New changes - Resto Druids.

[Cerelli]

almost 2k efflorescence ticks every second isn't all that weak IMO. you definitely see it doing its job when healing an instance. with the increased radius you use it as an additional AoE heal. you drop it on somebody and usually people are smart enough to gravitate towards it. so far i'm really happy with the efflorescence change.

Also, you are going to get a much higher efflorescence uptime with it tied to SM. there is no way you will be able to sustain regrowth spamming. simply not going to happen. with SM you can get a lot more efflorescence procs because of the reduced mana cost.

[krebul]

I have noticed that tank damage is so high in heroics, rolling rejuvination is not much of an option. Not because of mana, but you simply don't have many globals to spare on dps. In such situations, I find it hard to decide who to blow swiftmend on. Should I hit a raid member with it and allow the efflorescence to tick on the rest of them? Or am I going to regret using it on a dps because the tank is going to take a spike damage right after I do it?

When a tank gets low, you feel like you are in serious trouble.

In my opinion, raid healing is going to have to evolve a lot from WotLK. DPS are going to have to learn how to heal themselves by stepping in the AoE heal effects on their own, and by clicking on priest heal wells, etc. We simply aren't going to have the mana or globals to do all of the work. The entire raid is going to have to cooperate in keeping health bars topped off instead of thinking of their health bars as a square that automatically moves up and down on its own, and is not their concern.

[Mahon]

I try and look at it like this.

If I am tank healing Swiftmend now has a real nice HoT that hits other tanks, and maybe some dps too, if the boss hit box is small enough.

If I am raid healing I have another AoE heal that isn't to mana heavy.

In 5 mans, or in situations where I have to do both I need to think when the best time to use it is, and on what target. This actually makes for interesting game play and separates good players from "I copied my spec from EJ forums, and use the spells they tell me to" healers.

[Deleted]

Efflorescence ticks for around 3k in lvl333 gear.

---------- Post added 2010-09-27 at 10:01 PM ----------

Some healing numbers for heroic bosses:

[krebul]

Efflorescence ticks for around 3k in lvl333 gear.

This is only after a swiftmend crit. About 1900 per tick on a non-crit.

[Deleted]

Yeah it's more 1,7k on a fresh 85 premade.

[Canbie]

It really isn't.

Your job as a healer is to keep people alive. Pushing your HPS as high as possible does not mean you are doing your job, having 0 people die during the encounter does.

This.

[Ormula]

I have noticed that tank damage is so high in heroics, rolling rejuvination is not much of an option. Not because of mana, but you simply don't have many globals to spare on dps. In such situations, I find it hard to decide who to blow swiftmend on. Should I hit a raid member with it and allow the efflorescence to tick on the rest of them? Or am I going to regret using it on a dps because the tank is going to take a spike damage right after I do it?

When a tank gets low, you feel like you are in serious trouble.

In my opinion, raid healing is going to have to evolve a lot from WotLK. DPS are going to have to learn how to heal themselves by stepping in the AoE heal effects on their own, and by clicking on priest heal wells, etc. We simply aren't going to have the mana or globals to do all of the work. The entire raid is going to have to cooperate in keeping health bars topped off instead of thinking of their health bars as a square that automatically moves up and down on its own, and is not their concern.

This is exactly how I feel it's going to be, and I'm okay with this. Right now, unless something extraordinary happens (IE stealing aggro), a DPS can stand in most anything and a healer can carry him through it. It's sort of become our "job" to make up for messups that DPS make. And Blizzard is finally stepping in and saying, "hey, you're responsible for more than topping meters rogues!" I feel that if DPS stand in fire in level 85 raids, they're probably going to end up on the floor-- not because the healers are bad, but because there were more pressing, non-mitigatable damage to adhere to.

[Deleted]

This was definitely going on in the heroics I did tonight; often i could only spare heals for the tank and myself, and just didn't have the mana/time to put more than a rejuv on the dps. Makes the dps play better as well

[Circe]

I really hope they change what Efflorescence procs off of ... tying it to swiftmend bothers me for two reasons.

It's an emergency heal. I don't want to start using it on the raid or tank for its aoe tic and then have someones dmg spike and have no fast way of saving them.

We have the only "new" aoe that is tied to the spot of the person we cast it on + its on my emergency heal. I don't have time when its truly an emergency to select the person from my raid frames and see if they're in an optimal place to drop my aoe. They're dead by then.

[Cerelli]

I really hope they change what Efflorescence procs off of ... tying it to swiftmend bothers me for two reasons.

It's an emergency heal. I don't want to start using it on the raid or tank for its aoe tic and then have someones dmg spike and have no fast way of saving them.

