World of Logs

[Cursingmonk]

I have to agree that I do not want to see druids nerfed. They are high on the meters in many of the fights due to the copious amounts of raid damage, the 3 min tranq cooldown, and how their hots will tend to snipe healing done.

As others have said they are not necessarily OP they just look great on a meter. As a paladin healer I can still compete or beat our resto druid on some fights.

If blizzard decides to nerf tranquility that will begin to force raid stacking for tranquility again. Leave druids alone, a good raid leader will be able to spot good heals rather than padded meters.

[Afflictid]

I don't think anyone would take a druid over a priest just because they rock the meters. Priests still has pretty great cooldowns, druids only has one - Tranquility - which is a big reason for their huge hps.

Holy Priest have... ????

[Cursingmonk]

Holy Priest have... ????

Guardian Spirit

Lightwell

Body and Soul

Circle of Healing

Chakras which enhance certain healing spells/styles/situations

Prayer of Healing

The Raidwide healing and mana channeled spells (drawing a blank).

Edit: And spirit of Redemption but I yell at My priests for popping angel form...

[Zuziza]

The Raidwide healing and mana channeled spells (drawing a blank).

Divine Hymn and Hymn of Hope respectively, but all priests have this regardless of spec. Having these in the raid is very nice though, since the first increases healing taken for everyone and the second increases their mana pool for a time. Combining them with other healing/mana CD's is awesome.

[Ynna]

I don't think anyone would take a druid over a priest just because they rock the meters. Priests still has pretty great cooldowns, druids only has one - Tranquility - which is a big reason for their huge hps.

Not just that but I also imagine Firelands to be a big step up in terms of raidewide damage (I haven't been in Firelands yet, so I could be wrong.) which lets Druids with their HoTs really shine on the meters, since they do a lot of small trickles of healing while we are healing everyone up to an acceptable health level.

[Zuziza]

Not just that but I also imagine Firelands to be a big step up in terms of raidewide damage (I haven't been in Firelands yet, so I could be wrong.) which lets Druids with their HoTs really shine on the meters, since they do a lot of small trickles of healing while we are healing everyone up to an acceptable health level.

There is so much raid damage. An insane amount on several fights, but usually only for a short phase.

[Kacie]

With the crit buff it has made druids alot more powerful than before 4.2, i mean i was in firelands last night on the spider boss, before she came down i was out of mana and the druid was on full mana, he didn't have any mana problems at all and i had used most of my cd's when she landed, this is on 10m, normally we do 25m so will have to check that out next week.

[Deleted]

If you're group is stupid enough to equate HPS with good healing, link the Overhealing and Mana Gained from Recount or Skada. Your druid will no doubt top both of them by a ridiculous amount. The only ones who would gain more mana are DPS since they don't have passive mana gains. The druid will also be the one who needs everyone else's mana CD's before anyone else. Had a priest, pally, or shammy been doing the same thing (overhealing and going oom like crazy), they'd be slammed for it. Restos do it just because of their group heal capabilities.

Agree about the overhealing, but how are you focusing on the mana? Rapture>revitalize all day. I typically get 150kish mana back from rapture over a fight, druid around 85k from Revitalize(numbers pulled from wol) same logs show innervate worth 50k, fiend 40k. So no, druid dont gain more mana than all but dps.

[Zuziza]

Agree about the overhealing, but how are you focusing on the mana? Rapture>revitalize all day. I typically get 150kish mana back from rapture over a fight, druid around 85k from Revitalize(numbers pulled from wol) same logs show innervate worth 50k, fiend 40k. So no, druid dont gain more mana that all but dps.

I was referring to when Druids are pulling insane HPS and overhealing at the same time. If you check WoL or recounts for instances where this occurs, they are often being fed any available mana CD's. Prior to the 4.2 nerf to Innervate, this was especially true for WoL top HPS if there were boomkins in the raid. The point I want to make is not whether or not priests or druids are innately more mana efficient than the other, but instead that druids must have a mana IV running for them to pull crazy numbers, much of which will turn out to be overhealing. If you had a priest calling out for innervates and Hymns, the assumption would be that they are playing incorrectly. If a druid does it, it's assumed that they need it or the raid dies, regardless of how inefficient their healing actually is.

