Remember that in cata you will only be able to run either 10 or 25 man and on either normal and heroic mode, that will hopefully make blizzard able to give people a chance to try new content without letting emblems out of control.

I did some testing of Efflorescence last night with build 12539; I found out a few things that may be of some interest:

• The tooltip is correct in that it heals every second for 30% of what your Regrowth crit for. So, with a 9k crit, it would heal for 2700 every second for 10 seconds. The amount healed also does not double-dip with any of our talents.
• The amount it heals for is not affected by the number of targets within the 15 yard radius; it will always do 2700 hps to each person/
• It will heal anyone within 15 yards of the Regrowth target, even if they aren't grouped with you.
• The Efflorescence ticks are incapable of critting.
• Multiple Regrowth crits will create multiple layers of Efforescence patches, and they stack. So a person standing on two will receive double the number of Efflorescence ticks for a total of about 5400 hps per person.

Right now, Efflorescence is extremely overpowered, and its certain that its not going to stay the same. Ignoring the healing that Regrowth does, Efflorescence alone would heal a person 27k HP. If there were 10 targets standing on it, thats 270k healing with one cast and only 1223 mana (@ lvl 80 w/o Moonglow), putting its HPM at over 220.

It seems they've definitely decided on Swiftmend being the resto baseline ability. They've also moved around some talents in the tree. Nature's Grace still hasn't been finalized, though.

It does seem like they're making good on their statement that they want people to think about their talents (and as such, making fewer talents mandatory). In my own fiddle build, I had about 5 points float points split between almost as many talents (and I was taking a mix of raid/tank healing talents). The trees currently allow us a lot of wiggle room to specialize around raid or tank healing, but there just aren't enough points to maximize both.

Source: MMO Champion
Druid talent trees, since MMO is swamped today

Arc,

I think the calculator you linked is a bit dated. The MMO one is here.

Note that if mana is an issue, you'd really like both Moonglow and Heart of the Wild, but you'd need eleven points outside of the resto tree. Also, I think at least 32 points in the Resto tree are almost mandatory.

Any choice you make is going to risk at least one important area (mana, raid heals, tank heals).

I feel like overall the Restoration tree can't be near completion. Currently we're required to put a point into either Furor or Perseverance to reach the third tier, both talents are incredibly lackluster for a resto druid. Improved Rejuvenation and Empowered Rejuvenation are very nearly the same thing (with the obvious tooltip difference). Just feels unfinished at this point. It seems to be shaping up well, but I'm hoping they have something left up their sleeves.

I think Perseverance is a fine talent for raiding.

But yeah, the tree is awkward as far as tiering. I'm pretty sure all the trees are though. To be honest, they don't yet seem to have a solid plan for making 5-point tiers and (mostly) 3-point talents work out really coherently. It's possible that everyone will have to get more used to having points left over here and there.

Emp. Rejuvenation is currently flagged with a [TBR] in-game.

Isn't that what they wanted though? Convert healing to damage, they certainly stated they wanted to have choices outside +damage talents. I'm more concerned with the lack of choice for a pretty terrible talent - Natural Shapeshifter. I don't mind situational or nice-to-have talents but it feels like the top of the resto tree wasn't designed with resto druids in mind and that's the annoying part. In addition the "do damage instead of doing nothing" part is really lackluster compared to priest/shaman (paladins already have that in the form of mad mana regen from melee).
As for 11 points outside the resto tree that's not possible since you can only have 10 points in offtrees. Also keep in mind int is a throughput stat and as such so is HotW.

Right now the druid trees do seem very limited "choice" wise, but I don't think it's worth worrying too much about anything but the overall direction of the trees and specs (like where Eclipse is going) until at least a few patches has gone and the last of the "TBR" talents have been updated.

Ghostcrawler did state that druids were further behind than paladins, so even though we won't see a total overhaul like paladins had, we're sure to see some changes coming.

I'm wondering if they will eventually bake Nature's Splendor in to the initial Resto specialization perks considering that talent has been abolished in the beta and currently RJ is sitting at 12 seconds(!) at all ranks at the moment(?). The talent for the most part would be a solid choice for "you are now a Resto Druid and your healing spells are better than a normal Druid" combined with Swiftmend.


