Raiding as a Tree - Page 22

Ragnorr · 02/21/08, 6:06 AM

Originally Posted by Aciara

Does anyone else have anything to say about the new t6 pieces? Because as it currently stands I absolutely won't give up all my stamina 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 absolutely needless haste (after the lb Nerf, I think no one will try to get 5 lbs rolling as it should be inferior)?

Ill only use the bracers, The huge loss of stamina com paired to Lifestep and the Black Temple trash boots, its to much a loss. I doubt we will see many resto druids out there with boots/belt

Aciara · 02/21/08, 7:29 AM

Originally Posted by Ragnorr

Ill only use the bracers, The huge loss of stamina com paired to Lifestep and the Black Temple trash boots, its to much a loss. I doubt we will see many resto druids out there with boots/belt

This is exactly what I thought aswell, bracers maybe because they already have next to no stamina (16 or 17 depending on if you use cloth or leather I think), but why would blizzard change good, nice t6 Items (which I had at least hoped they were supposed to be) into crap nobody would actually want (ok for patchwork#2 maybe, but the old gear was just flat out better)?

Shuja · 02/21/08, 8:02 AM

They propably removed the stamina to reduce the viability of using 4-piece gladiator and 4-piece T6.

Playered · 02/21/08, 9:30 AM

I actually wanted decent Haste gear if it was going to be given to us at all, sitting at 80 or something is pointless, its 150-200~ or nothing. These 3 pieces of gear now allow that to be a much more viable option and if Sta is the big issue I will just gem them for it.

Orin · 02/21/08, 9:50 AM

Originally Posted by Playered

I actually wanted decent Haste gear if it was going to be given to us at all, sitting at 80 or something is pointless, its 150-200~ or nothing. These 3 pieces of gear now allow that to be a much more viable option and if Sta is the big issue I will just gem them for it.

I think this depends on your role in a boss fight.

If you are MT duty with more than 2 tanks, and like me cannot maintain more than 3 LB stacks because of latency, even a little extra Haste could turn the tide and allow some extra raid LB or Rejuv/Swiftmend to be used in the rotation.

Or for on Bloodboil, if you are healing a bloodboil group, even a small boost in Haste will allow more lifeblooms to be running at once.

The only real situation where I could see not adding more Haste right away would be if you currently are able to maintain 4 LB stacks at once and have very low latency. In that case, some Haste might make this easier for you, but you won't see any real improvement in your 4 stacks until you get enough haste to have 5 stacks at once.

Funboy · 02/21/08, 11:11 AM

So looking at my WWS report last night, I had:

4,658,338 effective healing
3,965,797 was lifebloom, 70%

After nerf my numbers would be:

4,341,074 effective healing
3,648,533 lifebloom

Net loss of 317,264 healing from lifebloom over the course of a 4 hour raid in Mount Hyjal or 6.8% of my total healing. This is significant.

lairpie · 02/21/08, 11:14 AM

1. Nerfing coefficients in expectation of wotlk changes will be done later, not now.

2. Haste will never be good (assuming its only affecting the GCD) for very many fights and is certainly not worth itemizing for on your primary gear other than to pick up a slight amount to give yourself a bit of a latency/laziness cushion. Picking some up for those rare fights where it would be useful might not be bad.

3. It takes a lot of latency or a bad ui to no be able to keep 4 lifeblooms up pretty consistently. I'll admit this varies greatly with the score of whatever sporting event is on the tv in the background. I'm planning to pick up a little bit of haste on some items where i can do it without losing hardly anything, like maybe a BBoK or the za neck, mostly just to give myself a little cushion.

4. If you're playing the role of predominantly stacking hots on 1-4 tanks and not blowing people away in healing done, either you're doing something wrong, or your guild is bringing too many healers. As the number of healers increases or the fight gets easier, tank hot stacks will tick less and less, plummetting your healing done, but when things are still hard enough that the tank isn't constantly topped off, you should be doing a ton of healing as a hots on tanks druid in any fight that isn't just goofy.

5. This change sucks. Don't get me wrong, if you looked solely at healing meters druids would look a bit op in pve, but the healing meters don't show the huge sacrifices druids make to do 1 thing well: constant healing dump into tanks.

Playered · 02/21/08, 12:28 PM

My healing done over a Full Hyjal / Half BT was: 35% Lifebloom, 25% Rejuvenation & Regrowth, and 10% was Swiftmend.
1.2mil was Lifebloom total healing for the night and the general overhealing was 21%.

