They've also gone back and overloaded Regrowth again with super high crit chance and have tied Effloresence to that one spell only. Honestly the class feels very confused despite there being some cool mechanics and solved issues from the past. Itemization has mostly been fixed with the inclusion of crit for hots, the new healing design where people are not expected to be topped off and where direct heals are more important.


Tank healing should include: Lifebloom, Rejuvenation and then a mix of Nourish and Swiftmend as standard or Healing Touch when necessary. Living Seed should be a key talent here as that is really the only place it can be and they have decided Lifebloom should be the prime source of our Revitalize. For the most part the key actors are there and only some balance issues need to be tweaked.

I would say Living Seed needs to be changed to make it contribute more for tank healing and considering it needs to be balanced around Regrowths unique crit chance the best option would be to just exclude Regrowth altogether. Once the raiding game starts we can see how much of a factor Lifebloom is in the mix but I would say it should be between 20-30% of our healing on the tank with only Nourish being higher.


Raid healing though is looking rather unclean in some regards. Tranquility is a solid panic button, Wild Growth works as a quick reactive button to press where needed and Regrowth on the merit of being a flash heal is fine. Then you get to Nourish which feels weak without a hot, Rejuvenation which feels to expensive and too short to be used that often, Swiftmend which requires a hot in advance, Effloresence which feels weak and is tied to our expensive flash heal. Finally you have Tree of Life which outside of making Regrowth instant is looking like a longer version of Avenging Wrath.


Moving on I would say the ideal adjustments would be:
* Nourish - no bonus healing from hots, but bonus critical strike (10%~).
* Living Seed - works from SM/NR/HT only and redesigned into a solid tank healing tool (open).
* Swiftmend - no longer consumes a hot but will refresh all hots on the target if they are present (could also work on enemies/dots).
* Lifebloom - glyphed to remove the bloom and add Inspiration (for PvP balance).
* Effloresence - rebalanced to feel more significant and reliable for AoE healing when required (open)
* Regrowth - normal crit chance.
* Rejuvenation - given a purpose (open).
* Tree of Life - bonuses outside of Regrowth reworked, potentially allows Barkskin to be targetable in this form only (gives us a minor cooldown once per 5 mins if needed).

These changes should make Nourish feel fine for spot raid healing as the bonus for a hot is less important (it's tied to a tank healing boost) and Swiftmend matches what every other class has especially in a world where hots aren't everywhere. Living Seed and Effloresence should become key staples of tank healing and raid healing respectively where right now they feel somewhat insignificant. You could even make Effloresence a short clicky such as:
"On use: For the next 8 seconds your direct heals sprout a bed of healing flora underneath the target, healing all nearby friendly targets within 5 yards for 75% of the amount healed by your direct heals over 5 sec." with a cooldown along the lines of 30-60 seconds. Considering there has been concern over our limited AoE raid healing tools compared to other classes this is one way to make our existing direct heals more involved in fitting that area where required.


It feels really odd that our tank healing looks the most refined but as Arawethion previously stated - a lot of our class is still designed around a TBC/Wrath situation with hots and until they resolve that and give an indication on how they actually want Rejuvenation to work it feels really awkward to look at the spec as a whole.

I think it's fairly likely that the strength of the stack will be variable based on the moment of refresh, whether by casting Lifebloom or Nourish. It'll be similar to the nerf that went in way back when druids would pop trinkets and keep that stack going ad infinitum during TBC. So in this case, you cast a Rejuv, load up your stack, refresh Rejuv or cast Regrowth, then refresh your stack. Unfortunately...

Mr. Ghostcrawler missed the boat on that question.


Swiftmend, however, needs some work. It's weak, despite being the "iconic" ability, for a variety of reasons already expounded upon. It essentially demands the corresponding glyph, otherwise the mana and opportunity costs rise by a significant amount. Compare it to Holy Shock, which heals for a bit less but has a fraction of the cooldown, and also builds resources for a strong, free, instant heal. Compare Daybreak or Strength of Soul to Nature's Bounty.

I like the suggestion to remove the HoT requirement, and to allow it to refresh the existing HoTs on the target. As a talent, perhaps it could also apply a HoT after-the-fact. It could follow the Efflorescence model and heal for an additional 25% over 5 seconds, or similar. This would provide a small window of opportunity to layer more heals into the target if it's needed, assuming the target has no pre-existing HoT. Ultimately, Nature's Bounty will depend upon the final strength of Swiftmend, but given its current strength it could use some love.

As a potential offensive ability, just toggle over healing to damage and HoTs to DoTs, as suggested.

Sounds like the mastery is simple. When you cast a spell on a target, it checks if you already have a different hot on it. If so, bonus. If not, no. LB refreshes should work as if you recast them, meaning you'd need another hot on the target, but that's the only gray area.
Double casting to heal someone up will be the norm as the numbers are looking now. A rejuv heals for roughly 25% of a DPSers HP pool. This mastery doesn't make the raid healing toolkit any worse because you still need a few casts, it just pushes it more to RJ/RG->Nourish. I think the main potential problem is the efficiency of AoE heals such as CH. If they are mostly on par with Heal (using Heal as the generic slow/efficient healing spell) when they hit all targets and are just meant to save GCDs / provide more HPS, then we do have our version - RJ. If they are more efficient - and some like PoM sure are - then the situation changes. Numbers from World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Level 85 Shaman Healing Numbers for instance suggest that it's the former.
Finally, our own AoE heal, WG, seems rather efficient and can provide a boost to the mastery. Optimally it will provide an uptime of 40% to the bonus on its own (10m raid, glyph), and while that is rather optimistic, standing in-between the melee and ranged clump and casting WG on yourself should provide high uptime.
Druids certainly needed the HPS boost when tank healing. Our main tank heals - LB and Nourish - didn't benefit from the mastery at all, we have no way to haste up Nourish and SM has a longish CD.

