Ok so I thought I’d throw my 2 cents worth onto the Interweb Understand that these are just my own opinions on each of the changes that affect us trees.

All heal-over-time spells (HoTs) will benefit from crit and haste innately in Cataclysm. Hasted HoTs do not reduce their duration, but instead add additional HoT ticks. Haste will also benefit Energy generation while in cat form.

Well given we have all pushed ourself to hit soft haste cap this is a nice change, this means that the cost of casting (more frequent refreshes as haste increases) does not change, but our longer ticking hot’s now really become powerful health buffers. Imagine get to cap and having Regrowth, Rejuv, Wild Growth and Lifebloom all ticking every second (I’m assuming ticks will not be quicker than GCD cap), thats some serious heals ticking over on a tank with incoming Spike Damage or buffer for raid with incoming AoE.

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.

Am I disappointed that I wont have another cool spell to hit while healing? A little. Do I understand where Bliz are coming from?

Yeah sure, we are possible the most versitile healing classes around.

Druids will lose Abolish Poison with the dispel mechanics change, but Restoration druids will gain Dispel Magic (on friendly targets) as a talent. All druids can still remove poisons with Cure Poison and remove curses with Remove Curse.

So we no longer have a hot dispell for Poison, meh. I have found little use for this type of dispel with the exception of fights where their is a stun and poisons floating around. I like that we will be getting an additional dispell type and it will apparantely be linked to a single spell (? i think I read that somewhere). Nice change overall.

Restoration druids will have a new talent called Efflorescence, which causes a bed of healing flora to sprout beneath targets that are critically healed by Regrowth.

So after pushing us towards Nourish this whole expansion they are pushing us back to Regrowth, interesting idea, will be interesting to see more details about how this ability to work, what will my pretty flowers heal for? Will they be an AoE heal? I think it’s a cool concept but will await talent details (as we are getting a big overhaul) to see if it becomes a standard ability in a raid spec.

HoT Scale Healing: HoTs will do increased healing on more wounded targets. The mechanic is similar to that of the Restoration shaman, but with HoTs instead of direct heals. In Cataclysm, we anticipate druids using a greater variety of their spells so there is a distinction between healing and HoT healing.

Sounds hot in my opinion, it has the potential to be wasted the majority of the time given the move away from spike damage in raids etc. Cool idea.

Tree of Life is changing from a passive talent to a cooldown-based talent, similar to Metamorphosis. Mechanically, it feels unfair for a druid to have to give up so much offense and utility in order to be just as good at healing as the other classes who are not asked to make that trade. We are exploring the exact benefit the druid gets from Tree of Life. It could strictly be better healing, or it could be that each heal behaves slightly different. You also will not be able to be banished in Tree of Life form (this will probably be true of Metamorphosis as well). Additionally, we would like to update the Tree of Life model so that it feels more exciting when you do decide to go into that form. Our feeling is that druids rarely actually get to show off their armor, so it would be nice to have at least one spec that looked like a night elf or tauren (and soon troll or worgen) for most of the time.

Ohhhhkay so this is the biggy and the change that’s caused such a stir… Let’s start with some facts and then work towards person opinion

Fact is this is actually a massive buff for us trees (oh shit can’t say that anymore ); our abilities and talents will be scaled to ensure we are at least on par with our abilities in tree form currently. We THEN get a lust type ability to pop tree and go nuts on healing, that does mean we will have a period of time that we are able to heal with significant buffs to what we currently do.

Ok onto personal opinion, I don’t give a rats arse about seeing my armour; I do think the model needs work though so that part of it sounds promising. I love the concept of changing form to heal, I love my form overall (even though I’d like to be able to customise it a bit) and I will be saddened to lose it.

In saying that GC has also said this:

We might (*might*) consider a minor glyph that kept the visual of the old tree form in some fashion even when not using the Tree of Life cool down.

My gut feeling is this is the best way to go, it solves both problems and would keep those like myself who like the tree form from raging on forums 

Overall I think that the changes will be interesting, I like the majority of it although really feel that the removal of the form is going to be a real shame to something that made us unique.

Upy