We have the only "new" aoe that is tied to the spot of the person we cast it on + its on my emergency heal. I don't have time when its truly an emergency to select the person from my raid frames and see if they're in an optimal place to drop my aoe. They're dead by then.

raid spike damage is never severe or rapid enough to kill somebody before you have a chance to heal them with a nourish or a single hot. And if it is, the damage was completely avoidable and it is the person's fault they took it to begin with.

swiftmend is a 15 second cooldown and the cheapest spell we have almost. use it as often as possible.

if somebody does get spiked, and you keep hitting them with regrowth you are going to watch your mana pool vanish like a cupcake at a fat camp.

The aoe of efflorescence is huge (see my screen shot a few posts above this one). you use it on the person most in need of the heal and if your raid members are too dense to move into the giant green circle then they need to be beat over the head.

[Circe]

raid spike damage is never severe or rapid enough to kill somebody before you have a chance to heal them with a nourish or a single hot. And if it is, the damage was completely avoidable and it is the person's fault they took it to begin with.

swiftmend is a 15 second cooldown and the cheapest spell we have almost. use it as often as possible.

if somebody does get spiked, and you keep hitting them with regrowth you are going to watch your mana pool vanish like a cupcake at a fat camp.

The aoe of efflorescence is huge (see my screen shot a few posts above this one). you use it on the person most in need of the heal and if your raid members are too dense to move into the giant green circle then they need to be beat over the head.

Good to know. I really HATE that I don't have a beta key. lol I just had visions of my druid being blown away by priests and shamans in raid healing, but I suppose at 85 they won't be able to spam their abilities and there won't be Wrath like raid dmg.

In terms of mana being an object in Cata though, I guess I do like this change. Although, it would be really awesome if they'd make swiftmend available from lifebloom for this or create a glyph to decrease its cooldown. =) I can wish.

[exochaft]

In my opinion, raid healing is going to have to evolve a lot from WotLK. DPS are going to have to learn how to heal themselves by stepping in the AoE heal effects on their own, and by clicking on priest heal wells, etc. We simply aren't going to have the mana or globals to do all of the work. The entire raid is going to have to cooperate in keeping health bars topped off instead of thinking of their health bars as a square that automatically moves up and down on its own, and is not their concern.

This is what I call "working as intended," and I'm sure many of us are thankful for it. Just stepping outside of the healing perspective, there's been talk with the feral druids, tanks and DPS alike, where the personal survival talents are just completely ignored. What they need to see/hear are things like this, because most of them that are not on the beta just don't understand even with blue posts screaming in their faces to value survival more in Cataclysm.

I think the message that needs to come across, especially from a healer perspective, is that anything the feral tanks/DPS can do to maximize their own survivability is a GOOD thing (and for feral kittens, valuing survival talents increases their DPS in the long run because they aren't dead since the healers had to prioritize tanks over people that cannot minimize damage taken). I get the feeling many ferals in this forum just don't get it yet.

[dmx87212]

I feel like giving us control over efflorescence is a good thing. But the problem is with Swiftmend. A simple way to fix it, is to buff Nature's Bounty. Increase base healing of Regrowth by 20%, reduce the crit rate given by Nature's Bounty to 25% and let all hits from nourish/healing touch lower the cooldown of Swiftmend by .5sec.

Simple suggestion

[Ravenblade]

It's just surprising how it's disproportionaly better.
Think about it, here we are discussing and trying to understand what we're actually supposed to do with Efflorescence, while Holy Word: Sanctuary is 1/3 of a Priest talent and is far better in practice. I have no doubts that numbers on Druid's heal will be superior for the sake of balance, it's just hard not to notice that they gave a new AOE heal to a class that has like 4 of them, an still made it more polished than the one given to a class seriously lacking one.

Chakra is the new Holy Priest's mechanic just as the new version of Eclipse is for Balance Druids actually. Considering that Druids already have more diverse mechanics to sport than any other class even though not every spec will use them equally (similar to Holy Power) this does not seem unfair to me.

ToL hasn't been touched in ages, the recent change to Lifebloom is a decent one, actually thought they would do that myself. They are still in a position to polish it but in general you can't compare ToL with Chakra outside the boundaries of spell transformation mechanics. A Priest might use Chakra alot more and the relative powers of each transformation are more likely balanced around it whereas new ToL will be designed around emergency situations thus its powers will come to bear in different levels and it should be in the end notable.

Quantitatively Holy Priests always sported a better arsenal, so I don't care whether they got 3,4 or godzillian AoE heals as long as their heals make sense within their own class' context and don't feel redundant or lacking.

Since you mentioned HW:Sanctuary, it does have drawbacks: only one sanctuary can be active at a time, it has a longer base cooldown than Swiftmend as it is tied to HW:Chastise and is a bit more expensive to cast.

