• Nature’s Splendor now increases the duration of Lifebloom by 2 seconds. (Down from 3)
• Glyph of Regrowth – Increases the healing of your Regrowth spell by 20% if your Regrowth effect is still active on the target. (Old – Increases the amount of your initial Regrowth heal by 50% if your Regrowth effect is still active on the target.)

The nerf to the [Glyph of Regrowth] was predicted by many, but it still hurts to see one fewer thing we have to look forward to. I still believe that Regrowth will remain superior to Nourish due to its synergy with some great talents, but maybe we’ll see more nerfs to Regrowth to force us into using it. (I hope to have some time to revisit a comparison of direct heals in the next month or so.)

A couple of days ago Class Developer Ghostcrawler responded to the concerns about the current state of Restoration. I’m going to break down what was said to better address each point.

We nerfed Lifebloom because it was just too good. It just healed for incredible amounts at good mana efficiency that other healers would have had trouble matching. It’s much more fun to buff spells than to nerf them, so we try not to let any of them get out of control. But sometimes it happens.

As discussed in my post Ghostcrawler: Healers not to be Interchangeable, I think Blizzard is trying to reduce the tedium of maintaining Lifebloom stacks. Prior to build 9014, it was healing for approximately the same amount over time (HPM), but with weaker ticks due to the increased duration from Nature’s Splendor. This recent change to Nature’s Splendor so that it only adds two seconds to the duration of Lifebloom represents a further decrease in HPM with no change to its HPS. It may be worth noting that you can preserve the pre-9014 HPM value by slotting a [Glyph of Lifebloom].

On a similar note, MeanderingMind commented on the Healers not to be Interchangeable thread with the following:

Nerfing Lifebloom makes sense, it was far too powerful. The problem is that our other HoTs haven’t been buffed to make up the difference. The only increase we’ve seen for the Rejuvenation and Regrowth HoT effects is a talent in Balance. As a result, we’re forced to make up the difference with direct heals. This is the single largest contributor to the general feeling that we’re being shifted away from what we felt was our style and niche.

I still feel that the heavy-handed nerf to Lifebloom is unnecessarily punitive. There should be a nice benefit to maintaining a stack of Lifebloom for long periods of time when the consequences of allowing your stack to bloom are so high (and even higher with the 40% increase in mana cost).

Nourish and Wild Growth are both situational. We actually tried hard not to hand out new healing spells that needed to be put into a normal rotation. Nourish is good to use when healing a tank, either in a 5-man or a raid. It seemed less effective than Regrowth probably because the Regrowth glyph was too generous. Sometimes you can’t wait for that Regrowth tick.

Wild Growth isn’t intended to make you an awesome group healer. Shamans and Priests are awesome group healers, but can’t hot the way a druid can. What Wild Growth is intended to do is let you heal a group when you are the only healer, or heal a group in fights (usually boss fights) where you don’t have an opportunity to distribute HoTs to everyone. Without going into a lot of detail on new bosses in case you’d spoiler averse, there are bosses in Naxx and then the Malygos raid itself where you periodically can’t get a bunch of heals up and yet the raid is still taking damage. Wild Growth is really helpful in those situations.

I’m disheartened that Blizzard finds it acceptable for our 51-point talent and 80th level spell to be “situational.” I do not want something that’s situational at the pinnacle of my talent tree. I want something unique, fun, and useful. MeanderingMind explains it thus:

Druids don’t mind having situational heals. […] The problem with Nourish and Wild Growth is that “situational” doesn’t begin to describe them. Even without the Regrowth Glyph, Nourish is inferior to Regrowth. It heals for less on average, has a roughly equivalent cost after talents (even with HoTs already on the target), doesn’t confer any additional benefits (a Swiftmendable HoT, for example) and runs into GCD issues if you’ve [Nature’s Grace procs]. The only niche it has left to heal are those situations where the heal absolutely must be .5 seconds faster than Regrowth, which is what NS or Swiftmend are for.

Wild Growth’s niche is obvious, it just fails to fill that niche in any meaningful way. Even in a Heroic, its targeting is the cause of consternation and frustration while its cost and healing barely warrant its use. In raids it’s practically a null factor. Blizzard is assuming you have at least one of each healing class in your raids, which means that you can count on the Priests and Shaman to have AoE heals covered. Wild Growth’s niche is effectively non-existent. It is the single most worthless top-tier talent since Lacerate crowned the Hunter’s Survival Tree.

