Yeah, the current Efflorescence can be good.

The main problem with it is the same reason Shamans are getting Healing Rain. When Chain Heal isn't effective or enough healing they need Healing Rain. When PoM and/or CoH aren't effective or enough, Priests have PoH. When Wild Growth isn't effective, Efflorescence won't be. When Wild Growth isn't enough, Efflorescence sometimes works. RJ was WG's supplement.

Compared to Cata's tank healing homogenization, it seems obvious that Efflorescence leaves too big of gap/niche between raid healers. Even Paladins got 2 complementary AoE heals...

We still have a HoT named RJ... It's nothing like WotLK RJ, which was the backbone of druid raid healing. The current Efflorescence is too situational to make up for that loss. This becomes more obvious when you compare it to other "small" raid heals, like I listed above.

These analogies just don't hold. A beacon would be just as useful if it wasn't for the glyph and I know as I've used it extensively. LB glyph is totally unrelated as it's simply a power boost. Oddly enough discussion of these abilities never resolves around or mentions the glyph. SM on the other one tends to get it linked to it quite a lot. For instance:
"That said, there's absolutely nothing at all wrong with its utility as a large, instant tank saving heal - assuming the SM glyph survives"

Well it might not survive. And even if it does, you're saying the merit of the spell is linked to it.
Another annoying side effect of SM's current implementation, by the way, is that if you want to Regrowth->SM there is some lag until you can SM, similar to how Destro locks can't go Immolate->Conflagrate.

It's not about a 2 step decision, it's about having to make 2 actions to cast an emergency heal. The Weaked Soul thing has nothing to do with that, it's a lot more akin to checking the CD of SM to know if you can actually do what you want to do or not. I'm not too familiar with Shaman healing, but riptide is not a preq to casting CH.

Not a problem, but the glyph is too instrumental to the spell, mainly because of Rejuv's high mana cost. Seeing as it's a fixed heal now, I'd be more than happy to see the glyph turn SM to useable on all targets regardless of a hot present. It would only put SM on somewhat equal grounds as an emergency heal with tools other healers have.
By the way DP is no longer the holy priests' ability, they got another instant heal instead

Just showing druids are not more mobile than holy priests. A holy priest in the Renew Chakra is shaping up to be a druid with benefits.

I guess I missed something then -- only changes I've seen to RJ have seemed positive (instant ticks via talents, haste/crit effects, etc.). What happened that suddenly made it bad?

EDIT: so I see mana cost is up, time is down to 12 seconds, frontloaded tick, it can crit. On a pointer toon with significantly less spell power than my main toon in live (pointer toon 2469 sp vs live toon 3842), it was accomplishing nearly as much healing on average in 12 seconds (crit dependent) than live does in 18 -- or that live could do in 13 or so if I glyphed Rapid. Cover that extra ~1400 sp, and I would expect it to be doing quite a bit more on average. Actually, I shed gear to bring my live toon down to the 2450 sp range, beta was healing for more than live even with just one crit tick (20% crit).

Anywho, I'm fairly confident that spamming RJ 15-wide has gone away and, if you believe Blizzard, the damage profiles, health pools, etc. may not demand it. I wouldn't be surprised if, by the time they are done tweaking it, we are casting RG nearly an equal amount to RJ in Cata -- especially if we get it down into the 1 second cast time range with haste. Right now mana values seem to be a bit all over the place -- LB and Nourish at 244, Regrowth and Healing Touch at 1200 and 1300 plus . . . I have to believe some of this is going to get changed. Once they sort the mana costs, I do like the toolkit that is getting built. I guess we'll know more how we're situated as 1st raids become available on beta and we start to see how things really look -- but I'm not convinced the sky is falling quite yet.

You're still only looking at druid. Also, those mana costs won't change much. In Cata, mana is balanced around efficient heals: Nourish, Heal, Healing Wave, and Holy Light. RJ was our efficient heal in WotLK. That's the big change. Exactly.

I would like to add that Ulduar and Trial of the Crusader are also instances made with "modern" design philosophy and should be included in analysis since they are just as a almost as good a model for what we can expect from raiding encounters in Cataclysm. Many of these were undertuned even on hard/heroic but the fight mechanics is the interesting part and they do tell a bit about how encounters have been handled by both Blizzard and raiders "recently".

Are healing zone healing really useful for these encounters?:
Flame Leviathan: NA
Ignis: Mostly clustered raid (no penalty for bunching). Yes.
Razorscale: High mobility fight. No.
XT-002: Clustered raid except single players running out with debuffs. Yes.
Iron Council/Assembly: Depending on fight order. "Hardest" mode with Steelbreaker last was highly dependant on clustered raid with healing synergy a top prio. Yes for that, maybe for the other 2.
Kologarn: Small area for fight. Lots of player sharing areas even if not clustered/bunched. Yes on melee and tanks, maybe on other.
Auriaya: Raid in a small area yet again. (most infront, large aoe cone). Yes.
Freya: Depending a bit on execution. Several times during fight where players bunch up but just as much spreading out at times. Big Maybe.
Hodir: Chasing moonbeams and releasing npcs as well as constant moving out of falling debris make it a mobile fight: No.
Mimiron: Firefighter was very mobile but the raid often grouped due to simple lack of space to move. Maybe.
Thorim: No for tunnelforce, yes for arenaforce. With current reach it would not be useful for second phase. (only part of melee/tank force would be possible targets for multiple healing). Overall I would say No.
General Vezax: For the last phase of the manaless hardmode it would definatly come in handy for melee/tank force. Yes.
Yogg: Most of fight highly mobile and would be utterly wasted. Maybe some use in last phase but healing in that phase isn't benefitting much from a manaeffective miniheal on tanks. No in total.
Algalon: Some use for recovery and buffert from the collapsing starts but the repositioning of tanks and the focus on output rather than effeciency makes usefulness dubious. On the other hand a fight like this is exactly what blizzard seem to be leanign away from with the changes to healing strategy and oneshot/0.5 second health windows. No in LK enviroment, Maybe / Yes in a 'clysm one. (really hard to compare since fight is such a WotLK fight imho)

