Originally Posted by Apollofatboy
It looks like Blizzard is moving us more in a both preemptive and reactive style of healing, giving us new reactive spells while keeping our preemptive nature intact, of course while throwing in a bit more AoE abilities for utility. Not that it's a bad thing that it would seem that Blizzard intends on our healing style being a little more active; looking at the arsenal of our healing spells, it'll be interesting to see if we develop a healing cycle like we have now, or will we use a dual-natured cycle of using 1-3 seconds keeping pre-existing HoTs up, with the remaining 4-6 seconds devoted to a reactive style of healing. Personally I hope for the latter.
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I would rather see the latter too.
In all honesty, the Wrath changes have me horribly conflicted. I haven't enjoyed my Druid in a very, very long time. (I wanted to switch to Priest for BC and all, but we had no trees.)
As it stands today, I'm still basically the only PvE tree in our entire guild alliance that fields 2 raids and hundreds of non-25 man raiders. (There's a couple alts that are Resto sometimes, and the new tree convert in our second raiding group.) I'm lonely, and I've grown really tired of the lifebloom-rolling, constantly scheduled style of healing we've developed. However, the Wrath changes for Resto druids are basically everything I would have ever thought to ask for, and it completely obliterated the "cons" list I had made when I was trying to figure out how I felt about the 4 healing classes, with the thought of a new main for WotLK.
I'm just not sure that 2 years of bitterness about my Druid are something I can get over because this stuff is shiny. I should probably move on, but at the moment, Resto Druids seem to have the most compelling setup from what we've seen so far, and they have the most interesting and unique mechanics.
My fear for is that lifebloom rolling and hot stacking being the unique mechanic it is, even if our other heals are competitively effective with the other healing classes, we'll end up in the same role we have now, simply because we're the only healing class that can stack and roll hots. Nourish and Flourish will have a much bigger role in 5 mans (and 10 to some extent) but I am not sure if I see our raid role changing much, even though Nourish and Flourish are great. Nourish and Flourish would have to be better than the offerings from the other classes to be used over rolling hots; and that won't/shouldn't happen for raid balance.
Flourish fitting a 6 sec rotation again is awesome. It'd see use certainly, but as a personal preference I'd like to see the healing style move away from the set cycles of heals we do. I don't care for the scheduled and unreactive feel of healing as a Tree as we cast our 4 (or 5) beat cycle. Maybe that's just me being tired of the cyclical nature, and I should move on if that's what the class is meant for, and people enjoy it as such.
Buffing, Decursing, and HT in tree are really just long overdue changes. It sounds kinda small, but shifting in and out was a nuisance, especially when you're dealing with a 2 druid raid where the other one is a feral with no ImpMotW.
All in all, these really are an amazing set of changes; I hope they make it live mostly intact.