By and large, DPSers aren’t getting “situational” abilities, and I really feel like there’s a lot of anti-healer discrimination going on at Blizzard right now. As Beta Tester Linden of Murmur (US) puts it, “Everyone’s HP has increased. Boss damage has increased. Other players’ DPS has increased. And our heals have… decreased? Barely increased? […] People like to see big numbers, be they healing numbers or DPS numbers. It’s really disappointing to go 10 levels and two ranks of a spell and end up maybe where you were when you started.” Seriously, who wants to play in an expansion where they feel no more capable? (I have to admit, however, that Revive has greatly improved my 5-man instance experience.)

We think mana efficiency for Resto druids isn’t too bad at the moment. You’ll struggle in situations where you have to throw out a ton of heals quickly (as you should) but recharge when you can afford to take a break. Having someone with Replenishment greatly helps. Remember, we do want you to run out of mana. If we didn’t want mana management to be part of the game, we’d just cut the cost of all your healing spells and call it a day.

What we don’t want is A) your healing to be worse than other healing classes because you run out of mana too fast, or B) the fights to dish out more damage than you could ever have enough mana to heal. If either of those starts to feel like a problem, please speak up. But just running out of mana is going to happen. We aren’t trying to prevent that.

Blizzard fundamentally changed mana regeneration midstream in TBC (Patch 2.4). At the time, I assumed they were intentionally making encounters less dependent upon healer mana and instead more dependent on healer skill and DPS throughput. Just copying my character from live to the beta servers, I noticed a considerable drop in my mana regeneration (down from 754/259 in live to 606/217 in beta). Failing because your healers have run out of mana is a LOT less fun than failing because they aren’t capable healers or because your DPS wasn’t high enough (at least for healers). There are some classes for whom this is not an issue: obviously Ferals, Warriors, Death Knights, and Rogues have essentially limitless energy stores (assuming no Rage starvation). Warlocks can chew on their own arms for mana. That leaves about half the classes (Druids, Priests, Shamans, Mages, Paladins, and Hunters) taken out of the fight if they run out of mana. It’s a lot less obvious when a DPSer runs out of mana or has to switch to a higher DPM/lower DPS rotation, but if a healer can’t heal, things tend to go south quickly. Having encounters balanced around limited healer mana is going to greatly reduce the fun of raiding as a healer.

Ghostcrawler goes on to say that we shouldn’t expect to run into mana regeneration issues in 5-mans to the point that they aren’t doable without one or more Replenishment effects (one of the mana restores provided by Shadow Priests, Retribution Paladins, and Survival Hunters):

The design is you should not need Replenishment to heal a 5-player, even a heroic.

I’d like to hear from any other Resto druids who are going OOM when healing small groups. HoTs, single-target heals like Healing Touch and Nourish, and the occasional group heal should be all you need, even in green gear for normal instances or blues for heroics.

Nearly every mana management benefit given to Restoration Druids in Wrath has been nerfed in one way or another. Let’s review:

• Wild Growth: mana cost increased, amount healed decreased.
• Lifebloom: mana cost increased, amount healed decreased.
• Replenish: amount of mana restored cut in half
• Gift of the Earthmother: mana restore for Nourish and Healing Touch removed
• Improved Tree of Life: mana reduction replaced with Spirit-based bonus to spell power
• Nature’s Splendor: duration increase to Lifebloom reduced (requires recasting sooner)
• Spirit/Intellect-based mana regeneration formula nerfed

On the other hand, we’ve seen the modification of Omen of Clarity so that it procs on healing spells, the addition of [Glyph of Innervate], and increased accessibility of Moonglow. One would think they would be expecting complaints of mana problems instead of pretending they don’t know what we could possibly be talking about.

Image credit to Eggo (thanks!)

Ghostcrawler goes on to give some more Resto niche clarification:

HoTs are your niche. Nothing has changed. We just want to expand your portfolio a bit, because HoTs won’t work in every situation. You’re about HoTs – not just throwing them out, but using them to set up "combos" like Nourish, Replenish and Swiftmend.

If you are really struggling to heal 25-player raids, or really getting clobbered by other healing specs, let us know. That is not what we have been seeing and hearing.

As I’ve mentioned before, I love the HoTs-based style of healing, and I really enjoy things that set up “combos” where one or more spells and talents can work in synergy with one another. I’ve been having a torrid affair with Swiftmend since it replaced Innervate as our 31-point talent. Unfortunately, it seems like HoTs-based healing – which revolves around maintaining one or more Lifebloom rotations – is getting clobbered in the expansion. Giving us direct heals to make up for this reduction to our primary style of healing does nothing to make me feel like I’m purchasing an “expansion.” It makes me feel like I’m paying money for the privilege of rerolling (figuratively for me, although several blog authors have expressed that they’re considering doing so literally).