This is why I argue that HPS charts alone are unreliable and should not be used to determine who is a better healer. I should have worded it better.

[traen]

Its all about crit. Druids top players with dots, so they steal healing from other players. How can shaman or paladin beat druid if all raid is at 95%?
Basicly blizzard just buffed druid hps by 20% by new crit mechanics. No wonder they are healing so good now. It was predictable from beginning.

Dont worry, 3-4 weeks and druids will be nerfed to death.

[Afflictid]

There is almost never a time where casting Divine Hymn is better then the normal PoH+CoH spam. The ONLY time I use it is if I am running oom, or if a Spirit Link is down. Also, the only thing on that list that counts as a "cooldown" is Guardian Spirit.

Directed at Cursingmonk


Somehow I missed the Reply with Quote button.

[Maruka]

druids win healing meters because of tranquility. they arent really any better or useful than other healers though

[Zuziza]

Its all about crit. Druids top players with dots, so they steal healing from other players. How can shaman or paladin beat druid if all raid is at 95%?
Basicly blizzard just buffed druid hps by 20% by new crit mechanics. No wonder they are healing so good now. It was predictable from beginning.

Dont worry, 3-4 weeks and druids will be nerfed to death.

Actually, I think shamans are really going to shine in Firelands with the insane amount of tank damage going out. We had a resto shaman healing one of the tanks on Shannox and he was pulling crazy crits when the tank's debuffs got stacked high and when the raid got the 40% fire damage debuff. Shammy mastery is funky, but if they get a crit on anyone with low health, they're practically back to max afterwards.

And don't discount priests altogether. Disc priests benefit from the crit buff for DA and direct healing, even if they don't rely on direct healing as much as other healers do. Holy has a ton of direct healing as well, so they stand to benefit just as much as a resto druid.

HoTs have their usefulness, and the crits do benefit them, but I know in my raid, our resto druid had trouble keeping up with huge hits of damage (Shannox in particular after a dog dies). We had to switch our disc priest to the tank because the HoTs plus direct spells simply weren't cutting it.

[Afflictid]

I would be happy if they just changed Divine Hymn in either one of these two ways:

A) Make it work like Tranq where it just casts faster instead of gaining ticks. The cast time is ridiculously long and the heals are far apart (even with haste stacking). In most fights it is hard to stand in the same spot for a 10 second cast. This way you will have more people with the healing buff on them faster, so you can take advantage of it.

or

B) Change it to apply the 10% increased healing buff to the entire raid for the duration of the channel. This isn't a gamebreaking cooldown, but it will give holy something to make it feel like we can save a raid. This idea was originally Kelesti's, so I won't take credit for it.

[Zuziza]

I would be happy if they just changed Divine Hymn in either one of these two ways:

A) Make it work like Tranq where it just casts faster instead of gaining ticks. The cast time is ridiculously long and the heals are far apart (even with haste stacking). In most fights it is hard to stand in the same spot for a 10 second cast. This way you will have more people with the healing buff on them faster, so you can take advantage of it.

or

B) Change it to apply the 10% increased healing buff to the entire raid for the duration of the channel. This isn't a gamebreaking cooldown, but it will give holy something to make it feel like we can save a raid. This idea was originally Kelesti's, so I won't take credit for it.

Well, think of it this way: if you're using DH, it's not going to be at a time when most people are topped off. Even if you have something better to use when EVERYONE is low, it's somewhere in between. Thus, most people in your raid are going to have low health, and the lowest will probably be a tank.

