So lets first look at the Set Bonus;

• Two Piece – After using Innervate, the mana cost of your healing spells is reduced by 25% for 15 sec
• Four Piece – Your Rejuvenation and Regrowth spells have a 10% chance to Timeslip and have double the normal duration

Two piece looks really interesting actually, will definately change the way we use Innervate going forwards and is a real buff to our mana regen throughout an encounter. Will be interesting to see how much of affect it has in oomform spamming regrowths on everyone

Four Piece is pretty pro too actually, I am interested to see what the internal cooldown is going to be like but it has the potential to be great for raid heals and keeps 2 potentially expensive hots up on a target a lot longer (pro for tank heals too).

Now the look, they have only really shown the skinny version, I have a feeling my cow will make it look a lot less appealing but it’s ok. Nothing stupid about it, but also quite plain:

Now on to the 4.3 patch notes;

Wild Growth healing has been reduced by 20%.
Glyph of Wild Growth now also increases the cooldown on Wild Growth by 2 seconds.

Clearly our logs are filled with Wild Growth goodness right now, a massive nerf but I do like the idea that a Glyph has both a pro and con. It really makes us choose the play style we wish to use, BUT right now we really don’t have a lot of viable glyphs to pick from. So while the idea has merret, they need to provide pros/cons for all glyphs and provide more options for those glyphs.

I was concerned it was going to only affect the hots on the target of the direct heal.. but not so /huzzah!!!

Good news all /TranqDance

Upy

Restoration two-piece Your periodic healing from Lifebloom has a 40% chance to restore 1% of your base mana each time it heals a target.
Restoration four-piece When your Lifebloom blooms, it instantly heals up to 2 nearby injured targets for the same amount.

First thoughts are, yet another set bonus linked to Lifebloom /sigh then WHAT TWO OF THEM?

This is not because it’s not a spell I dont use or that I dislike, it’s because it’s a spell that we are now managing on a single target. I miss my rolling lifebloom across multiple tanks, but I digress.

The 2 piece bonus, I have to say is a little meh, + mana is nice and all, but I love a bonus that directly affects my healing output/throughput. The mana regen portion of it to me looks overpowered, but I’m yet to see the intensity of the raid content, I’m assuming heroic level raid gear will be more than enough for entry level raiding in 4.2. I have a feeling that the 40% is going to be dropped significantly during PTR testing.

The 4 piece really seems like such a situational ability that I wonder how much use we will get from it. If the LB is rolling on our tank, and like most fights the tank is taking a beating while melee are on the bosses sides/arse I wonder what the range on the bloom will be. In fights were you have 2-3 tanks in the same area it has the potential to be very useful but I can see myself switching the 4 piece in/out depending on the encounter.

I get the feeling the 2 piece bonus is only there to take ease the mana costs of letting LB bloom for the 4 piece ability and rerolling on your target after.

The only real way to use this would be to ToL and LB the raid. It’s a lot of prep time and skill to time it to pop JUST right though.

What would I have liked to see instead? Perhaps a bonus that affected the amount of absorbs Living Seed did on your target? But that’s an optional ability so doubt that would ever happen. Perhaps a bonus that directly affected the cast time on some of the annoyingly slow spells like Healing Touch/Nourish? Perhaps a 4 piece that affects one of our raid heals? Perhaps a 4 piece that makes our tree form look sexy? lol

Upy

We agree with the sentiment among some players that Restoration druids and Restoration shaman are lacking in the healing cooldown department. The shaman buff and Power Word: Shield adjustment above should bring all healers reasonably close in terms of throughput. The decision on who to bring then might end up being dictated by the strong cooldowns offered by paladins or priests. This isn’t the kind of thing we can address via a hotfix, but it is something we are looking at for the next major content patch.

The general feeling amongst the community is there are a couple of different options to achieve this;

1. Enhance Barkskin – There has been a lot of talk over the years about Barkskin being castable on other players, this would definately be one way to provide a ‘shield’ type ability and easily lends itself to fullfilling that cooldown/catchup type ability we currently lack.
2. Enhance Mushrooms – mushrooms are a cool little ability, reality is for Resto it’s unused except while stuffing around. Adding a +heal or mitigation to the ability could be a cool way of getting some use out of this spell. Biggest issue here is the GCD’s that would be required to make it work. Maybe a way of forcing the shrooms to auto detonate would remove this restriction.
3. Add a new Proc to an existing ability- Adding a proc type ability that add damage mitigation to Swiftmend or crits from Nourish/Healing Touch is an interesting thought. It would definately encourage the use of more crit in the resto gear sets but may not be as reliable as you would like for a cooldown, but if it is a high proc rate with lesser benefits like 15% damage mitigation per proc to a max of 90% it builds in an interesting mechanic to our healing. Incoming big damage, land 4-5 big heals on a tank prior to the hit and build up the mitigation percentage.
4. Enhance Efflorescence – Either change the effect or add a new damage mitigation to our only new spell in Cata would make this ability more interesting. At the moment it is a weak ability at best, just adding a little (1k per tick if you’re lucky) extra healing, but it definately isnt high on the priority list.