Crabcakes, anyone?

Additional Reading

• Give Resto Some Love, Just a Little with feedback from Ghostcrawler
• Restoration Feedback: New Nerf, No Buffs with feedback from Sydera of World of Matticus
• Resto Talents that Don’t Hold Up from beta tester Lisana

Related Posts

• Wild Growth … Grows a Pair *
• Blue: Nourish may be Affected by Wild Growth
• Ghostcrawler: Healers not to be Interchangeable

Blizzard Developer Ghostcrawler responded at length to the well-articulated concerns of Beta Tester Talruum of Lich King (US). Talruum’s generally PvP-oriented points included:

1. Druids currently struggle with group-wide damage because we don’t have an accessible group heal (one without a long cooldown) and are limited by our global cooldowns when casting HoTs. Flourish solved that problem but has since been nerfed into uselessness.
2. In PvP, Druids have difficulty healing themselves and party members through burst damage. This is one of the reasons that Druids are so reliant upon the ability to kite (read: to avoid damage) since it removes them from insta-gib range and gives their heals over time … time to be effective.
3. Nourish was clearly intended as the Druid’s answer to Flash Heal, a spell designed to be high HPS, low HPM. Unfortunately, it is usurped quite handily by the superior Regrowth partly because of the design of Nourish and partly because of the amazing [Glyph of Regrowth].

Whether you agree with the points above (given their obvious PvP-slant, I’m sure there will be a number of detractors), Talruum’s post and subsequent player discussion sparked a number of lengthy responses from Blizzard Developer Ghostcrawler, the first of which was:

Would Regrowth >> Nourish without the Regrowth glyph?

The response was generally “yes,” due to the fact that Regrowth benefits from 50% additional crit 5/5 from Improved Regrowth (leading to easily acquirable Nature’s Grace and Living Seed procs) as well as setting the target up for a Swiftmend if necessary. It also benefits from the mana cost reductions of Moonglow and Tree of Life while Nourish does not.

Fearful of an impending nerf to what is regarded by many as “our last good heal,” Beta tester Tauraran of Murmur argues that Regrowth shouldn’t be nerfed in order to improve Nourish, because Nourish simply isn’t “worth saving”:

Please do not feel like you’re required to nerf every spell we have in order to make Nourish work. As it stands, simply removing the glyph really wouldn’t be enough. You’d have to nerf Improved Regrowth and/or Nature’s Grace to ultimately make Regrowth less effective and desirable (in addition to getting rid of a very cool glyph). Then, you’d have to remove the HT glyph, or nerf Empowered Touch, or both, because glyphed HT would still be out performing Nourish.

Nourish is not currently doing something that Resto druids can’t do. It seems like a nice heal for the offensive specs, but we just don’t need it. In the end, it’s just a 1.5 second cast heal. It doesn’t do anything interesting, aside from interact with HoTs in the most bland way possible. It could reset HoT durations, or cause HoTs to jump to nearby targets, or have some sort of RNG chance to do something cool (resto druids are somewhat lacking in the random RNG department >.>), or ANYTHING that Flash of Light cannot currently accomplish… and then it might be worth fighting for.

Beta Tester Nerothyn (US) goes onto to propose an interesting change to the current dynamic of Nourish whereby casting it would actually increase the duration of Regrowth and Rejuvenation by 3 seconds or the duration of Lifebloom by 1 second. I’m personally a little reticent about anything that arbitrarily messes with the duration of my Lifebloom spell since it could end up being confusing when maintaining a rotation (ex. having two Lifeblooms set to expire simultaneously because you cast Nourish), I do like the idea of it boosting the duration of our non-stacking, non-cyclical HoTs. As Nerothyn says, “Even the name makes sense since it’s ‘Nourishing’ your current HoTs to help them live longer.”

In response to fear that Regrowth will be nerfed to make Nourish a more attractive spell, Ghostcrawler goes on to say:

We don’t want to hurt Regrowth, because it is nice to finally see it being used a lot. My fear is that the glyph is making it a lot better than Nourish.

Ideally, and I don’t know if we can get them all to this stage, glyphs should be an option that changes the way you play your character, not just free talent points. In some cases, they are going to feel like buffs. It would be cool, for example, if the Regrowth glyphs let some Resto druids focus more on Regrowth while others used different spells. The Regrowth glyph is just so good, on top of the Regrowth talent, that it may be a non-decision to use which also ends up making Nourish useless.

