In my mind, they are approaching the 'Fury of Stormrage' type talents from the wrong direction. Rather than have your healing grant occasional DPS spells, making casting DPS spells provide healing buffs. Something like:

Fury of the Stormrage
Each successful Wrath cast reduces the casting time and mana cost of your next Nourish by 33%. Stacks up to three times. Lasts 10s.

There are lots of knobs to twiddle there; you can change Nourish, to Healing Touch/Regrowth, change mana cost or cast time to Crit boost, etc. That way you are free to DPS when you can / need to, and doing so will positively affect your main raid role too. I think this would be much more interesting for levelling and 5 mans too.

Great idea, I totally agree. This would make FoS very valuable for PvP as well. Botched kill attempts often lead to a counterkill if you left your partners without hots - this talent would allow the druid to catch up on healing when the opposing team retaliates.

Speaking of homogenization, has anyone heard any news about a possible damage reduction buff for us? Back in May, GC posted this comment on a thread about class buffs in Cata:

Damage Reduction Percentage Buff: ...
... Also considering adding a Resto druid talent here.

MMO-Champion BlueTracker | Mandatory Raid Buffs and Debuffs

From GC's latest post in that thread, looks like that category is gone. However, does anyone remember those developer notes in the Druid talent trees a few beta builds ago? I am picturing it listing "health buff talent?" in Resto... Which is about the only logical raid buff/debuff left for Resto Druids to bring.

Currently Holy Paladins bring: 5% stats, armor, 10% AP, and mp5. Resto Druid brings 5% stats and 12% armor debuff (if the duration stays long enough?). Hopefully they add another that directly benefits a healer.

While a good idea for leveling and PvP I don't think it would be that great for raiding as it would encourage us to use an instant cast Nourish after every 3 casts whether we need it or not. It could be useful, but wouldn't something similar but granting haste instead be better? Every cast of wrath gives 1% haste stacking 5 times lasting for 5 seconds or something? Enough haste that in a raid it will make our hots tick faster and our casts will be faster, and if we don't need the healing it also helps our DPS by making wrath casts 5% faster. Maybe add your effect as like a 33% chance on Moonfire cast too? That would be worth investing points in at that point, as compared to the worthless talent it is now. The only problem would be that it might be a bit too much sometimes. It can't be good enough that we feel like we're forced to cast wrath to maintain 5% haste in raid environments, part of the reason I'm saying it should be a 5s duration. Opinions?

So there’s obviously some heavy debate about what resto druids are in fact capable of with their healing toolbox. I know mana costs have largely been left untweaked for resto druids and a host of our key talents remain NYI but the overall theme of our class seems extremely up in the air and I wanted to know what people thought of the following thoughts I had:

Toolbox: I don’t think anyone wants all healers to be entirely equal, however what you would like is for all healers to have a spell in their arsenal to handle any situation. The very general categories would seem to be: Fast Inefficient Heal, Efficient Heal, Big Inefficient Heal, Tank Healing Aid, Single Target HoT, Small Raid Heal, Large Raid Heal, and Cooldowns. Most of these speak for themselves but the “raid heal” spells are a little unclear. First the lists (leaving out the first three types of heals listed):

Priest:
Tank Healing Aid: Power Word Shield (and to some extent Penance/Prayer of Mending)
Single Target Hot: Renew
Small Raid Heal: Circle of Healing, Prayer of Mending
Large Raid Heal: Prayer of Healing
Cooldowns: Divine Hymn, Pain Suppression, Guardian Spirit

Shaman:
Tank Healing Aid: Earthshield (and Riptide as well)
Single Target Hot: Riptide
Small Raid Heal: Chain Heal
Large Raid Heal: Healing Rain
Cooldowns: Reincarnation, Heroism/Bloodlust

Druid
Tank Healing Aid: Lifebloom
Single Target Hot: Rejuvenation
Small Raid Heal:
Large Raid Heal: Wild Growth
Cooldowns: Tranquility, Rebirth

Raid healing should be an art just as single target healing is. Heal selection has to be important and require some thought. Obviously we choose who to heal and play into the “triage” style of healing that they are promising. Currently all three healers listed have single target heals of many shapes and sizes that can be used to spot heal a raid when necessary.