Whether the solution with Swiftmend is polished or not is another matter and in my eyes not very important yet because this is still Beta. Considering that they worked far longer on Holy Priest mechanics than Efflorescence altogether it is quite logical to assume that Efflorescence far less polished. It could also very well be that they are trying which spell is best suited to proc it.

In general I am not too fussed about whether this will "ruin" Swiftmend, if you can't just solely reserve it for absolute emergency situations on the tank anymore then this is just fine because that's just a reflection of things changing for healing and tanking as a whole.

[Deleted]

Well, the main problem for me is WHY they want to attach efflorescence to one of our heal, and not make the spell exist on its own. Linked with regrowth ? You'll be tempted to only spam this spell to create multi-efflorescence, and it adds too much value to our fast heal that already has a good crit rate + leave a hot + plant a living seed, etc etc. Linked with swiftmend ? You literally push druids to forget the for-the-moment sole purpose of this talent so appreciated by ghostcrawler in its comments: an emergency reactive heal, that force the healer to see who is in dire need of a quick heal that you have to build before with a hot. Now, many druids will fish for efflorescence every swiftmend cd. And there are similar problems if you link efflorescence with all our others heals.

They really need to untie efflorescence of everything, and make it a real new spell, a real new button to push. It's like they are reluctant to do it because it will means that they didn't stick to their word, expressed in ultra-long druid polemic threads, that they'll not give us a new spell in cata. I sense some stubbornness there, a sort of pride to follow their original thought and design (that is many months old now so not very up to date of the actual beta) and not change it because it will be seen as a withdrawal, a defeat against the players and their whines. But if it's for the better, they need to do it without any thought about the message that this decision may send to players, there will still be, after all, people who think that they can influence the devs with their topics and their complains.

A targeted aoe heal will complete very well a smart one with a 10 cd. And there is gamedesign's thinking to do, like "ok wild growth is an aoe smart hot, efflorescence need to be targeted with a reticule to supplement the former. But it also need to be different than a hot, druids lacks of some sort of "burst aoe heal", a direct aoe heal will complete wild growth. But a targeted aoe heal with cd will be too much like circle of healing and other's class spells, so maybe a reverse lifebloom/regrowth aoe heal, with 50% of the heal the first tick, and 50% through 7 seconds. Add some flavor/utility on it, like a very big radius (12 yards), but with different levels of healing the more you are in the center of the effect (in the borders, you receive a weak heal, in a first circle in it, a better one, and in the middle, the full power of the heal, to force players to move on it).

There are so many possibilities, i really hope that they will create a real new spell with efflorescence rather than an artificial 5th effect attached to one of our existing heals.

[Bluetarragon]

Well, the main problem for me is WHY they want to attach efflorescence to one of our heal, and not make the spell exist on its own. Linked with regrowth ? You'll be tempted to only spam this spell to create multi-efflorescence, and it adds too much value to our fast heal that already has a good crit rate + leave a hot + plant a living seed, etc etc. Linked with swiftmend ? You literally push druids to forget the for-the-moment sole purpose of this talent so appreciated by ghostcrawler in its comments: an emergency reactive heal, that force the healer to see who is in dire need of a quick heal that you have to build before with a hot. Now, many druids will fish for efflorescence every swiftmend cd. And there are similar problems if you link efflorescence with all our others heals.

They really need to untie efflorescence of everything, and make it a real new spell, a real new button to push. It's like they are reluctant to do it because it will means that they didn't stick to their word, expressed in ultra-long druid polemic threads, that they'll not give us a new spell in cata. I sense some stubbornness there, a sort of pride to follow their original thought and design (that is many months old now so not very up to date of the actual beta) and not change it because it will be seen as a withdrawal, a defeat against the players and their whines. But if it's for the better, they need to do it without any thought about the message that this decision may send to players, there will still be, after all, people who think that they can influence the devs with their topics and their complains.

A targeted aoe heal will complete very well a smart one with a 10 cd. And there is gamedesign's thinking to do, like "ok wild growth is an aoe smart hot, efflorescence need to be targeted with a reticule to supplement the former. But it also need to be different than a hot, druids lacks of some sort of "burst aoe heal", a direct aoe heal will complete wild growth. But a targeted aoe heal with cd will be too much like circle of healing and other's class spells, so maybe a reverse lifebloom/regrowth aoe heal, with 50% of the heal the first tick, and 50% through 7 seconds. Add some flavor/utility on it, like a very big radius (12 yards), but with different levels of healing the more you are in the center of the effect (in the borders, you receive a weak heal, in a first circle in it, a better one, and in the middle, the full power of the heal, to force players to move on it).