Ideally you should want to use Regrowth and Nourish on some occasions. Flourish, Rejuv, Swiftmend and Lifebloom already have pretty decent niches. If glyphing for Regrowth makes you lean towards that spell, awesome. I just think the case at the moment is every druid will have that glyph and use Regrowth as a generic heal-all spell.

We’re not going to touch the Regrowth talent or other synergistic talents, at least not to solve this problem.

It’s safe to assume that we should anticipate the removal or adjustment of the currently highly desired [Glyph of Regrowth]. This is depressing given all of the nerfs we’ve been hit with lately. One can only hope improvements will be made in other areas to reduce the sting.

Nerothyn goes on to make the excellent point that Regrowth and Nourish already fulfill so similar a role (a fast-casting, high HP heal) that players will inevitably choose whichever is better and abandon the other. This goes back to his original call for fundamentally changing or replacing the spell we get at level 80: “Bottom-line is that Nourish needs to be changed. And not made into a better direct heal. It needs to be tweaked to make it a compliment to Regrowth instead of a replacement for it.”

The conversation is then more or less taken in a different direction by Beta Tester Arenis of Lich King (US) who asks, “Are healers being designed to be as interchangeable as tanks? Is it not going to matter what healer you bring any more than it matters which tank?” Surprisingly, this prompts the following response from Ghostcrawler:

No, that isn’t the goal. The reason is largely because encounters are designed such that you already want to take more healers on a raid than you have available specs. What I mean is that almost every 25 player will have Holy paladins, Holy priests, Resto shamans and Resto druids. And maybe a Disc priest too. Even a 10 man will have 2-3 healers, and most likely they will be different classes. That’s a different situation than the tank is in. There are very many raid encounters that require one tank while almost none that require one healer. By and large, I think we’ve done a decent job in giving healers niches, but that strategy hasn’t worked for tanks (and won’t really work for dps either).

Now, where we have needed to give healers more tools is in the 5-player case, and possibly PvP. The same tools are useful in unusual encounters, say a Loatheb where you can’t heal often, or a Void Reaver, where the paladin has to run around. A Holy paladin who is great at flashing heals on a MT can’t do that in heroic Nexus and expect to keep everyone alive. A druid can’t just keep rolling Lifeblooms up and keep everyone alive. Wild Growth is great in those situations. It’s probably not going to compete with Chain Heal, but it doesn’t really have to. It just gives you another tool in your box.

The part about it not being necessary to make all healers universally interchangeable more or less makes sense. The part about Wild Growth being “another tool in my box” makes me want to spit acorns, though (PTUI)! Honestly, if my 51-point talent is going to be arbitrarily handicapped to avoid encroaching on another class’s niche (like AoE healing for Shamans and Priests), I’d prefer something that’s a superlative of what I am supposed to be good at instead. Something like a new heal over time, maybe with an interesting dynamic. Something fun and exciting, not something lame and watered down. As it is, Groves of Druids are going to be shying away from dipping too deeply into Restoration, picking up more talents from Balance because what awaits us at the bottom of our primary tree is so lackluster.

Beta Tester Nessis of Lich King (US) challenges Ghostcrawler’s assertion that Druids (along with other healers) should continue to fulfill a distinct niche: “Tell us what those niches are? Efficient heals that take time to heal that will be overwritten? Obviously that’s not the case anymore.”

I’m struggling with this myself. At the start of Wrath, I believed that Druids would become more or less the premier tank healers, a role comprised of the following:

• Maintaining Lifebloom rotations on 1-3 individuals (since nerfed to be both less effective and less efficient) but less tedious than before thanks to a 1.0 GCD from the original Gift of the Earthmother
• Feeding the tank “threat-building” fuel in the form of Rage, Mana, or Runic Power restored from Replenish, giving us a good reason to keep a Rejuvenation on the tank, a prospect made less tedious by the addition of the [Glyph of Swiftmend].
• Nourish: a direct heal with significant efficiency bonuses when cast on someone with one or more heals over time (i.e., tanks of all flavors). If you remember, the original incarnation of Gift of the Earthmother also included the effect, “causes your Healing Touch and Nourish spells to refund 5% of their base cost for each healing over time effect on the target” making this spell an attractive efficiency choice.
• Flourish: a powerful AoE heal over time with a 15-yard radius that would have been ideal for casting on a tank and allowing the “overflow” to heal beleaguered melee.

As of build 8932, Lifebloom has lower throughput, significantly decreasing the HPS buffer it provides. The restoration effect of Replenish has been cut in half. Nourish is no longer affected by Gift of the Earthmother, ostensibly in an effort to make Restoration Druids run out of mana more easily. And Flourish has been gutted and transformed into Devs-Gone-Wild – I mean – Wild Growth, a spell widely regarded as not worth the database column used to store its spellpower coefficient. (Luckily, Wild Growth is now affected by the GCD-reduction from Gift of the Earthmother so we can “get the HoT on more people faster” – LOLOLOLOLOLOL!! I’m not bitter.)