I very largely agree with Hamlet on his assessment of the tree, the sheer number of skills related to Rejuv really makes me wonder what exactly their design goal was when very few of the Cataclysm healing design mechanics truly seemed to support its usage.

This reminds me of mid to late wotlk cycle when Paladins were basically being force-transitioned off of Illumination (and the mana regen it provided via crit) but yet many of their internal mechanics had not been shifted off of their reliance of crit rating. This shortsightedness left many holes in the design of the class, and was really compensated by their introduction of divine plea (something that hardly made the class interesting nor was it really needed if illumination had gone unchanged.

The point is, as much as I respect Blizzard, they really don't want classes having one go-to heal thats used 90% of the time. The changes your proposing present an even greater issue in the eyes of other healers. If we have the capability to keep Rejuv up on 15ish or so players, our healing done will by nature trivialize the other healer outputs due to the low volume of heals the other classes will be putting out (and the near-constant output of our own). Even if they make it significantly smaller then it currently is, the problem still remains that we are the one class that will be required to keep heals up almost 90% of the time (adjusting targets based on health, but still non-stop casting). This is contrary to the design of other classes, so I truly wonder if this problem can be solved merely by addressing the length and scope of Rejuv at this juncture.

Afaik this is only true if you are in a "bad" haste of count.

If the number of ticks you get from haste are rounded down then refreshing after penultimate tick really has no penalty. If, on the other hand, the number of ticks on the spell is rounded up due to haste then you lose one tick. So (at least early expansion) when you've just reached 5th rejuvenation tick it makes little sense to refresh rejuvenation before it runs out, you'll only get a total of 9 that way.

Ohh, hmm, is that true? How exactly does the refresh work?

If I have a DoT that gets (4.5 + epsilon) ticks in the default duration, then the first cast gets me ROUND(4.5) = 5 ticks of duration. But if I refresh with half a tick left, you're saying it's going to refresh to a duration of
ROUND(0.5 + 4.5) - 0.5 = 4.5 ticks, and not to
0.5 + ROUND(4.5) = 5.5 ticks?

i.e. does it
1) add the base duration to the partial tick remaining, round to an integer number of ticks, and then subtract back off the partial tick that's underway? Or
2) round to determine how many ticks are added by a fresh cast, and add that to the partial tick remaining?


e: I'll try to look into this with Resto HoT's when I can, but my experience with Glyph of Starfire leads me to think the system biases towards giving extra ticks.

(2), at least for DoTs.

For a DoT, even a very early refresh gives you one "extra" tick. Talented IS is nine ticks, two seconds apart. From Arythorn's log, in the Balance thread, he refreshes just 0.3s after a tick, and then gets ten more ticks. The DoT lasts 19.7 seconds after the refresh.

[12:47:17.093] Calculatéd Insect Swarm Melee Target 1 (O: 2730)
[12:47:17.322] Calculatéd casts Insect Swarm on Melee Target
[12:47:17.322] Melee Target's Insect Swarm is refreshed by Calculatéd
[12:47:19.092] Calculatéd Insect Swarm Melee Target *1* (O: 7312)
[12:47:21.092] Calculatéd Insect Swarm Melee Target *1* (O: 7311)
[12:47:23.128] Calculatéd Insect Swarm Melee Target *1* (O: 7311)
[12:47:25.092] Calculatéd Insect Swarm Melee Target *1* (O: 7312)
[12:47:27.024] Calculatéd Insect Swarm Melee Target 1 (O: 3498)
[12:47:29.091] Calculatéd Insect Swarm Melee Target 1 (O: 3498)
[12:47:31.092] Calculatéd Insect Swarm Melee Target *1* (O: 7312)
[12:47:33.092] Calculatéd Insect Swarm Melee Target *1* (O: 7312)
[12:47:35.092] Calculatéd Insect Swarm Melee Target *1* (O: 7312)
[12:47:37.025] Calculatéd Insect Swarm Melee Target *263* (O: 7050)
[12:47:37.025] Melee Target's Insect Swarm fades

[EDIT] Removed

I don't think anybody was suggesting to nerf rejuvs healing or to make it free to spam as it is now. What would be nice is to see the mana cost adjusted enough that prehotting 6-8 people wouldn't be completely painful. That would really help our heals to feel a bit more synergistic and giving us some way of dealing with AoE damage. Right now rejuv seems like a reactive spell which makes it hard to use things like swiftmend and to get your extra 20% nourish. If they don't feel like rejuv being a somewhat spammable spell they need to change a bunch of core stuff that everybody has mentioned above.

This is basically what I'm saying. I do think that they are very skeptical of this idea of prehotting after WLK, which they seem to view as some kind of massive failure (w.r.t. Rejuv blanketing). But without some basic idea of prehotting, the whole point of HoT's evaporates--and that's before you even get into the Resto-specific mechanics that support it.

Everything you said here we already know on this thread, read higher up. I also gave a general formula for the haste breakpoints here:
http://elitistjerks.com/f73/t101219-...9/#post1744447

In reference to that Lifebloom Omen of Clarity proc, if it is intended to be something we rely on to some degree for healing mana efficiency would we not have to make some sacrifices talent wise to make that work given the amount of bloat that exists.

With Nature's Grace being less effective for resto I'm curious would you use something as outlandish as this?
WoW Talent Calculator - Sigrie

People might say pushing balance is actually worthwhile and if so i'd be curious what spec people would use. If it was decided heavy balance and no furor was a suitable option would this work? (flavor points in resto to taste of course)
WoW Talent Calculator - Sigrie