This is a multi-opinion post - so bear with me .. ill try as best as i can to not make this a wall of text, however, i am in between classes and typing fast after reading the t10 / 3.3 changes

now let me start off in saying that, yes, trees have become very efficient healers. However, and correct me if i am wrong, there, now more then ever, seems to be a hierarchy of resto druids.

you have druids that are amazing - you have druids that just seem to hot blanket - and you have druids that should definitely reroll.

the reason i am saying this is that i have run, over the past 3 weeks, several raids where there were multiple resto DRUIDS. [i am comparing druids ---> druids atm, not to pallys or shamans, or priests]

And these druids were within 50 points of my gear score [yes i checked] . however their healing was so spread out. on most fights i am consistently above 5k, but on shorter fights i go over 7k hps easily and have topped out over 9k hps - the other druids in the raids were barely hitting 3k hps and were almost at the bottom of the healing meter.

now dont take what i am saying as my ego talking. i will tell you right now that i have been blown away by other resto druids. and now i will also say have been completely destroyed by hooly priests.

i am now looking at the druid t10 compared to t9 as well as to other classes in what blizz wants to do in 3.3

resro idol t9 : rejuv procs a 234 sp increase
t9 set bonus [4p] : gives rejuv the ability to crit

blizz response : we did not intend for druids to use rejuv as much as they are .

did i miss something ? that's like giving a child a lollipop and saying that you didn't intend for them to eat it.

do some druids do nothing but roll rejuv on the raid - yes .. are they lower on the healing meter then another druid optimizing all their spells - yes.

my first question would be ... WHAT DID YOU EXPECT TO HAPPEN.

with the priest t10 :
Priest
•2 piece bonus - Your Flash Heal critical strikes cause the target to heal for 25% of the healed amount over 9 sec.
•4 piece bonus - Your Circle of Healing and Penance spells have a 20% chance to cause your next Flash Heal cast within 6 sec to reset the cooldown on your Circle of Healing and Penance spells.

dont you think that 75% of all priests are going to gravitate to FOL spam >> COH spam?

not the smart ones mind you, but the other 75% that are simply spamming raid.

what is the response going to be ? 'we didnt intend for priests to use COH as much as they are'

Back to the Resto Dru for a second :
we all know that pvp ruins pve .... prediction within 4 weeks of 3.3 , if not sooner

all classes complain that r-druid hots are too much to eat thru atm w/ a respectable amount of resil. Now you've given rejuv the ability to scale w/ spell haste - i GUARANTEE that you have pvp resto drus take some pve pieces to get their haste as high as possible ... and have that 2.2-2.5k rejuv tick to the point where your attacks arent making a dent.

is this a QQ .. no .. i have not been disappointed by blizz yet. It just truly seems that Blizz do not know where to place resto dru's in the grand scheme of things.

i have outhealed every other class .. and have been outhealed by every other class. imo - it doesnt have much to do with balancing the class as much as it has to do with people spam-abusing one heal [on any class] and calling themselves a healer.

imo - there is a HUGE HUGE diff between a healer , and someone that rolled a healing class.

was the change to Gift of the earth mother needed - imo - yes

do i think that in reaction you will see tree dru's dropping either [seed of life] or [revitalize] and going into Celestial Focus - yes.

do i wish i had time to finish my thoughts =] yes .. but i have to go back to class.

I can't believe I read the whole thing. Do you have a point, exactly?

1) Yes. Some druids are better than others, just like some players of any class/spec are better at what they do. You're just now figuring this out?

2) re: rejuv, and "what did you expect". See this recent blue post:

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Q u o t e:
I think our dislike for Rejuv blanketing gets oversold on these forums. We nerfed Rejuv because Rejuv was too good. Druids do have a lot of heals and ideally they would use all of them (and HT proponents even crop up from time to time). On the other hand, it's challenging given that when a relic or set bonus props up one spell, that is probably going to be a popular spell. We're fine with that to some extent. It's interesting when certain pieces or tiers of gear lead you to want to change up which spells you favor.

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3) I think the above quote answers your priest question, to some extent.

4) @pvp - I don't care. I get the impression that we're not the go-to 2s choice anymore, and I hope that's the case. If we're struggling in pvp there's less of a chance they'll screw up my ability to raid effectively.

5) I agree that the GotEM change made sense, although I hope they find a way to properly balance the dual nerfs of 12s rejuv and our longer HoT global cooldowns, whether or not that means reverting the rejuv duration nerf.