The buff for 10% healing lasts 8 second from the time they receive 1 of 3 heals per tick. So, the first 3 to get a heal get the buff for the duration of the channel. The next 3 (which may be different, though the tank is likeliest to get a repeat), also get the healing buff. By making the buff work that way, the healing buff only goes onto the raiders who have the lowest health. It's an attempt to narrow down the buff only to the raiders that need it most.

Overall, it seems like an attempt to keep DH from being OP. Making the +10% healing go to the entire raid would be insane if coupled with Tranquility, which already can top off the entire raid. It's something that has to be used strategically.

In my guild, I'm usually the one who uses a hymn rather than the Disc priest. This allows all 3 healers to pump out the raid heals while my DH (or HoH if they need mana) boosts their abilities. DPS is rarely an issue in my group unless someone dies, so we see it as a good trade off. I can see the issues a healer would have with trading controlled throughput for a limited and slow smartheal, but keep in mind that it's a class-wide spell; unless they take it from shadow, I doubt they'd buff it.

As for making it like Tranq... well, it's not Tranq. What happened to the pride of having very distinctive healing spells?

[Deleted]

I was referring to when Druids are pulling insane HPS and overhealing at the same time. If you check WoL or recounts for instances where this occurs, they are often being fed any available mana CD's. Prior to the 4.2 nerf to Innervate, this was especially true for WoL top HPS if there were boomkins in the raid. The point I want to make is not whether or not priests or druids are innately more mana efficient than the other, but instead that druids must have a mana IV running for them to pull crazy numbers, much of which will turn out to be overhealing. If you had a priest calling out for innervates and Hymns, the assumption would be that they are playing incorrectly. If a druid does it, it's assumed that they need it or the raid dies, regardless of how inefficient their healing actually is.

This is why I argue that HPS charts alone are unreliable and should not be used to determine who is a better healer. I should have worded it better.

Scanning the top few now it doesn't seem to be the case, after checking a random 20 or so from the top 25 man druid parses they just have their own innervate, there's one where he gets 50k from hymn of hope but all healers in that raid group would be similar(assuming low mana arcane mages arent stealing all the ticks) this seems a silly argument to have but i'll get to my point in a second.
Pre 4.2 druid were top yes, but that was mainly on fights where there's heavy tank damage so almost all healers are assigned to tanks and splash healing heals the raid(sup wg) or pulling roughly 10% or so more than other classes which made up for their lack of a mitigation CD of any sort. Fair enough.
But the boost to crit to everyone else, isn't always good, a lot results in overhealing, but with druids the odds of overhealing with a hot crit are reduced somewhat, so they just have a flat boost to healing.
My point about arguing about the mana is its easy to ignore reasons by claiming 'oh they must have done this' but if thats not the case and druids are doing 40% more throughput on a lot of fights and 20% on the rest, this is a balancing issue, not so much in regards to disco and pallys. But it could lead to a situation where holy is fairly useless in raids.
Personally i found that if someone got an innervate in pre 4.2 it was me for shield spam when needed not a druid for more hots.

[Ynna]

There is so much raid damage. An insane amount on several fights, but usually only for a short phase.

Then most HoTs will get a maximum amount of useful uptime, especially if you have time to heal up after the AoE Damage phase.

Before Cataclysm came out Blizzard said that they knew that Druids where going to be powerful with the way healing was going to work. This proves that they were right, but I'm confident they'll tweak if necessary.

[Zuziza]

Scanning the top few now it doesn't seem to be the case, after checking a random 20 or so from the top 25 man druid parses they just have their own innervate, there's one where he gets 50k from hymn of hope but all healers in that raid group would be similar(assuming low mana arcane mages arent stealing all the ticks) this seems a silly argument to have but i'll get to my point in a second.

HoH works similarly to DH in that only 3 get mana at a time; the lowest are likely to be 2-3 healers and maybe the 1 caster DPS that's beginning to have trouble (such as the arcane mage you mentioned). It tends to be more balanced in a 10 man, where you have 3 healers max, but in a 25 man, it's much more likely for a mana-inefficient healer to be taking most of the tics.

