On Cho’gall, my guild typically relies on Typhoon to knock the congealed bloods back if we get unlucky with the MC’d targets just before (which can slow the time it takes to kill them). However, I’ve seen all the bloods packed almost right on top of each other, and while it seems my typhoon has knocked all of them back, one or two of them will bug out and zoom forward as if they weren’t actually knocked back at all. And this oddity is confirmed to be seen not just by me, but by other people in the raid helping DPS them down. I’ve also seen situations where typhoon clearly passes over all of the parasites on Magmaw (heroic), only to have one or two of them basically ignore being knocked back, which can cause havoc if you’re given only a short distance to work with, depending on the fires left by the constructs spawning. This doesn’t happen all the time, and I don’t really understand why it happens in these situations.

Then there’s the way it operates in PvP, which is half broken. I remember some time in Wrath Blizzard fixed an issue where being stunned while typhoon was in flight (before it hits someone) would prevent its knockback from taking effect. But some time between the beginning of Wrath and the beginning of Cataclysm, this bug was reintroduced. And it’s absolutely frustrating when you get your typhoon off, and you think you’re about to knock the rogue off the platform while his shadowstep and CoS are down, only to have the mage deep freeze you right after you get the typhoon off, preventing the rogue from being knocked off, even though he clearly took damage from the typhoon because you can see it roll up (or down) your scrolling combat text.

The responsiveness is equally a problem. I had one arena game where I cast typhoon at three people. It hit two people instantaneously as it passed over them. But it delayed hitting the third person for roughly three seconds, even though all three people on the team were standing right on top of each other. This isn’t even a case of the server reporting him where he actually wasn’t, because typhoon does not take three seconds to travel its full distance. So even if he was standing further back than the server actually reported, the delay would have only been something like half a second. Three seconds is really inexplicable.

And don’t get me started about the times it just fails to work in PvP (which I think may have something to do with the odd times it fails to work in PvE). I realize some classes have immunity effects, like pillar of frost, which causes them to be immune. So this isn’t a case of me being mistaken about that. But it bugs me when an unholy DK and his pet are sitting on the same target, right on top of each other, so I typhoon both of them to knock them off the edge of the Dalaran Sewers’ platform. But instead of it hitting both, it hits his pet, and just passes right over him, as though it didn’t hit him at all. (And take note: AMS does not prevent the knockback effect, so it wasn’t that, either.) It’s like typhoon is suffering the same responsiveness issue that solar beam had before it was hotfixed. Maybe.

In Summary: Typhoon is incredibly buggy. It is one of our primary defensive (and offensive) tools in PvP, and can be extremely important in PvE in some situations. Because it is so crucial, it needs to be fixed so it will work the way it is intended without much issue. I understand latency will make some spells behave oddly at times (this is true for any game mechanic), but I highly doubt all of typhoon’s issues are solely to blame on network latency or hiccups, given my extensive familiarity with the spell’s behavior. It needs to be fixed, and the fix needs to be permanent and well-documented, so any bugs are not reintroduced again in the future.

• Fungal growth duration has been increased to 20 seconds, up from 10. In addition, it should now be much more responsive when detonating Wild Mushrooms.
• Moonkin Form now grants 15% damage reduction instead of increased armor.
• Starfall will no longer strike targets that are not in combat and will now drop stars at a slightly faster rate.
• Wild Mushroom is now instant cast, down from 0.5 seconds. In addition, the radius of detonation has been increased to 6 yards, up from 3, and damage done increased by 30%.

While moonkins can no longer shift out of roots, the 15% straight reduction is much better than merely increased armor. With so much physical DPS now focused on bleed damage, this is a lot better than simply an armor increase. And this also gives moonkins an extra bit of defense against casters, particularly those that can also root us.

The change to mushrooms is also great. One of the biggest issues with mushrooms was that we couldn’t cast them on the run, which meant fungal growth was limited to mainly just stacking them on pillars for kiting. They will see more use in BGs and open spaces now that we can effectively use them to kite, as well.

The damage and area increase of the damage is mainly a needed PvE change, though it’ll be useful in PvP for interrupting flag cappers.

So while we lose shifting out of roots, we gain some much needed utility and passive damage protection.

Edit (Jan 24th): And now moonkins get the ability to shift out of roots, again. I think we may now be in a good place.

Unlike the other healers, Restoration druids will not be receiving any new spells. They have plenty to work with already, and our challenge instead is to make sure all of them have a well-defined niche. A druid should be able to tank-heal with stacks of Lifebloom, spot-heal a group with Nourish and Regrowth, and top off lightly wounded targets with Rejuvenation.

I wouldn’t argue that we have more variety in our spells than paladins or shamans, but priests? Really? The variety priests get is simply unparalleled. They get:

• Power Word: Shield – A damage absorption spell.
• Circle of Healing – A smart multi-target heal on a short cooldown.
• Prayer of Healing – A cast-based, direct group heal.
• Renew – A single-target HoT.
• Flash Heal – A short direct heal.
• Greater Heal – A long direct heal. (Which isn’t that useful except in situations where they can time the cast to land right as a large hit falls, admittedly.)
• Prayer of Mending – A proc heal that smartly jumps between damaged people on an intermediate cooldown.
• Divine Hymn – A channeled smart heal on a long cooldown.