I think the shaman serves as a good base line for varying size of raid heals. Shaman have a heal that can heal 4 people simultaneously for varying amounts and, like other aoe heals, has a chance to not heal all of those people as well. Even if it whiffs beyond the first target the output is not embarrassingly low, but certainly not spectacular. The cost of not maximizing the output of a single chain heal is also fairly low. I believe at level 80 in cataclysm a chain heal is approximately 750 mana, with circle of healing at 827 and wild growth at 1922. With wild growth healing noticeably more than circle of healing and costing a disproportionate amount more it definitely falls into the “big heal” category.

For druids I feel like we really do need some form of intermediate group healing tool. Ideally it should cost significantly less than wild growth but heal for noticeably less as well. I’m not saying give is “chain bloom” or something…but perhaps a spell that affects 2 or 3 people and ideally has some form of HoT component to it. Give us a spell that doesn’t have a painful mana cost so that we can use it intermittently between our other heavier hitting spells and if it whiffs on its secondary targets we don’t feel nearly as bad. The Effloressence proc from Regrowth really seems like it wants to try on these shoes, but with the loss of the regrowth crit talent you can't ever reliably trigger this event.

This brings me to the mastery situation. Right now we don’t have any reliable logs or parses saying X% of our total healing done for a standard encounter will be done by direct heals, and Y% will be done by hots. My initial observation with our current state of affairs seems to be direct heals will be pulling in a rather large %. Our options for heal over times are lifebloom, rejuv, wild growth, and regrowth. Lifebloom will ideally be a tank healing tool; Rejuv and Wild growth are currently extremely expensive especially compared to their counterparts; and we don’t know how strong regrowth’s hot will actually end up. Things seem to be lining less than optimally. I don’t know if it is a fair comparison but looking at Shaman’s mastery which is a 20% boost to direct healing based off of current HP levels it seems to be noticeable better suited to their playstyle. On top of their 3 major heals, having a direct heal aoe heal seem to give them quite the leg up. Someone will need to fill me in but does the priest mastery that adds a HoT add it to ALL of their direct heals (e.g. Prayer of Healing leaving a hot on everyone).

I completely agree that we should not heal like shamans and I'm not endorsing that I apologize if that is how it came off. I was more making a very simplistic comparison outlining a gap in our repertoire if you will. I agree that added raid utility deep in the tree would indeed be fantastic.

The only reason why I was mentioning shamans and talking about a small raid heal style utility is that as their plan for us is unfocused and unrefined. They are tweaking spell costs to mKe them a more significant choice but in doing so it drives them into a more narrow focus and creating gaps at certain efficiency levels.

I would love efforvescence to live up to this role. The talent is great and so far testers seem really happy with it. Not being a tester might make it tough to comment but I'm just not sold on a on crit based proc on an expensive spell counting as a healing tool in our toolbox. I tend to more think of guaranteed spells in that list is all. Now if our crit can get to a reasonable level and make "forcing" efforvescence not a mana crushing thing then so be it.

What if Efflorescence was a 100% proc on Regrowth cast with a short internal cooldown (5-10sec)? Or even a small cooldown clickable (to prevent "wasting" Efflorescence when you just needed a Flash Heal): "Your next X Regrowths leave Efflorescence". I would prefer controlling such a powerful/fun* heal and there are plenty of make-crit-attractive things left: Revitalize, Living Seed, 2nd part of Nature's Bounty, and innate HoT crits. Actually, this implementation would still benefit from crit and have synergy with Nature's Bounty without being reliant on them (the original 50% Regrowth crit when <25% HP gave us a scary vision of Druid raid healing because of this powerful reliance).

*I'm very excited by positional heals. Anything that requires more than Grid to heal sounds fun to me.
Really do need targetable Barkskin. Especially if they continue to give us tank healing abilities, it's all useless without an emergency cooldown (too many things wrong with ToL for this). On top of that, the forethought required would add depth to an otherwise use-without-repercussions ability in PVE. Also: Druid!

It doesn't fit the flavor, but on the other hand we kind of need some sort of raid buff, especially after the battle rez nerf, and the Kings/MotW normalization.

