Melador

I agree with giansm as well, largely. Nerfing LB isn't going to make me use it any less unless they nerf it into uselessness. If multiple tanks are taking damage, it will be up. The problem of druids spending too much of their time casting it isn't due to it being too powerful, it's due to it being Quite Good but only lasting seven seconds.

I like the additions I've seen in WotLK, and appreciate the fact that they're trying to work more interesting spells into our rotation. But if they really want to solve the problem, nerf the coefficient even more and make it last for a few more seconds. I really enjoy most druid healing -- maintaining the LB stack (a fudamental feature of the spell that I hope they don't change) while fitting in other heals has a nice "feel" to it, like I always have a few balls in the air among my other responsibilities.

The one-second LB GCD is a nice addition, but I hope they don't effectively make the LB glyph "required" to fix what should just be a change the spell itself.

 

Kortar

I'd actually lean more towards the latter. If you've got 100% uptime on Spirit Link, you've just made a 51-pt. talent mandatory for raiding - which is something that no other last-point talent has ever been. I'd be less concerned about Spirit Link if it were simply a baseline Shaman ability - then you could legitimately scale Resto Shaman to account for 100% Spirit Link uptime and not have serious balance issues with raiding.

Also, the former would make Spirit Link very problematic even in 5-man instances. Remember, you don't get to choose the targets of the link (although it is likely you can do so by manipulating player range from the tank). If your Spirit Link happens to land on a squishie, he'll actually be taking a lot more damage than the tank is (and with a much smaller health buffer).

Spirit Link - as we're assuming it works - is sufficiently powerful that your strategy would almost certainly include every melee you didn't want linked withdrawing beyond link range every 30 seconds for refresh. Likewise, with the "two Holy Priest" strategy I outlined above, the power of 50% mitigation on your tank justifies having them stand in melee range, despite the increased danger.

Since I'm pretty sure that no one's idea of reasonable raid structure involves a 3-man healing team with 2 Holy Priests gearing for Stamina being the 'standard', I think it's fair to say that however Spirit Link ends up working, it won't work like it's presumed to work right now.

 

Xanil

Past 2-days I have been reading about coefficients and how they are involved in the mechanics of healing. Just in the morning I finally started to understand how to calculate coefficients in the different types of healing spells. Then reading the forums in the morning I came to realize that Blizzard has revamped the coefficients abit for the upcoming expansion.

So what do you think they have changed in the coefficience mechanics?
1. Have they touched the basic mechanism according to which different types of spells are calculated different ways? Personally I dont think so.
2. What would be change in coefficiency when going to Wotlk? Beta tester Delphine did some test/calculations on beta and suggested that we should just multiply the current coefficiency with ~1.89 and there we go. But Cathela in his Woltk paladin talent tree thread has pointed out that some of the coefficiencies have changed in different scale. Any reflections on this?

 

Vodrin

2. Paladins had BoL rolled into their healing spell coefficients explaning the greater adjustment (due to spell power change).

 

• Playered

Didn't it just get added into the base values? BoL was a static bonus not a scaling one (sans Librams).

 

Xanil

Ok. I came up with a new problem. Basically with this I mean that Beacon of light and Flourish dont really go into any of the existing coefficiency categories. Why so? Mainly because they are both HoT's and Area of effect heals (group heals). In wowwiki there is a list of the coefficiencies and there isnt anything into which these two new AoEHoT's drop into. Priests CoH and shamans Chain heal drops into AoE heal slot cause they are basically direct group heals. But the problem is that the new group heals that we get in expansion have a HoT element in them as well.

In Cathela's paladin thread Cathela speculates that for the Beacon of light "The spellpower coefficient is 94% spread over the entire duration of the beacon, roughly equivalent to a +healing coefficient of 50%." So the number according to this article is 94%.

However, if you take the Are of effect and HoT coefficiencies given we dont get anywhere near the 94%. To explain.
Area of effect coefficiency is calculated as follows:

(Cast Time of Spell / 3.5) / 2 *1,89= Benefit

Over time (HoT) coefficiency is calculated as follows:

(Duration of Spell / 15) *1,89 = Total

The 1.89 in the formula is the speculated coefficiency raise which we get in Wotlk.

Now if you take Beacon of light into calculations and fit into both AoE and HoT coefficiencies you have the following results:
AoE (1.5 / 3.5 ) / 2 *1.89 = 0.41
HoT (15 / 15) * 1.89 = 1.89
From here you can see that the suggested 94% coefficiency for Beacon of light doesnt fit into neither coefficiency category.

Therefore I suggest that there is a new category of healing coefficiencys and that the 94% given to us in the paladin forums can work as the ground from which we can theorycraft coefficiencies for all other AoEHoT's. It is left here open what the formula would look like (ill try to work something out).

This is what it says in there to make it easier to find the argument that coefficiencies have been tweaked in similar types of spells into different proportions:

Heals
-Flash of Light has a 100% spellpower coefficient. This is higher than expected based on the old +healing coefficient and the conversion rate of +healing to spellpower.
-Holy Light has a 166% spellpower coefficient. This is also higher than expected.
-Holy Shock has an 81% spellpower coefficient when used as a heal. This matches expectations from the old +healing coefficient for this spell.


For instance if we take the new flash of light spellpower coefficient that Cathela has speculated we would have 100% coefficiency for a 1.5sec spell. This is incredibly high considered that 3.5sec used to be 100% coefficient for Standard heals. Taken that the speculated new raise into coefficiency is 189% then we should end at looking at (1.5/3.5)*1.89= 0.81. So - from where does the 0.19 come into the new coefficiency?

