[Druid] Raiding as a Tree - Page 13

Berengar · 02/20/08, 5:38 PM

I just tested it and its not such a big deal.

On the live server I get 257 as tick instead of 281 (with 2358 Healing). With the Empowered Rejuvenation buff one LB (that ticks through) heals roughly the same on the ptr as on the live server. The same for pvp gear with 1500ish healing.

So they nerf LB ticks just that the emp rejuv buff doesn't change the raw healing of one LB, but the 3x stacked lb does get a nerf. And if you consider that LB would be dispelled in PVP before it ticks through, Emp. Rejuv would be even a buff for PVP.

Pyros · 02/20/08, 5:41 PM

Originally Posted by malthrin

Looks like a ~9% nerf according to the patch notes thread. No biggie.

Well that's a big nerf considering lifeblooms makes up for the majority of our healing, and there's nothing to balance it as far as I can tell. 4T6 is still 5% healing touch.

For random values:
2148healing Live=1823 from the 7ticks PTR=1676
1688healing Live=1508 from the 7ticks PTR=1390

Final heals:
2148healing Live=1673 PTR=1880
1688healing Live=1457 PTR=1616

So well, it's a nerf on the hot, but a buff on the final heal it seems, which somewhat makes it BETTER for pvp, and worse for pve. Not sure if that's intended.

Edit: Oh right they made it so final heal is affect by empowered rejuv. Still a weird choice

Galashin · 02/20/08, 5:50 PM

An 8% nerf, assuming 80% effective healing from lifebloom ticks, results in a 6.4% reduction in total effective healing. At 95% effective healing from lifebloom, it's a reduction of 7.6%. While raiding will go on, and resto druids will still have a place, the only effect will be to increase the healing burden of the other classes as, unlike them, our HPS is entirely capped by the stacking mechanics and GCD use, rather than having a rank choice component. I fail to see the purpose of this change.

• giansm · 02/20/08, 6:09 PM

Going by the numbers I have seen so far on the forums (two posts here and two on the official druid forums) it looks like the per-tick coefficient on a 3-stack is down from 29.42% to something like 26.4% +/- 0.2%. In absolute terms this means you would expect to lose 3% of your +healing value on a 3-stack, for example you would expect to lose 60 on your ticks if you have 2000 +healing (going from around 720 to 660). In relative terms, you would expect an 8 to 9% reduction in healing done by lifebloom, depending on how much +healing you have. In other words, it's nowhere near as bad of a nerf as the trinket thing was, and again will probably not affect our playstyle much but just make us somewhat less effective.

The situation isn't as bad as Galashin suggests, since we do have ways to increase our effectiveness, especially with the additional mana we will be receiving with the spirit changes. On single-tank fights we have a lot of ability to contribute extra raid healing through hotting and regrowths. We can also boost our healing on the MT by increasing the frequency of regrowths, including the tactic in which you use max-rank regrowth to put up a hot and then one- or two-downranked regrowth as a direct heal. Sure, it's inefficient, but the rest of our spells are so efficient that if you have the mana to burn, you might as well. When doing lifebloom cycles on multiple tanks, we can add rejuvenations if we are healing two or three tanks. We can try to get spell haste to heal 5 tanks, or to enable us to use more rejuvenations in our 3- and 4-tank cycles. We can spec Insect Swarm and use spare GCDs to put it up on the boss to boost the tank's avoidance (don't laugh, I do this sometimes).

lairpie · 02/20/08, 6:19 PM

That's a pretty big nerf for seemingly no reason. The vast majority of resto druids are basically sacrificing everything to be really good at 1 thing, buffering tank hp. We move slow, we choose a route of rather inneficient gearing compared to other healers which can balance mana and +healing. We have the slowest big hp heal, the slowest flash type heal. We have to be in a tank group to get the most use of our 41 pt talent. Can we do other things, usually with a respec or regear, sure, but not better than any other healing class. I could play in the role of being a raid healer and do well at it, but there's no way i would be better at it than if i were to reroll a different class or find an equally geared/skilled healer of another class. Proving that druids can be good raid healers is like proving feral druids can do well in arenas. Sure with the right makeup and gear and skill you can do it, but you'd still almost always be better off being a different class.

