Resto Druid - Legion Talents

[stormgust]

I never said it was super good, but yeah you totally "spend" time on casting rejuvs, it's not like you always have 2 up, and you should certainly have a few more up, 6-8 is certainly a thing in mythic+ dungeon, with 20 sec duration on rejuvs, + 25% with refresh,

It caps at 50% without germination, and you'd be casting up to x rejuvenations you may not even need (i.e. those targets do not require healing to begin with) just to trigger the effect, at which point you'd be outright be better of to waste the mana on regrowth to begin with. Not that you'd waste mana in 5+ on regrowth anyway, if you can just opt for MoC there (or: CW+ Flourish). Honestly, about any other combination of talents yields a signifcantly better option than Abundance, even if it's merely because it is signifcantly less restrictive in use (well, though usually it's not only that, but also provides significant throughput advantages).

and even at 7-8 stacks its fine, its still okay spot healing with 0.2-0.6 sec cast time, closer to 0,8-1 sec it starts to become weak.

It's gonna yield GCD clipping, and that just plays incredible bad.

True, and yet Abundance will be a go-to talent for a lot of people with this switch. Simply because there are a ton of situations where having Inner Peace

That's because Inner Peace inherently is rather weak given the current state of raid CD's.

or Spring Blossoms is simply not wanted. And even though Abundance is just as bad (don't mistake this for a defense for this horrible talent, because it's lame), it'll be a go to talent for people due to it's utility.

The problem is, as I said above, any other talent combination is signifcantly less restrictive, and will yield superior results.

I'll once again bring in the PvP crowd; that will look at this talent for a minor, yet noticeable throughput increase compared to the alternatives (especially now that it doesn't compete with ToL / SotF anymore).

You can claim that "that's what the pvp talents are for" but that's a completely irrelevant argument, as PvPers (and certain small group PvE'ers) will have to choose talents here as well.

I don't see why PvPers should have >1 talent tree available to adapt their gameplay, and for PvE we're going to be stuck with a single talent build. Sorry, but if a talents only use is in PvP, put it in the PvE tree. If there's no room for it there - especially if it's because all option theres are better - then you really should ask the question wether this talent is any good to begin with.

I think you'd be surprised how popular Abundance might become after they swapped it with cultivation.

Even if it somehow became more popular than Abundance (doubtful compare e.g. the SoO set bonus, you simply do not need that many direct heals to begin with, even in 5's, as you procede along a strict priority in spells - which can be further skewed in favor of other abilites by less restrictive talents), the swap still has some severe implications on T75, i.e. Cult triggers when you'd use ToL, yet has no uptime restriction, provides higher throughput due to an additional mastery stack and both for a large fraction get their value due to the same spell (high trigger treshold all hold this problem due to the mastery stack being essentially permanent then, and at low values, you hardly ever get use out of the talent, as that's a state you ideally would not want to see that often).

So in a best case, they didn't change anything, slot 3 on T75 is still dead, and T75 still has the same option, to the more likely outcome I think is: T75 -> Cultivation, T90 -> SB, that is they eliminated choice. Fun fact: the culprit here isn't so much the talents in question (well it partially is for abundance), but how this thing called Harmony yields significantly higher value on certain talents, than it does to others. I don't see this changing, unless those talents get turned into "counts as 1 mastery stack" (and that has some severe implications on how those talents perform on a high haste/low mastery build ...)

[Nerxyrall]

Not sure if you or i didnt get his post 100%, but i think in essence he just said :
"Abundance is crap, but if you dont use efflo(spring blossoms) or tranq(inner peace) then abundance is just (even if it yields only a little advantage in singel-target-direct-heals)the talent you pick."
That might occur in 5-man with heavy movement or pvp.
(Just curious why you picked his post apart, saying things you said probaly 10 post before and he was not really disagreeing with you, maybe the pvp talent part)

Another or more a similar topic:
Cultivation now competes with very strong talent-choices. Has anybody information about raid testing/encounter design in regard of usefulness?
Like previously said, when you would use ToL, Cultivation is kicking in "automaticly" in those moments, will that be a real choice, or are the dmg patterns more agreeing with 2 Raidcds every 3min?
Can you clarify your ToL vs Cultivation argumention pls, not sure i get it 100% in your previous post (sry not a native speaker)

[theburned]

Another or more a similar topic:
Cultivation now competes with very strong talent-choices. Has anybody information about raid testing/encounter design in regard of usefulness?
Like previously said, when you would use ToL, Cultivation is kicking in "automaticly" in those moments, will that be a real choice, or are the dmg patterns more agreeing with 2 Raidcds every 3min?
Can you clarify your ToL vs Cultivation argumention pls, not sure i get it 100% in your previous post (sry not a native speaker)

There is very little arguementation more than speculation, due to no real testing with the new talents, but in essence:

Best case scenario, cultivation is useless compared to ToL and wont be picked
Worst case scenario, mastery stacking becomes too useful and SB + cultivation is the go to talents.

[Tiberria]

The issue with the argument for using Abundance is - in exactly what cases is not using Efflo going to be anything other than playing very poorly? Efflo has significantly higher HPM than anything else we have in our toolkit and Spring Blossoms buffs it by a significant amount (plus adds mastery healing on every target in Efflo). Even if it's only effective on 2 targets, or even if we have to recast it every 15-20 seconds because of movement, it is still going to a better use of mana than anything else in our toolkit. There's just no reason not to take it unless you want/need the 2 minute Tranq cycles. It is always giving you a throughput boost, whereas Abundance only gives you anything when you are casting seldom used single target heals.

Also, even if you want single target healing, I strongly suspect that Spring Blossoms will outscale Abundance. You can just drop it on the tanks, and it will add the HoT, plus add an extra mastery stack (probably worth 12%-15% extra healing on tanks). You would probably need 20-25%+ healing done from HT/Regrowth on tanks/single targets before Abundance outperforms Spring Blossoms for single target. I strongly doubt you will get that much healing from the single target heals; 80%+ will come from HoTs.