So what’s left? A powerful Regrowth spell benefitting from great synergies among several talents and a Glyph we’re now lead to believe will be nerfed. And a new Restoration ability, Nourish, we don’t even gain access to until level 80 only to discover it’s no better than the spell we acquired at level 12.

Commentary on the Great Lifebloom Nerf (of Build 8962)

No, not the other one we saw earlier in beta. And not the one earlier this year that was subsequently repealed because they recognized that it would spell the end of the raiding Restoration Druid in TBC. The one last week that was even worse. Yeah, that one.

I’ve more or less come to terms with what I believe to be the reasoning behind the Lifebloom nerf. As painful and unfair as it feels, I believe that the decision to reduce its effective healing while simultaneously increasing its mana cost came as a result of the addition of Nature’s Splendor, an easily accessible Balance talent that increases Lifebloom duration by 3 seconds. I believe this talent and the Lifebloom nerf were intended to do several things:

• Make it feel less tedious to maintain rolling Lifebloom on 1-3 tanks while giving Druids increased flexibility to cast spells other than Lifebloom and simultaneously making the spell too expensive to set up rotations of 4 or more people (which many Druids regard as an obnoxiously boring playstyle). By extending its duration and lowering the GCD while simultaneously reducing the amount it ticks for, they’re ensuring it doesn’t become too efficient (unfortunately resulting in an HPS decrease).
• Increasing the duration of Lifebloom would make it easier for the “HoT and hide” style of Arena healing easier and more effective since the Druid could potentially duck out of line of sight for longer stretches of time while her HoTs continued to heal her partner. By reducing the HPS throughput of the spell, a Druid can’t rely as much on “set it and forget it” healing.
• Increasing the duration also makes the spell an (even) less attractive choice for raid healing as the final bloom of the spell only occurs ten seconds after casting the spell, at which point your target is likely already healed to full by one or more of the non-targeted heals (Prayer of Mending, Chain Heal, or Circle of Healing). I think Blizzard wanted to encourage the use of other spells – such as Regrowth or Nourish – for this purpose.
• Increasing the mana cost of Lifebloom has ensured that, while we may not have to cast it as often, we’re still paying the same amount of mana over time to maintain our stacks (42% increase in duration, 40% increase in cost).

An extremely efficient spell that heals for next to nothing has little value (and an extremely inefficient spell that heals for next to nothing – i.e., Wild Growth – has even less).

If things remain as they are now, come Wrath of the Lich King, I will feel like I’ve taken one step forward (hooray Revive and raid-wide Gift of the Wild!) and two steps back with a Lifebloom that costs more and heals for far less than it did before I installed the “expansion.” Instead of feeling like I have something to look forward to – with the notable exceptions of a fabulous new hairdo, some nice healing-oriented additions to my non-healing tree, and a more heavily armored me – I feel like we’ve been told to hop on the treadmill and try to get back to the level of effectiveness we saw in TBC. But hey, at least we’re not snared anymore.

Further Reading

• Resto feedback (long, blue please read) with commentary from Ghostcrawler
• R.I.P Flourish – 17/09/2008 with commentary from Koraa

Related Posts

• Blue: Nourish may be Affected by Wild Growth
• 9014 Nerfs and Ghostcrawler Responds to Resto Concerns
• Wild Growth … Grows a Pair *

I haven’t been documenting the recent commentary and Blue posts related to powershifting, so to catch you up to speed, here is a quick summary:

1. Powershifting was an unintentional game mechanic whereby a Feral Druid at 0 Energy would shift out of Cat Form and back in to gain the 40 Energy from Furor. The ability to do this was limited by the Feral Druid’s mana pool, of course, but it was a common tactic in both PvE and, to a limited extent, PvP. « Source »
2. The change to Energy so that it refills “smoothly” rather than in ticks eliminated the ability to gain an occasional extra “free” tick of Energy depending upon when you triggered a skill.
3. A change was made to allow Energy to continue regenerating while outside of Cat Form. The original intention was for the amount of Energy to cap out at 40 with 5/5 Furor, but as a result of a bug, it capped out at 100. This explains Runycat’s comments last night about being able to shift into Cat Form with full Energy. « Source »
4. Furor has subsequently been changed to have the following effect:

Gives you 100% chance to gain 10 Rage when you shapeshift into Bear and Dire Bear Form, and you keep up to 100 of your Energy when you shapeshift into Cat Form, and increases your total Intellect while in Moonkin form by 10%.