What do druids get?

• Lifebloom – A short-duration HoT that stacks and procs a heal at the end.
• Wild Growth – A smart multi-target HoT on a short cooldown.
• Rejuvenation – A single-target HoT.
• Nourish – A short, single-target heal (that, however, requires you to have HoTs currently running to achieve maximum potency).
• Regrowth – A direct heal that leaves a weak residual HoT. (That we don’t use for the direct heal unless the person would also benefit from the HoT.)
• Healing Touch – A long direct heal. (Which isn’t useful except in conjunction with Nature’s Swiftness, and that’s only when an NS’d regrowth wouldn’t be better; the glyphed version is only useful on Faction Champs and Anub25 hard.)
• Swiftmend – An instant, direct heal on an intermediate cooldown.
• Tranquility – A group-based (meaning only the druid’s own group) channeled heal on a super-long cooldown.

In numbers, we’re roughly equal. But while druids have a high variety of HoTs, priests have a high general variety in their spells. You could argue that priests make trade-offs based on their spec, nevermind that they can simply respec to fill what role is needed at the time and druids have to work with what they have. Druids make incredible trade-offs in globals, anyway. In order to stack lifebloom, you have to spend three globals (roughly three seconds at high-end levels of gear). Nevermind that the end-heal is often prone to overhealing, something that is supposed to be penalized in Cataclysm. And if HoTs aren’t optimal for the situation, good luck relying primarily on nourish (which is weak without HoTs running), swiftmend (which requires wasting GCD’s to make it useful when HoTs aren’t optimal), and the glyphed version of healing touch (which isn’t better than nourish except when HoTs aren’t running on the target).

I’m not saying restoration druids don’t have a wider array of tools than paladins. And shamans have a smaller variety to work with, as well, though their spells are generally useful and chain heal is incredibly unique. But to say priests get a new utility spell and restoration druids don’t seems short-sighted to me. Especially when we can’t really make decent use of our direct heals without spending extra globals on HoTs. I think every single spec deserves new spells. Holy paladins moreso than anyone else, however the strength of beacon would need to be addressed in doing so.

I realize Blizzard did talk about our current spells and how they should be generally useful (which heralds perhaps changes to their potency and/or mechanics), and these can certainly be addressed. But I still feel restoration druids deserve a new baseline spell. Even if it’s solely based in utility.

Eclipse now increases damage done by Wrath by 40% (up from 30%) and the critical chance of Starfire by 40% (up from 30%)

I’m not sure the 2% buff this results in will make up for the loss of the aura macro, but it’s a needed fundamental change nonetheless. I am somewhat amused, because before the nerf I was talking with a friend about how the 2PT8 bonus was something I’d be using in my end-game gear. The discussion concluded with us agreeing that 2PT8 needed to be nerfed while the base moonkin mechanics needed to be buffed to counter a gear nerf. Seems Blizzard agreed!

Eclipse: This effect will not activate again within 15 seconds of either type of Eclipse effect firing, in addition to the existing 30-second cooldown for each type of Eclipse.

Item – Druid T8 Balance 2P Bonus – Increases the bonus granted by Eclipse for Starfire and Wrath by 7%. (Down from 15%)

Before you get the wrong idea, I believe a player should be compelled to upgrade to subsequent sets. I do, however, want to address Ghostcrawler’s response to someone complaining about the nerfs and discuss how moonkins are both overpowered and underpowered at the same time.

Our intent was not to nerf Balance druid dps with this change. Our intent was to make a macro or addon that was quickly becoming mandatory at competitive levels not mandatory. It would be one thing if cancelling Eclipse auras was a fun or interesting choice, but since everything was so automated, the only thing I can really imagine anyone getting upset about was the dps loss, which we plan on offsetting.

The extra component to our rotation was certainly maddening from a theoretical standpoint. I’m happy that I will be able to throw out my macro for this reason. To elaborate, starfire has a flight time. It’s a very short flight time, but a flight time nonetheless. A spell takes into consideration the buffs you have as they begin to take flight. Procs, however, happen only when a spell lands. If you are at he soft crit cap, starfire will crit 100% of the time while eclipsed. So by canceling eclipse while your last starfire that can receive the benefit of eclipse is in flight, you will automatically proc a wrath eclipse (because the starfire eclipse is no longer active, meaning it can proc).

This will have a rather substantial effect on our maximum DPS potential. But note that Ghostcrawler says Blizzard plans to offset the nerf. So I’m not going to complain. But to help them consider our issues, I want to go over the situation moonkins are in.

As I said earlier, moonkins are both overpowered and underpowered at a basic level. In terms of individual DPS in a raid that has every buff and debuff, we are currently middle-of-the road. But the irony is the only reason we are is because our 2PT8 is overpowered and we can make use of the macro. It is, essentially, what allows us to be viable in terms of individual DPS. But that’s getting nerfed.

Meanwhile, in terms of the buffs we bring, there’s really no one better. We bring a 5% crit aura, 13% spell damage (though we can’t apply it to multiple mobs like an unholy DK), and 3% hit. We also bring an extra innervate (and this is especially noteworthy because we shouldn’t need our own innervate at high levels of gear, unless we’re AoEing).

