target now increases the healing done by this spell by 20% like other heal over time effects.
• Polearms: Now trainable by Druids.
• Primal Tenacity: Now reduces the cost of Bear Form, Cat Form, and Dire Bear Form by 17/33/50% in addition to its previous effects.
• Protector of the Pack: No longer changes value based on party size.
• Savage Roar: The buff now persists outside of Cat Form but only provides its benefits while in Cat Form.
• Starfall: Instead of canceling shapeshifting, now cancels on shapeshifting into an animal form.
• Survival of the Fittest: This talent now grants 22/44/66% bonus armor in Bear Form and Dire Bear Form in addition to all of its previous effects.
• Swipe: Swipe (Cat) has now been added at level 71, dealing 260% weapon damage, costs 50 energy with no cooldown. All talents affecting the Bear Form version affect the Cat Form one as well.
• Wild Growth now has a 6 second cooldown.
• Bear Form: This ability will now grant the correct attack power per level for levels 71-80.
• Entangling Roots: When determining if a new Entangling Roots should overwrite an old one, and will now calculate the correct damage modifiers for the creature type of the target.
• Maim: Tooltip adjusted to match the duration the ability has always had.
• Opening: Opening doors and objects should no longer cause shapeshifted forms to be cancelled.
• Rake: The initial damage from this ability is now properly considered bleed damage, and will be increased by Mangle and Trauma.
• Savage Fury – Mangle (Bear) damage was being increased by a higher percentage than intended. This has been fixed, and in result Mangle (Bear) should see roughly a 16% damage reduction. Also fixed a bug with Savage Fury where the Rake bleed effect was not being increased.
• Starfall will no longer cause nearby creatures to become hostile for no apparent reason while the Druid is affected by fear effects. In addition, it will no longer pick ambient creatures as targets.
• Survival Instincts: The extra health from this ability now persists in all forms, but the ability can only be activated in Cat Form, Bear Form, or Dire Bear Form. This prevents the health gain from occurring multiple times if constantly shapeshifting.
• Swiftmend: Riptide will no longer cause this ability to light up, and this ability will no longer sometimes consume Earthliving off the target.
• Idol of the Emerald Queen: This idol was providing greater healing than implied by its tooltip. It has been reduced to correct value.
• Glyph of Rejuvenation: The heal from this glyph is now properly considered a periodic heal.
• Soul Preserver: This item will now interact correctly with Desperate Prayer, Lay on Hands, Riptide, and Wild Growth.

Boo at no longer being able to Swiftmend Bobo the Shaman’s Riptide!

Blue Tidbits

Responding to concerns from Priests that they’re not strong enough in PvE or PvP, Ghostcrawler made the following (much abbreviated) statement:

If your raid is stacked with Paladin healers your group healing will suffer. If your raid is stacked with Druid healers, your tank healing will suffer. If your raid is stacked with Priests, you won’t have any problems.

Um … what? Am I the only one who finds it alarming that developer opinion is that Druids aren’t good tank healers? Especially given that three (arguably four) out of five of our healing spells are designed for use on tanks? Lifebloom is too inefficient to use single-stacked, Rejuvenation generally heals too slowly to use as a raid heal and better serves as a buffer, Nourish works best on a target with one or more HoTs (and don’t even get me started on the 4-piece T7 set bonus), and Regrowth gets a 20% throughput bonus when used on a target who already has Regrowth (assuming the [Glyph of Regrowth], of course). With a 6-second cooldown on Wild Growth and 4-minute cooldown on Tranquility, we are definitely not specialized as raid healers. The changes to Nourish above will certainly help counteract the Wild Growth nerf, but I find it worrisome that a developer would make a statement that seemingly flies in the face of the spells and tools we’ve been given.

On a separate topic entitled It’s time for the silence mechanic to change, Ghostcrawler shared this bit of PvP-specific but encouraging news:

We are considering DR for silence effects.

Praise Elune! Am I the only one who’s tried trinketing out of a silence? Silence is nothing but a form of caster-specific crowd control and should have been subject to diminishing returns from the beginning.

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!

