I just tested it and its not such a big deal.

On the live server I get 257 as tick instead of 281 (with 2358 Healing). With the Empowered Rejuvenation buff one LB (that ticks through) heals roughly the same on the ptr as on the live server. The same for pvp gear with 1500ish healing.

So they nerf LB ticks just that the emp rejuv buff doesn't change the raw healing of one LB, but the 3x stacked lb does get a nerf. And if you consider that LB would be dispelled in PVP before it ticks through, Emp. Rejuv would be even a buff for PVP.

An 8% nerf, assuming 80% effective healing from lifebloom ticks, results in a 6.4% reduction in total effective healing. At 95% effective healing from lifebloom, it's a reduction of 7.6%. While raiding will go on, and resto druids will still have a place, the only effect will be to increase the healing burden of the other classes as, unlike them, our HPS is entirely capped by the stacking mechanics and GCD use, rather than having a rank choice component. I fail to see the purpose of this change.

Going by the numbers I have seen so far on the forums (two posts here and two on the official druid forums) it looks like the per-tick coefficient on a 3-stack is down from 29.42% to something like 26.4% +/- 0.2%. In absolute terms this means you would expect to lose 3% of your +healing value on a 3-stack, for example you would expect to lose 60 on your ticks if you have 2000 +healing (going from around 720 to 660). In relative terms, you would expect an 8 to 9% reduction in healing done by lifebloom, depending on how much +healing you have. In other words, it's nowhere near as bad of a nerf as the trinket thing was, and again will probably not affect our playstyle much but just make us somewhat less effective.

The situation isn't as bad as Galashin suggests, since we do have ways to increase our effectiveness, especially with the additional mana we will be receiving with the spirit changes. On single-tank fights we have a lot of ability to contribute extra raid healing through hotting and regrowths. We can also boost our healing on the MT by increasing the frequency of regrowths, including the tactic in which you use max-rank regrowth to put up a hot and then one- or two-downranked regrowth as a direct heal. Sure, it's inefficient, but the rest of our spells are so efficient that if you have the mana to burn, you might as well. When doing lifebloom cycles on multiple tanks, we can add rejuvenations if we are healing two or three tanks. We can try to get spell haste to heal 5 tanks, or to enable us to use more rejuvenations in our 3- and 4-tank cycles. We can spec Insect Swarm and use spare GCDs to put it up on the boss to boost the tank's avoidance (don't laugh, I do this sometimes).

That's a pretty big nerf for seemingly no reason. The vast majority of resto druids are basically sacrificing everything to be really good at 1 thing, buffering tank hp. We move slow, we choose a route of rather inneficient gearing compared to other healers which can balance mana and +healing. We have the slowest big hp heal, the slowest flash type heal. We have to be in a tank group to get the most use of our 41 pt talent. Can we do other things, usually with a respec or regear, sure, but not better than any other healing class. I could play in the role of being a raid healer and do well at it, but there's no way i would be better at it than if i were to reroll a different class or find an equally geared/skilled healer of another class. Proving that druids can be good raid healers is like proving feral druids can do well in arenas. Sure with the right makeup and gear and skill you can do it, but you'd still almost always be better off being a different class.

We accept all of that to be really good at 1 thing, keeping tank(s) alive. Nerfing lifebloom's healing output after we've already had to sacrifice almost everything to get our +healing and talents to a point where lifebloom does enough to be worth it, isn't a slight balancing thing, its a big nerf.

Here's my numbers:



Only self buffed, not in tree form.

It's the same as losing a little more than 150 +heal from live for me.

That's pretty hilarious, significant boost to the bloom portion will benefit PvP and the reduction in periodic healing will impact PvE a lot more than PvP.

It occurred to me that one possible reason for the nerf wasn't so much healing now, but the future of lifebloom. If you consider that +healing has practically doubled from vanilla to now, we could conclude a similiar doubling of plus healing from gear in the next expansion. It's quite possible that the mathematics behind the nerf will increase per the amount of plus healing such that 5000 plus healing would not put out such a ridiculous triple tick of lifebloom as to be overpowered.
This of course is all speculation on my part, and yet I had previously wondered at what point a continuous stream of healing every second finally becomes too powerfull for the measley amount of mana expended to make it happen. The percentage, seemingly 8%, could increase to some maximum of whatever%, finally resulting in an actual ceiling...

Does anyone else have anything to say about the new t6 pieces? Because as it currently stands I absolutly won't give up all my stamine on bracer/wrist/waist to get haste rating-t6. Is there anything apart from some form of error on their part that would make sense to drop stamina from all new t6 pieces and add absolutly needless haste (after the lb nerf, I think no one will try to get 5 lbs rolling as it should be inferior)?

I'll probably use it for trash, but since most boss encounters give some pretty hefty raid damage, I'll likely stick with my higher stamina gear.

I would propose waist/wrist/boots without stamina are no good for Arena matches. When playing resto I am normally placed in the MT group, so I very often have commanding shout and imp buff. My health value usually is quite high, so I could imagine that for some fights i could do perfectly fine.

5 lifeblooms each giving 6 ticks in approx 7 seconds is 4.28 ticks per second approx.
4 lifeblooms each giving 6 ticks in approx 6.2 seconds is 3.87 ticks per second. (6.2 is just an approximation for the refresh interval)

It's not so much the increased healing it gives (approx 10% more for ~200 haste, which is equivalent in item budget to 500 healing) but the fact that one can actually heal a whole group with it. I'm not sure 8-9% will much impact on the situation where you'd heal an entire group with lifeblooms, though.