The buff and debuff strength is not so potent in 25-mans, because you will have the 13% from unholy DK’s on a lot of fights, the 3% from shadow priests, and elemental shamans are (currently; not really sure for 3.3) doing pretty decent DPS, so they are often there and provide the buffs we do. So we’re not that essential for 25-mans, and if our individual DPS drops low enough, we won’t be needed.

But in 10-mans, our debuff and buff capabilities shine like burning magnesium. Because you have limited raid slots and typically want good synergy, moonkins get heavy consideration. Instead of bringing an elemental shaman and a shadow priest to augment a lock, you can bring a moonkin, drop the shaman and shadow priest, allow the warlock to use a damaging curse, and then put in a caster that does a better job for the given fight than perhaps the shaman and priest (though there are some fights shadow priests and shamans shine on, so it’s not like this is always the case, but it happens with some frequency).

However, with the nerf, our personal DPS is going down. So in situations of buff and debuff redundancy, we risk falling out of consideration when the extra innervate is not needed (and we’re not the only class who has an active mana return; hi priests).

So what should be done? Well, for one, I personally think the inherent 60% chance to proc eclipse on a wrath needs to go. This will partially make up for the nerf, but not entirely. After that, I’m not sure. I think either the base bonus of eclipse needs to increase, or other talents need a boost.

They’re planning to address it already, so I’m not worried about it too much.

Back when I started playing WoW, there was a lot of theorycrafting for how players could overcome or even minimize the impact of random numbers on their gameplay, which totally makes sense. Over the years though that has sort of morphed into: all RNG is bad, and any mechanic that has an RNG element is also bad. We don’t think Balance is saddled with an over dependence on RNG more so than other specs, and if you feel that way, you might want to talk to some Fire mage friends.

I’ve played both in a raiding environment. There’s an issue with RNG that lies in floors and ceilings. If the ceiling is too good, you can get lucky and put out (for example) 30% more than your average DPSer can ever hope to produce. But the opposite is also true. There’s a chance on a given attempt you can do everything right and come in dead last on the meters if your floor is too low.

This is why people rail against RNG. Me? I don’t have a problem with it as long as the ceiling doesn’t go too high, and the floor doesn’t go too low. But when this is the case, RNG can be the source of massive cognitive trauma.

Blizzard has to look at the scalability of such RNG mechanics, also. If at the highest gear level the RNG-based mechanic becomes so good that someone produces 20% more DPS than everyone else on average, that’s a problem. You either have to put in some sort of check, or lower its strength. But if you lower its strength, that could detrimentally affect the concept at low levels of gear, which is also important. So this is why RNG is such a tricky component of the game.

At low levels of gear, eclipse was more frustrating than even hot streak was. And I think, honestly, to counter for the unlucky streaks (for both classes), they need to implement something like a failsafe, where if you don’t proc something within, say, 10 spells, it automatically procs. This would fix the performance problems of each spec at low-end levels of gear.

If they can do something like that, RNG is fine. But it’s a fine mathematical line to walk.

Likewise, we don’t think it was good for warlocks to just use Shadowbolt or mages to just use Fireball. Furthermore, we don’t think a 1,2,3,4 rotation is a whole lot better. If your class mechanics invite you to be able to macro everything you do, then you as a player aren’t really making decisions; you aren’t playing a character so much as babysitting a bot.

I don’t think anyone is going to argue against the concept of using more than one ability to DPS. But the issues with RNG are separate matters and need to be addressed on a case-by-case basis, as discussed earlier.

We’re more sympathetic to the argument that it might provide too much of a dps increase relative to other talents, but at the same time given what I said above, we aren’t really trying to promote an Eclipse-less Balance spec.

I don’t think it’s a huge issue to make a single talent really powerful, as one talent can often be the thing that makes a spec viable. One could argue vengeance is just as important for balance druids, if not more important at times. Ironically, vengeance and eclipse are mutually beneficial. Personally, as my gear’s increased, I’ve warmed up to eclipse, as those unlucky streaks happen almost never. Admittedly, at low levels of gear, I simply cussed it out, because it seemed to never proc enough and I’d often get streaks of 15 wraths without a proc.

I personally think balance is fundamentally sound, but we could use some balancing (ha… ha… get it) and tweaks to fix our issues at the low-end gear level.

…

On a different note: Stay tuned for another entry in the coming week. I’ve got an announcement concerning me (and it will affect the blog and its future content). But Thanksgiving is distracting me from finishing that entry.

To be honest, we may revert the Rejuv nerf. This isn’t 100% finalized yet, so please don’t say we promised anything.

We definitely wanted to nerf Rejuv. However we also wanted to fix Gift of the Earth Mother. That change wasn’t necessarily aimed at further nerfing druids, even though that was the outcome. It was aimed at not making haste such a wonky stat for Resto.

In short, we think the GotEM change both nerfed druids and fixed the haste scaling problem so the Rejuv duration nerf may not be necessary. Stay tuned.

Good news. I don’t have anything to say about this possibility, yet, however, as I’d have to number crunch the scalability of all three raid healers. Which is something I’m sure Blizzard will do in assessing the issue, but I may do it myself if I can find the time between recruitment and midterms (but that’s unlikely).