- - - Updated - - -

It's really impossible to properly evaluate Cultivation until we see damage patterns and average health pools. It's unlikely to outperform Incarnation or SoTF (especially 4 piece SoTF) unless it's a fight where the entire raid sits sub 100% HP for extended periods. Cultivation would be a terrible talent if it went live at any point during WoD or MoP, because the damage patterns just wouldn't support it. Plus, historically, burst healing cooldowns like Incarnation have been superior to baseline passives, because most fights - even on Mythic - tend to have long phases where people mostly sit topped and then shorter more healing intensive phases when the healing actually matters. Unless they significantly retune the damage patterns/fight cadence from what we have seen since virtually WoTLK, I don't see Cultivation ever being used.

[Pyrianis]

Something I wondered while reading through the theorycrafting blue responses. Does the Dreamwalker RPPM benefit from haste? If it doesn't, it should probably be brought up along with the scales-with-attack-power error.

Moreover, is it possible to tell this from RPPM tooltips? Like how the haste-affected cooldowns are now green?

[stormgust]

It's really impossible to properly evaluate Cultivation until we see damage patterns and average health pools. It's unlikely to outperform Incarnation or SoTF (especially 4 piece SoTF) unless it's a fight where the entire raid sits sub 100% HP for extended periods. Cultivation would be a terrible talent if it went live at any point during WoD or MoP, because the damage patterns just wouldn't support it. Plus, historically, burst healing cooldowns like Incarnation have been superior to baseline passives, because most fights - even on Mythic - tend to have long phases where people mostly sit topped and then shorter more healing intensive phases when the healing actually matters. Unless they significantly retune the damage patterns/fight cadence from what we have seen since virtually WoTLK, I don't see Cultivation ever being used.

I don't think you need to know the damage patterns to judge wether you pick ToL or Cultivation, because the trigger condition of Cultivation is usually met on any phase where you want to use ToL (even more likely with the reduction on proper raid CD's). The argument really is, that in any case where you'd want to use ToL for it's throughput (not mana saving), the Cultivation trigger condition is trivially met, and then Cultivation outperforms ToL by a rather large margin (If the cultivation HoT is active for 18s, that's essentially a 125% boost to rejuvenation, not counting mastery stack).

Sure you could hope for the HoT, trigger condition and whatnot to be changed to differ it from ToL, but what you really have there is:
triggers at trivial values (>65% HP or so), at which point you couldn't really have the HoT yield anything but trivial healing (meter padding), i.e. it's akin to a permanent additional HoTstack taged on to rejuvenation (-> may not compete with ToL in burst healing anymore, but instead - depending on how high your mastery is - it's going to overtake SotF without 4T19 most likely).
triggers at even lower values (<35%), at which point it occurs quite rarely, thus neccesarily having to provide significantly more healing here. This could see occasional use in PvE, but the problematic aspect here is, that it likely would be rather ridiculous in PvP and thus is not a reasonably option.

But anyway, just looking at the different trigger conditions, to me it seems, that this talent significantly better fits onto the T90 row:
-Inner Peace was aimed at the burst heavy damage patterns/ToL (targets drop extremely, you need a real raid CD - at least prior to the paradigm shift on raid CD's)
-Cultivation is to be tused when damage is slightly more concentrated
-SB for consistent aura fights.

Just repeating myself here, but they really should do some proper rearanging of our talents: move the "weak" talents onto one tier (Abundance could see more regular use next to CW, similar for Stonebark - Prosperity is a lost cause) and rearrange again so that the talents increasing HoT availability (it's problematic for talent selection/tuning, if only one talent on a tier does this - alternative: change mastery). Something like:

MoC, CW, Abundance, Stonebark (three out of them on one tier)
SotF, ToL, Germination (not quite happy with germination, but it had to go somewhere)
SB, Cultivation, Flourish (just to add an active option on this tier)
?, ? , ?

[Torty]

I think the current distribution of talents is frankly very good and supports their philosophies shared during Blizzcon, if you ignore the tuning. Remember, they said that they wanted both passive and active choices in the same row so that you could gain SOME benefit, if you are playing your 3rd-4th character and don't want to complicate things too much. Also, you don't want talents doing the same thing in one tier or players figure out better one (there's ALWAYS a better one) and use it all the time. For that reason alone Cultivation and Spring Blossoms will be staying in different tiers. Your way is inherently broken as shown by all past expansions. I'd rather have talents aimed at different things in the same tier (kinda like blink + self heal are in the same tier) than have all movement dumped into one, all personal healing into one, all cooldowns into one, etc. This is why we have coockie cutter builds now.

Tier 15: Cenarion Ward and Prosperity - burst/single target healing. Germination - mastery trigger, more hots, somewhat easier to use than other two.
Tier 75: Soul of the Forest - playstyle change, passive aoe/single target healing increase. ToL - cooldown, more burst aoe healing. Cultivation - passive mastery trigger, no additional actions needed.
Tier 90: Abundance - passive single target healing increase. Inner Peace - burst healing increase. Spring Blossoms - passive mastery trigger, no additional actions needed.
Tier 100: Stonebark - "passive" single target buff. Flourish - burst healing / more hots. Moment of Clarity - passive single target healing increase / more mastery triggers for free.

For consistency sake they could switch tier 100: put Flourish in the middle, Stonebark to the left and MoC to the right. Then all talent tiers would have somewhat single-targetish talent (at least all of these can be used to improve single target healing) to the left, burst healing / cd in the middle and passive increase to your amount of hots on the right. Very clear cut choices that you can make based on your playstyle, encounter or just preference. The problem is with tuning, as usual for Blizzard.

I think that Abundance is severely undertuned and can't be overtuned because of PvP concerns. It shouldn't be increasing casting speed for Healing Touch, but rather make it hit harder and take slightly longer to cast (like 0,3-0,5 maybe?). The crit for Regrowth is ok, I guess, but will never be strong. Might also consider reducing the length of hot portion and making it heal for more in less time (kinda like Affliction class trinket on live) so that chain casting on the same target works better or increasing it's healing by a flat amount instead of increasing crit chance.

Inner Peace can be very good dependant on the encounter. There was Spider boss on one of the tests, Erethre-something. There were 2 heavy damage bursts per ground phase and ground phases were exactly 2 mins apart. Without Inner Peace you could only Tranq every second one (once in 4 mins), with Inner Peace it was possible to Tranq each one. That's effectively 100% increase, not even counting the value from CD being higher than whatever passive healing from other talents, even if they are stronger numerically. You obviously don't take it if there are damage bursts every 45sec, 1min or 1,5mins, but that's the nature of this talent. It shouldn't be stronger than other ones numerically or it would be broken and super boring. I think it's in a fine spot at the moment. I don't want it to be mandatory, fringe use here and there is more than fine.