On to the ToGC encounters
Beasts: Only on Gormok and mostly for tanks. Rest is too mobile. No
Jaraxxus: Damage/positioning really isn't lending itself for healing zones to be useful in this fight. No
Faction Champions: I really don't know here. Having zones of "free healing" for raid members to use while trying to surviving with a focus on mobility might be a good use. Especially if this encounter would appear in the mindset of cataclysm with "huge healthpools with slow refill rate". Maybe
Twins: Depending a bit on execution but definatly lot of clustered raid members taking constant damage. Yes
Anub: Tightly packed raid but spread out tanks. (depending on executionstyle). Could have been contraproductive in last phase if heal outpaced the leech by too large a margin. Maybe.


So I would say that not knowing what design philosophy the Cataclysm raids will have and the big variance we had in WotLK raiding I think that general statement "will/will not be useful" is still too early to tell. There is definitly a lot of potential in this idea and if it will continue to be unlimited AoE healing with high heal/mana ratio it will be useful in a lot of potential type of raidencounters.

Having done most of the 5-mans on beta, I feel lifebloom as a tank healing ability needs to get some love. 1.2k ticks on 3 stacks, on a 100k+ hp tank (and thats with mix of Deepholme quest greens and a few ICC 277 leftovers) feel kinda underwhelming, more like a bonus to revitalize procs than a heal. I don't mind "bigger health pools, smaller heals" concept, except that when your tank gets 30-40k hits you don't have an easy time with keeping him alive. Surely, it should be easier with Uldum and Twilight Highlands quest rewards (which are currently not itemised at all), I'm just not sure if that will make that much of a difference.

On a sidenote, rebirth seems to resurrect people with full hp without the glyph, very handy.

Perhaps I missed something but doesn't Chakra have a cooldown?
Doesn't Chakra also only allow one Chakra'd state at once due to the cooldown?

If so, then what you're saying is that Priests can get an equivalent HoT to our RJ but on a cooldown and by foregoing a corresponding boost to other spells. I'm not seeing the problem sorry.

I don't understand the bolded bit. SM vs Nourish currently:

- Roughly the same cost (16% base mana vs 18%)
- Roughly the same heal amount and spell coefficient if you're consuming RJ and have Empowered Touch & Nourish Glyph
- Both require a HoT on the target to achieve the functionality
- Both cast in 1 sec when properly geared
- Both can leave the HoT still active on the target
- SM frontloads by 1 second over Nourish

ergo, if SM is on cooldown, Nourish is a functional substitute.

In Cataclysm (and please correct me if I'm wrong), SM is becoming a much larger heal but still roughly equivalent in strength to Nourish but that will increase the frontload time since Nourish's cast time increases. It seems to me that those changes remove it from the emergency raid heal category and push it into the emergency tank heal category. Doubly because Blizzard have repeatedly stated that raid members will spend more of their time between 0% & 100% than at either extreme.

Regrowth seems to be our emergency raid heal with the fast cast, short duration HoT which ticks for much more than it does now. It's a 1 GCD spell with a powerful follow up which is similar to how we use RJ + SM now (except in reverse order).

Imagine the following situation. Warriors get a new stance, called "stance of the archer." What this stance does is nerf their melee damage, but gives them hunter autoshot and a bunch of their melee abilities get converted into ranged abilities. In archer stance warriors end up doing about equivalent dps of a hunter, while in zerker/battle stance they keep their normal warrior dps. Let's imagine warriors can change into and out of this stance once a minute. Now:

If a fight favors melee, warriors stay in zerker/battle stance. If a fight favors ranged, they pop archer stance and go be ranged. Don't you think other classes would complain that warriors are getting too much flexibility with no real downside? Sure, their melee damage is nerfed in archer stance, but they only use that stance in fights where melee damage is not favored. Same with their ranged damage in zerker/battle stance. Sure, they have a cooldown on changing into an archer and back, but the point is that encounters as a whole generally favor a particular damage style, and this cooldown isn't really a huge limitation given the huge additional tactical flexibility it offers.

This is the situation with holy priests and us.

re: Anaram's post about numbers being important for balance:

Of course that's true, and we can't start making definitive statements about balance until we see the first raid tier, and the numbers they expect us to fight with in that tier. All we can do is try to divine designer intent based on their posts (the healer homogenization post seems relevant) and based on the state of the beta. My intuition based on current info is druids are a bit "off" right now, raid healing wise.

I've been saying for a couple weeks in various blog posts & forum posts that we need another AOE healing tool. Our "raid" healing toolset is not even good enough for feeling like we have all the tools we need for 5-mans, let alone what will happen when we get into raids.

Unfortunately, GC & the other devs seem to be totally uninterested in even thinking about AOE/Raid healing class balance & rotations, based on his latest round of posts (such as: World of Warcraft: Cataclysm Beta - (English) Forums -> My holy paladin feedback. )

Making rejuv overpowered or nerfing priests to compensate for them having better toolsets than other healers won't really work. They need to balance druids & pallies to have real healing toolsets.

Well, I'm pretty sure that any smart raid group will just assign druids to tanks, since our HOTs plus direct heals should actually be great for tank healing.

For keeping alive the DPS in raids, I'm spamming a lot of rejuv and regrowth (with wild growth when we're grouped up), and then running OOM due to not really having alternatives.