Gift of the Earthmother now increases your total spell haste by 2/4/6/8/10%

From the PTR patch notes. Nourish already clips the GCD with Nature’s Grace active. This will benefit mainly healing touch and regrowth, both of which are extremely niched to begin with. The removal of a tick of rejuvenation is already a substantial nerf. This will nerf our general raid healing further beyond substantial. The addition of the glyph is only a situational buff (as already discussed in this article).

We are trying to make haste a slightly more attractive stat for classes that utilize a lot of damage or healing over time spells, specifically Shadow priests, warlocks (though especially Affliction) and Resto druids. We realize other classes use hots and dots too, but I think we can all agree that it’s a bigger problem for the ones I mentioned.

So after my post, the blues are planning to address the way haste scales with HoT and DoT classes. Which is a good start, but I think they run the risk of making druids scale too well in early content (which was one of my points in the earlier post). Then again, with the nerf to rejuvenation’s base duration, the two changes may balance each other out.

We have new tech that will allow specific hots and dots to tick faster — the time between ticks would decrease. This means more damage or healing per time but also having to refresh those spells more often. Since there is a trade-off, we’re not sure the change is a no-brainer, especially in the healing case.

They are correct in assessing the problems of the change. By making the HoT tick faster, and lowering the duration of the HoT as a consequence, they will remove some of the utility of HoTs in dealing with damage. One of the strengths of rejuvenation right now is that I can stack it 18 seconds before incoming damage and the ticks will heal as many people as possible given my haste value. This is a huge boon on Algalon and XT, where merely one tick can save someone from almost certain death by extraneous damage (constellations on Algalon, and light bomb on XT).

Because of this, we are planning on introducing the concept through glyphs. Glyphs represent a great test bed for new ideas because they are easier to change (and easier on the players when we do change them) compared to core spell functions or even talents. If we like the way it feels and players like the way it feels and the glyphs prove popular or fun, then this may be the kind of thing that shifts from glyphs over time — not unlike the way some favorite set bonuses eventually become talents.

This is a great way to potentially deal with the problem. It will be great for dealing with isolated damage, as well as tank damage. For example, the faster ticks would likely be beneficial for raid healing on fights where the healing is more reactive or not as predictable, like normal Freya, Faction Champs, Yogg, etc.

But they should keep it as a glyph, not a talent, because there are times when faster HoTs are detrimental. For example, a faster rejuvenation on Iron Council hard mode could cause the HoT to heal at a faster rate than his aura deals damage (particularly if all your raid healers have the talent or glyph). So we’d have to either set our dual specs to counter that, or pay 50 gold every time we don’t want it. I would easily sacrifice my current rejuvenation glyph (or nourish glyph, depending on the situation) for the faster ticks in situations where it would be better, instead of sacrificing my moonkin spec or paying 50 gold.

For 3.3 we are talking about introducing three new glyphs for Shadow Word: Pain, Corruption and Rejuvenation that would allow these spells to tick faster with the more haste you have. There are glyphs of Corruption and Rejuv already, and we’re not sure how we’re going to resolve those yet.

Different names. Some classes already have glyphs for the same ability that just have different names. For example, Glyph of Typhoon and Glyph of Monsoon both affect typhoon.

In any case, this is a good way to address some of the concerns I mentioned in my previous entry.

An alternative I would suggest is frontloading HoT ticks, rather than backloading them. Decrease the duration by one tick, and put a tick at the front. Such is why druid T8 was extremely good (and still is in a lot of situations). Of course, that would cause issues with riptide losing its niche. So that might not be a way to go.

We don’t want rank 15 to have that extra tick. It is technically a bug in that we didn’t intend for it to have that behavior, but obviously we sat on the change for awhile. However since the popular Resto style has now become Rejuv on as many people as possible, we thought the extra tick had become problematic. Frankly we think druids can absorb the small nerf without hurting their overall healing much.

We’re not trying to hide a nerf, and we can certainly change the patch note to not say bug fix if that makes it go down any easier.

We’ll look into any discrepancy in numbers between rank 14 and 15 and make sure things are working as intended.

This is a quote from Ghostcrawler. I’m about to pick it apart, because I really feel the druid community is being done a disservice by this nerf.

We Need That Extra Tick, Otherwise We Lose Our Biggest Niche and Drop Below Other Healers in Competition and Available Healing Tools

Consider the ramifications of losing that extra tick. Did you know renew is roughly comparable to rejuvenation? Raid buffed, glyphed and talented, it’s only slightly worse than rejuvenation (but also with that heal on application that mimics our 4PT8 bonus). On Anub’arak hard, my priest partner and I were each putting a HoT on targets of penetrating cold. My rejuv was ticking on average for 3000 non-crit. His renew, meanwhile, is ticking for about 2500. But his gear is worse than mine; I have three ilvl 258 piece and four pieces of T9, and only two pieces of gear otherwise that aren’t ilvl 245. Remove the tier bonus on me and level out our gear and I’m only slightly ahead of him. If not for the extra tick, the percentage difference would be miniscule.