I don't like Prosperity and SotF, but it's because of Swiftmend cooldown and its supposed role. Don't want to beat the dead horse here. Both of these would've been more than fine with 10-15 sec Swiftmend.

[Nevcairiel]

I think the current distribution of talents is frankly very good and supports their philosophies shared during Blizzcon, if you ignore the tuning. Remember, they said that they wanted both passive and active choices in the same row so that you could gain SOME benefit, if you are playing your 3rd-4th character and don't want to complicate things too much

That thought should include however that the active choices should be the stronger ones, otherwise the whole idea isn't worth much and classes just generally get simpler, and if eg. Cultivation and Spring Blossoms are dominant, this is not the case since they are two passive bonuses on the normal rotation (without even changing our playstyle at all). In T75 the two alternatives are both more active, and in T90 one could argue that Abundance is actually the most active of those talents - even if crap.

[stormgust]

I think the current distribution of talents is frankly very good and supports their philosophies shared during Blizzcon, if you ignore the tuning.

But you cannot ignore tuning, or to be exact, wether the abilities can be tuned in a way, which would have fall then in the categories you outlay below. And my argument here is, it isn't possible, as the mastery triggers always have a heavy overlap into the at least one of the two columns - in most cases strong enough to essentially invalidate the single target options (and similar for ToL, the overlap is too large with when Cultivation actually occurs)

Remember, they said that they wanted both passive and active choices in the same row so that you could gain SOME benefit, if you are playing your 3rd-4th character and don't want to complicate things too much.

I now what the wanted, but the thing is, it doesn't achieve any of that currently.

Also, you don't want talents doing the same thing in one tier or players figure out better one (there's ALWAYS a better one) and use it all the time. For that reason alone Cultivation and Spring Blossoms will be staying in different tiers.

But Cultivation and SB already filled different roles, one fore more consisten damage patterns, the other to be used whenever it got more bursty. And in this case, the differentiation is entirely a tuning problem, as mastery would not create an obscure overlap with the non mastery affected talents (Inner Peace being problematic - though an easy fix would be to have Inner Peace also provide a small HoT on tranquility).

Your way is inherently broken as shown by all past expansions.

Not really. SotF/ToL worked out nicely most of the part (and I didn't touch that), raidtests were about even between Cultivation/SB (and I suggested that - and they fall into different situations where you'd want to use either of them: one more consisten, the other more bursty, spread vs. stacked.)

Also, just because it hasn't been shown, but do you honestly think that a column design fares any better? You just create a entirely different problem by being able to stack onto specific talents for a given situation for rather large effects. Not that this would occur in actual encounters, as those usually have a vayring damage pattern and you end up selecting a mix of talents. But then you cannot have the weak options of a given category (e.g. Abundance for single target), next to the least restrictive/most practical option of a different category (SB for mastery gains), as for maximizing effects, you'd pick the individual options yielding the most gains out of each category - unless there'd be some hefty correlation

Or if you want the short answer, you just transposed the talent matrix, that doesn't change the fundamental problem. That's why I always thought (but apparently I was off here), that what they meant with column based design was: different levels of complexity (i.e. active/conditional/full passive) - yet all falling into a similar category/aiming for a similar situation.

Tier 15: Cenarion Ward and Prosperity - burst/single target healing. Germination - mastery trigger, more hots, somewhat easier to use than other two.

Two abilities falling into the same slot (-> already missed the design goal), and the third one having a heavy overlap with the non burst part of the other two. That's already a design failure under their new goals right there, and not merely a tuning problem for CW/Prosperity

Tier 75: Soul of the Forest - playstyle change, passive aoe/single target healing increase. ToL - cooldown, more burst aoe healing. Cultivation - passive mastery trigger, no additional actions needed.

I didn't even question the first two, and for Cultivation, it isn't a mastery trigger, it's a conditional mastery trigger, with the condition occuring when you use ToL. Spring Blossoms here would also provide mastery, not overlap as severely with either of the other two options (though still problematic due to how mastery always provides a significant gain, or not significant if mastery is low)

For consistency sake they could switch tier 100: put Flourish in the middle, Stonebark to the left and MoC to the right. Then all talent tiers would have somewhat single-targetish talent (at least all of these can be used to improve single target healing) to the left, burst healing / cd in the middle and passive increase to your amount of hots on the right. Very clear cut choices that you can make based on your playstyle, encounter or just preference. The problem is with tuning, as usual for Blizzard.

Nothing wrong with Flourish being on the right, it is an active option to increase mastery uptime (throughput being a nice extra).

I don't like Prosperity and SotF, but it's because of Swiftmend cooldown and its supposed role. Don't want to beat the dead horse here. Both of these would've been more than fine with 10-15 sec Swiftmend.

Definitely agree on Prosperity working better with a lower Swiftmend Cooldown, the thing is, those talents would be fine individually, but then stack up nicely when combined.

[Torty]

That thought should include however that the active choices should be the stronger ones, otherwise the whole idea isn't worth much and classes just generally get simpler, and if eg. Cultivation and Spring Blossoms are dominant, this is not the case since they are two passive bonuses on the normal rotation (without even changing our playstyle at all). In T75 the two alternatives are both more active, and in T90 one could argue that Abundance is actually the most active of those talents - even if crap.

Active choices shouldn't be stronger options or they would always get picked. Wtf is even this logic? You want choices and then say that one of the choices needs to be better. How exactly is that going to work in your world? Either neither of them is much stronger than another or you don't have a choice. I hope you realise this simple logic. You probably should, considering we ALWAYS picked stronger throughput options even if they were only marginally better and were substantially harder to play.

I now what the wanted, but the thing is, it doesn't achieve any of that currently.

Yes it does. I can pick all passive talents that just work when I'm healing normally and don't get any extra buttons. What are you talking about? For example I pick Germination, Cultivation, Spring Blossoms and Moment of Clarity. That's it. I just mash buttons I already have with nothing extra getting in the way. HOW I mash them or IF I mash them efficiently is completely irrelevant. The fact is that it's a viable way to play and it's not gimping your throughput majorly. Currently there are tiers that don't even have passive talents like HotW/NV/DoC or tiers with full passive talents like Germ/RG/MoC. You can't get more buttons or less buttons even if you wanted to.