On the subject of cooldowns, it is amazing to me that tranquility is still group wide in beta. I can only assume they either have some sort of new idea for it, or they are just waiting until the design pass to decide what to do with it.

The trouble with your Efflorescence idea is that it essentially becomes Healing Rain. Of course if you ask me, Healing Rain is a lot more "druidy" than "shamany." I always thought tranquility would become essentially a very powerful healing rain effect with a long cooldown in Cata, and seeing shamans get it kind of threw me for a loop.

Beta really aren't finished enough for us to be making much conclusions at this point, at least not based on how playing currently feels.

Mana regeneration is so far through the roof that it's basically impossible to go OOM even regrowth spamming without any buffs. Combine that with efflorescence being so overpowered that's it not really even fun anymore. Additionally there's no proper raids so you are stuck doing 5-mans where it's quite difficult to predict how raiding will feel anyway.

I'd suggest to just sticking to theorycraft or waiting for them to do a pass on resto druids - it does seem painfully obvious that we are quite a bit behind the other healers at this point.

I think that's because for basicly majority of WotLK Blizz has kept up with the mentality that trees are right where they want them to be. Now that Cataclysm is coming around they're most likely trying to work on getting all the other healer classes where they want them to be first, and then worrying about trees last since we've only had arguably minor changes done to our class.

My major complaint right now is that they've made revitalize a personal buff talent and not a raid talent like it was before. I see the justification we probably won't be blanketing the raid in WG/Rejuv anymore due to mana restraints, but it was a unique raid utility that's been taken away. It was seperate from replens and it effected classes that don't have mana, it was the perfect raid utility talent.

Revitalize was indeed too unique, the best example for abuse being powering up the abom on Putricide. Its current form however seems quite overpowered, easily outperforming replenishment even with conservative estimates. Plea on CD is slightly more mana but at a substantial penalty. This may be the cause of the sentiment above regarding mana on the beta.
As for devs thinking WotLK trees are close to where they want them to be in Cata this is plain out false. It was recently stated that shamans were closest, if you want it from the horse's mouth; regardless, just looking at mana costs of hots and the stronger emphasis on slow, direct heals it is clear that druids are the ones changing the most, not the least.

I would agree that we are changing the most. The other healers seem to be going through more of a tweaking and receiving new tools where they didn’t fit the standard toolbox that Blizzard has based the archetype on. No one ever likes to cry that the sky is falling…I think that I, like a lot of other druids here, just think that their current plan for druids is clearly in a massive state of flux and it looks like there is a lack of focus. The mastery they have given us shoe horns us into the HoT role as does our description, but the mana costs they attach to our hots will ultimately dictate how much of that mastery we can utilize in a mana constricted fight.

It is obviously dangerous for us to draw any final conclusions about how we will fair at the endgame with all of these changes as the damage level in raid environments is supposed to be a lot different than it is now. That being said I think we have the right to voice concerns for two reasons: the first is that this is all we have to go on, we are going through the most change of all the healers and we’d like to know that this new way of healing is going to be one we’d enjoy; the second is that their “good intentions” about changing the raid damage designs always seems to fade by the end dungeons in an expansion, the ‘insta-gib” factor seems to go way up at that point.

I still stand by my thought that we need some additional raid-healing utility as well as straight up raid utility. I can’t say I’m totally sold on the healing wild mushroom approach that Lissana has taken however I will give her a lot of credit that it is a creative solution. All the other healer classes will have some form of healing utility that will allow them to heal a couple of people for a significantly lower mana cost than wild growth. It is clear that wild growth is NOT supposed to be a raid-heal that, as they are looking at it right now, we can spam every time the cooldown is up. That being said we are forced to ask ourselves “well, if wild growth is cost prohibitive, what tools do I plan to use to heal a raid”. If the answer is simply single target heals (one of which, rejuv, still being very expensive) that any other class also has access to then it doesn’t feel like our game plan is really there. I’m not asking for a druid equivalent of prayer of mending, beacon, chain heal, or circle of healing (if it stays very cheap), just some type of reliable trick/tool that let’s us do a little more.