“Resto4Life” is sounding more like a prison sentence lately. And here are the rest of the Druid-specific changes announced (or discovered) today:

• Feral Attack Power: All weapons now have the potential to grant feral attack power based on their dps (as compared to the best superior-quality weapons available at level 60).  Players will see their existing feral weapons grant roughly the same attack power as they did before (+/- 2 or so), but many new weapons will be options for the feral druid.  Some feral weapons have had strength converted to attack power to be more appealing to other classes able to equip them.  All druids will see the amount of feral attack power granted by an item in the item tooltip, if it grants any, but other players will not see that information.
• Bonus Armor: The mechanics for items with bonus armor on them has changed (any cloth, leather, mail, or plate items with extra armor, or any other items with any armor).  Bonus armor beyond the base armor of an item will no longer be multiplied by any talents or by the bonuses of Bear Form, Dire Bear Form, or Frost Presence.
• Genesis: Now works with Tranquility and Hurricane.
• King of the Jungle: The Bear effect is now physical, and thus cannot be dispelled.
• Nature’s Grace: Now also effects Revive.
• Primal Tenacity: Now reduces the cost of Bear Form, Cat Form, and Dire Bear Form by 17/33/50% in addition to its previous effects.
• Protector of the Pack: No longer changes value based on party size.
• Savage Roar: The buff now persists outside of Cat Form but only provides its benefits while in Cat Form.
• Starfall : Now be cancelled by any shapeshifting.
• Survival of the Fittest: This talent now grants 22/44/66% bonus armor in Bear Form and Dire Bear Form in addition to all of its previous effects.
• Swipe: Swipe (Cat) has now been added at level 71, dealing 260% weapon damage, costs 50 energy with no cooldown. All talents affecting the Bear Form version affect the Cat Form one as well.
• Wild Growth: Now has a 6 second cooldown.
• Savage Fury: Mangle (Bear) damage was being increased by a higher percentage than intended. This has been fixed, and in result Mangle (Bear) should see roughly a 16% damage reduction. Also fixed a bug with Savage Fury where the Rake bleed effect was not being increased.

I’m really excited about the addition of a mana cost reduction for Feral forms on Primal Tenacity. This is essentially what I suggested last month in light of Feral mana woes and should make PvP as a BearCat much more fun and sustainable. On the other hand, the bug fix to Mangle – Bear was unexpected. I wasn’t aware this was an issue. Either way, ouch. Or maybe “less ouch.”

Not necessarily Druid-specific but still interesting:

Tapping: All player spells which cause a creature to become aggressive to you will now also immediately cause the creature to be tapped.  

This means we’ll be able to “tag” mobs using the slightly cheaper Faerie Fire rather than having to spend 4% additional base mana on a Moonfire. Not a big deal, but nice if you’re Restoration-specced and grouped with your husband’s leather-wearing DPS Warrior where your Moonfire is less than necessary to help kill things (and your mana would be better spent keeping your partner from impaling himself).

Want more delicious Feral stuff? Be sure to check out Kalon’s recent post The Collected Ideas on How to Fix Bears (But what if I wanted cubs!?) and Runy’s recent post on tanking idols (or the lack thereof), Azerothian Idol: Bears to Rock Out with New Idols.

The Feast of Winter Veil is coming up which would be a great time to hint-drop about wanting a Tree Shirt or two from a certain blog. *Nudge nudge* In preparation for the holiday season, I’ve added three great new designs:

1	2	3

1. Tree of Life Emblem
   The first is the orange symbol that features prominently on the chest of our Tree of Life form. Although I’ve featured it on brown shirts (mostly), you can switch the color of the shirt to whatever suits you best. The nice thing about this design is that it’s vector-based and should print as a crisp, understated option for the discerning tree.
2. Restoration Wreath (Autumn) by Diego SS. Dicaro
   The second design is a autumnal variation on Eggo’s earlier Shift Happens Restoration Wreath design. This design was requested by several readers, and Eggo actually sent it in a number of weeks ago. Sorry that it’s taken me so long to get it added!
3. “Shift Happens” Grid from Valenna
   Finally, Valenna created a design for the “Shift Happens” contest earlier this year. Since he’s pretty much my best friend, there was no question as to whether I would add it, but I really love it! It features 8 rounded squares with each of the Night Elf forms (including the still-awaited critter form). The design includes black, purple, orange, brown, and light blue and should work well on many different shirt colors.

Also note that many designs have long sleeved options. Colors for men are unfortunately typically limited to black or white, but women have several to choose from. To view all long-sleeved shirts:

1. Visit the Spreadshirt storefront.
2. Under the dropdown All Products, select Men or Women.
3. Under the dropdown All Articles, select Long sleeve shirts.

Looking for more information about delivery times? See Spreadshirt’s Shipping Page.

[Intravenous Healing Potion] Macro from Vreenash

Some of you may not be familiar with the [Intravenous Healing Potion]. This item was newly added with Wrath and is sold by Angelique Butler in the Dalaran First Aid shop at a starting price of 2g 70s. Essentially, it’s an infinite-use health and mana restore for 3 minutes (usable only outside of combat). This macro deploys the IV and gives instructions to those nearby on how to use it:

#showtooltip
/s =/\= Intravenous Drip has been deployed =/\=
/s –Stand still while clicking to regen Health/Mana–
/use Intravenous Healing Potion

According to Vreenash, he’s seen overwhelmingly positive response in battlegrounds, particularly Arathi Basin. Perhaps best of all, this item can be deployed and used by a Feral or Balance Druid while still in form, allowing you to help out with healing during downtime.