Now, consider the spell coefficient is going to change if they nerf rejuvenation’s base duration to 12. You get the full benefit of spell power when a spell is 15 seconds. Nerf it to 12, and not only do we lose an extra tick, we lose some benefit of our spell power. So the nerf (when talented) is not 26%. It’s more than that, unless you have absolutely 0 spell power. That would actually drop its effectiveness to at least the level of renew, if not below it.

So tell me why I should continue playing a druid and not reroll a priest? They have so many different tools compared to me. PoH. PoM. Renew. CoH. Shields. Hymn of Hope. Holy Hymn. Shadowfiend. Offensive dispels. Mass dispel. The ability to respec and become a damn good tank healer. I’m tempted to drop out of constructive argument and simple ask, “What the fuck?”

The only thing that gives me pause about switching is the fact that some damage is best healed by multiple HoTs, especially when there’s only two people with that sort of damage coming in on them. For example, Brutallus’ Burn was best dealt with by a druid keeping HoTs rolling on the burn victims. One person got burn, I could stack HoTs on them. Then when the next person got burn, I could switch off the previous burn target to stack HoTs on them, without risking the first person dying. We’re also good compliments to the DPS downstairs on Yogg0, because retadins can’t decurse and shifting out to decurse for a feral is technical decrease in the DPS you need for decent stuns. Oh, and I like playing moonkin, but we’re talking about healing here.

These non-raid healing situations where we are extremely strong, however, are so few and far between, I could probably just keep my druid geared w/ badges and come in when the situation calls for it and it’d do just as well. Otherwise, other classes have similar or better tools to bring. To elaborate:

• One person takes spike damage while running around? Just riptide/PoM/shield them. These spells are comparable to swiftmend, and better if that person doesn’t already have rejuvenation running on them and the healing needs to be immediate.
• Clumped up and moving while taking heavy raid damage? CoH + PoM + Renew. And PW:S if someone is about to die and needs preventative healing while PoM is not active and on CD.
• General HPS on stationary fights? We’re definitively going to fall behind priests with this nerf. I already have to struggle with good priests to keep up with them on fights with constant raid damage. And shamans are already catching up with CH as they get more and more haste and crit.
• Tank healing? Don’t get me started. We’re terrible tank healers. And the generic resto spec, we have to spend so many GCD’s refreshing HoTs just to make us viable with nourish. If we spec HT, we’re no better than paladins or shamans (and paladins are better, because they can heal two tanks at once, or someone in the raid while they heal the tank). We also provide no inspiration buff, so we’re not complimentary to paladins in most situations and make the tank healing actually more difficult in general if you need just two tank healers.

The Heals Used Are Not Determined by The General Strength of a Spell, but by the Situation

Why is Blizzard seeing such a high percentage of rejuvenation by druids? It’s not because rejuvenation is so overpowered. It’s because our other spells either have a cooldown, or they are generally weak in dealing with the majority of the style of damage you see today.

With the introduction of metric fuckloads of raid damage, increased because of spells like WG, CoH, targetabble PoH, and the fact that pallies can now also heal other people along with the tank at the same time, Blizzard has compensated in most fights by simply increasing the raid damage. Regrowth, in dungeon blues and greens, was the best for dealing with this damage early on. But once you got enough mana regen, rejuv took its place. By this point, rejuv is far and away the best in terms of HPS for spells without a cooldown.

If the idea is to get us to not put so much emphasis on rejuvenation, which is the vibe I get from Ghostcrawler’s post, they need to realize the emphasis is there largely because our other tools suck for general HPS output. It’s why shamans cast mostly CH for general HPS. Why priests cast most PoH for general HPS when full groups take damage. Why they cast PoM whenever it’s off CD, too. Etc.

Think about the encounters that all have massive raid damage that is delivered either predictably or in a straightforward manner. XT. Kologarn. HM IC. Hodir. HM Thorim. HM Freya. Mimiron. HM Vezax. Twin Valks.

On XT, as soon as my BigWigs timer tells me tantrum is going to happen in less than 18 seconds, I start spamming rejuvenation around like crazy, because he’s likely going to tantrum when those 18 seconds are up, and I’ll have rejuv ticking on people. Even before then, when I have free time, I tend to spam rejuvenation, because people are going to take damage from people with light bomb during the second or two before they get far enough from the raid. WG has a CD, so I can’t spam that all the time, even it is better in terms of total HPS. And lifebloom doesn’t do as much healing per cast as rejuv (on top of its issue with making your mana drop extremely low before you get the return value, effectively decreasing your mana pool while a bunch is active). Regrowth is too slow, though I might cast it when tantrum has between 18 and 27 seconds left. But, otherwise, what the hell else would I cast?

It’s a similar situation given all the encounters listed. It’s not because it’s overpowered in general. It’s because it’s our best spell to use between WG’s for the style of damage being used in the encounters.