But Cultivation and SB already filled different roles, one fore more consisten damage patterns, the other to be used whenever it got more bursty. And in this case, the differentiation is entirely a tuning problem, as mastery would not create an obscure overlap with the non mastery affected talents (Inner Peace being problematic - though an easy fix would be to have Inner Peace also provide a small HoT on tranquility).

What? They fill exactly the same role. You get an additional hot from healing normally, that's it. You just get it from different spells and you absolutely don't have to change your healing pattern. Inner Peace is a fine talent. Your only solutions to every talent is to buff it, just read your own posts, it's completely ridiculous. That's not how balancing works. It's absolutely fine to have 1 talent in the tier be the ultimate fringe one that's rarely gets used. Especially if it's a talent that buffs raid cooldown. I don't want strong raid cooldowns that do fuck loads of healing just as a reward for you pressing a button when told. If this talent stays shit or gets nerfed even further and never gets used, I wouldn't shed a single tear.

Also, just because it hasn't been shown, but do you honestly think that a column design fares any better? You just create a entirely different problem by being able to stack onto specific talents for a given situation for rather large effects. Not that this would occur in actual encounters, as those usually have a vayring damage pattern and you end up selecting a mix of talents. But then you cannot have the weak options of a given category (e.g. Abundance for single target), next to the least restrictive/most practical option of a different category (SB for mastery gains), as for maximizing effects, you'd pick the individual options yielding the most gains out of each category - unless there'd be some hefty correlation

Yes, I absolutely love this design decision. This is where your decisions start actually mattering. There's no universe where two talents doing the same role (SB and Cult. for example) will be perfectly balanced. There will ALWAYS be a stronger option that will be mathematically figured out and you will never switch from it. If you get blink + self heal in one tier, you can't mathematically figure out which is better, hence why you switch between these two based on the encounter and that's YOUR decision. You can't mathematically figure out if Inner Peace is worse than Spring Blossoms in all cases, as presented by my spider boss arguement above. That's a choice. Flourish will not always be better than MoC. That's a choice too. You switch based on the encounter, because talents fill different roles.

You will NEVER switch talents, if they fill same roles. It's shown by all specs currently in the game. You can obviously point out 2 or 3 exceptions, but they are just that - exceptions. If Spring Blossoms and Cultivation stayed in the same tier, we would all collectively figure out which one was performing better after 1 week of raiding and it would be a default choice you never switch from. It's the case for Disc Priest's tier with Cascade, Halo and Divine Star right now, where Halo always gets picked and it's wrong to pick any other talent. Spirit Shell vs Power Infusion were also mathematically figured out and you never pick Spirit Shell. Compare that to Words of Mending and Clarity of Will that fulfill two completely different roles (raid healing passive vs tank healing active) and you see people switching between the two based on the encounter. Holy Paladins have Prism vs Hammer vs ES. Prism always gets picked, just maths done for the same role, nothing more. It's completely disingenuous
of anyone to say that talents fulfilling same roles could ever coexist in the same talent row. They never were and never will unless some of them get weird interactions from other tiers and then you combo two together, which isn't really this particular talent row design result.

Two abilities falling into the same slot (-> already missed the design goal), and the third one having a heavy overlap with the non burst part of the other two. That's already a design failure under their new goals right there, and not merely a tuning problem for CW/Prosperity

You are grasping at the straws here. Prosperity is single target heal increase with low amount of actions from user. Cenarion Ward is a more bursty version that requires active decision making AND adds a button on top of that. Germination allows you to multi hot (for example multiple debuff targets, there were plenty encounters like these alredy tested). It's also fine for two talents in the same to provide same results in the first row, considering it's for lvl 15 and there aren't even enough spells at that point around which you can build talents.

and for Cultivation, it isn't a mastery trigger. it's a conditional mastery trigger, with the condition occuring when you use ToL

Yes it is. It adds a hot and it doesn't matter whether it's conditional or not. All talents can't be the same and there should be restrictions in place. ToL provides only marginal increase to the amount of hots you are able to dish out, Cultivation can provide much more.

- - - Updated - - -

Almost all the whine here is more experienced people asking for buffs to almost everything without consideration of how Blizzard is planning to balance the game in Legion. What exactly do you expect to get from this?

[stormgust]

edit:
Added a Too Long to read version at the end ~~

What? They fill exactly the same role. You get an additional hot from healing normally, that's it. You just get it from different spells and you absolutely don't have to change your healing pattern.

They provide the HoT under different conditions. That's a little, but rather significant difference in how those two talents are played, and perform different under different damage patterns. It's precisely what this talent tree ought to do, pick different talents on a tier for different situations, just with the addition that pairing those doesn't yield a 99% 1% split in how often you use the individual talents, as they patterns each fill are significantly more common.

Inner Peace is a fine talent. Your only solutions to every talent is to buff it, just read your own posts, it's completely ridiculous.

I asked for the garbage talents to be redesigned, not to be buffed, and questioned the ability of Inner Peace ever being balanced If I remember correctly. All I asked for "buffs" here were a mastery contribution, as to not have the other options scale better throughout the expac (and that was when Inner Peace was next to Cult/SB). But yeah, all I ever asked for was "buff every talent". Continue on with misrepresenting what I said, drop details when it fits your argument, add something I never said you give your arguments more ground.

That's not how balancing works. It's absolutely fine to have 1 talent in the tier be the ultimate fringe one that's rarely gets used.

It's fine if it get's used occasionally, it's not if it gets used once per expansion (Abundance), it's absurd to give exactly one spec access to a talent which provides +33% to a raid CD, when no other class has access to similar option (overal throughput balance across specs being the problem here)

Especially if it's a talent that buffs raid cooldown. I don't want strong raid cooldowns that do fuck loads of healing just as a reward for you pressing a button when told. If this talent stays shit or gets nerfed even further and never gets used, I wouldn't shed a single tear.

You're fine with a bad talent, because you do not like how it interacts with the associated spell?

Yes, I absolutely love this design decision. This is where your decisions start actually mattering. There's no universe where two talents doing the same role (SB and Cult. for example) will be perfectly balanced. There will ALWAYS be a stronger option that will be mathematically figured out and you will never switch from it.