There are so many possibilities, i really hope that they will create a real new spell with efflorescence rather than an artificial 5th effect attached to one of our existing heals.

Perfect. I like that a lot. Great idea.

[krebul]

If you view Swiftmend as an emergency heal, then use it as an emergency heal. Efflorescense only makes it a better heal than it was before.

If you use the spell on cooldown just to get the AoE effect, then that might present a problem for you. Blizzard has made it known they intend to actually make a visible difference between good healers and bad ones. So if you spam Swiftmend on cooldown you're going to have problems.

If you pop your swiftmend on a non-tank, does that make it any less of an emergency? Also, if you're having so many emergencies that your party doesn't have enough cooldowns to get you through the 15 second swiftmend cooldown then someone is doing something wrong. You'll notice that Lifebloom is a godsend due to its ability to give you mana and tons of free spells. Nourish spam on the tank will shorten the cooldown on swiftmend.

If you don't hear anything else in my post, hear this. If they had put Efflorescence on swiftmend first, and then moved it to Regrowth, that would indeed be a nerf. It would go from 120% of the heal to 30% of the heal. Yes Regrowth is spammable for a few seconds, and then you're oom. Regrowth should only be cast in emergencies, or when Omen of Clarity procs. You can't spam it for Efflorescence effect.

Swiftmend is healing for 10-11k non-crit in the lowest level gear they expect us to do 5 mans in. When we are fully geared in raid gear, Swiftmend might be double that or more, which means even more insane ticks. Efflorescence is going to scale so much more now that its on swiftmend than it would have on Regrowth.

[Deleted]

This is what I call "working as intended," and I'm sure many of us are thankful for it. Just stepping outside of the healing perspective, there's been talk with the feral druids, tanks and DPS alike, where the personal survival talents are just completely ignored. What they need to see/hear are things like this, because most of them that are not on the beta just don't understand even with blue posts screaming in their faces to value survival more in Cataclysm.

I think the message that needs to come across, especially from a healer perspective, is that anything the feral tanks/DPS can do to maximize their own survivability is a GOOD thing (and for feral kittens, valuing survival talents increases their DPS in the long run because they aren't dead since the healers had to prioritize tanks over people that cannot minimize damage taken). I get the feeling many ferals in this forum just don't get it yet.

What are you on, can I have some as well?

You talking about all those Feral tanks that skip Survival Instincts, Hide, POTP talents...? ^o) No wait, they don't exist.

Seems like a weird personal grudge against ferals.

[ELEDIN]

Well, the main problem for me is WHY they want to attach efflorescence to one of our heal, and not make the spell exist on its own. Linked with regrowth ? You'll be tempted to only spam this spell to create multi-efflorescence, and it adds too much value to our fast heal that already has a good crit rate + leave a hot + plant a living seed, etc etc. Linked with swiftmend ? You literally push druids to forget the for-the-moment sole purpose of this talent so appreciated by ghostcrawler in its comments: an emergency reactive heal, that force the healer to see who is in dire need of a quick heal that you have to build before with a hot. Now, many druids will fish for efflorescence every swiftmend cd. And there are similar problems if you link efflorescence with all our others heals.

They really need to untie efflorescence of everything, and make it a real new spell, a real new button to push. It's like they are reluctant to do it because it will means that they didn't stick to their word, expressed in ultra-long druid polemic threads, that they'll not give us a new spell in cata. I sense some stubbornness there, a sort of pride to follow their original thought and design (that is many months old now so not very up to date of the actual beta) and not change it because it will be seen as a withdrawal, a defeat against the players and their whines. But if it's for the better, they need to do it without any thought about the message that this decision may send to players, there will still be, after all, people who think that they can influence the devs with their topics and their complains.

A targeted aoe heal will complete very well a smart one with a 10 cd. And there is gamedesign's thinking to do, like "ok wild growth is an aoe smart hot, efflorescence need to be targeted with a reticule to supplement the former. But it also need to be different than a hot, druids lacks of some sort of "burst aoe heal", a direct aoe heal will complete wild growth. But a targeted aoe heal with cd will be too much like circle of healing and other's class spells, so maybe a reverse lifebloom/regrowth aoe heal, with 50% of the heal the first tick, and 50% through 7 seconds. Add some flavor/utility on it, like a very big radius (12 yards), but with different levels of healing the more you are in the center of the effect (in the borders, you receive a weak heal, in a first circle in it, a better one, and in the middle, the full power of the heal, to force players to move on it).

There are so many possibilities, i really hope that they will create a real new spell with efflorescence rather than an artificial 5th effect attached to one of our existing heals.

Im totaly agree with you