I guess if we are to take Blizzard seriously, we have to believe that incoming DPS on raid will be balanced in such a way that it outpaces normal healer HPS, but is outpaced by "execute" healer HPS (e.g. HPS boosted by talents like Efflorescence+Nature's Bounty).

That will cause raid hp to behave as you say.

I would hope that we'd continue to see a variety in the healing required in bossfights as we do at least somewhat now, but I'm not sure the changes to druid healing are going to make us quite as versatile as Blizzard seems to be hoping. In constant damage fights or fights where the raid spends most of the time at less than 95% hp, I'd expect Rejuv and Regrowth to continue to be our best heals, since that's more or less ideal circumstances for HoTs in general, and with our mastery buffing them on damaged targets they should win out fairly easily - I do expect that Blizzard will tweak Regrowth enough that we'll want to use it when standing still and Rejuv when moving or if we need more on a target with Regrowth up already, which will be more interesting.

Tank healing looks decent, but unless they tweak the relative mana numbers for Nourish and/or HT, tank healing is going to remain a much higher mana drain than "normal" druid healing, which poses a problem for being capable of doing both. However, without any tank buffs from our heals, I see it ending up with druids being the worst choice for dedicated tank healing and thus our tank healing still mostly being limited to using HoTs to assist a little and helping with Swiftmend and Nourish on damage spikes on heavy tank damage fights even if we end up capable of a more dedicated role, though that's not really a problem.

Kinda worried about our ability to quickly top off random spike damage though, at least at the first raid tier or two before gear scaling removes most mana worries again. If they succeed in causing us to stop constantly keeping HoTs on a large portion of the raid when they don't need it, I don't see Nourish being of much use for spike damage other than as a follow-up spell to Rejuv or Regrowth if one is needed and Swiftmend is on CD. Regrowth seems like the most likely candidate for spike raid healing - but with a major HoT attached I'm not sure how that's going to end up being powerful enough to match other healers while not being much more expensive than other "flash heals." If it does end up that strong, it's going to be a little ridiculous in situations where more of the HoT is useful.

Efflorescence seems interesting, but I do question just how many tools a raid needs to heal up groups of people - I think we're already at a point where healing the melee on a standard spread out fight tends to not be an issue unless something blows up in the middle of them that isn't supposed to, at least compared to how difficult healing the ranged is on the same fight. Unless we see more fights where the ranged clump up as well, the usefulness may be a bit limited though we'll at least have the extra healing on the primary target.


One major question on my mind though is whether or not you get mastery bonuses from trees outside the one you have the most points in, as for some reason I've gotten the impression that you may. If so, that could put odd pressures on resto druid talent specs to skip any mediocre to bad talents they can in the resto tree to instead pick up otherwise bad or useless talents in balance for the haste mastery bonus. I imagine the effects will be limited as I'm not currently seeing useful places to put some of the 16 more or less required points in balance - but I'd rather not have pressure on me to skip improved barkskin for something I'd otherwise consider much less useful than the marginal PvE benefit of a better damage reduction cooldown and actually having armor in my primary healing form, just because I'd have 51+ points in resto without it and balance points would give me a bit of haste.

Any thoughts on why they (Blizz) would put the movement reduction back on ToL?? IMHO, 50% is crucial in many PvE boss encounters and is obviously is an awful "debuff" in PvP. =( .....sure we have the 240% armor increase, but that's not gonna help me much running 1/2 speed and trying to LoS that mage before he gibs me. *chuckle*

Not whining here folks, just wondering why they would re-implement something they found terrible enough to remove from the game previously?


- V -

I agree with your conclusions about spells. It would be interesting to crunch numbers about relative values of crit vs haste, it's just difficult to do without knowing the details of how haste affects hots. My intuition is crit will actually be a lot stronger for Regrowth spam than haste, past the soft haste cap (in other words after haste reduces Regrowth to 1 second casts). This is because after the soft haste cap, haste will only improve Regrowth throughput in one way (by shortening hot ticks), while crit will continue to benefit hots in two ways (via crit hot ticks and via proccing Efflorescence more).