Does anyone else miss the TBC healing style? [Druid]

[Kuniku]

I really loved the healing style back in BT/Hyjal, I liked the Tree form, and more importantly the spirit buff and the group synergy that went with that.

For those newer druids - back in TBC while in Tree of Life form everyone in your group got a percentage of your spirit as +healing done to the group.

My role in raids was as a tank healer, my gear was stacked with spirit (I often forwent set bonus' and wore a lot of cloth to increase my spirit - before the leather specialisation bonus we get now) and I was in the tank group with the 3-4 tanks. Healing wise my favourite fights were the multi tank fights, namely Bloodboil, I'd keep lifebloom and rejuv rolling on all 3 tanks, adding in Regrowth or random raid rejuves in any spare GCDs I had going - because of the stacked spirit I never ran out of mana, and the fact I was primarily healing the tanks I was grouped with made up for the lack of spell power I sometimes had.

I didn't mind the fact we were limited on what spells we could cast, because I only wanted to cast my HoTs anyway - naturally I had my NS+HT macro for 'oh shit' moments, as well as tranquility.

I think the only more recent spell I'd really add in would be Wild Growth and the AoE on Swiftmend (which I don't think we had back then?)

Obviously I'd have to change the mastery to suit, as harmony's buffing of the Direct Heals wouldn't be much use, possibly mastery could increase the spirit to +healing buff


TBH I've yet to really play my resto druid in MoP, so it might be a bit better now, he's pretty much always been my main, until mop at least, but the last 2 expansions I've not really enjoyed healing as a Druid anywhere near as much as I did in TBC...

[lettuce]

Yeah, earlier style healing was more fun in my opinion. I'm sure others disagree and love the new style of efficiency management but healing has enough going on just playing whack a mole during fight mechanics, I don't want to have to ponder the style of hammer too overly much.

[Deleted]

i cant get into my resto druid since cata, i cant quite tell whats changed but something feels wrong about it. it was my main during tbc/wotlk and i loved resto healing, and im not sure why now, but i just cant get into it. maybe ive just gone off the class.

[noobadrood]

Im pretty sure we did have LB back then (t6 decreases its CD), but I loved the style. 2 things I would have changed anyway were: unable to cast HT while in tree form (WHYYYYYYYYYYYY??), and unable to DECURSE in tree form. All in all, the same stupid limitation just because.

[Deleted]

Im pretty sure we did have LB back then (t6 decreases its CD), but I loved the style. 2 things I would have changed anyway were: unable to cast HT while in tree form (WHYYYYYYYYYYYY??), and unable to DECURSE in tree form. All in all, the same stupid limitation just because.

old lifebloom use to have high mana cost and the bloom healed for more i think.

[Kuniku]

No the mana was quite low, no limitations on the number of people you could cast it on, I never used the bloom part so can't comment on that, just kept it rolling.

As I said I didn't mind the limitations, in raids my job was to keep my HoTs rolling on the tanks, HT was only ever cast with NS, as for decursing; it wasn't needed that often and most of the time it was more important i stayed in tree form for the tank buff so one of the mages did my decursing for me =p

(i vaguely remember them adding decurse to the list of tree form spells? could be wrong though...)

It was even better in the 2.0 patch when for a short while the treeform buff stacked, you could have 5 spirit stacking trees in a group healing each other for crazy amounts :3

[Deleted]

No the mana was quite low, no limitations on the number of people you could cast it on, I never used the bloom part so can't comment on that, just kept it rolling.

As I said I didn't mind the limitations, in raids my job was to keep my HoTs rolling on the tanks, HT was only ever cast with NS, as for decursing; it wasn't needed that often and most of the time it was more important i stayed in tree form for the tank buff so one of the mages did my decursing for me =p

(i vaguely remember them adding decurse to the list of tree form spells? could be wrong though...

are you sure the mana cost was low? at least in wotlk im sure the LB manacost was high. cant remember it too well though :z

[Deleted]

That was their change for LB in WotlK - high mana cost but returned mana.
With Cata they reverted it to the TBC style - low mana cost no returned mana - however added the target limitation.

I too prefer the TBC model, I used to have so much fun jumping around lifebloom-ing people. Trying to keep blooms up on both tanks while throwing rejuvenations out was way too much fun ^^

[Deleted]

That was their change for LB in WotlK - high mana cost but returned mana.
With Cata they reverted it to the TBC style - low mana cost no returned mana - however added the target limitation.