6) re: CF - I'm not completely sold on that yet. People may or may not take CF to compensate for the increased GCD the GotEM gives us, but the main reason one would want to stack haste is the rejuv glyph that allows haste to affect the span between tics. Faster rejuv tics mean more single target HPS, but it also means we'll be able to roll rejuv on fewer targets. I think a lot of it depends on the mechanics of the fights in ICC - if they warrant blanketing rejuv, we might eschew the haste glyph in my opinion.

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Q u o t e:
Leaf! I get it!

Because you're a tree and stuff!

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Q u o t e:
3) I think the above quote answers your priest question, to some extent.

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The first sentience understates a lot of DRUIDS dislike for Rejuv blanketing. I have other spells, and like the chance to use them.

The last sentience is directly contradicted by the fact that T8, T9, and T10 all buff rejuv, so apparently Bliz doesn't find people switching up spells all that interesting.

The rest of the post was fluff that didn't really say anything.

I don't really care about what Bliz wants here. What I want is to feel like my best performance in a raid comes from using my whole toolbox of spells.

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Q u o t e:

I don't really care about what Bliz wants here. What I want is to feel like my best performance in a raid comes from using my whole toolbox of spells.

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Yep, I understand. The OP's sentiment seemed to be directly related to blizz's intention, which is why I quoted that post.

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Q u o t e:

The last sentience is directly contradicted by the fact that T8, T9, and T10 all buff rejuv, so apparently Bliz doesn't find people switching up spells all that interesting.

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Yoru confused by the fact that blzzard is trying to acheive two seperate and distinct goals.
They want druids to desire crit and haste more. T10 bonus of crit to rejuv does that. They could have made it say Healing touch now crits at 200%, Would people suddenly use healing touch more and get more crit? No they would have kept on rejuving the raid and stacking SP/spirit. Both t10 set bonus and GotE are directed at acheiving this.

Their 2nd objective is to make Druids use more of their toolbox. They have pushed Nourish till its on the border of massivily OP, but druids still dont use it. I do find it interesting that even GC talks about reversing the "nerf" despite it being called a Bug fix in patch notes.

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Q u o t e:


Yoru confused by the fact that blzzard is trying to acheive two seperate and distinct goals.
They want druids to desire crit and haste more. T10 bonus of crit to rejuv does that. They could have made it say Healing touch now crits at 200%, Would people suddenly use healing touch more and get more crit? No they would have kept on rejuving the raid and stacking SP/spirit. Both t10 set bonus and GotE are directed at acheiving this.

Their 2nd objective is to make Druids use more of their toolbox. They have pushed Nourish till its on the border of massivily OP, but druids still dont use it. I do find it interesting that even GC talks about reversing the "nerf" despite it being called a Bug fix in patch notes.

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Q u o t e:
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.

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Q u o t e:
Yoru confused by the fact that blzzard is trying to acheive two seperate and distinct goals.
They want druids to desire crit and haste more. T10 bonus of crit to rejuv does that. They could have made it say Healing touch now crits at 200%, Would people suddenly use healing touch more and get more crit? No they would have kept on rejuving the raid and stacking SP/spirit. Both t10 set bonus and GotE are directed at acheiving this.

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You're right that that crit bonus wouldn't get healing touch used, but if the bonus was say, 1 second off the cast time of HT, I think the builds that came out to take advantage of that might get... interesting.

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Q u o t e:
say, 1 second off the cast time of HT

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Well, it won't be that, at any rate. Naturalist + glyph of HT + this tier bonus would mean instant HT. Being able to direct heal on the move without any cooldown would make us beyond OP, especially in arena.

The only thing wrong with treeform in PvE is that I can't use a deviate delight.

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Q u o t e:

And these druids were within 50 points of my gear score [yes i checked] . however their healing was so spread out. on most fights i am consistently above 5k, but on shorter fights i go over 7k hps easily and have topped out over 9k hps - the other druids in the raids were barely hitting 3k hps and were almost at the bottom of the healing meter.

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Healing is not like damage, there is a limited amount of healing that can be done. If you are sniping heals and aggressively healing everyone, others are likely to let you instead of playing the "who can rack up the most overhealing" meta game.

Meters are a terrible way to gauge healing.

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Q u o t e:
Well, it won't be that, at any rate. Naturalist + glyph of HT + this tier bonus would mean instant HT. Being able to direct heal on the move without any cooldown would make us beyond OP, especially in arena.