The 4.1 PTR Notes are pretty thin for Druids at the moment but a little sniff of change is there;

Efflorescence has a new spell effect.

I look forward to seeing what they are planning….

Upy

See what I did there with the title? Clever aye? Well for us “trees” this has probably been the most obvious and painful change; we are no longer running around with wind flowing through our branches, we are no longer the easy stacking point (“stack on the bloody tree! how hard is it?!”) and our new OOM (Tree) Form is lackluster at best.

Firstly the appearance is nothing too pretty, in fact what I thought was a starting point for the models (and posted about earlier) became IT. It’s pretty ugly, the movement looks slow and clumsy (and no little root tail to giggle at), and it’s pretty ugly for all involved. Soooo I have taken the Glyph of the Treant just so I dont feel quite so ripped off.

Secondly the situational benefit of the new treeform buff has really been a big let down, in reality the only viable use for treeform is to pop it, roll Lifeblooms on multiple targets and Regrowth VERY SPAREINGLY for fear of going out of mana in 5 seconds. If we get carried away and spam regrowth, we’re OOM and then we get 40 seconds to look at ourselves, remembering good old times where we had a real tree form while the group dies due to lack of heals.

At this stage I’m considering dropping the talent altogether in favour of more mana savings related talents in the other trees (I will talk through my spec in other post).

In saying all this, there may be some value in this form once gear levels and the current mana restrictions ease up a bit.

What does the rest of the community feel about the execution of this change? Did it fall short of your expectations

In terms of the basic healing style we’ve gone from being the epitome of raid healing to being unable to easily manage healing a party of 5 with the expansion. I do not see druids walking into raids after a few heroics and being successful in maintaining a ‘rolling hots raid wide’ style and staying mana viable for an entire encounter.

With the cost of Rejuvenation and Regrowth so steep right now we can only really afford to keep it up on a tank on long fights. Add to that the limitation of our Lifebloom to a single target (outside of Tree Form) and the increase in the cast time of Nourish (2.5 seconds at entry level heroic gear and I just got mine down to 2 seconds with like 1600 haste lol) and those two spells being our two most efficient spells it’s going to be tough to compete with Chain Lightning and other efficient AOE heals out there for raid healing.

We currently stand as being a viable tank healer and competing with Pallys for that spot in raids. I hope this all changes getting to raid level gear but right now I just dont see it, I loved the druid ‘fix-er-upperer’ style of healing where we could fill healing needs and switch mid fight from raid to tanks and back again, I just hope it works out.

Am I just QQ’ing here or do people agree

New Resto druid mastery: Increases the potency of your heals on targets upon which you have a hot.

It benefits both hots and direct heals equally while still supporting Resto being a healer that cares a lot about hots. It encourages layering different spells while disincentivizing Rejuv blanketing.

Examples:

1) You cast Regrowth on someone who has a Rejuv = bonus healing.
2) You cast Nourish on someone who has a Lifebloom = bonus healing.
3) You Swiftmend a Rejuv = bonus healing.
4) You cast a Rejuv on someone who does not have a Regrowth, LB or WG on them = no bonus healing.
5) You cast Rejuv on someone who has a Rejuv = no bonus healing. (You merely refreshed Rejuv.)
6) You cast a Wild Growth = bonus healing on those with preexisting hots.

It is very much good news for us druid who were feeling a little beaten up going into the Expansion.

I have confirmed that all the Bliza hate is in fact my fellow Druid’s fault from Bizarro… Tohaita Said;

Well.. I was in a PuG with a couple Blizz Devs, they were healing, talking shit how good they were. In the end i beat them just 5-1ing and keeping 2 stacks of LBs on the tanks, they got mad, said they were going to nerf druid HoTs so I can’t heal.

If you wanted to post all hate here I’ll make sure he gets it (square in the nuts?)

When running the 5man on Upy it was easy peasy, mana was manageable, the big thing I noticed was how slow Nourish seemed, especially when comparing it to Regrowth. I get the feeling Nourish will be used a lot less by myself in raiding situations.

I also noticed that tree form does last a really long time in the encounter, longer than it feels it should, but thank god they have removed the movement penalties because it would mean that tree form could only be used in situation you knew you wouldnt have to move for the next minute or so.

When running the prebuild mana was an issue, I could put that down to the gear being relatively crap but maybe also I got thrown into a pretty tough 5man boss fight with a bunch of people (myself included) who knew little to nothing about the fight.

I look forward to playing some more later If Live continues to slow down I may even try levelling Upy up to see how it feels, I’ll probably go owl for levelling.

Upy

Here are some pics for you

Casting in Cow Form is a little /yawn but some nice effects

Enter tree form and … sigh … it’s the same tree as before? wtf? I thought they were going to do something interesting with it. I was actually surprised at how long tree form lasted when I was playing… but I guess we will notice when it’s on cooldown more than anything