Pre 4.2 druid were top yes, but that was mainly on fights where there's heavy tank damage so almost all healers are assigned to tanks and splash healing heals the raid(sup wg) or pulling roughly 10% or so more than other classes which made up for their lack of a mitigation CD of any sort. Fair enough.

So you're arguing that druids are top HPS because they weren't assigned to tank heal alone? So their raid heals are why their HPS is inflated. Yes, that was the point I was trying to make.

But the boost to crit to everyone else, isn't always good, a lot results in overhealing, but with druids the odds of overhealing with a hot crit are reduced somewhat, so they just have a flat boost to healing.

Crit bonus is always good, but it was never the original reason for overhealing. Druids overheal more than other classes because their spells have a chance of being used inefficiently more than another class' might simply because of the way they are designed. HoTs aren't as easy to control as a direct heal, so druids have to play their luck a bit with "that should be enough to hold them" and hope that another healer in the group doesn't heal the same person with a direct spell, making the HoT count as overhealing. This has nothing to do with crit, but has to do with whether or not the druid and the other healers involved can read each other well enough to maximize the efficiency of each cast. That was actually the challenge of Chimaeron: the healers have to work together to make the 6 seconds as efficient as possible so they minimize overhealing and mana loss, but at the same time have to heal everyone for at least 10k (tank more so).

And I have no idea where you get the idea that a HoT means crit is a flat increase to druid healing, but it wouldn't be for direct heals. Both are affected in the same way by crit. If you're arguing that the small crits are more manageable/predictable, I really don't buy it. It does nothing to alleviate the issue of balancing whether a raid member is going to be okay with HoTs rolling or if a another healer will top them off in the meantime. The outside influence of another healer making a druid's HoTs overheal is unaffected.

If you're not getting it, let's revise the perspective a bit. A direct healer would look at a raid member with damage and consider what direct spell would minimize mana spent for the heal they need. It's a very quick decision. A HoT healer, like a druid, looks at it the same way, but has a greater risk of running the overheal compared to the direct healer just because HoTs take time. A direct heal is done instantly, so if both had targetted the same person for the same amount of healing, the direct healer will have less overheal than the druid. There is a similar issue with AOE/raid damage situations. A druid knows that the healing will take time, so pre-emptively HoTing up the raid members to follow with something like Tranquility would be best for big raid damage situations. Direct healers don't have that same option, they have to wait for the damage to actually occur. They can time a group heal to land afterwards, but the druid will have already started overhealing before any damage is done, and the HoTs may still be running (in some situations) when the raid members are already full.

In short, HoTs are more prone to unwillingly overheal than direct heals just because they're designed that way. Druids can't let up on that because otherwise their heals would be too slow to make much difference. A very mana efficient druid will be working with the other healers so everyone knows when HoTs should go around and how "okay" any particular raider is at what health. A druid that doesn't communicate with their group is more prone to overhealing and wasting mana, as well as requiring mana CD's to keep it up, but their HPS will be about the same as a mana efficient druid.

My point about arguing about the mana is its easy to ignore reasons by claiming 'oh they must have done this' but if thats not the case and druids are doing 40% more throughput on a lot of fights and 20% on the rest, this is a balancing issue, not so much in regards to disco and pallys. But it could lead to a situation where holy is fairly useless in raids.
Personally i found that if someone got an innervate in pre 4.2 it was me for shield spam when needed not a druid for more hots.

Throughput means effective, non-overhealing spells. Disc overhealing is incredibly low, so if you compared the throughput, they wouldn't be that far off. I can't speak much for pallies, but with beacon (even after the redesign), I'm pretty sure they can keep up with a resto druid's healing just on the tanks.

What you're ignoring is that each of these healing classes has been given a bit of a niche, even if they have some overlap. Disc is still mitigation for either tanks or raid (with the option of DPS healing), holy has incredible direct raid healing, Pallies are bomb tank healers, shamans are awesome with high burst damage fights, and druids are very mobile and HoT for the whole raid.