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Ah, but it would definitely get people using HT, now wouldn't it? ;p

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Q u o t e:


Yoru confused by the fact that blzzard is trying to acheive two seperate and distinct goals.
They want druids to desire crit and haste more. T10 bonus of crit to rejuv does that. They could have made it say Healing touch now crits at 200%, Would people suddenly use healing touch more and get more crit? No they would have kept on rejuving the raid and stacking SP/spirit. Both t10 set bonus and GotE are directed at acheiving this.

Their 2nd objective is to make Druids use more of their toolbox. They have pushed Nourish till its on the border of massivily OP, but druids still dont use it. I do find it interesting that even GC talks about reversing the "nerf" despite it being called a Bug fix in patch notes.

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Plenty of druids use nourish.... when we tank heal. We just don't get put on tank healing duty too often. If I am put on tank healing duty then nourish is usually my #1 heal. If I'm on raid healing duty it's #1 rejuv, #2 WG and then regrowth/nourish/swiftmend etc... depending on how the fight goes.

People act like we just ignore this OMG amazing heal out of spite or something.

Wow, I never realized how many druids do the blanketing thing.

When I'm on raid healing duty, I heal who needs it with rejuv...regrowth if they are still hurting bad. Wild growth as often as possible for the hurt. And Nourish if they're falling too fast.

For tank healing I put up rejuv and regrowth on the tank and have it rolling. If some spike damage comes in...I nourish till it's not an issue while refreshing rejuv and regrowth. If I really want the tank to be protected I pop a lifebloom on him. Maybe. The only thing I never touch...ever....is healing touch.

And I've healed every fight in the game successfully. I don't know what my meter scores are, and frankly, I don't give a damn. People rely too much on meters to determine if a player is good or not. Bad practice, imo.

If you live through the fight and down the boss...you're doing your job. Period.

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Q u o t e:
Wow, I never realized how many druids do the blanketing thing.

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Way too many of them use the blanket strategy in all situations. The problem with it is that not only is it so mindless any retard can do it, it will almost invariably leave you in a competitive position on meters as well. Most raid leads, not being healers, won't recognize that there's a problem here.

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Q u o t e:
If you live through the fight and down the boss...you're doing your job. Period.

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I think you knew even as you said that that you were vastly oversimplifying. Clearly a healer could potentially half-ass his healing, concentrate on staying alive, and be carried by the rest of the healing team. As one example. The real problem, however, is that while quantifying a healer's effectiveness is never as simple as looking at a meter, most raid leads dont' know what else to use.

wow . i havent looked at this post since i wrote it. obviously there is a lot i need to clarify on as, more times then not, on these posts people suddenly develop downsyndrome in the reasoning portion of their brain.

i have pve'd and pvp'd resto since ive had this toon.

no i was not sniping heals

yes many druids blanket consistently w rejuv like retards ..

hmmm .. lets see what else.

was it 'fluff' no .. that would be the %**% below your mothers waist. btw tell her i have a weed wacker if she wants to trim that.

it was an opinion directed towards the fact that every time blizz gives us something, they state they didnt intend us to use it. That being said, i stated that i think blizz doesnt know what it wants to do with us.

yes nourish is extremely op.

even with an instant cast healing touch .. no not the talented one.. no druid would use it in a regular situation. it would be THE go to 'oh %**%' spam button being that healing touch is ~700 mana cost compared to nourishes 500 .. please .. go ahead .. spam that heal ... when your done ill finish up healing for you.

regrowths on anything but the tank ? lol @ you

go ahead keep casting your 1.7-1.8 sec heal .. lol ill throw a rejuv / sw or WG / nourish for 10-11k eat that heal while you still have .3 seconds on your cast bar. I like to call the druids that use regrowth on the raid 'tree huggers'. Yes in reference to hippies, due to the fact that they dont know what they are doing or why, but they think they are helping.

hmmmmm .. anything else. OH the fix to GOTEM - it was def op bec druid could have ~505 haste +5/5 GOTEm and have their one sec GCD self buffed ... this haste amount was much much less with a pally or boomkin in the group. easily obtainable.