Theres more to life than Lifebloom, but the general loss for me would be just under 100k healing done from the change =o

The regeneration changes and the inclusion of haste might make us more generally viable on raid healing, but Regrowth will remain really subpar with so much of the healing done via the slow, weak, HoT.

Pyros · 02/21/08, 12:48 PM

Originally Posted by Playered

My healing done over a Full Hyjal / Half BT was: 35% Lifebloom, 25% Rejuvenation & Regrowth, and 10% was Swiftmend.
1.2mil was Lifebloom total healing for the night and the general overhealing was 21%.

Theres more to life than Lifebloom, but the general loss for me would be just under 100k healing done from the change =o

The regeneration changes and the inclusion of haste might make us more generally viable on raid healing, but Regrowth will remain really subpar with so much of the healing done via the slow, weak, HoT.

Heal spell usage varies greatly between players. My lifebloom healing is over 60% all the time, and sometimes reaching peaks at 80% when I'm feeling lazy and not keeping regrowth on tank. Rest is rejuv/swfitmend. It's still an unnecessary nerf in my opinion, and I'd like to get an official word as to why it was nerfed, was it because it was deemed too powerful in pve, or was it a side effect of a pvp nerf. Will we see compensation?

As you said, regrowth will probably stay mostly inneficient even if you get the cast time down to an aceptable level, simply because it doesn't heal a lot at once, and by the time it ticks the target should be back to full hp. In 1/4 of the cases, you might have a use for the remaining hot, but the rest of the time it's just wasted, unless done on a tank. They could maybe tweak healing touch a bit to add it in the usable spell list.

Sylvannae · 02/21/08, 1:25 PM

What is the purpose of a restoration druid in a raid if he *doesn't* top healing meters? The nature of our spells basically means that either we have overall top healing done, or we are worthless in comparison to other healers. This is due to several reasons:

1) Lowest overall utility of any healer class. See Shaman/Paladin.
2) Healing over time style. Barring NS/HT, resto druids will rarely save someone's life. We provide brute force HPS, but pretty much nothing else.
3) Fickle healing. In our best possible healing situation (rolling four lifebooms), even half a second of silence will ruin some of it. Though some think that silences work in favor of a resto druid, silences ironically only worsen our healing in a manner unique to all other healing classes.

The only situations where resto druids are preferable is mobility fights, but true mobility fights are very rare if not nonexistent (and the tree snare is just infuriating).

Take resto shamans, for example. Max rank chain heal spam is simply huge healing per second casting, and the mana efficiency is actually higher than that of Flash of Light. (Indeed, flash of light boasts about 11HPM at 2000+ heal, while chain heal is in the area of 13).

Even ignoring the simply numerical superiority of chain heal with its 125% coefficient, its unique mechanic makes it simply indispensable. For example: imagine a random raid member is standing in a fire and taking 3k damage per second. At that rate, he's going to die in around 3 seconds. Assuming 0.5 seconds of reaction time, the pally can land a 7k holy light in 2.5 seconds. A shaman, on the other hand, could have just landed a chain heal and therefore the jump would land on the injured player pretty much instantly - buying even more time for the holy light or other chain heals to top the player up.

In addition, earth shield works as a semi-HoT, providing healing/second equal to around half a lifebloom stack. This mean that 2 shamans, just by refreshing their E-shield on the main tank, are effectively matching a lifebloom stack with almost comparable mana efficiency.

All resto druids have to compete with this kind of healing is the fabled quadruple lifebloom triple stack. 2.3 fixed the trinket bug and thereby nerfed LB by 27%, and now there's another 10% nerf. I don't feel that it is justified.

lairpie · 02/21/08, 1:36 PM

I almost feel that every druid should put a little block in their sig about their normal raid makeup because it has such a huge huge impact on everything they say. Like for me, our usual setup is 1 DS priest, 2 paladins, 2 trees, 1 shaman. Sometimes we'll bring another healer for either particularly healing intensive fights ie bloodboil, or for hyjal as one of our normal holy palys is tanking (stays holy because sucking at healing on bosses makes him /wrists, just wears tanking gear).

Perhaps more than anything, the presence of a second resto druid takes hots in general from a mere hp buffer that heals a bit, to a primary form of healing. Like for hyjal we have our priest assigned to follow 1 prot warrior around as he takes a mob and goes and gets 1/2 the npcs, and 1 paly heals another tank who goes and gets all the other npcs. that leaves 2 trees worth of hots doing all of the healing on the remaining tanks with a shaman chain spamming random damage, and a paly doing some raid healing / some random reactive tank healing.