SB pulls ahead on stacked fights/periodic damage auras, cultivation on spread/more bursty ones. Sure one will be mathematically superior in a given situation, but that's not something you can change - that's how this game is designed (though you can get to select based on per fight, instead of per content type as your suggest is prune to end up...)

You can't mathematically figure out if Inner Peace is worse than Spring Blossoms in all cases, as presented by my spider boss arguement above. That's a choice. Flourish will not always be better than MoC. That's a choice too. You switch based on the encounter, because talents fill different roles.

That's not choice, you're selecting based on wether a talent fits a given damage pattern better. Also, just because you declare this decision to be not mathematical, it's not actually a non-mathematical one. The reason you pick Inner Peace is precisely because the healing it provides is significantly above SB when it actually matters.

You will NEVER switch talents, if they fill same roles. It's shown by all specs currently in the game.

You actually did throughout earlier parts of WoD with SotF/ToL - and those talents both fall into a "raid healing" role, they just fill different group damage patterns.
What you want to differ spells by is absolutely distinct categories: single, group, burst. What I want is a more narrow scope in: group damage continuous, group burst, group medium (similar for single target). In effect though, neither solution yields different results: your's has severe balancing problems, as the individual talents stack up, it eliminates choice whenever one form of damage becomes predominant (focused in mythic5+, groupdamage in raids -> reduces to the status quo).

You can obviously point out 2 or 3 exceptions, but they are just that - exceptions. If Spring Blossoms and Cultivation stayed in the same tier, we would all collectively figure out which one was performing better after 1 week of raiding and it would be a default choice you never switch from.

You won't do anything different the way you suggested to group up talents. The way raiddamage stacks up, single target talents always fall short to the group based ones, especially in a healing meta (you may pick the most advantegous single target per spec, rest is group healing one per class). Then you get so select between burst and consistent raiddamage/group, and I don't see how that solution is any different from what I'm asking for in terms of "choice".

Compare that to Words of Mending and Clarity of Will that fulfill two completely different roles (raid healing passive vs tank healing active) and you see people switching between the two based on the encounter. Holy Paladins have Prism vs Hammer vs ES. Prism always gets picked, just maths done for the same role, nothing more.

They fill different roles, but you pick one as soon was one damage pattern becomes predominant, which is not decided by you, but by the enviroment you are in (i.e. PvP vs. 5 vs. raid). It's rather naive to assume that in the overall healing meta more than one single target talent will be specced per healer (i.e. the strongest) - they simple stack up absurdly well. I don't even see this changing much for mythic5+, as group damage still should take up a rather signifcant fraction of your healing their (so you may opt e.g. for two instead of one single target option, but the weakest one still are obsolete - especially if a lot of group options usually come with a non-negligible single target component as well).

It's completely disingenuousof anyone to say that talents fulfilling same roles could ever coexist in the same talent row. They never were and never will unless some of them get weird interactions from other tiers and then you combo two together, which isn't really this particular talent row design result.

As I said above, I don't see how I grouped them up to fall into similar categories. The conditional on Cultivation clearly assigns a different damage patterns to it, than SB has, it is favorable in focused target over SB (the HoT component). The fact that it doesn't create absurd problems in tuning mastery is a nice extra here (if you go from x stacks average to x+3 via Cult+SB+Germ via primarily group healing talents, that not only creates balancing problems, it also has some odd consequences in how well the single target talents actually perform relative to a combination originally aimed at group damage)

Germination allows you to multi hot (for example multiple debuff targets, there were plenty encounters like these alredy tested).

I know how germination works, and never really argued it's usefulness.

It's also fine for two talents in the same to provide same results in the first row, considering it's for lvl 15 and there aren't even enough spells at that point around which you can build talents.

Then do it like it's the case for other classes. If you do not have enough abilities available, add active abilities here - which actually allow some, not neccesarily complex, variation early on. Don't have two talents fill the same niche (especially not if you're exactly critizing that on the current live tree's ..., because placement in the tree honestly does not matter). Or do it as I suggested, move abundance here - it fills a different role (using my definition), and you have all abilities available for it to work out.

Yes it is. It adds a hot and it doesn't matter whether it's conditional or not.

Conditions matter, because that what creates the difference in when you'd pick them, and is a component in balancing them (i.e. low hp trigger threshold + higher heal -> it's more bursty than SB.).

All talents can't be the same and there should be restrictions in place.

Neither did I say that, nor do I want that. You're ignoring the restriction Cultivation has, and thus concluding it's the same as SB, while the trigger condition is precisely what creates the difference in how both talents are used.

ToL provides only marginal increase to the amount of hots you are able to dish out, Cultivation can provide much more.

The additional HoT affects the same target as the Rejuvenation used under ToL. The trigger condition of Cultivation is usually fulfilled when you actually want to use ToL. You thus primarily compare: ToL Reju + 50% vs. Cult Reju (i.e. Reju+1HoT+Cult HoT).

Almost all the whine here is more experienced people asking for buffs to almost everything without consideration of how Blizzard is planning to balance the game in Legion. What exactly do you expect to get from this?

I'm not asking for buffs, is my english really that awful? Also, saying that I do not consider balance definitely shows you being ignorant, because I was probably the first raising balancing concerns for: Mastery (intra class with a rather large spread on different talent builds, inter class as a consequence on how they choose to balance it), Inner Peace (it's a Tranquility - no other class get's that much throughput via a talent when applicable), the ridiculous stacking potential of 4T19/SotF/Prosperity/Dreamwalker. But yeah, I obviously do not show consideration for how blizzards plans to balance this game....

edit:
Too long to read version:

Once you take the single target column out of the picture, our concept for the other two columns isn't that different to begin with. I believe the single target column to be highly problematic for raiding, as across the heal meta, the "best" option of those usually suffices, given the still significant group damage in smaller groups, it's going to be similar for mythic+ (may require a second talent, but the more burst oriented group damage talents can fill a dual purpose here). It's problematic for PvP due to rather high stacking potential.

Furthermore, seperating the additional HoTs talents across columns adds a layer of complexity not only to balance mastery itself, but also to balancing the respective tiers, as the additional mastery stack usually covers a lot of situations, and thus always runs at risk to just beat the other option.

edit2:

Compare that to Words of Mending and Clarity of Will that fulfill two completely different roles (raid healing passive vs tank healing active) and you see people switching between the two based on the encounter.