This means that with 5/5 Furor you will no longer lose Energy from leaving Cat Form and will continue to regenerate Energy as if you had remained in form. « Source » I asked well-known artist and Feral Druid Andrige for his thoughts on this change:

With this change Ferals will no longer have to count on the fairly unreliable and unintended mechanic of the design of Furor. Instead, Ferals suddenly got a boost when it comes to versatility between forms at the loss of the “powershifting” mechanic. This change comes at the cost of PvE where this mechanic was a lifesaver (all Ferals who play seriously should know that), but I believe tweaking the proc rate of Omen of Clarity and the cooldown of Tiger’s Fury could make up for it.

Some Druids have clamored that this change will be a substantial nerf to their PvE viability, including Beta Tester Odz who writes:

Furor was always a PvP talent that a PvE Feral could make use of through powershifting. Moonkins complained that there was nothing for them in the first tier of Resto to get as they worked their way toward Omen of Clarity so now you’ve changed Furor to help them but left PvE ferals out in the cold because there is NOTHING in the first tier I would take. Devs just seem to band-aid everything and create more problems as they go along instead of fixing the main issue which Feral and Balance Druids having to invest ANY points at all into the Resto tree to be viable.

Let’s see what this talent has now become shall we:

1. It’s now mainly a Moonkin talent as they get the most benefit from it.
2. This slightly fixes the fact that Devs broke the talent and what [Ferals] end up with now is a consolation prize which will greatly reduce PvP burst potential as Energy is no longer on-demand below 40 Energy.
3. A PvE feral druid who wants OoC and Master Shapeshifter will have nothing in T1 of Restoration to take –only Naturalist in T2 – but will be forced to take Natural Shapeshifter, a talent which could have been justified if powershifting were still in the game but is now dead weight just to get to Master Shapshifter.

I don’t see this getting any better as long as you don’t address the core problems inherent with having to invest any points in Resto to begin with.

I’d love to hear from Feral readers (and anyone else, of course) about how you feel this change will affect you, both in PvE and PvP.

Balance Druids are celebrating this change as it provides a much more attractive way to spend five points in Tier 1 of Restoration. Of course, this means that buffing Gift of the Wild will more than likely fall solely upon the shoulders (boughs?) of Restoration Druids, but let’s try to look on the bright side. Apparently, it’s possible to pick up Omen of Clarity without spending five points in T2 of Restoration, so Balance Druids can continue to help us buff. My mistake!

For another Dyed-in-the-Fur Feral’s opinion of the removal of powershifting, I encourage you to read Alas Poor Powershifting, I Knew Thee Well by Tigerfeet of Secret Agent Cat.

Related Posts

• Omen of Clarity
• Balance Tree … Uprooted and Transplanted
• Guest Post: Moonkin Mana Regeneration

Edit 11:34 MST: I had to make several significant updates to this post as I missed some important changes in my hurry to meet my instance group. Please reread the following, and sorry for the confusion!

For Graylo’s Balance perspective on these changes, I encourage you to check out his recent post Raid Stacking in WotLK.

A significant change to the way buffs and debuffs will stack is being made, ostensibly to make raid composition more fluid and less subject to optimizing every slot. Developer Jimmythenumbers explains:

As Ghostcrawler has been posting recently, we’ve decided to make a change in the way we allow buffs and debuffs to stack exclusively in a raid. For the most part, what this change means is that many buffs and debuffs which were previously allowed to stack together no longer can, and that many buffs and debuffs which only a single talent specialization could bring can now be brought by multiple different specializations. The philosophy behind this change shows up in many of the changes we have made in Wrath of The Lich King, such as when we made almost all buffs raid-wide. We want players to be able to form raids and parties based on who they want to play with, rather than who has the correct talents and abilities to min-max their raid performance. Raid composition will still matter to some extent, but without this change, it would have overwhelmed every other aspect of raid planning (as we added new capabilities to each of 30 different talent trees). You no longer need to rigidly control the melee/spellcaster balance of your raid, or make sure every group has all the critical buffing classes, etc. This change has many class balance implications. Before we are done, we will thoroughly test the performance of every class. Do not assume that the classes’ current performance relative to others in the beta is final. Some classes (and specializations) will need to be reduced in power and some increased. Many will complain the change has more impact on class X than class Y. We will address all those concerns via our internal testing and community feedback.