We accept all of that to be really good at 1 thing, keeping tank(s) alive. Nerfing lifebloom's healing output after we've already had to sacrifice almost everything to get our +healing and talents to a point where lifebloom does enough to be worth it, isn't a slight balancing thing, its a big nerf.

Pyros · 02/20/08, 6:19 PM

Originally Posted by giansm

Going by the numbers I have seen so far on the forums (two posts here and two on the official druid forums) it looks like the per-tick coefficient on a 3-stack is down from 29.42% to something like 26.4% +/- 0.2%. In absolute terms this means you would expect to lose 3% of your +healing value on a 3-stack, for example you would expect to lose 60 on your ticks if you have 2000 +healing (going from around 720 to 660). In relative terms, you would expect an 8 to 9% reduction in healing done by lifebloom, depending on how much +healing you have. In other words, it's nowhere near as bad of a nerf as the trinket thing was, and again will probably not affect our playstyle much but just make us somewhat less effective.

The situation isn't as bad as Galashin suggests, since we do have ways to increase our effectiveness, especially with the additional mana we will be receiving with the spirit changes. On single-tank fights we have a lot of ability to contribute extra raid healing through hotting and regrowths. We can also boost our healing on the MT by increasing the frequency of regrowths, including the tactic in which you use max-rank regrowth to put up a hot and then one- or two-downranked regrowth as a direct heal. Sure, it's inefficient, but the rest of our spells are so efficient that if you have the mana to burn, you might as well. When doing lifebloom cycles on multiple tanks, we can add rejuvenations if we are healing two or three tanks. We can try to get spell haste to heal 5 tanks, or to enable us to use more rejuvenations in our 3- and 4-tank cycles. We can spec Insect Swarm and use spare GCDs to put it up on the boss to boost the tank's avoidance (don't laugh, I do this sometimes).

While I can see myself using regrowth every time I can and stuff to burn mana, it's still slower than a flash of light so it will mostly land too late. Insect swarm takes you out of treeform, fucking up mana efficiency more than the spirit change is going to give you, but yea, I'm sure I'll manage to find stuff to do anyway.

It's just weird to directly nerf our main healing spell, when as far as I could tell, it wasn't vastly overpowered. I mean, maybe it's me, but I rarely beat other healers on heal meters, and while there's a lot of stuff that go with heal meters, the only fight I can usually heal more than everyone else is Illidari Council. Every other fight, I'll end up between #2 and #4, which is good, but not totally out of line.

Don't know, in the eyes of my guildmates, it seems it's a pvp nerf, but since empowered rejuv boosts final bloom, it ends up being only a pve nerf as far as I can see it.

Kamileon · 02/20/08, 7:32 PM

Here's my numbers:

Only self buffed, not in tree form.

It's the same as losing a little more than 150 +heal from live for me.

ex-moz · 02/20/08, 7:39 PM

That's pretty hilarious, significant boost to the bloom portion will benefit PvP and the reduction in periodic healing will impact PvE a lot more than PvP.

Ribeye · 02/20/08, 8:15 PM

It occurred to me that one possible reason for the nerf wasn't so much healing now, but the future of lifebloom. If you consider that +healing has practically doubled from vanilla to now, we could conclude a similiar doubling of plus healing from gear in the next expansion. It's quite possible that the mathematics behind the nerf will increase per the amount of plus healing such that 5000 plus healing would not put out such a ridiculous triple tick of lifebloom as to be overpowered.
This of course is all speculation on my part, and yet I had previously wondered at what point a continuous stream of healing every second finally becomes too powerfull for the measley amount of mana expended to make it happen. The percentage, seemingly 8%, could increase to some maximum of whatever%, finally resulting in an actual ceiling...

• Quantum · 02/20/08, 9:08 PM

Originally Posted by Ribeye

It occurred to me that one possible reason for the nerf wasn't so much healing now, but the future of lifebloom. If you consider that +healing has practically doubled from vanilla to now, we could conclude a similiar doubling of plus healing from gear in the next expansion.