To further pick apart the problems with our other spells (in a raid environment):

• Regrowth:
  • It’s too slow. The reason its healing per time spend casting is so low, is because it has a base of two seconds. For this reason, rejuvnation has more HPS potential at mid and upper levels of gear.
  • It’s also not instant. Can’t cast it while running.
  • And its HoT is too small for predictive healing situations. It wouldn’t top people fast enough on Algalon, for example.
• Lifebloom:
  • As it currently stands, lifebloom’s healing isn’t enough to raid heal with it. My rejuvenation currently heals for about 18K per cast, disregarding tier bonus (w/ T8 and T9, this number is 20K or above). At one stack, currently, my lifebloom only ticks for roughly 600. Even if I were to overestimate and claim 650, to cover for the fact that my parses might be a little off, the HoT portion would heal for 5850, meaning the end-heal would need to heal for 12150 to match rejuvenation’s healing potential. At one stack, LB’s bloom doesn’t even come close to that.
  • It’s backend heal is also very difficult to time, if not impossible, in most situations. It either gets stomped by other heals, or the timing doesn’t coincide with a boss ability because it doesn’t happen at rigid intervals.
  • Lifebloom also has a problem in the sense that it lowers you mana temporarily before you get the mana back from the blooms. If you have like 2000 mana left, for example, you will likely get to 0 mana after only three or four casts (depending on what mana you get back in the time it takes to apply three or four), and then you’ll sit at 0 mana for a while. You’ll get some mana back as they begin to bloom, but if you’re going to hit 0 mana during that time, it creates staggering issues, which also decreases its effectiveness in that situation.
• Wild Growth:
  • It has a cooldown. When it’s on CD, you can’t cast it. So rejuvenation is the best substitute.
  • It requires people to be clumped. If multiple people are taking damage, but they are farther than the jumping distance of WG, rejuvenation is our best option.
  • It requires three or more people to be taking damage. If only one or two people take damage, rejuvenation will generally do more healing per cast.
• Nourish:
  • Its heal per cast is really low. Simply put, on fights where your raids needs to put out a lot of HPS in general, any time you cast nourish, you waste the time you spent casting it that you could have spent casting a rejuv or WG. Both rejuv and WG have far better healing per time spent casting. So the more nourishes you cast, the less raid healing you do, the more your raid falls behind, the worse off you are in the long-term.

We really need rejuvenation to be strong for us to be effective. Because it’s really the only spell that allows us to compete in general HPS (which has become an important stat, given the number of raid damage-heavy encounters). And I don’t know if Blizzard has noticed, but other classes have either caught up to us in HPS potential, or are passing us. Priests already do more HPS than I do in situations where the raid damage is reactive and people are clumped. CoH and PoH are better reactive raid heals, and PoM supplements their healing such that they can have high HPS output (and, oh yeah, renew is not half bad in situations where they can talent/glyph it without losing heals for other situations). Even in predictable situations, a priest can compete and outheal me.

And CH is catching up for stationary fights, given that shamans’ haste and crit are increasing with each tier level (whereas druids don’t get as much benefit from haste due to haste stacking being multiplicative, and our base haste for rejuv starting at 20%). On some fights, our top shaman now matches my healing, whereas previously he used to be only capable of doing 60% of the amount (using primarily CH).

If not for four-piece T9 allowing rejuv to crit, the scaling comparison would be even worse.

What Blizzard should do is fix the scaling issues. Rejuv does really well early on because of GotEM. But at the later stages, it slows down. So a nerf seems necessary for Naxx and early Ulduar (and for the fact that bad druids can put out a lot of healing in general because it’s a simple concept spamming rejuv), but unnecessary for when people are decked in ToC and IC gear and for when you’re comparing good druids with good priests or shamans.

But what do I know. I only have been raiding with a druid since Molten Core. =)

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.

–GC (src)

In my opinion, it would be a mistake for the development team to evaluate this now. 3.0.2 has nerfed the current content so hard that people are using circle of healing and wild growth so frequently because the tanks are taking virtually no damage at any given moment. Further, it is because a lot of the existing raid encounters were designed with raid-wide damage in mind. What’s more, there could be sarcasm, exaggeration or ignorance underlying a statement like “Please nerf Circle of Healing so I can push another button!”

From Felmyst on, in Sunwell Plateau, the raid-wide damage is enormous. It’s only natural that you’re going to see a large amount of raid-wide heals going off, especially when the tanks are taking so much less damage than they were pre-3.0.2.

Furthermore, Naxxramas and the Obsidian Sanctum are entry level raid dungeons. You can’t possibly balance spells solely around entry level content. Especially when you consider the fact that a lot of Naxxramas’ fundamental encounter design was based around level 60 tools.

So to evaluate CoH and WG now would be a mistake. One of the reasons CoH was changed and WG added was because you only had the group-only CoH and chain healing to deal with high amounts of raid damage. So tack on heroism, and shamans were too highly valued, making the change to CoH and the addition of WG necessary to make sure shamans didn’t dominate the scene also in Wrath. So to go back on this now would be tragic.

While there will definitely be some need to balance the spells against each other in the future, depending on just how well CoH or WG scale in comparison, now is not the time to do it. The current content is not a good benchmark for it. Especially when you additionally consider that the parses are showing high percentages largely because these classes are assigned by their healing leaders to cover raid-wide healing, while others are assigned to focus on the tanks.

When and Why WG Is Used, and When It Is Not: A Look at Specific Encounters

Rage Winterchill

The tank takes virtually no damage in this encounter. Even before 3.0.2, the tank literally had to stand in death and decay to artificially generate rage (or mana, in the case of a paladin tank). Because he hits for virtually nothing and spends a lot of his time casting spells, very little focus is placed on tank healing, which is best combated through single-target heals.