Now with GOTEM providing 10% spell haste .. the druid goal will be ~700 haste ( i believe is the number dru theorycrafters came up with) for that same 1 sec GCD for your hots. a little harder to obtain HOWEVER - DID NOT SOLVE THE PROBLEM OF DRUIDS CHOOSING HASTE > CRIT AT ALL. and a few extremely leet dru's that i know are all discussing 3/3 cel focus to lighten the blow.

i wish you guys would either :
1) know the subject you are discussing
2) have experience
3) do a little math to back up your claims

anything else -

oh !! /AGREE WITH YOU ALL DAY THAT METERS ARE A TERRIBLE TOOL WHEN USED IN THE WRONG HANDS.

Disc priests are subject to this all the time. ive had simply amazing amazing disc priests that have had over 1,000,000 absorbed damage.

oh to the person that said 'i cant beleive i read all this' ... cant remember who you are, youre not that important .. im surprised too. in fact, im surprised you can dial a phone and im very proud of you for even knowing how to turn on your computer.


iight keep posting .. ill be back to rip your responses apart in a week or so.

Like so many healers, I think you are putting too much emphasis on healing meters. Recount and other healing analysis tools are useful for tweaking your own playstyle and gear.

The only question that matters is, did the boss die? If you are going absolutely crazy with your heals so that no one is in trouble, should another healer still waste his mana to heal someone that doesn't need it?

If the raid is consistently wiping it might be time to break out the HPS meters and see who isn't pulling their weight other than that; who cares?

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Q u o t e:

1) Rejuv was too good. We nerfed it. The change got labeled as a bug fix, because technically it was a bug. We didn't mean to buff Rejuv's duration but once we did we didn't think it was breaking anything for a time so we let it stay. For 3.3 we decided it was breaking things and reduced the duration. We understood the confusion this caused with the community by labeling it a bug fix so we changed the patch note to no longer refer to it as a bug fix. It doesn't really matter what it was called -- it was a nerf.

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Fair enough

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Q u o t e:

2) In the same patch, we decided to change Gift of the Earth Mother because it was adding a gratuitous amount of haste and at the same time making druids avoid haste where they could. We have been too generous with some of the haste talents that coupled with gear and buffs are causing problems.

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I may not be all druids, but I disagree on this point. Our tier sets that gave me crit over haste made me cringe. My personal order of priority is Spellpower > spirit > haste. I actually saved up badges and bought my 245 tier shoulders which were a downgrade so I can replace my tier chest with a haste chest.

Edit: I think it's because the only spells that crit make up a small margin of our healing output, and those abilities have talented crit rate.

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Q u o t e:

5) Resto druids have a lot of heal spells. Which ones you go to the most is going to be a function of things like set bonuses, idols, your role in the group as well, as well as the encounters themselves. Druids healing the raid currently seem to use a lot of Rejuv and Wild Growth while those healing tanks use a lot of Nourish and perhaps even Lifebloom. Lifebloom still gets a lot of use in PvP. Regrowth has slipped off the radar a little, IMO, but it has been good at various points in LK and I don't think it would be that hard to bring it back (and we'll see what the GotEM change does). Bringing it back would probably slide something else down the bar, at least temporarily. We're pretty much okay with that. Healing Touch (and maybe Tranq) is the only Resto spell for which we're really not interested in carving off a major raid-healing niche. It still has situational uses with NS or in 5-player dungeons.

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It's because (imo) being able to heal 15 people at once is ideal. I don't ever really use any "big heals" unless it's nourish on p3 Anub or SM for a quick spike heal. I just don't ever need to. A pally/shaman/priest usually throws the clinch heals. In my head my heals work as a buffer, or an extended time period that one of these other classes has to heal the target to full. This may not be your idea of restoration druid design, but it works for me, and efficiently at that.

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Q u o t e:

6) Particularly angry druids like to talk about Nourish getting "shoved down their throat" or whatever. We added Nourish because we recognized the druid need for a "Flash Heal." Healing Touch is too long to cast without NS and both NS and Swiftmend have a cooldown. The hots all do great healing, and they can definitely save someone's life, but they just aren't reliable for e.g. someone being focused by faction champions. In the BC era where we basically mandated that druids are just one arm of the healing machine that must also include paladins, priests and shamans it was okay to have a very narrow niche. In a world of 10-player raids, we want you to be able to heal with say 2 Resto druids and a Disc priest. "Hey, I'm just here to hot the raid," is fine if it works for your group, but that can't be the only thing that works. (And this applies to all 5 healing specs.)

Hope that clears things up. :)

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I ran a totc yesterday with two resto druids healing, on normal 10 man apart from some tank damage hots was enough to keep everyone up at all times.