It would also be nice if they would implement something like Evangelism & Archangel in the current place of NSS/MSS or at least within the first 3 tiers so that if players decide to level as a healer they are able have some form of boost to their solo/dps ability so they can do ok outside of the dungeon finder. Obviously it needs to be tied in some way to make it unattractive for Balance (such as triggering on SM or hot casts) but considering both Holy Palas and Disc Priests get a core ability which is capable of being used to help soloing it would be nice if they could at least implement something via early talents for us, Shamans and even Holy Priests.

Fury of Stormrage as our 'DPS talent' being so deep in the tree essentially makes it a high level option which is too late for most real purposes (leveling up and/or DPSing when you outgear the dungeon/raid - as you need to spam heal to even get it to proc) and the way it is implemented makes it almost unusable for anything outside of raiding where you would be spamming Nourish/HT.


When you look at the first two tiers of the tree you are left needing 3 points in the first tree and 2 points in the second. The first almost has to be something actually useful for us considering both Feral and Moonkin have their 5 points sorted for them while we are left with only 2 and Furor being pointless for us. The second tier seems the best place to put the DPS talent (Fury of Stormrage in a different iteration) so that players have the choice of 3 (Imp RJ) + 2 points in the survival talent or 2 points in the DPS talent. The issue you then have left to think about is that both Feral and Moonkin only have 5 points in a secondary tree to spend and ideally need another 2 points on that tier that provide them with something attractive enough to make a decision on.

If you kept MSS/NSS there for the hybrids that gives both Feral DPS and Moonkin 9~ points worth investing in as well as a choice for Feral tanks to go either for DPS with MSS/NSS or go for survivability in Perseverance. In the end I would recommend a 3 point talent providing a minor healing boost on the first tier (so that PvP Resto Druids have an option between that and NSS if shifting frequently is still viable for them) and moving Fury of Stormrage to the second tier and iterated in a better way for both leveling as Resto and performing DPS in easy end game content.

I feel that 'Fury of Stormrage' is more of a PvP talent than PvE (Natural Perfection too). I mean there should be some difference between the PvP and PvE specs.

Fury of Stormrage is a lot of different kinds of talents rolled into one. The three purposes as I can tell are: To take while leveling (which it isn't great for compared to the other healer damage talents like archangel), to give you something to do when you over-gear content (they are certainly trying to eliminate the 'bored healer' syndrome in 5 mans), and pvp. Of the three it's probably best suited for the over-gearing issue.

Natural perfection is a clear PVP talent. In fact GC's recent criteria for a PVP defense talent is something happens when you get crit...that's natural perfection in a nut shell.

To me it's hard to say exactly but while the additional ticks were key factors in the RJ∞ cycle they were hardly the only culprits. Early on in Wrath we did not do this until after they changed the mana system (mostly killing off Regrowth for a couple of tiers) which combined with the previously mediocre [Idol of Awakening] made RJ spamming almost the only way to go. Throw in multiple encounters designed in such a lazy way that they promoted the brainless cycle and you are left with the current situation. Heck even on Sapphiron initially players tended to do better by mixing RG/RJ/WG than just RJ and that was almost the ideal RJ∞ encounter.


You have been left with a lot of psychological issues too where players feel that without placing RJ on as many targets as possible before <insert raid wide damage "Ground Tremor"> happens they won't actually be able to get any healing off before the all the other healers use their direct AoE smart heals to bring everyone back to full within 2-3 seconds - where we would get one WG and perhaps a RG off otherwise?

Without knowing how they have designed the raid content in Cataclysm it is hard to make much of a judgement on how it will effect things. My current concern is that they will overreact (like with LB) with Rejuvenation and essentially neuter it for a large chunk of the expansion and that we will have a raiding game with far too many brainless AoE heals which remove the need for triage and again promote the pre-hotting for any healing culture again.