Well, Lifebloom wasn't included in vanilla, and it's a pretty safe bet that there'll be one or two new healing spells for druids included in WotLK. Also, if +heal gets doubled, so would stamina and boss damage, I assume. But there's no reason to speculate about WotLK at all, since it has nothing to do with 2.4. Sorry, there might be good (or bad) reasons for Blizzard to nerf LB, but being overpowered at +5000 heal is not one of them. Right now, it's a nerf, and many find it to be an unnecessary one.

Actually, the nerf makes picking up haste completely useless, in my opinion. Why bother running 5 stacks of LB if you have to pick up better "traditional" healing gear to make up for the loss of ~9% +heal?

Aciara · 02/21/08, 2:02 AM

Does anyone else have anything to say about the new t6 pieces? Because as it currently stands I absolutly won't give up all my stamine on bracer/wrist/waist to get haste rating-t6. Is there anything apart from some form of error on their part that would make sense to drop stamina from all new t6 pieces and add absolutly needless haste (after the lb nerf, I think no one will try to get 5 lbs rolling as it should be inferior)?

◊ Noressa · 02/21/08, 2:13 AM

I'll probably use it for trash, but since most boss encounters give some pretty hefty raid damage, I'll likely stick with my higher stamina gear.

MastaMarax · 02/21/08, 4:22 AM

I would propose waist/wrist/boots without stamina are no good for Arena matches. When playing resto I am normally placed in the MT group, so I very often have commanding shout and imp buff. My health value usually is quite high, so I could imagine that for some fights i could do perfectly fine.

ppilatee · 02/21/08, 5:28 AM

Maybe the ability to have 4 GCD's bettween Lifeblooms with the new mana regen changes would be to OP in its current form, so it has to be toned down a bit....

Anaram · 02/21/08, 5:52 AM

Originally Posted by ppilatee

Maybe the ability to have 4 GCD's bettween Lifeblooms with the new mana regen changes would be to OP in its current form, so it has to be toned down a bit....

5 lifeblooms each giving 6 ticks in approx 7 seconds is 4.28 ticks per second approx.
4 lifeblooms each giving 6 ticks in approx 6.2 seconds is 3.87 ticks per second. (6.2 is just an approximation for the refresh interval)

It's not so much the increased healing it gives (approx 10% more for ~200 haste, which is equivalent in item budget to 500 healing) but the fact that one can actually heal a whole group with it. I'm not sure 8-9% will much impact on the situation where you'd heal an entire group with lifeblooms, though.

Ragnorr · 02/21/08, 6:06 AM

Originally Posted by Aciara

Does anyone else have anything to say about the new t6 pieces? Because as it currently stands I absolutely won't give up all my stamina on bracer/wrist/waist to get haste rating-t6. Is there anything apart from some form of error on their part that would make sense to drop stamina from all new t6 pieces and add absolutely needless haste (after the lb Nerf, I think no one will try to get 5 lbs rolling as it should be inferior)?

Ill only use the bracers, The huge loss of stamina com paired to Lifestep and the Black Temple trash boots, its to much a loss. I doubt we will see many resto druids out there with boots/belt

Aciara · 02/21/08, 7:29 AM

Originally Posted by Ragnorr

Ill only use the bracers, The huge loss of stamina com paired to Lifestep and the Black Temple trash boots, its to much a loss. I doubt we will see many resto druids out there with boots/belt

This is exactly what I thought aswell, bracers maybe because they already have next to no stamina (16 or 17 depending on if you use cloth or leather I think), but why would blizzard change good, nice t6 Items (which I had at least hoped they were supposed to be) into crap nobody would actually want (ok for patchwork#2 maybe, but the old gear was just flat out better)?

Shuja · 02/21/08, 8:02 AM

They propably removed the stamina to reduce the viability of using 4-piece gladiator and 4-piece T6.

• Playered · 02/21/08, 9:30 AM

I actually wanted decent Haste gear if it was going to be given to us at all, sitting at 80 or something is pointless, its 150-200~ or nothing. These 3 pieces of gear now allow that to be a much more viable option and if Sta is the big issue I will just gem them for it.

Orin · 02/21/08, 9:50 AM

Originally Posted by Playered

I actually wanted decent Haste gear if it was going to be given to us at all, sitting at 80 or something is pointless, its 150-200~ or nothing. These 3 pieces of gear now allow that to be a much more viable option and if Sta is the big issue I will just gem them for it.

I think this depends on your role in a boss fight.