Last night on archimonde i looked and there was a period, with some pretty annoying fires cutting off healers, a fear, and a dumb lock that managed to get doomfired like 2-3 times and suck up healing, where the tank went 25 seconds just fine without getting a single direct heal, just hots and earth shield. With roughly 4k of every 3 second heals (1 renew, 2 rejuvs, 2 regrowths) and almost 2k per second of lifeblooms along with some earth shield procs, our direct healers know they don't have to constantly heal the tanks because we also have 2 swiftmends and 3 NS heals ready if we ever need them.

Changing the lineup of what and how many healers you have will have huge implications as to what spells you use.

Bigtoy · 02/21/08, 2:56 PM

Originally Posted by Sylvannae

What is the purpose of a restoration druid in a raid if he *doesn't* top healing meters? The nature of our spells basically means that either we have overall top healing done, or we are worthless in comparison to other healers. This is due to several reasons:

1) Lowest overall utility of any healer class. See Shaman/Paladin.
2) Healing over time style. Barring NS/HT, resto druids will rarely save someone's life. We provide brute force HPS, but pretty much nothing else.
3) Fickle healing. In our best possible healing situation (rolling four lifebooms), even half a second of silence will ruin some of it. Though some think that silences work in favor of a resto druid, silences ironically only worsen our healing in a manner unique to all other healing classes.

Many good points. I believe that the fundamental issue is Blizzard trying to balance preemptive versus reactive heals. Traditional healing is reactive "whack-a-mole" (or for good healers, predictive) where heals are cast in response to damage. Druids are the only primary healer class that's preemptive, we wind our HoTs up and then keep the flywheel spinning. The only other abilities that are similar are Prayer of Mending and Earthshield. The tricky game-balance is that Blizzard does not want preemptive healing to be powerful enough by itself to render reactive healing unnecessary. If all healing was preemptive, then there would be no need to react and Blizzard thinks that would be bad (and I agree).

So to reframe your question slightly, what druids Bring To The Raid (tm) is superior preemptive healing. Preemptive healing helps prevent the great raid wiper: spike damage. When the unlucky string of hits occurs, two variables determine survival: stamina and healing throughput in those 2-3 seconds. HoTs provide less HPS than heal-bombing... but what they are is instantaneous. The lifebloom starts to tick immediately when the unlucky streak starts therefore their value isn't in throughput it's functionally increasing the MT's HP pool. So between our HoTs and the most powerful/lowest cooldown instant cast in the game (Swiftmend) we are spike smoothers. Balancing that with traditional healing is going to be tricky. We can't be worthless, but it's very easy for our style of healing to be too powerful.

Norfair · 02/21/08, 3:27 PM

Since that very cool idea of Blizzard to remove stamina and give us a bit of haste rating instead, I figured to check what you gain and lose if you choose to take t6. Here are my findings:

Thunderheart Bracers - Rejuvenating Bracers (sockets + bonus stay the same):
-16 stamina
2 intellect
3 spirit
17 haste rating
9 +healing
5 mp5

Thunderheart Belt - Life-step Belt (if you socket for bonus):
-20 stamina
7 intellect
9 spirit
20 haste rating
2 +healing
3 mp5

Thunderheart Boots - Boots of Divine Light (if you socket for bonus):
-47 stamina
3 intellect
2 spirit
26 haste rating
22 +healing
8 mp5

lairpie · 02/21/08, 4:43 PM

But if you don't socket for the bonuses anyway, you're losing a little +healing and a lot of sta to gain mana, which is almost funny at this point, and post 2.4 will be even more comical, and haste which is situational at best.

Playered · 02/21/08, 5:10 PM

Well bracers alone, slap a 15sta gem and your missing (1) stamina from before, and you gain 17haste or so, decent trade-off.
Belt again you end up loosing a pathetically small amount of stamina (5) but you will loose the socket bonus (2spi) which is not really an issue.
Boots are the only debatable ones depending which you were using before, you'll miss around 20 stamina in total from them on a best-case scenario.

I know its somewhat unethical to put anything but a +healing gem in sockets these days but... those poor Spinels will finally be safe for some time, while the amassing hoards of Sapphires will be confronted in an epic battle!