If you outgear content maybe you should be casting starfire/wrath (hurricane for 5m) instead of chaining nourishes to get a free cast every 20-30s . For leveling, likewise. The 8s duration is just adding insult to injury.
Rewarding casting damage spells is good since it is quite viable to use them in a lull. The other way doesn't work since it's clearly counterproductive mana wise to do while having no benefit. In other words, casting a damage spell is nearly always useful and if you get a benefit out of it (mana regen, extra strength healing etc) then that's an incentive. Casting a healing spell to fully overheal just to have a low chance at a minor DPS proc? No thanks/

The original GotEM is another one to "blame" for the rise of RJ as it gave it a tremendous HPS boost over RG. The fact that RJ and RG heal for roughly the same one but RG is nearly twice as slow and has a very uneven healing throughput was hard to overcome, and RJ is castable on the move which is important for quite a few fights. In preparing for a big hit - which many of the Ulduar fights were based around - a post-tick of RJ was much more useful for healing than the weak RG one and so it took over as the preemptive healing spell. Our tier bonuses also heavily pushed RJ as the heal to use.
I disagree about RG being useable for Sapphiron though, WG/RJ was certainly the way to go.

Argh, post just got eaten, but brief point:

I think it's often stated a bit too simplistically that the problem with Tree in WLK is that you cast Rejuv in most GCD's. Lots of healers, now and earlier, use one spell most of the time. The problem is really that in most GCD's, there's no interesting choice of whom to cast Rejuv on--because of the extremely fast oscillation of HP across the raid, there's no particular reason to favor one target over another. This is important because the healing changes they're trying to put into place for Cataclysm (more time at partial HP, slower movement overall) would greatly improve this situation even absent any other changes.

I'm sad to see 18s Rejuv go to 12s because (in a non-whiny way) it homogenizes us more into other healers. If you make Rejuv the same as Renew, and give us some cast-time heals, things become much easier to balance. But it was neat to have a very unique role in the overall raid-wide healing picture.

Mostly, I agree with this, but a few notes:

Back when we wore T8, I observed a non-trivial difference in the amount healed by the 4 piece between smart druids and less smart druids . I observe the same thing still with renew Holy Priests. There's is definitely room for smart targeting an hp deficit with an instant hot tick.

Personally, I view druid homogenization as a positive. In wotlk we didn't make a lot of interesting decisions when healing, nor did we really have a very big toolkit for dealing with problems like priests do, nor did we have a good general purpose burst answer like chain heal. In exchange we got a huge HPS premium, efficiency, and mobility.

Of the two hardest fights in wotlk, one heavily favors druids (halion) and one mostly marginalizes druids (LK). This sort of shows the dangers of having a "unique role," if this role isn't as ubiquitous as paladins' role of tank healing (have to have someone do tanks every fight!). I would be a lot happier if in Cata druids got more tactical (e.g. having an answer to every problem) like priests, and had their HPS cut as a result. I think in the end, this would make us useful in more fights, and probably more fun to play.

This. I suppose that change (if it will stand) is part of Blizzards way of making mechanics simpler. With this change Rejuvenation and Renew are basically one single spell, so it becomes a lot easier to tamper with it. And with two classes sharing a spell, it can be expected be be available in a small size raid, so it will be possible to construct damage dealing abilities around it.

And that still leaves open the possibility of differentiation through talents and glyphs. Druids usually had Nature's Splendor, increasing the length of the spell. Priests had the Renew Glyph, reducing the length of the spell. Both classes had the possibility to frontload a part of the heal using setboni or talents. The Druid Glyph, which increased healing sub 50% HP became (in a slightly changed form) baseline for them. Lots of room to design and implement new ideas to change the two spells in such a way that they will still feel different, even though they are basically the same.

From a designer point of view it saves work to just create a single spell, reference it with different names to the two classes, and then add a layer of modification. If balance problems arise, just balance the layer without touching the basic spell. And homogenization is a key part of cataclysm. Quite a lot of spells and abilities are somewhat mirrored between the classes, which is certainly necessary for the focus on 10 man raiding and the ever repeated 'bring the player, not the class'.