Targetable Barkskin does seem like something that has been a long time coming and would be an absolute fantastic ability. I was curious what people thought of the following talent in case they felt that only resto druids should be able to do so (outside of the simple 1 point talent that lets you cast it on someone else):

Improved Barksin (2 point talent)
Increases the damage reduction component of barkskin by 5%/10%
When you cast Barkskin, your target also gains 33%/66% of the damage reduction bonus for as long as barkskin remains active.

The 33/66 numbers can be tweaked. Right now it works out to something weird like 8.5% for 1 point, and 20% for 2 points. You could change it to 40/80 or some other value.

The other common issue people seem to bring up is Tree of Life. Clearly this hasn’t even been touched since it was first announced and many of the special bonuses it grants have been decreed useless. I’m curious what other people think about this talent and ways that it could be improved. I’ve had a couple of thoughts, clearly the tree couldn’t do ALL of them but they seem like nifty ideas that could be implemented.

Added static bonus: some % reduction to the cost of our hots + healing touch
Lifebloom: you may roll lifebloom on up to 2 (or 3?) targets while tree of life is active
Rejuvenation: Increase the up front tick of rejuvenation by some % while tree is active
Nourish: When you heal a player with Nourish, you will also heal a nearby wounded player for some % of the amount healed
Healing Touch: Your healing touch leaves a HoT on the player for some % of the amount healed, or your healing touch spell modifies the remaining time on a cooldown such as swiftmend or tranquility
Thorns: some type of avoidance bonus, damage reduction bonus, or something along those lines would make this more interesting to use during the CD

The snare also needs to go, or be drastically reduced. As Lissanna and many other druid posters have pointed out, strenuous healing moments often occur when the raid has to move. Movement usually is done to avoid death traps and moving half speed would clearly deter us from using it or moving at all. If you stand still when you pop tree…fast regrowths vs. instant regrowths are not that different.

A simple fix for tree of life would be to add a short range aura that negates X% raid damage effects for raid members while active. In fact, it seems like mass damage avoidance is enough of an effect for a big cool down without all the messing around with balancing two versions of most of our healing spells. Additional simple perks like "your heals while in tree form also heal raid members in your sheltering aura" could be added to make it powerful without cranking the avoidance numbers up really high.

I think tree of life is quite fine except for the snare being too punitive. In a lot of today's fights you might be able to put it up during a particularly dangerous time but might have to cancel it based on RNG.

The difference between instant and fast regrowth can be quite significant to avoid multiple healers hitting same target. And even if people don't need that much emergency healing in cataclysm, instant cast regrowth does optionally give you that ~1.5 sec more to wait it out and see if you really need that heal thus allowing you to easier conserve mana.

Or make priests waste life grip on you. Sort of gives new meaning to "carried by priests."

A CD on rejuv won't work, it will just become a crappy Riptide with no instant tick. If you notice, Riptide isn't a big % of shaman healing done even with that tick, it's mostly used for setting up other heals.

Lissanna's idea of a healing component to exploding mushrooms is not a bad idea (perhaps Efflorescence will evolve into that, as we need our Regrowth for flash heal duty, and sticking our aoe salvation there will unduly "warp" the spell.)

The way I see it, if we are to retain a hot focus on the raid, our hots need to be shorter in duration, and apply to more targets per cast. That's the only way to cut down on overheal % and make them worth the mana cost. Imagine how much nicer Rejuv would be in the Cata environment if it applied 2 ticks to 2 targets (or even 1 tick to 4 targets ), instead of 4 ticks on 1.

There have been several recent announcements that haven't been updated to this thread.

Furor is now a feral talent, heart of the wild (15% maximum mana increase) will take it's place in resto. It should also be noted that it's been implied in another thread that the 2% intellect increase of furor that was switched to not be moonkin only, could be going back to moonkin only.

MMO-Champion BlueTracker | Location of Furor for Druids

A thread including quite a bit of feedback on the resto druid model in cataclysm. Amidst all of the back and forth between GC and those disliking the cataclysm model is a very nice break down of the developer's current model for our spells.