I too prefer the TBC model, I used to have so much fun jumping around lifebloom-ing people. Trying to keep blooms up on both tanks while throwing rejuvenations out was way too much fun ^^

ah ok! i cant remember TBC healing too much :P but i loved my druid in wotlk

[Deleted]

TBC healing as a Druid was fine - it wasn't exactly involving or challenging aside from timing your LB refreshes correctly. WotLK was, debatably, even more boring with the dominance of a RJ x 5 followed by WG rotation. I enjoyed Restoration Druid in Cataclysm a surprising amount despite being unable to raid as much as I would have liked.

My Druid was my main for something close to six years. She has 59 reputation factions at Exalted and despite all the driving factors that should have been pushing me to get her to 90 and continue playing as her, in a lesser amount of time than it has taken me to level my Druid from 85 to 88 I rerolled a Priest and levelled her from 1 to 90 and started raiding with her. That is how enjoyable I found MoP Druid healing.

You couldn't decurse in ToL if I remember correctly - memories of Kalecgos seem to involve my Night Elf being in humanoid form far more often than ToL. We also didn't have an AoE on Swiftmend until Cataclysm if I recall, introduced in order to fix the deficiencies that lead to RJ x 5,WG being so strong.

[schwank05]

I sadly didnt get my druid leveled to 70 until 3 weeks before Wrath was released, he was main for all of Wrath and Cata. Now I just cant stand to play him anymore. I would love the old healing style back.

[Kuniku]

yeh in TBC lifebloom was borderline OP, low cost, high heals and cast on lots of targets, wrath it changed to high cost, good heal, mana return and i think single target, cata changed further to low cost ok heal no target limitations.

in TBC you could pretty much heal heroics with just lifebloom =D

(and I've not even got started on the way druids handled in PvP, I'm not sure what they're like now but we were true hybrids in arena back then, used all 4 forms available to us in most games =D

Wrath had potential, but we got forced to blanket the raid with rejuve while throwing in the odd wild growth, I've always prefered tank healing to raid healing tbh.

---------- Post added 2013-04-15 at 03:56 PM ----------

TBC healing as a Druid was fine - it wasn't exactly involving or challenging aside from timing your LB refreshes correctly. WotLK was, debatably, even more boring with the dominance of a RJ x 5 followed by WG rotation. I enjoyed Restoration Druid in Cataclysm a surprising amount despite being unable to raid as much as I would have liked.

My Druid was my main for something close to six years. She has 59 reputation factions at Exalted and despite all the driving factors that should have been pushing me to get her to 90 and continue playing as her, in a lesser amount of time than it has taken me to level my Druid from 85 to 88 I rerolled a Priest and levelled her from 1 to 90 and started raiding with her. That is how enjoyable I found MoP Druid healing.

You couldn't decurse in ToL if I remember correctly - memories of Kalecgos seem to involve my Night Elf being in humanoid form far more often than ToL. We also didn't have an AoE on Swiftmend until Cataclysm if I recall, introduced in order to fix the deficiencies that lead to RJ x 5,WG being so strong.

yeh thats why I wanted to add the swiftmend aoe to that playstyle ^_^

I might level my druid to 90 and see how I get on with the old fellow, I've already got a dic priest at 90 (MoP main so far) and am leveling a monk healer, eventually I'll find a healing class I still enjoy properly :3

[Deleted]

Probably not going to be a popular opinion, but it was utterly awful. Keeping your LB stacks up with a macro and throwing the occasional heal elsewhere with your spare GCDs was not a fun playstyle.

[insanedruid]

old lifebloom use to have high mana cost and the bloom healed for more i think.

No, old lifebloom was cheap and lifebloom rolling is always better than let it bloom in pve (not counting the bugged lifebloom in 2.0)
In TBC, all resto druid did was to keep all tanks lifebloomX3+ rejuv

[Kuniku]

Probably not going to be a popular opinion, but it was utterly awful. Keeping your LB stacks up with a macro and throwing the occasional heal elsewhere with your spare GCDs was not a fun playstyle.

Can't say I ever used a macro (other than NS+HT) I liked the tight 'rotation' of keeping LB and RJ up on multiple targets, combined with my general dislike of raid healing... which made it more ideal for me =p

[kendro1200]

are you sure the mana cost was low? at least in wotlk im sure the LB manacost was high. cant remember it too well though :z

Yeah the hpm (and hps) for LB was super high, hence why druids spammed it. Although very few druids I knew of while raiding up to Sunwell actually stacked spirit, instead we stacked spell power as much as possible (you were force fed enough spirit to still have enough of a significant boost to healing on the mt and ot's). The mana cost of LB was super low, so you didn't need regen, if you were a super good druid you could roll lbs on three people at a time until the end of time.