I think the main concern is that right now Renew is being propped pretty heavily in talents and abilities - Emp. Renew is a lot more potent than the new GotEM, and Chakra is the same as the old one, which was majoring strong. Inner Will makes holy priests excellent on the move healers and further reduces the mana cost. Meanwhile Rejuv lost 33% of its power from lost ticks.
Even if Renew and Rejuv end up on equal footing (which doesn't seem to be the case currently), a holy priest has a much stronger raid/group healing suite with CoH, PoM, PoH and Holy Nova (the last one getting a nifty +50% crit or potential free cast). And there's the much hated but possibly useful Lightwell.
In addition, the priest can alternate spec to shift into tank healing mode (and regardless of spec, can provide inspiration and a strong tank CD); beta resto tree offers little in the way of customization.

I hope Fury of Stormrage is redesigned:

1 - Noone will level as resto.
2 - I doubt the talent will be of any use to progression content. The majority of druids will likely agree with me when I say that healer damage is meaningless in over-geared/farmed content. I could, however, see a niche for this talent in HM XT'esque fights.
3 - In PvP, there are very few occasions where a resto druid uses wrath. I don't expect this to change in cata. You wrath when you're almost guaranteed a kill - or when you can force a bubble/shield wall/ice block. Odds are this talent won't provide reliable uptime when these kill opportunities arise. My fear is that druids will not find this talent worthwhile.

My suggestion:
Fury of Stormrage is a stacking buff that increases the spell power of your next wrath by 100%. Buff triggering mechanic changed.
Fury of Stormrage is a stacking buff that reduces the cast time of Starfire by 1/2/3 seconds. Buff triggering mechanic changed.

Perhaps this talent will line up well with ToL?

Edit: Given that wrath casting time will be less than the GCD while in ToL, this talent provides very little synergy with ToL. Thanks Playered for correcting me.

I don't know what you are looking at exactly but currently there is no Moonfire/Starfire component to the talent only the 10% chance on Nourish/HT to Wrath.

As to the ToL DPS bonuses you have:
Wrath - Cast time reduced by 50%, damage increased by 30%
Thorns - unknown (the spell itself was meant to be redesigned)

Fury of Stormage does seem very weak for PvE. Best case is fights where your raid has a bit too much healing, but is in danger of missing some DPS check.

Optimistic numbers for FoS:

2.2 procs per minute (requires 22 HT+Nourish casts per minute. Seems pretty high).
2.2 procs per minute give me 2.2 free Wraths instead of a single SF (untalented SF takes 2.2 GCD's to cast).
2.2 Wraths does as much damage as one (SF+Wrath)

so in a perfect fight, the raid gains a resto-Wrath every minute, and the druid saves one SF's mana (about 1/2 of a Regrowth Mana) per minute.

Note that FoS+Wrath may be roughly as strong as Insect Swarm (maybe a little more, but probably less), unless the target already has IS, Unless the Druid has more than five GCD's/minute available for DPS (5 IS/minute is 100% IS uptime), FoS provides almost no DPS benefit.

In PvP, FoS is hamstrung by the requirement to cast our slowest heals in order to get a proc. Instant wrath still has very little to recommend over IS, unless dispels are cheap (not supposed to happen), your target already has your IS, or you're trying to prevent an AB base capture (situational: got a proc after completing a 2s cast in PvP, but don't have the mana for MF).

A simpler suggestion would be to take that instant FoS Wrath off the GCD. A tool that takes no mana, is off the GCD and provides any benefit at all is always valuable. It is hard to imagine a context where two RNG-proc-based free Wraths per minute would be OP.

It's two different ways to get to the same route, but one of them is more fallible. Pre-hotting in advance of potential damage isn't going away; as you said, the difference is how interesting the target selection is. That difference is a result of the number of Rejuvs you can have up at any one time; if you can have only three up, you're making interesting choices about likely targets, considering their other survivability options like immunities, whether the target is fulfilling some vital raid role, etc. If you can have 10+ up, you're well on your way to blanketing the raid and the decisions are much less consequential.

So what stops you from having all 10 up? In a slower healing world, maybe mana constraints. Mana's subject to a lot of variables that may not be tuned properly at every tier, though: length of fight, Innervates/Tides, unexpected gear inflation. Available mana naturally increases as your progress through the tiers; healing becoming simpler as you gear up is not a great design (WotLK Paladins actually go through the same thing). So where's the upside in allowing the potential for this gameplay? Why not enforce the maximum number of Rejuvs via the spell mechanics, whether that takes the form of a cooldown or shorter duration?