If you are MT duty with more than 2 tanks, and like me cannot maintain more than 3 LB stacks because of latency, even a little extra Haste could turn the tide and allow some extra raid LB or Rejuv/Swiftmend to be used in the rotation.

Or for on Bloodboil, if you are healing a bloodboil group, even a small boost in Haste will allow more lifeblooms to be running at once.

The only real situation where I could see not adding more Haste right away would be if you currently are able to maintain 4 LB stacks at once and have very low latency. In that case, some Haste might make this easier for you, but you won't see any real improvement in your 4 stacks until you get enough haste to have 5 stacks at once.

Funboy · 02/21/08, 11:11 AM

So looking at my WWS report last night, I had:

4,658,338 effective healing
3,965,797 was lifebloom, 70%

After nerf my numbers would be:

4,341,074 effective healing
3,648,533 lifebloom

Net loss of 317,264 healing from lifebloom over the course of a 4 hour raid in Mount Hyjal or 6.8% of my total healing. This is significant.

lairpie · 02/21/08, 11:14 AM

1. Nerfing coefficients in expectation of wotlk changes will be done later, not now.

2. Haste will never be good (assuming its only affecting the GCD) for very many fights and is certainly not worth itemizing for on your primary gear other than to pick up a slight amount to give yourself a bit of a latency/laziness cushion. Picking some up for those rare fights where it would be useful might not be bad.

3. It takes a lot of latency or a bad ui to no be able to keep 4 lifeblooms up pretty consistently. I'll admit this varies greatly with the score of whatever sporting event is on the tv in the background. I'm planning to pick up a little bit of haste on some items where i can do it without losing hardly anything, like maybe a BBoK or the za neck, mostly just to give myself a little cushion.

4. If you're playing the role of predominantly stacking hots on 1-4 tanks and not blowing people away in healing done, either you're doing something wrong, or your guild is bringing too many healers. As the number of healers increases or the fight gets easier, tank hot stacks will tick less and less, plummetting your healing done, but when things are still hard enough that the tank isn't constantly topped off, you should be doing a ton of healing as a hots on tanks druid in any fight that isn't just goofy.

5. This change sucks. Don't get me wrong, if you looked solely at healing meters druids would look a bit op in pve, but the healing meters don't show the huge sacrifices druids make to do 1 thing well: constant healing dump into tanks.

• Playered · 02/21/08, 12:28 PM

My healing done over a Full Hyjal / Half BT was: 35% Lifebloom, 25% Rejuvenation & Regrowth, and 10% was Swiftmend.
1.2mil was Lifebloom total healing for the night and the general overhealing was 21%.

Theres more to life than Lifebloom, but the general loss for me would be just under 100k healing done from the change =o

The regeneration changes and the inclusion of haste might make us more generally viable on raid healing, but Regrowth will remain really subpar with so much of the healing done via the slow, weak, HoT.

Pyros · 02/21/08, 12:48 PM

Originally Posted by Playered

My healing done over a Full Hyjal / Half BT was: 35% Lifebloom, 25% Rejuvenation & Regrowth, and 10% was Swiftmend.
1.2mil was Lifebloom total healing for the night and the general overhealing was 21%.

Theres more to life than Lifebloom, but the general loss for me would be just under 100k healing done from the change =o

The regeneration changes and the inclusion of haste might make us more generally viable on raid healing, but Regrowth will remain really subpar with so much of the healing done via the slow, weak, HoT.

Heal spell usage varies greatly between players. My lifebloom healing is over 60% all the time, and sometimes reaching peaks at 80% when I'm feeling lazy and not keeping regrowth on tank. Rest is rejuv/swfitmend. It's still an unnecessary nerf in my opinion, and I'd like to get an official word as to why it was nerfed, was it because it was deemed too powerful in pve, or was it a side effect of a pvp nerf. Will we see compensation?

As you said, regrowth will probably stay mostly inneficient even if you get the cast time down to an aceptable level, simply because it doesn't heal a lot at once, and by the time it ticks the target should be back to full hp. In 1/4 of the cases, you might have a use for the remaining hot, but the rest of the time it's just wasted, unless done on a tank. They could maybe tweak healing touch a bit to add it in the usable spell list.