The long expected 6-second cooldown has been applied to Wild Growth on the Public Test Realms today, along with a host of other Druid-related changes. All I can say is, “PHOOEY!” I don’t see why Wild Growth should be subject to the same degree of nerfage that Circle of Healing is when Blues have repeatedly acknowledged that Circle of Healing is a considerably larger problem. While this isn’t going to have much effect in 5-man instances, it’s going to be quite painful in 10-man and 25-man. To make you (and me) feel better, here is an illustration from Eggo “Crabsmacker” Egoo:

“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.

Related Posts

• Nourish to Benefit from Moonglow and Wild Growth HoT (and Blues)
• Homer’s WoW Patch
• Patch 2.4 Official Class Changes

New Tree Shirts and Long-Sleeved Options

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.

Related Posts

• New Tree-Shirts!
• Timber!! New Tree Shirts Are Here!
• Community Spotlight

There are a couple of recent blue posts I’d like to draw attention to this morning. The first post was made in response to complaints by Nightshroud of Aleria (US) that mana regeneration is simply too complex a stat to deal with, making gear comparisons tedious and more difficult than they should be. In summary, she says:

• 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).

Related Posts

• Blue: 3.1 Changes (Mana Regen and More)
• Blue: Mana Regen to be Updated or Redesigned
• Blue: Question, Answer, and Response

So it appears that kitties will be getting an AoE ability:

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?

Related Posts

• Indoor Roots and Mark(ed) Improvements
• Barkskin to be Usable in Cat and Travel Forms
• Druids Have the Blues

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.

Related Posts

• Blue: Nourish may be Affected by Wild Growth
• Wild Growth … Grows a Pair *
• Nourish to Benefit from Moonglow and Wild Growth HoT (and Blues)