He does, however, cast a frostbolt that entombs someone in a block of ice and deals heavy damage to this target. A druid will not use WG when this happens. I would be casting regrowth, a nature’s swiftnessed healing touch, or rejuvenation followed by a quick swiftmend to keep this person alive.

Death and decay is a raid-wide damage spell. When he uses this spell, I am naturally going to use WG. What’s more, he cannot cast a frostbolt and this spell simultaneously, so I don’t have to worry about looking for the frostbolt the moment it goes up. And because he hits the tank so softly, I have time to cast WG. Often more than once, even.

Kaz’rogal

There is very little raid-wide damage that goes on during this encounter. The only time the raid-wide damage is high is when someone runs out of mana and blows up on people. If there is a high amount of WG or CoH casts during this encounter, it’ is because someone didn’t manage their mana well, or because the raid’s DPS is so poor they didn’t kill him before people started blowing up.

Because my raid kills him so quickly, I spend most of my time keeping single-target HoTs up on the tank. However, even then, because 3.0.2 nerfed the boss’s melee so much, this is usually only when he cleaves the tank. So 3.0.2 has lowered the amount of single-target heals I cast even in this encounter.

Azgalor

Rain of fire is the big damage dealer in this encounter. And because only the cleave does significant damage to the tank, I primarily focus on making sure I have full HoTs up on him only when the silence is incoming. This is because the paladins won’t be healing him at all during the silence, and I don’t want the cleave to gib the tank. Otherwise, outside of the silence, the paladins are focusing on the tank and I’m focusing on dealing with rain of fire damage. WG is the natural choice for this.

Archimonde

I don’t use WG as much on this fight as I do single-target heals. This is because the damage is concentrated on people randomly, given the very nature of doomfire’s random trajectory and the erratic synchronization of various abilities. The only time I do use WG on this fight is when a large group of people standing next to each other get doomfire at the same time. Otherwise, I’m using single-target heals.

He can still hit the tank relatively hard compared to other bosses, even after 3.0.2, so I often throw heals on the tank. Also, as a raid healing leader, I can’t micromanage my assignments given the random nature of the abilities people have to deal with. So everyone is going to be casting single-target heals when the tank looks to be in danger. This is because other people might be busy running from a doomfire, flying through the air, preparing for a fear, or decursing.

With my guild, usually only one or two people in close proximity get doomfire at a time. This is because we’ve been dealing with this encounter for ages and most people are familiar with the fight. So instead of spamming WG, I just throw singular heals. The only time a lot of people get doomfire is when Archimonde throws down a fresh doomfire next to people right before he fears them into it. Otherwise, you have time to get away from an existing doomfire and tremor totem usually pulses before people get anywhere near them.

Supremus

During the “tank and spank” phase, people don’t generally spread out. However, they are also not taking a lot of raid-wide damage. Post-3.0.2, it is primarily the off-tanks that take the damage, as special abilities weren’t nerfed damage-wise. However, the primary tank takes little damage. With the focus mostly on only two people, I’m primarily casting single-target HoTs on them.

During the “loose” phase, when he’s running around at people and spawning volcanoes, people are too spread out sometimes for WG to be profitable. For this reason, I have a mixture of both WG and single-target heals.

If you are seeing parses with a lot of WG during Supremus’ loose phase, it’s because the people have a hard time taking a peak away from their raid frames at the player out on the field. So sometimes people will just spam WG because they’re not cognizant of just how spread out people are from the person they’re casting on. Me? I tend to use player health bars and cast on someone who is actually close to dying near me. I imagine I likely save more people’s lives doing that than someone who is indiscriminately spamming a raid heal (unless it’s CH, because its healing is concentrated on the first target, meaning lack of discrimination is less impactful).

Teron

In 3.0.2, the damage on the tank is a joke. Even before 3.0.2, when he was considered one of the more hard-hitting bosses of BT, you could keep up the tank merely with two people spamming chain heals through him or her. So, post-3.0.2, you can imagine that my raid is mostly assigned to raid healing, of which there is a fairly substantial amount. I think I assigned only one paladin to heal the tank and the rest just threw him heals when it was needed (which was virtually never). So, naturally, people were spamming their group heals in high concentration.

Gurtogg

This fight is designed for raid heals, be they chain heal, wild growth or circle of healing. Even before 3.0.2, I assigned bloodboil by group number, meaning we could use CoH to explicitly deal with the mechanic. With the way the encounter is designed, you are simply going to have people who cast primarily raid-wide heals.

Illidan

This is a fight where the spell use depends on the phase and situation. In phase one, there is pretty much no raid-wide damage. The only damage anyone other than the tank can take is from flame crash (the fiery circle Illidan leaves on the ground), and parasites. Flame crash is avoidable by the melee, so they should take no damage from it if your tank positions well and your melee pays attention. Meanwhile, parasite is cast only on a single target. If the resulting parasite mob spawns are dealt with in the correct manner, no new parasites should spread from it, either. So only single-target healing is used in this phase, typically.