The reminder of the shaman/disc/hpriest tree's though have two tiers exactly how I'd want them (heals aimed at different forms of AoE damage patterns), a tier primarily focused on single target, and a last one how you described it to create choice (as I said above, you may want +1 single target heal in mythic5+ - and at least to me, it certainly doesn't look like they've chosen the weakest single target option to be placed there)

The only ones slightly diverting are Monks/Paladins, but that's probably more due to fitting in the battle healer talents across the tree (and it not being part of their inheren rotation, like it is for disci). Though at least for monks, the of the talents reminder (well actually also the battle healer talents) seem to fit more with how the three specs above are designed. Paladins I can't really judge, but T15/T75 seems to be like it is for the other specs (excluding druids obviously)

[Nythiz]

I don't see why PvPers should have >1 talent tree available to adapt their gameplay, and for PvE we're going to be stuck with a single talent build. Sorry, but if a talents only use is in PvP, put it in the PvE tree. If there's no room for it there - especially if it's because all option theres are better - then you really should ask the question wether this talent is any good to begin with.

You're once again not reading what I'm saying, but what you want to read.

I'm not saying that this talent is fine because it will be good for PvP players.
I'm saying that PvP players will chose this talent (irrelevant whether it's right or not, they get both the normal and pvp talent tree!); and thus statistics will show this as a talent that turns out as situationally useful, thereby ticking off a major checkbox for Blizzard of what a talent should be..

Of course this talent is lame to begin with. But when raiders massively opt for Spring Blossoms and Inner Peace (situation dependent probably); and a small-mediocre part of the player base opts for Abundance, you know how blizzard will react?

They won't say: "Oh they're picking Abundance because the alternatives are even worse. Lets fix this row!"

They'll say: "This line provides different talents for different situations. Our data shows that raiders like to opt for SB and IP and that non-raiders tend to gravitate toward Abundance, and we're fine with that"

I hate abundance, because it really doesn't do anything useful. HT is generally unnecessary as spell (not sure why they're not just culling this, as rejuvenation is go-to efficiency spell); and you don't need the crit on Regrowth.
However there are plenty of scenarios where the alternative 2 talents provide even less. And that small fact is playing into blizzards hands as they can play the "diversity/situational card" on that talent.j
Abundance should be an active or a rotation altering talent (one that actually has impact), seeing as the whole tier is passive and has minor interaction really.

Fun fact: the culprit here isn't so much the talents in question (well it partially is for abundance), but how this thing called Harmony yields significantly higher value on certain talents, than it does to others.

Ye this is true and a complete pain. Further enhanced by the funky scaling on mastery, making some of these talents great in some scenarios and "meh" in others

[Torty]

They provide the HoT under different conditions. That's a little, but rather significant difference in how those two talents are played, and perform different under different damage patterns. It's precisely what this talent tree ought to do, pick different talents on a tier for different situations, just with the addition that pairing those doesn't yield a 99% 1% split in how often you use the individual talents, as they patterns each fill are significantly more common.

Nice dream, just never works in reality. One of them will be better and you will never switch from it in the course of the expansion.

You're fine with a bad talent, because you do not like how it interacts with the associated spell?

It's not "bad" bad talent, it just can't be very strong, because of its design. And yes, that's because of the spell it's associated with. I've played this whole expansion with overpowered raid cooldowns, I think I've seen enough of this playstyle to make a conclusion that it's not a fun way to play the game. The current version of Tranq and Inner Peace are completly fine for me. I think I will pick it from time to time instead of Spring Blossoms.

SB pulls ahead on stacked fights/periodic damage auras, cultivation on spread/more bursty ones. Sure one will be mathematically superior in a given situation, but that's not something you can change - that's how this game is designed (though you can get to select based on per fight, instead of per content type as your suggest is prune to end up...)

No it doesn't. First of all, they both give hots and that's what the most important part is. The math will be done. The conclusion will be drawn and that would be the end of it. You are really naive if you think they will be both balanced perfectly so that you will pick them based on an encounter. At best you will pick them based on the content you are doing (raid, 5m, pvp). And that's if we are lucky.

That's not choice, you're selecting based on wether a talent fits a given damage pattern better

That's as much choice as you are going to get with Blizzard. Source: played the game for longer than 1 month.

You actually did throughout earlier parts of WoD with SotF/ToL - and those talents both fall into a "raid healing" role, they just fill different group damage patterns.

SotF/ToL were actually the only 2 good designed talents in one tier in our whole talent tree, but they are really there according to Blizzard's new logic of spreading talents, not yours. Your's would be putting ToL, HotW and NV in one tier since they are basically the same, but with narrower scope. Another 2 tiers that were done according to your logic were movement one and self healing one. Look how well it turned out.

The way raiddamage stacks up, single target talents always fall short to the group based ones, especially in a healing meta (you may pick the most advantegous single target per spec, rest is group healing one per class). Then you get so select between burst and consistent raiddamage/group, and I don't see how that solution is any different from what I'm asking for in terms of "choice".

I hope you realise that these same talents are supposed to work not only in raids, right? There's PvP and 5m content, which are also competitive. Just because all you do is raid (all I do is raid too for reference) doesn't mean that every talent should be working in the raids at equal capacity. You absolutely can't have all aoe heals in one tier, because that makes PvPers and 5m players unhappy. The result of that tier would be that we get a full row of single target talents, which will make me and you unhappy.

If you do not have enough abilities available, add active abilities here - which actually allow some, not neccesarily complex, variation early on.

Cenarion Ward is an active ability. Who the hell would put 3 active abilities in 1 tier? That's not what Blizzard wants. They are not pruning 10 abilities just to give you 15 more. You are again discussing your dream universe of raid healing which will never happen. There will be competitive passive talent in almost all tiers. Welcome to Legion, enjoy your stay.

They fill different roles, but you pick one as soon was one damage pattern becomes predominant, which is not decided by you, but by the enviroment you are in (i.e. PvP vs. 5 vs. raid).

As opposed to being decided by the guide author? People would rather make decisions themselves and pat themselves on the back for being so smart.