He goes on to detail that 30+ new buff/debuff categories are being created, within which only the most powerful of the effects will be affect raid members. Here’s a breakdown of the categories affecting Druids:

• Armor Debuff (Minor): Faerie Fire (1260), Sting (Hunter pet) (1260), Curse of Recklessness (800)
• Melee Critical Strike Chance Buff: Leader of the Pack, Rampage (5%)
• Bleed Damage Increase Debuff: Mangle, Trauma (30%)
• Spell Critical Strike Chance Buff: Elemental Oath, Moonkin Aura (5%)
• Increased Spell Damage Taken Debuff: Ebon Plaguebringer (13%), Earth and Moon (13%), Curse of the Elements (10%)
• Increased Spell Hit Chance Taken Debuff: Improved Faerie Fire, Misery (3%)
• Percentage Haste Increase (All Types): Improved Moonkin Aura, Swift Retribution (3%)
• Melee Attack Speed Slow Debuff: Infected Wounds (4% x 5 = 20%), Judgements of the Just (20%), Thunderclap, Icy Touch (15%)
• Melee Hit Chance Reduction Debuff: Scorpid Sting (5%), Insect Swarm (2%)
• Healing Debuff: Wound Poison (10% x 5 = 50%), Aimed Shot (50%), Mortal Strike (50%), Furious Attacks (25% x 2 = 50%)
• Attack Power Debuff: Curse of Weakness (416), Demoralizing Shout (410), Demoralizing Roar (406)
• Stat Add Buff: Mark of the Wild
• Percentage Increase Healing Received Buff: Tree of Life (25% x Spirit), Improved Devotion Aura (3%)

In the above list, I’ve bolded the buffs or debuffs with the highest positive or negative effects and reordered them in terms of greatest benefit to least benefit. In the case that two entries are listed in bold, their effects are equal but only one will be active at any given time.

Other significant changes being made to talents and abilities include:

I will also list the changes to abilities which exhibit new behavior regardless of the exclusive categories. The changes usually mean the old behavior was removed and replaced by the new behavior. Numbers listed are for maximally-talented versions. Here is that changelist:

• Improved Moonkin Aura: Grants 3% haste of all types.
• Earth and Moon: Increases spell damage taken from all schools by 13% on the target.
• Improved Faerie Fire: No longer benefits melee and ranged hit chance, only spell hit.
• Tree of Life: No longer grants healing based on spirit, grants 3% increased healing received to raid.

Tree of Life aura will no longer stack with Improved Devotion Aura. This is especially significant with the simultaneously-announced change whereby Tree of Life grants 3% healing in the same way that Improved Devotion Aura does. If it’s true that the above changes are for maximally-talented versions of each ability, there will be no raid-wide benefit to having a Tree of Life if a Paladin with 18 or more points in Protection is present.

If, on the other hand, the 3% is solely for Tree of Life and does not include the 15% bonus from Improved Tree of Life, a Druid with 44 or more points in Restoration can have an aura at 3.45% strength. This is a very important distinction, and one that I hope is clarified soon. And while I would certainly prefer that our spec-defining form trump the 18-point Paladin talent, it’s kind of sad to think that taking a point in IToL will invalidate a Paladin’s 3-point investment in IDA, making the talent almost superfluous (although it will still afford an additional 600 armor).

It looks like Shaman’s Elemental Oath is being reduced from 6% to 5%, making it equal to the +crit benefits of Moonkin Aura (at its previous value of 6% it would have trumped Moonkin aura). The change to Earth and Moon is great, an increase from 6% stacked to 13%, presumably with a single application. Unfortunately, Insect Swarm’s chance to hit debuff will no longer be useful in raids where at least one Hunter is present; Scorpid Sting will overwrite it. Obviously, though, its DPM makes it more than worth having for any raiding Balance-specced Druid.

A further implication of this change is that only one aura from any given class will be active at a given time. In other words, the Restoration Druid with the highest Spirit will be the only one whose aura is effective when not trumped by Improved Devotion Aura. Whether or not this would end up being the case, was previously the subject of much debate that can now be put to rest.

While I feel the goal of this change is an admirable one (making all classes more equally desirable), I believe that it will actually have the opposite effect. If several classes can provide the same buff (or debuff), raid leaders won’t have to worry as much about raid composition. But worrying about raid composition to optimize the stacking of buffs and debuffs has previously created opportunities for many classes and specs that might have otherwise been passed over. If everyone has roughly the same utility, then you will only want the classes/specs that excel at their primary role (DPS, healing, tanking). If Balance and Feral can’t match the DPS of their parent classes, Mages and Rogues, and yet no longer provide any unique utility, what will be the point in bringing them along?

