At the beginning of TBC, I think most people would agree that Resto Druids were pretty lackluster. It was hard to tell if Druids were better off trying to be single target healers with Dreamstate or HoT spammers with ToL. Every guild had a Feral already and bringing additional Restos didn't make much sense when you could stack Paladins for blessings.

The high point of this Resto Druid antipathy was probably Nihilum stating publically that Resto Druids were underpowered and that's why they didn't bring any to their raids.

Then one day Blizzard changed the +healing coefficients for Lifebloom applications and things changed dramatically.

I'm not sure when I first noticed it, but it was our first Illidan kill on Monday that really brought home how incredibly powerful Lifebloom stacking could be. The number one healer on our kill was a Resto Druid app we had who was in mostly Karazhan gear. In fact, looking back at our recent late BT kills, Resto Druids nearly always ruled the healing meters with their Lifeblooms.

In the Mother Shahraz thread on this forum, someone from DnT stated that they brought 2 Paladins to spam FoL on the MT and that really helped their healing a lot when the MT had this quick heal buffer. Well, on our Mother Shahraz kills our 2 trees do almost the same thing with Lifebloom stacks, but they're able to do it for all 3 tanks at the same time.

Killing Illidari Council with 3 of the 4 tanks having double Lifeblooms stacks on at all times? The difference it makes for the other healers in the raid is huge.

I look at WWS reports from other top guilds killing these same bosses and rarely see other guilds utilizing Resto Druids to the same extent we do. It this because they just don't have the Resto Druids in their guild? Or do they think it's more effective to not depend on Lifebloom stacks?

What about other top guilds who shared Nihilum's concerns that Resto Druids were underpowered? Does the Lifebloom buff change that view at all?

I think this problem was slightly overstated even at the time that the Nihilum fella made that statement about restos. I checked all the other Illidan killing guilds recently and I think all apart from two had at least one resto druid (by that I mean T6 geared). I think the difference was very small back then, and most people would bring one just for MT healing + the combat res/innervate they could provide. I mean at a time when people were using warlock alts to soulstone half their raid in BT another combat res is a nifty thing to have.

Nihilum are the very pinnacle of min/maxing to the point of extremes. Most other guilds this wouldn't apply too, even if they were slightly weak you aren't going to tell your guildmate and friend of 2+ years that hes too gimp to bring to raids anymore.

Then came the lifebloom change and I think it put Druids at almost the right place. As you've said yourself, keeping 3x trinketed lifeblooms up on all your tanks in an encounter is mighty powerful, true I've not seen into T6 personally yet but it applies at T5 level too. Very cheap and very efficent and more importantly a different style of healing to pallyspam.

I do think that resto druids could still use a slight tweak to make them as useful as Paladin's but at the moment the difference is small.

But after that rambling, to answer your original question yes we have embraced it. Its a great tool for almost all boss fights, and as you said you can keep it up on 3 tanks easily with 1 Druid. The extra healing ticks are great and the mana efficency is fantastic. I just worry slightly about how interesting it is to play.

Lifebloom is great, and looks very nice on the healing metres because it ticks every second, rather than every 3 seconds like all other hots, so its effective healing is insane.

Correct me if i'm wrong, but weren't druids also godly towards the end of WoW vanilla? I think we are seeing a classic case of item scaling slightly better for druids, just like they do for Rogues in current end-game.

I think what totally changed my outlook on resto druids was switching from using them for raid healing, which is the more intuitive use of HoT, to using them to sustain healing on the main tank. MT healing they are insanely good, raid healing they are actually fairly underpowered.

I'm unsure about the specific math on the coefficients, but what makes Lifebloom so powerful is the ability to trinket a large stack and then maintain it throughout the fight.


Here's some recent WWS of the kind of numbers we see from Lifebloom in raids:

Wow Web Stats <- Illidan
Wow Web Stats <- Illidari Council
Loading... <- Mother Shahraz


Keep in mind the Druid on top of those 3 charts is not a Tier 6 geared Druid. We got him a piece of BT loot tonight, but when those fights occured, he was in almost all Kara/T4 gear with 2 piece of T5 we got for him when we attuned him along with boots from Hyjal.

He's able to put up the big numbers because he has very good uptime on all his Lifebloom stacks.

The fights in BT/Hyjal seem very friendly for priests/druids in general, there's even fights where Circle of Healing is excellent. Can actually feel useful there - starting with fights like Najentus. My guild's always used 1-2 Restos per raid - they're MT healers some raids, FFA other ones. Healing is always about finding the roles where the strongest are as taxed as the weakest. But healing meters tend to reflect what you've been asked to do, rather than the state of your class. I think Awake's got a good guild but I'd guess comments like this relate more to their desire for a minimum of 3 Blessings, their dislike of Paladin and maybe Shaman "offspecs" and probably their love of ferals.

I cant get the numbers to add up, is Lifebloom unaffected by the resto talents? From the numbers in those logs it seems the Coefficent is 46% regardless of any talents.

So with Gift of Nature and Emp. Rejuvenation you can get a total of ~81.8%?

I just cant get it to add up with the numbers in the log provided above from the Illidan kill, there you can see Pyxis with Lifebloom ticks for 914 with 1838 healing on his gear, this only adds up to a coefficient of ~47.6%.

Unless I'm missunderstanding entirely how Lifebloom works here, these figures dont add up.

You could be missing any number of effects. Amplify magic, tree of life aura perhaps?

Tree of Life aura reduces damage taken, I dont see how that could be having any effect on it. Ampliy Magic would be increasing the healing received. Could be Dampen Magic though. I'll check if it was applied to his target.

Edit: Neither Dampen Magic nor any other spells that would affect healing done to the target has been applied in this log as far as I can tell.

Sorry, I was thinking of the old version. Yes, the ToL aura adds healing received equal to 25% of the druids spirit. My bad.