The reminder of the shaman/disc/hpriest tree's though have two tiers exactly how I'd want them (heals aimed at different forms of AoE damage patterns), a tier primarily focused on single target, and a last one how you described it to create choice (as I said above, you may want +1 single target heal in mythic5+ - and at least to me, it certainly doesn't look like they've chosen the weakest single target option to be placed there)

We can come back to this discussion when dust settles and first guides appear. I guarantee you that each of these tiers will have a clear winner, sometimes one talent will see occasional usage on 1 fight and another talent will be completely garbage.

Generally the point I'm trying to make is that shit's never ever balanced and when shit is not balanced, you are picking stronger options considering the same target of your choice. If you put different targets to the available choices, we will sometimes switch talents around. I don't even remember when was the last time I unspecced out of Germination, Ysera's Gift, Tree of Life or Displacer Beast in the raid. The only way I would've ever been forced to make choices would be to put Displacer Beast and Ysera's Gift in the same tier or HotW with Germination and SotF.

[Tiberria]

A few things.

1. I disagree that a passive talent has to be better than an active talent all of the time. The issue with that is that a passive talent is basically free throughput that requires no effort or player skill to use correctly, while an active ability can add a significant amount of skill cap to the class. I think that active abilities should be stronger than passive abilities when they are used to their maximum skill/effectiveness. If not and the passive ability is always better outside of a few outliers, the theorycrafting will quickly identify that, and when the best talents to take are primarily passive talents, specs become very boring to play.

2. Cultivation is not something that you are really going to be able to do any definitive level of math around. The value of it is going to be dependent on how many players sit <60% HP for what percentage of the fight. That's something that is going to vary significantly on a player to player and raid to raid basis based on execution, strategy, number of healers, how good your other healers are, how much gear you have, etc.,etc. You aren't going to be able to pinpoint an exact value for Cultivation without having some type of addon that projects those variables out. Unless it's either way overtuned (and therefore always the superior talent) or way undertuned (and never worth taking), it's going to be variable on a per player basis whether it beats other talents.

3. I think that Spring Blossoms and Cultivation were fine on the same row. The value of one versus the other would have had wide variances. However, I also am not particularly bothered by them deciding to put them on separate rows. If they want to continue to push this mastery, giving us the option for one more HoT effect isn't the worst thing in the world.

4. That said, if damage patterns look anything like they've looked in like the last 3 expansions, I have my doubts that Cultivation will end up being competitive with Incarnation or with SoTF with the current 4 piece. For a way to look at the value of Cultivation - it effectively buffs your Rejuv healing by 50% when targets are <60% HP. Rejuv is about 30% of our healing in raid test logs, so you can consider it an 18% throughput buff when the raid is <60% HP. Incarnation buffs all of our healing by 15%, plus buffs our Rejuv healing by 50% (an additional ~15% buff) plus our Wild Growth healing by 33% (worth about another ~9%). Even before taking into account the mana cost reduction, ToL is about a 39% throughput buff when it's active. It's active 17% of the time, so it's about a 7% overall buff.

For Cultivation to overtake Incarnation, the raid would have to be <60% HP 39% or more of the time. Based on past experience of how healing and HP patterns work out, I consider that to be extremely unlikely. Plus, Incarnation also has added value because burst healing beats passive healing and because of the HPM buff from the 30% Rejuv mana cost reduction.

TLDR, I can't see Cultivation being a real option unless it gets buffed significantly. The real question is going to be whether SoTF overtakes Incarnation with 4 piece. Let's say that Wild Growth is 25% of our total output. Without 4 piece, we would get a 75% buff on every 3rd WG for a total of a 6.2% buff to our WG healing. In practicality, it's probably a little more valuable, because we won't cast WG exactly every 10 seconds, so more than 1/3 of WG casts will be SoTF buffs. However, that gain should be mostly offset by the ToL mana cost reduction and burst healing value.

However, if you have the 4 piece, you can safely assume that 2/3 of your total WG casts will be SoTF buffed (the 4 piece is not quite a doubling of the amount of SM casts, but you don't need it to be since we won't be able to afford WG on CD every CD). That increases the expected throughput gain from taking SoTF to +12.4%. That clearly makes it superior to Incarnation. Sure - you might want the burst healing cooldown, but I think it's going to be difficult not to be shoehorned into SoTF when it maths out as nearly twice as strong.

TLDR

SoTF with 4 piece > Incarnation > SoTF w/o 4 piece > Cultivation

[theburned]

How would anyone like a change of regrowth into a "chaos bolt-like" heal? In the past we've usually just picked the glyph, and never really gotten any extra crit on regrowth, so changing it into something that always crits 100% obviously adjust numbers to compensate, this would solve a few problems.

1st Abundance the crit portion of the talent is close to useless.
2nd regrowth has a roughly 80-90% crit, and is also kinda banking on that 80-90% to be worth casting (40k mana for a 60k-80k heal doesnt really sound worth it.)
3rd MoC is currently a weak talent, so buffing abundance and changing regrowth would synergize very well with MoC, and perhaps give it just that extra oomph to make it a better choice than flourish in certain situations.
4th abundance currently has the issue that "half" of the talent scales very well with crit, and the other half makes regrowth not scale with crit.

I would expect a nerf to the regrowth part of abundance with this.

One major downside would obviously be that this could both push the resto druid toolkit into being too strong all around.
And another thing that I would expect a lot of people here to not like, a larger part of the heal would be put towards living seed, which is cut out of pretty much all the theorycrafting about both Healing touch and regrowth, for quite obvious reasons.


Anyways just trying to air out an idea here, so would like to hear others thoughts about this, downsides in the first place.

[Nevcairiel]

Active choices shouldn't be stronger options or they would always get picked. Wtf is even this logic? You want choices and then say that one of the choices needs to be better. How exactly is that going to work in your world? Either neither of them is much stronger than another or you don't have a choice. I hope you realise this simple logic. You probably should, considering we ALWAYS picked stronger throughput options even if they were only marginally better and were substantially harder to play

Tiberia already explained this position, but if an active option that requires actual skill to use is not stronger than a passive option that just does its work without any skill, then this is not the correct design - and Blizzard said as much in their talent philosophy. Your alt classes are not supposed to be just "simpler" due to passive talents, you are supposed to be able to choose to give up a bit of potential power to make playing for you easier, since you may not care about 101% performance on your third alt.