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No major news today, but there were a few tidbits I wanted to bring to your attention, particularly concerning the itemization for Restoration-based PvP in Wrath of the Lich King.

PvP Itemization

Some of you may remember that prior to Patch 2.4, Blizzard considered converting MP5 to Spirit on Kodohide gear. At the time, there was a tremendous outcry from players (myself included) that this was an intentional decision to handicap Druid mana regeneration in Arenas since MP5 was widely regarded as the superior regeneration stat in PvP. With the buff to Spirit-based mana regeneration in Patch 2.4, however, it suddenly became apparent that Spirit was no longer a stat to be discounted. In fact, the change in 2.4 single-handedly made Kodohide significantly less valuable in PvE.

According to reports from MMO Champion, this will no longer be an issue in Wrath of the Lich King. Druid PvP armor will come in three flavors:

• Feral with Agility, Stamina, Critical Strike, and Attack Power « link »
• Spell Power with Stamina, Intellect, and Spirit « link »
• Spell Power with Stamina, Intellect, and Critical Strike Rating (mmm … tastes like Laser Chicken) « link »

The Spirit-based set is obviously intended for use by Restoration, but the spell critical set could be used either by a Balance Druid, or a hybrid Restokin spec (assuming that spec continues to be viable). However, the complete absence of either Spirit or MP5 leads me to believe its itemization is as yet incomplete. After all, everyone needs some form of mana regeneration. It’s also worth noting that none of these sets include pieces with “green” armor, and the set bonuses appear to be unchanged (though the Balance set reads slightly differently, I suspect it’s a typo).

Druid Changes

Unfortunately, there was nothing particularly earth-shattering for Ferals anxious about their relevance as a tank. Here are the changes that have been discerned so far:

Feral Skills

• Ferocious Bite damage slightly increased.
• Swipe now hits 4 targets.
• Savage Roar now increases attack power 40% and lasts 14/19/24/29/34 sec depending on how many combo points you have up. (Previously 35% attack power and 9/12/15/18/21 sec)

Balance Talents

• Celestial Focus (Tier 4) reduces the casting time lost when damaged by 25/50/70% when casting wrath. (Previously reduced interrupt chance)
• Control of Nature (Tier 2) reduces casting time lost when damaged by 40/70/100% while casting Entangling Roots and Cyclone. (Previously reduced interrupt chance)

The change to Celestial Focus was likely made because of the previously mentioned spell pushback changes. We can probably expect a similar change to be made to Nature’s Focus which functions in the same way as Celestial Focus on live. The Swipe change when considered with the [Glyph of Swipe] will allow Druids to hit five targets at once which is certainly good news.

There have also been bug reports that Swiftmend is not functioning at all on the Beta servers. Unfortunately, this will make healing in the new instances more difficult for Restoration Druids. Thankfully, we have a functioning version of Revive handy!

Balance Revamp Coming

Responding to a detailed and eloquent post by beta tester Ashthra, in which she details several key areas of unnecessary bloat in Balance, Developer Koraa promises that further polishing to the Balance tree is currently in the works. Hopefully she was kidding when she promised Boomkin more bloat:

Currently working on a polish pass of the Balance tree. Get ready for more bloat!

Clearly, the Developers haven’t taken a good look at Moonkin recently. They’re already quite bloated!

More Comments on Feral Tanking

Following up on the now legendary tanking thread with many blue responses, Developer Ghostcrawler made several additional statements concerning Bears in WotLK. Once again, due to the length of these responses and the fact that this is a Restoration blog, I’ll try to summarize the key points:

• Of the four tanks, two have shields and two do not. All four are intended to be equally viable through talents like Survival of the Fittest.
• Ideally, they’d like to see raids filled based on how well players are liked rather than a must-have utility or buff.
• Efforts are being made to improve the ability for Tanks and Healers to fill other roles when not needed to tank or heal. This should hopefully lead to less raid member swapping due to changing encounters.
• Blizzard agrees that it’s a problem when a tank outgears content and cannot generate enough rage to maintain threat.

Here’s hoping the aforementioned polishing pass to Balance will simultaneously include some of these promised improvements to Ferals.

Hairstyle Names

Shamelessly procured from WotLKWiki, here are a few of the new names for hairstyles (replacing the placeholder names like “Female Human Hairstyle 1”): Bald, Peasant, Solider, Monk, Barbarian, Dashing, Loose, Scholar, Rogue, Fabulous, Samson, Bearded, Colonel, Duellist, Goatee, Wizard, Chops, Van Dyke, Mustacioed, Clean, Prince, Wild, Swept, Foxtail, Slicked

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