Personally, I don't miss that era or style of healing. If you knew your tank names you could macro your healing cycle into one button and spam it until the end of time. Early Cata healing was actually super fun imho. You really got to see who was bad and who was half decent at their job. All of the TBC and WotLK druids would run out of mana asap and be useless for the entire fight, and it'd show. All of the half decent and vanilla relics would know how to budget their mana, heals and carry raids to win.

All of that being said, the healing that I miss the most was vanilla healing, simply because you didn't need to be resto to pull that healing off. You could be feral, balance or resto, and the only thing you needed was regen to account for largely r4 ht spam, with some extra on the side for rejuv and regrowths. The actually oomph behind the heals was already baked into the spell itself and so you could pvp as feral clutch heal at a node for 30 secs or so, go back to kitty or bear and tear face. You could also bring yourself back from the brink of death with a single ht and regrowth.

[NightZero88]

I enjoyed rejuv spam personally. While I didn't like HUGE hits on tanks that needed to be healed instantly or they would die, I loved casting 24/7 and never running out of mana. LBs and rejuvs all over the place. I liked the running around and jumping all crazy while only casting HoTs. We've moved away from HoTs to a more direct heal approach at least in my opinion so you jump around all day.

[Eroginous]

I really loved the healing style back in BT/Hyjal, I liked the Tree form, and more importantly the spirit buff and the group synergy that went with that.

For those newer druids - back in TBC while in Tree of Life form everyone in your group got a percentage of your spirit as +healing done to the group.

My role in raids was as a tank healer, my gear was stacked with spirit (I often forwent set bonus' and wore a lot of cloth to increase my spirit - before the leather specialisation bonus we get now) and I was in the tank group with the 3-4 tanks. Healing wise my favourite fights were the multi tank fights, namely Bloodboil, I'd keep lifebloom and rejuv rolling on all 3 tanks, adding in Regrowth or random raid rejuves in any spare GCDs I had going - because of the stacked spirit I never ran out of mana, and the fact I was primarily healing the tanks I was grouped with made up for the lack of spell power I sometimes had.

I didn't mind the fact we were limited on what spells we could cast, because I only wanted to cast my HoTs anyway - naturally I had my NS+HT macro for 'oh shit' moments, as well as tranquility.

I think the only more recent spell I'd really add in would be Wild Growth and the AoE on Swiftmend (which I don't think we had back then?)

Obviously I'd have to change the mastery to suit, as harmony's buffing of the Direct Heals wouldn't be much use, possibly mastery could increase the spirit to +healing buff


TBH I've yet to really play my resto druid in MoP, so it might be a bit better now, he's pretty much always been my main, until mop at least, but the last 2 expansions I've not really enjoyed healing as a Druid anywhere near as much as I did in TBC...

I agree. Being able to use Lifebloom as a group heal was a much better healing style. Now it's a pain in the ass to manage correctly. Any smart team will just pressure you into stacking in on someone else, then hard switch to you and global you.

[windfish]

Yeah i'm in the same boat, didn't really start playing much until Wotlk, I did main the good ol' Tree of life in wrath and loved it, keeping all my HoTs up but still having my Oh S*** abillities, then cata hit and making rejuv the only main HoT and making regrowth more of a burst abillity really made me sad. I just don't find it enjoyable anymore. Monk healing is the closest i can get to resto druid pre-cata but it still is nowhere near as fun as it used to be.

[Deleted]

Dunno how the TBC style was as I started healing in Wrath, but out of the three expansions I liked healing in early cata the best, provided you at least had some gear. It really separated the good healers from the bad although you did have the factor that dps at that time had a lot less room to screw up which was actually 50% of the new healing game at the time even if people don't realize it. You couldn't heal stupid anymore like before. The amount of patience I got however was so much more amazing as I was expecting a lot more bit**ing on the constant wipes. I actually enjoyed the triage system as long as your group wasn't completely brain-dead. I liked that I had to use ALL my healing spells and CDs to get through. The only spell that should have healed for 50-100% more was Nourish though as it was really too weak. When we got the Cata prepatch they added those clearcasting procs on your screen I personally didn't understand the need for that until the expac hit.
People probably found the new style very difficult, but to me it was a lot more rewarding than the ICC rejuv WG spam. I also like the change to tree of life as you could use it two ways, as a power CD or a mana preservation CD. I get that people missed the permanent tree form (but hey you have it back now), but since the age of transmog I like to see myself in caster form.