There is also mention of a possible talent to get rejuvenation to a 1 second gcd and possibly removing the wounded restriction from Nature's Bounty (aka a flat +30% crit on regrowth).

MMO-Champion BlueTracker | [druid] Restoration Beta PvE update

Lastly, this is a general druid point, but Soothe beast is now Soothe and can remove enrage effects. Which adds druids to the group of classes, and the only healer, that can remove enrage effects.

Empowered Rejuvenation is still listed as To Be Redone on the latest Beta build, so that would seem to be the logical place to put a GCD reduction as they've stated a goal to remove coefficient boosting talents. Putting it back in GotEM doesn't work out so well as GotEM has become more of a PvP talent.

Naturalist being back in Tier 2 has really soaked up some points, making it very hard to pick up Perseverance or GotEM without pulling more points out of Balance. Removing the limitation on Nature's Bounty would necessitate a nerf of Efflorescence, which is going to have to happen at some point anyway.

I am going to try to compare druid with holy priest, healer closest to us in spirit:

Renew+PoM ~ Rejuv (rejuv is stronger, but priests have PoM to compensate).

CoH ~ WG (WG heals for more, CoH is instant, a wash)

Heal ~ Nourish

Greater Heal ~ Healing Touch

Divine Hymn ~ Tranquility

PW:S ~ Swiftmend (Swiftmend is more powerful and actually heals, PW:S has an implicit 15 sec cd on one person, but can be used every 4 seconds on different people, PW:S has a talented speed boost)

Inspiration ~ Lifebloom (lifebloom is better vs low incoming damage, can guarantee 100% uptime, works on all damage, actually heals, inspiration good vs hard physical hits, can go on multiple targets in principle, no mana cost, but is a proc)

Flash Heal ~ Regrowth (not exactly comparable yet, also Efflorescence is a wild card)

Unique holy priest abilities: guardian spirit (tank cd), lifegrip + body&soul (raid mobility), PoH+serendipidy and Holy Nova (aoe burst).

Unique druid abilities: Efflorescence (zone aoe, proc based), Tree (45 second 15% healing boost (plus minor spell perks), 5 minute cd), battle rez (much weaker now -- one use per encounter).


Preliminary view: priests have better cds, efflorescence would have to end up being more awesome than priest aoe toys in order to keep healer parity. Big concern with hots being inefficient is that if a few people are at 70%, it's more efficient to chain heal than put up a few hots as GC suggests.

Switching Furor and HotW does seem to clear up some builds. The resto spec stills has quite a few weak spots:
1. Quite a few weak and boring talents - Blessing of the Grove, entire tier 1 of balance. NS feels outdated at this point and Empowered touch is quite underwhelming as well.
2. Adding to (1), MS and LS not only weak (MS borderline useless), they also cost 3 points each and are a preq to the "real" talents. NB is similar, although tweaking or removing the restriction will obviously help.
3. Rejuv that was regarded as an efficient heal costs 25% base mana. Granted as a hot it will be more efficient than a direct heal of the same HPS, but still, that is a bit of a stretch. Renew will heal for less but will cost a lot less, with 20% mana cost reduction compared to only 9% for Rejuv (which is partially exclusive with a Rejuv throughput boost) and a lower base cost. This makes Renew better for prehotting, even if we assume Rejuv gets a 1s gcd talent.
4. Both direct-only heals are barely prompted by the talent tree.
5. ToL is regarded as a short CD but at 5 minutes it's no better than tranq, that is up about once a fight. The boost some abilities get clearly need to be revised.

I don't think there is any desire by Blizz to provide the level of spell-to-spell parity between healing types that you are trying to create. They've said they want all healing specs to have the basic tools to raid heal, to tank heal, and to use cooldowns for stressing situations, which is supported by the changes thus far implemented in Cata.

Accordingly, your comparison between say Nourish/Heal is apt, but the line up fails when you start trying to equate things like PW:S/Swiftmend and Lifebloom/Inspiration. Inspiration makes a good parallel to our Living Seed, if anything. I think trying to force such a 1:1 comparison between our tools and those of any other healer is just setting yourself up for disappointment, honestly.


edit: directed at Rijndael's post, not Fallenangel's