Note: These items do not stack. Always use a fresh needle.

Favorite Posts of Late

There have been an incredible number of useful and informative posts in the wake of Wrath. Here are a few of my favorite:

• The Bear T7 List: Part I | Part II from ThinkTank
  Kalon releases some great bear-oriented gear lists along with ratings.
• Feral Factions from Of Teeth and Claws
  Karthis submits an overview of the best Feral-oriented rewards from various factions to help you plan your reputation grinds.
• Pre-Naxx Feral Worksheet from Of Teeth and Claws
  A spreadsheet of Feral gear to help kitties and bears prepare for raiding Naxxramas.
• Pre-Naxx Moonkin Gear: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 from Gray Matter
  Gearing up for a little Pew Pew in Naxxramas? Graylo has you covered with this extensive guide of available and recommended upgrades.
• Resto Pre-Raid Gear from Elitist Jerks Forums
  Tuftears of Stormrage (US) summarizes pre-Naxxramas gear by slot and type in an easy to read format.
• WotLK Cooking 375-450 from Kaliope’s WoW Crafting Blog
  Kaliope walks you through reaching 450 cooking in Wrath. It’s more difficult than you might think!
• WotLK Wallpapers from Banana Shoulders
  Missing Northrend while away at work? Siha has created several gorgeous Wrath of the Lich King wallpapers at 1680 x 1050 size.
• Wrath: Overview of Daily Quests (Level 70-75) from Yashima Plays
  Yashima lists the available daily quests and from level 70 to 75, their location, associated faction, and reputation awarded.

Ghostcrawler says L2Play (with Druids) and “Dude”

There are plenty of druids topping healing meters.

I think where the problem comes from sometimes is that you need healers who are good at working with hots. When someone has a hot on them, you have to be able to guess if that hot will heal the dude and if it can do it fast enough. Inexperienced healers sometimes stomp on hots, wasting the druid (or priest) mana and making sure that the hot-healer appears to have not contributed much.

This has been a long-standing problem for Druid healers. Given the competitive nature of healing, training one’s guildmates to not overwrite your HoTs is pretty difficult. Does anyone have any tips?

Other Blogs to Visit

As I suspected, the release of Wrath has contributed to a whole new crop of great blogs to visit and subscribe to!

Warcraft Dryad by Marina Siu-Chong

• Cenarion Musings
  Restoration Druid Pixiedark ponders Cenarius.
• Chrille
  PvP, Feral, Taurens, and machinima. Could there possibly be a more interesting combination for a blog?
• A Druid in Time
  From reader Shopshopshop of Uldum (US) comes this great new blog on playing a casual Restoration Druid!
• Druid Heal
  Raaff the Tree shares his thoughts on Druid healing, starting with Talents!
• Eighty Percent Fur
  With a name that sounds strangely reminiscent of a Fergie song, Lushious blogs about all things Feral Druid.
• Moonfire
  Real life couple Gwyn and Cablin of Bronze Dragonflight (EU) play Restoration and Balance Druids respectively. One has to wonder about the “discussions” that occur when spell power gear drops!
• One Rogue’s Journey
  According to Zaltu of Scarlet Crusade (US), “Rogues do it anywhere in between ninety and two-hundred and seventy degrees.” Kind of makes you shift uncomfortably in your chair, doesn’t it?
• Rawrbitchrawr
  Stompalina of Staghelm (US) shares personal character stories alongside theory development on her Restoration-oriented blog.
• Shields Up
  Drugfreeyth of Teldrassil (EU) delivers an eclectic mix of “Restoration Shamans, black holes, backstabbing, and ponies.”
• Stealth Runs
  Furble writes an interesting blog that focuses on completing stealth runs through instances.
• Threat Monster
  From Zaydok of Stormscale (US) comes this great new blog about “threat build” warriors who tank with an aggressive style.

• MP5 is the most straightforward of mana regeneration stats.
• Spirit is complicated since it scales based on your level and its return is affected by the square root of Intellect.
• Intellect also plays into Spirit/Intellect-based mana regeneration and is now also affected by the raid-wide Replenishment effect.
• Many classes have additional effects to consider like mana regenerated from spell crit.