QQing because restos can pad the numbers due to their niche just doesn't make sense to me. Numbers alone should not be the reason for a nerf to any class.

---------- Post added 2011-07-01 at 02:21 PM ----------

Then most HoTs will get a maximum amount of useful uptime, especially if you have time to heal up after the AoE Damage phase.

Before Cataclysm came out Blizzard said that they knew that Druids where going to be powerful with the way healing was going to work. This proves that they were right, but I'm confident they'll tweak if necessary.

I agree completely. The issue I'm taking up in this thread is that people are calling for a nerf because of what a chart shows. There's so many issues with that.

[Deleted]

Had a long post drawn out, decided to shorten it.
When i spoke about splash healing my point was typically that is what has made druids top meters but you can't sit and argue that they're OP because of that.
Throughput was the wrong word, effective healing is what i meant. Throughput wise druids are probably further ahead but i digress. Druids do a LOT of aoe healing since the patch. I don't see room for holy to keep up. Disco's ability to stop damage before it happens will always shine, meters make no difference there. However, in a 25 man raid, i don't see a use for holy over resto's 'burst aoe healing' is irrelavant largely as druids hots rolling will be topping everyone frequently and if there's a point they can't keep up neither could holy, and people on verge of dying will probably benefit more from just having a disc priest in the raid than a holy to 'burst aoe' it up. Holy nieche is burst aoe, sniping druids at times doesnt make them better the raw ability to keep a raid up is what holy is strong at and currently druids are far outperforming them in that role.

Edit: crit may not be the reason for it, but it seems to be a big boost to druids, when hot shine, crit hots will. It is an unpredicable stat. If you have 5 casts, you have a high chance of either having lots of, or very little crits which can easily overheal a lot. With hots you will have many ticks and although there will still be times you crit a lot in a row or not, it is more likely to balance itself out.

[Zuziza]

Had a long post drawn out, decided to shorten it.
When i spoke about splash healing my point was typically that is what has made druids top meters but you can't sit and argue that they're OP because of that.
Throughput was the wrong word, effective healing is what i meant. Throughput wise druids are probably further ahead but i digress. Druids do a LOT of aoe healing since the patch. I don't see room for holy to keep up. Disco's ability to stop damage before it happens will always shine, meters make no difference there. However, in a 25 man raid, i don't see a use for holy over resto's 'burst aoe healing' is irrelavant largely as druids hots rolling will be topping everyone frequently and if there's a point they can't keep up neither could holy, and people on verge of dying will probably benefit more from just having a disc priest in the raid than a holy to 'burst aoe' it up. Holy nieche is burst aoe, sniping druids at times doesnt make them better the raw ability to keep a raid up is what holy is strong at and currently druids are far outperforming them in that role.

Edit: crit may not be the reason for it, but it seems to be a big boost to druids, when hot shine, crit hots will. It is an unpredicable stat. If you have 5 casts, you have a high chance of either having lots of, or very little crits which can easily overheal a lot. With hots you will have many ticks and although there will still be times you crit a lot in a row or not, it is more likely to balance itself out.

I agree with a lot of your points, particularly the issues with 25 man and pairing a disc/holy priest with a resto druid. The only point I want to make on that is that a resto druid cannot heal an entire 25man raid alone. What I disagree with is that crits benefit them more because of the issues that arise with burst AOE heals. The issue is just that this is where druids and holy priests overlap, and I don't see how the crit change alone exacerbates that problem.

It comes back to druids looking good on a meter because they can HoT everyone up, while a Holy Priest has to be more conscious of who they're healing and when because they don't have the HoT/smartheal capability that a druid does. A guild should not be benching a good holy priest because they have lower HPS. Druids have the challenge of not being able to "catch up" when the raid gets too low, and any other raid healer (shaman, disc, holy priest) can make up in that regard. While this seems totally counterintuitive to what HPS is supposed to predict, it's simply because druids can affect more targets at once, but not at the same potency as a holy priest.