Phase two is a mixture of single-target and raid-wide damage. The two flame tanks are going to be taking heavy single-target damage. However, once you have assigned enough single-target healing to them, the rest of your healing is going to be focusing primarily on the raid-wide damage thrown out. This is due to Illidan’s fireball, which does splash damage. There is not enough space on the grate to spread people evenly out and avoid the splash damage. So the way we deal with it is to clump into groups of four. So roughly five or more people are going to take damage, making WG and CoH ideal in this case.

Then you have the final phases. During the human phase, you have to deal with the same thing as phase one. However, instead of merely parasites and flame crash, you also have agonizing flames. However, if your raid is positioned properly, agonizing flames should not be spread beyond its initial target. So only two or three people should have agonizing at any given point. And because these people should be at range and spread out, WG or CoH is not ideally worth using. For this reason, single-target heals still reign.

During the demon phase, however, it’s a different story. You will have residual agonizing flames from the human phase, and possibly a residual parasite. Following this, the damage will largely be focused on the demon tank (usually a lock). So most of the healing is going to be single-target in nature on the demon tank. But we will use an ability called flame burst, which does damage to everyone in the raid. After a flame burst is when people will definitely be using WG or CoH. Otherwise, single-target heals are still best.

The use of WG and CoH is concentrated during phase two and right after a flame burst. Phase two is less than half the fight, though it is an important part. And flame burst isn’t constantly being cast during his demon phase (which many call “phase four”). So WG and CoH have their place, but they should not dominate the choices people make in an optimal rotation for the fight.

This parse shows masterfully how the design of Illidan makes it so WG does not chew up 70 to 90% of his casts in an ideal mixture of healing spells. Gian did more healing than anyone else on the fight, even the priest whose cast mostly CoH during phase two and then random spots of DPS, renews and shields.

Kil’Jaeden

WG has its place in this fight, no doubt. But mostly when you collapse and spread after collapsing. It also has its place during flame darts and right after the fire blooms go up. But once the fire blooms are up and people react to them, the spread of people is too large for WG to be ideal. At this point, I’m stacking single-target HoTs and casting regrowth to keep them alive.

This is another parse where Gian tops of the meters. The parse shows that WG was ranked third in the number of his casts.

Spell Use Depends on Encounter Design and Assignments

Some of the examples I’ve given weigh heavily towards the over-use of WG and CoH that the developers are worried about. However, I have also given adequate counter-examples as to where the use of those spells depends on encounter design. To change these spells now would likely throw a wrench into the encounters currently being designed, since the raid developers consider what tools people have available to them. This is why DPS in Sunwell was balanced around the pre-3.0.2 use of heroism and why a lot of raid-wide damage was based around chain healing. In order to create a high level of difficulty, the designers had to consider the best tools for the job. And the major problem was that the people who could bring such tools were limited in number. With the change to CoH and WG creates a situation where more people are capable of bringing those tools.

So it astounds me the process through which the ideas have been implemented and reconsidered. As a joke, I used to reply to people asking for advice on how to beat the Twins by saying, “Just throw resto shamans at them.” While amusing, it was absolutely true. That was the best way to approach the encounter. CoH was just too terrible for dealing with flame sear, given that it that flame sear was not limited to groups, as CoH was. This made recruitment frustrating, as the pool of resto shamans was so limited. So the change to CoH and the addition of WG were extremely welcome and have provided a more than solid fix to what was once a huge balancing issue.

But now the development team is concerned with the overuse of such spells, even though the overuse is merely indicative of encounter design and sometimes unideal approaches to healing by individual players. Parses are not suggestive of the optimal approach to healing, merely of what is adequate. And the fact that people are beating content with tons of priests and druids spamming one spell is simply because the content is extremely easy right now. As the encounters become more finely tuned in the later content of Wrath, you will discover people who only spam CoH or WG becoming less and less successful as they continue to use a strategy that is not prime in every situation. When two people in close proximity are taking a steady stream of damage, prayer of mending is better to use for a priest. When one person is taking heavy damage, stacking single-target HoTs is best. Not CoH. Not WG.

I’ve provided ample counter-examples that already exists to show when CoH and WG are not ideal to use to maximize healing throughput. I’ve also provided counter-examples that explain what is best used for keeping people alive, not simply for topping the meters.

CoH and WG for PvP?

I should also perhaps mention PvP, since it’s relevant.

Players are going to adjust their strategies based on the spells people use. If WG and CoH are keeping up a raid in AV against an AoE strategy, players are going to shift to single-target DPS. This is what is called the “assist train” and it is used to combat area of effect healing and force healers to adjust and change the spells they use. I saw this in Dark Age of Camelot, where AoE healing was so strong, and it is a valid strategy to combat it by shifting to an assist train.

Also, WG and CoH will have virtually no place in 2v2 or 3v3. I doubt a lot of priests and druids will even spec for it.

Not Now

Let’s not jump the gun on changing WG and CoH based on statistics. You can’t rely only on statistics to make adjustments to spells. We have yet to even begin to see enough truly complicated encounters to fully understand where they lie over other spells. And, even then, current encounters suggest that WG and CoH isn’t the only thing there is to raid healing. So let’s not consider changing these spells here and now.