For the record, the current mana regeneration formula looks like this:

Base Mana Regen_{Int, Spi, Level} = (0.001 + SPI * Base_Regen(Level) * √I) * 5

Was it really necessary to make things THAT complicated? Developer Ghostcrawler seems to question whether it was:

This is something that is totally on our radar. Mana regen requires looking at a lot of different numbers and we’d like to simplify it, without losing any of the interesting gear options that players have.

Simplified mana regeneration would definitely be a welcome change. Or at the very least, increased transparency of how a given stat will affect you. There’s a certain amount of fun in determining whether an item is an upgrade, but I reach my limit at about 30 seconds of thought and often end up picking between two similar items based on which is prettier (a decision made more difficult by the fact that armor designers apparently made ONE texture/mesh for all pre-raid armor in Wrath). With the radical changes that were made to so many ratings systems in the expansion, I really think that they should have scrapped their current formula in favor of something less complex on day 1.

On the perhaps alarmist post entitled "The Druid Dilemma: Worst Healers Post-Naxx", Dimachaeri of Tichondrius (US) laments Druid-unfriendly itemization with many items laden with spell crit and/or spell haste. This is an issue for a number of reasons:

• Our HoTs do not benefit from spell crit as they cannot crit.
• Our HoTs benefit VERY little from spell haste. In fact, haste actually devalues Gift of the Earthmother, the 5-point talent at the bottom of the Restoration tree that reduces the GCD of Lifebloom, Rejuvenation, and Wild Growth by a percentage of its base cast time.
• The benefit to Regrowth from spell crit is extremely marginal. If you’re using Regrowth any considerable amount, chances are you’ll have 5/5 Improved Regrowth, making an additional 1% spell crit practically worthless.
• The benefit to Healing Touch from spell haste is also very small. The 0.5 second reduction in Wrath combined with a Glyph of Healing Touch and 5/5 Naturalist means that haste has no effect on sustained HPS.

Ghostcrawler responds:

A few random thoughts:

• When you talk about scaling, you have to separate a few different issues:
  1. Does the class / talent / spell scale?
  2. Does it scale well once it has good gear?
  3. Does that gear actually exist?
  4. Is it readily available or is it hard to get?
• Some classes complain about having too many stats and others about not having enough stats. They are just different class styles. There are advantages and disadvantages to both.
• Our goal is not that every stat is useful for you.
• Our goal is not that only stats which are useful for you appear on your gear.
• One of the interesting things about resto seems to be that there is some player preference involved in how you heal. Some use Regrowth a lot now, others use Healing Touch, and others stick with rolling blooms. While it may end up that someone can prove one of those strategies sufficiently trumps the others, for now it is cool to see the experimentation.
• That said, we do worry if Nourish’s niche is too narrow. We’ll see. It is getting compared to heals with very good glyphs affecting them.

If the idea that it’s okay for one class to benefit from fewer stats than another that fills the same role seems familiar, it’s because it mirrors the paradigm of Druid tanking gear. Bears needn’t stack parry or block since they don’t benefit from those stats. This difference means they can more readily equip what would ordinarily be considered "Rogue gear." Meanwhile, the differences between a DPS Warrior set and a tanking Warrior set are far more pronounced. This paradigm relies upon the "simpler" class getting MORE out of their limited stats than the classes who benefit from a more diverse set of stats. This means that Druids should expect to scale better from adding spell power, Spirit, and Intellect since we derive little benefit from haste or spell crit. Whether or not we will remains to be seen.

Looking for information about recent Feral changes? Check out impressions on the armor reduction from Karthis and Kalon (which should totally be a police drama, by the way).

Yeah, if I can offer a suggestion, please don’t disregard a player’s argument just because their class is good in aspects of the game you care about that the OP may not.

We think we are going to remove the cooldown of Fan of Knives altogether. There are just too many PvE situations where rogues feel at a disadvantage without a reliable ranged attack. The example that came up recently is Meathook in CoT:Stratholme and having the spawning zombies causing pushback on your healers. Rogues can FoK once and then have to run over to help the healer.

And in case it gets asked, Feral druids we haven’t forgotten about your AE either.

We’ll try and announce something soon.

Or is that really what that comment means?  Not forgetting about it doesn’t actually mean they’re going to give it to us, just that they’re thinking about it.

What do you think about that?  How would that work?  Would we Purr the enemy to death, rattling the integrity of their skeletal structure into nothing but a fine powder?  Maybe the Angry-Kitty Death Shriek where we make that creepy baby sound cats make when they’re hurt, tearing the tympanum from the eardrums of our foes with an awful wail?  Or could it be the Spastic LoLCat Scritch-Scratch, blinking from alien girl to alien girl like James T. Kirk on Red Bull?

Who knows?

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.