In the same line of thought, if someone is not that good of a player, he may actually do more dps/hps with the passive talent, since the active option overwhelms him more than it helps his character.

So in short, perfect usage of active talent options should be stronger than fully passive options. This then still assumes that you need sufficient skill to actually use the active talent properly. If on the other hand the passive option is equal or even stronger, why would anyone bother using the more complex option. A more skillfull play should be rewarded.

[Torty]

Tiberia already explained this position, but if an active option that requires actual skill to use is not stronger than a passive option that just does its work without any skill, then this is not the correct design - and Blizzard said as much in their talent philosophy.

You are both arguing with a strawman. I never said that passive talent should be stronger than active talent. First I said that active shouldn't be stronger than passive in all situations (these 2 points are not equal) and then I said that passive talent should be buffing different way of healing. Active talent can be giving you burst (Tree of Life) and passive talent in the same tier can be giving your hots additional something (Cultivation). Is Tree of Life a "better" option? Probably yes. Are you absolutely fucked at all times by not picking it? Absolutely not. Now put Inner Peace in the same tier as Tree of Life and you will see yourself being objectively wrong to pick it in every single possible situation. These are two talents doing the same thing, giving you more burst options on a cooldown, but ToL is better at it and is an active. You are a dumbass if you ever pick it. That's why Inner Peace and ToL should be in different tiers and that's why they ARE in different tiers. Same goes for Cultivation and Spring Blossoms.

Cultivation is not something that you are really going to be able to do any definitive level of math around. The value of it is going to be dependent on how many players sit <60% HP for what percentage of the fight. That's something that is going to vary significantly on a player to player and raid to raid basis based on execution, strategy, number of healers, how good your other healers are, how much gear you have, etc.,etc. You aren't going to be able to pinpoint an exact value for Cultivation without having some type of addon that projects those variables out. Unless it's either way overtuned (and therefore always the superior talent) or way undertuned (and never worth taking), it's going to be variable on a per player basis whether it beats other talents.

At the moment Spring Blossoms is way better than Cultivation unless the raid is below 60% hp about (Total Efflo healing / Total Rejuv healing)*100% of fight duration and you are spreading your Rejuvs around instead of stacking them on same people for Mastery gains. It IS overtuned. Just use it a couple of times in the raid and it's pretty obvious. On top of everything, Spring Blossoms buff Efflo for much more than Cultivation buffs Rejuvs, because Efflo heals for more per cast and, again, has higher uptime so it gives more mastery hots.

I can't believe people are whining that Abundance is ridiculously undertuned and nothing is being done with it for ages in the same posts as they are expecting two other talents to be perfectly balanced between each other. Like... really? You don't see the precedent or that's just willfull blindness and hope for the best?

So in short, perfect usage of active talent options should be stronger than fully passive options. This then still assumes that you need sufficient skill to actually use the active talent properly. If on the other hand the passive option is equal or even stronger, why would anyone bother using the more complex option. A more skillfull play should be rewarded.

If you are good at the game, you will be sticking to active version for the whole expansion. Is that what you want? I don't get it. What the fuck do people want? Options or this type of balance you propose? You can't have both at the same time.

[Nevcairiel]

You are both arguing with a strawman. I never said that passive talent should be stronger than active talent. First I said that active shouldn't be stronger than passive in all situations (these 2 points are not equal) and then I said that passive talent should be buffing different way of healing. Active talent can be giving you burst (Tree of Life) and passive talent in the same tier can be giving your hots additional something (Cultivation). Is Tree of Life a "better" option? Probably yes. Are you absolutely fucked at all times by not picking it? Absolutely not

And you are arguing in unreasonable extremes.
The ToL tier is probably not the best example, since the choice often comes down to encounter design, and for healers its unfortunately never as simple as simply maximizing HPS at the end of the fight. Picking the "easier" talent also isn't supposed to "absolutely fuck" you, just leave you with a minimally smaller performance than you could be doing with a potentially more complex/higher maintenance play style - at the advantage of easier rotations.

This entire concept works better for DPS, but it can be roughly translated to healers as well, just not in every case where talents cater to encounter design as much as class complexity.

If you are good at the game, you will be sticking to active version for the whole expansion. Is that what you want? I don't get it. What the fuck do people want? Options or this type of balance you propose? You can't have both at the same time.

With everything else being equal, I still have the choice not to use it in some cases, ie. maybe some fight requires more attention and makes it easier to play to use a passive option.

This is "Options". You can opt for a different playstyle, potentially easier or more complex, or a balance of the two.
You don't agree that skill should be rewarded?

[Torty]

And you are arguing in unreasonable extremes.

No, I'm arguing in Blizzard balancing history from the last 11 years of WoW. I mean, there's currently unbalanced Spring Blossoms and Cultivation, absolutely dog shit talents that get zero attention and you are telling me with a serious face that we can get balanced options for the same roles in one tier. They can't balance talents aimed for the same purposes literally RIGHT NOW and you expect balanced options RIGHT NOW as well. Is this some sort of advanced trolling?

With everything else being equal, I still have the choice not to use it in some cases, ie. maybe some fight requires more attention and makes it easier to play to use a passive option.

This is "Options". You can opt for a different playstyle, potentially easier or more complex, or a balance of the two.

Everything is not equal and you don't have a choice. You can't opt for a different playstyle right now on live, you couldn't in MoP, you couldn't in Cata, you couldn't in WotLK, you couldn't in TBC and you couldn't in Vanilla. You can do the same stuff they've done before and put talents that are fit for the same roles in one tier, but that's kind of, you know, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Spoiler alert: results will be the same.

You don't agree that skill should be rewarded?

Do we have a loaded question competition here? I'll have a go as well: you don't agree that world peace is good?

[Nevcairiel]

No, I'm arguing in Blizzard balancing history from the last 11 years of WoW. I mean, there's currently unbalanced Spring Blossoms and Cultivation, absolutely dog shit talents that get zero attention and you are telling me with a serious face that we can get balanced options for the same roles in one tier.

You are the one that brought up their philosophy of active vs. passive talents and simplifying classes that way, all I did was poke holes into your interpretation of it.
It makes no sense to follow this philosophy at all if using the more complex option isn't rewarding (because noone would use it then), that is all.