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

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

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

When it comes to big ugly lumps of mutated flesh that hit for up to 30k, relying on avoidance stats which ‘make it a little less likely’ that you’ll take a few consecutive hits over any given interval starts to look a little less attractive than stacking ‘Effective Health’ (EH) stats which give you a little more room to survive those consecutive hits which will inevitably land.

There’s not all that much you can do to tweak your EH upward short of upgrading your gear or cramming a few more stamina gems in, but if you don’t usually use two stamina trinkets, now would be a good time to equip that second lump of pure health – or a Glyph of Indomitability (cheap at 50 Triumph Badges).

Consumables and Raid Buffs

The other place to go looking for that little edge, is consumables and raid buffs.

Indestructible Potions are rather amazing, and should be tossed back like candy in any content that’s putting stress on you healers with direct physical damage. Perfect for Festergut, you should be able to keep that bonus 3.5k AC up for the entire time you’re taking hits by simply drinking your first potion a few seconds before the pull.

Drinking your first potion while out of combat might ‘waste’ a few seconds of the two minute buff, but ensures that your potion cooldown will be usable again two minutes into the fight, allowing you to get up to 4 minutes coverage – enough that neither tank should have to take a hit without this buff up on this fight.

The two main raid buffs to triple check before pulling are Devotion Aura, and Stoneskin Totem – preferably with the Protection and Enhancement talents ‘Improved Devotion Aura’ and ‘Guardian Totems’ buffing their effect.

There are plenty of other raid buffs you don’t want to be without – but those two are the most likely to ‘go missing’, and are both very strong buffs when faced with hard hitting melee attacks.

AP Debuff

2/2 Vindication, 5/5 Feral Aggression, 5/5 Improved Demoralising Shout, 2/2 Improved Curse of Weakness

Make sure someone in the raid is keeping up the fully talented version of one of these debuffs with as close to 100% uptime as possible. Your friendly Neighbourhood Prot or Ret Paladin is the most likely suspect, thanks to the relative ease of application – but if you can’t guarantee that someone else will be keeping it up for you (or won’t be running around with a spore for long enough for their debuff to drop off!) then it may be worth considering spec’ing into this yourself where possible.

I find Auracle a very nice little addon for tracking debuffs like this.

Ok, so you’ve Piled on as much mitigation and health as you can, the boss is hitting as softly as he’s likely to – what now?

Well, aside from doing your best to save your cooldowns for your turn at tanking the three-inhale phase (during which you’ll probably want to be chaining your survival tricks together right up until he burps on everyone) the only things left to do is try and kick out as much damage as possible. Try to line up a salvation for the tank swap and do your best to return some of the love. With tanks capable of breaking 5k DPS on this one we suddenly become a realisitic part of the effort to beat the enrage timer

Introducing Katjia this is what he has to say about himself;

I’ve played a Feral Bear from Maraudon through Stratholme, Kara to the Black Temple and onward into Northrend.

I certainly enjoy playing Balance, Restoration and Feral DPS, but Tanking (10% Meticulous attention to gearing, 20% Gleefully ripping the Face/Kneecaps/Toe-Hairs off the big ugly standing in front of you, 65% Finding bloody good healers you trust and 5% not standing in the fire) has been my primary focus since TBC.

I may not be an expert at all things Druid – napkin math is about the limit of my theorycrafting – but if I don’t know something, I’ll probably know where to go to find out more about it.

If you have any questions or topics you would like Katija to cover please post your comment here and we’ll see what he can do for you

For the first time since hitting 80 I will be running with 2 resto specs.

Spec 1
I think this will be my raid healing type spec. I have dropped Natures Grace and put it into Revitalize just for the mana/rage return etc.
http://ptr.wowhead.com/?talent#0VG0zZZf0fufuxiuVIsVo:xkA

Spec 2
Tank heals. Pretty much as my spec is now.
http://ptr.wowhead.com/?talent#0VG0uZZf0fufuxiuVhsVo:Lkx

Spec 3 (maybe)

Raid: http://ptr.wowhead.com/?talent#0VGzu0hZZf0fuduxVuVhsVo:xkA
getting into Celestrial Focus for the Haste
Spec 4

Tank: http://ptr.wowhead.com/?talent#0VG0uZZf0furuxiuVusVo:xkL

Update: Fixed Glyph in Tank Spec and added 2 more options