The AoEHot situation seems to be solved. If we combine Hot and AoE coefficiencies we get the following formula:

Beacon of light formula (15 / 15) / 2 *1,89 = 0.94

Therefore, by taking the duration element from HoT coefficiency and the /2 penalty for AoE spells we get the right numbers.

 

Darian_TruBlade

Like gianism said, so long as Lifebloom is useful it will be kept up on tanks. In order for it to work more like our other heals the healing from the bloom would have to be vastly more useful than the actual HoT itself, which in turn would be ridiculous for PvP.

If Lifebloom remains as it is we'll still have a little more freedom than we do currently, even three stacking Spirit Link synergy. We can maintain the three stack in the same time it currently takes us to maintain two, and we can have an extra free second to boot. However, I don't really see us having to maintain three stacks with Spirit Link. Assuming the 50% damage is split half and half between the other two targets (25% each) it's unlikely a full Lifebloom stack is entirely necessary. Resto Shaman are going to be casting Chain Heal in order to proc Tidal Waves. Between that and Ancestral Awakening it doesn't seem unlikely that it would be overkill.

That is assuming a lot about how Spirit Link will function, and how raid healing will turn out, but I don't think we'll be perpetually stuck doing nothing but maintaining multiple Lifebloom stacks.

 

Kathbrian

I wish they would extend lifebloom's duration and make it the bloom part that stacks, not the HoT. This way Lifebloom will require some thought as to whether or not you should refresh it, it would also bring back the "bloom" element of Lifebloom. The bloom could also use a cool spell animation. >_>;

The base values would have to be adjusted accordingly ofc.

 

Darian_TruBlade

A Glyph to that effect would be interesting, and in line with the functionality of Greater Glyphs.

 

• DigitalDemon

Just throwing out a thought I had as I looked at our talents. Living Seed is currently a 33/66/100% chance on crit to apply the 30% heal on hit. It looks like it will be fairly weak if you don't have 3/3 points in it. I think I'd much rather see it as a 100% chance on crit to apply a 10/20/30% heal on hit. This makes it a bit easier to use as a filler point or two.

 

ionasej

In regards to PvP:
With Feral Charge being moved down int the Feral tree - what about this Restoration/Dreamstate build: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?drui...30000000000000 VS this PvP build: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?drui...00000000000000

Brambles looks great too.

 

ithecho84

I daresay the mana cost would have to go up as well, because the bloom stacking three times would be, as they say "imbalanced". Sure you can argue that it requires skill but seems blizzard is wanting to take skill out of the equation when it comes to healing. (I'm just a peeved priest ) Anyways, I did see a glyph that extends lifebloom by one second. Druids are looking like the premiere healing class more and more. I'm starting to become interested.

 

resto4ever

What about a completely new build for Wotlk? What about if you do regrowth instead of rolling lifeblooms?

Heres the talent tree for regrowth druid

Druids have for long moaned for a regrowth build and with the expansion they certainly seem to be getting one. When before the problem was the mana cost of this build with the new talent points we can roll a Moonglow/ToL build with which we get a cheap regrowth. Also cause omen of clarity turns to be beneficial to casters we get ~8% cheaper casts from there; and from few points from dreamstate we get ~2k mana that is welcome.

Also as regrowth spam will in the expansion get the benefits from the new regrowth glyph (increases initial regrowth heal by 50% if the regrowth HoT is active) and living seed (100% chance that if spell crits a living seed is placed on target which heals him for 30% of the amount healed). Its incredible isnt it. With having 10 new talent points we get enough talent points to get moonglow, new talents into restoration tree such as living seed and a regrowth inscription makes us new semi-gods of healing.

How much does this regrowth heal then? According to this calculation regrowth rank 12 heals ~3.5k HPS. How to compare this to other classes then? Well if we take a random Kil'jaeden paladin we fcan see that he has healed 370k in total at Kil'jaeden fight. So what this is a TBC paladin compared to Wotlk druid, this cant make sense? Ok - paladin will be getting 19% more healpower than other classes from coefficiencies for Fol/HL; also paladin will get 5% more to heals from its new glyph of Seal of light ; and of course paladin will have more spellpower in Wotlk. If we take these into account the paladin will get 150% boost to its healing and if we just roughly multiply the Kil'jaeden maount healed with these new bonus's of paladin we get 555k healed in one 8 minute Wotlk Kil'jaeden encounter.

What would a regrowth druid heal in that amount of time then and would the druid have mana for it? Well if druids HPS is 3.5k and the druid would heal a comparable amount to paladin the druid would be casting 159 seconds. Basically this means that out of 8 minute (480second) fight a druid would be casting regrowth for 33% of the time to be able to get same overall heal results as the paladin.

How about the mana issue then - does druid have enough mana for this? How much does a regrowth rank 12 cost to cast? Well if you take that a druid can have a moonglow-9%/omenofclarity-8%/ToL-20% build the regrowth rank 12 that as a tooltip amount costs 1040 mana ends up costing 655 mana. Now if you take that the druid would be casting 159seconds and regrowth takes 2 seconds to cast (I havent even calculated the Natures grace into this which after every crit reduces the cast time of regrwoth by 0.5 seconds) then we get a resutl that regrowth would need to be cast for ~80 times to get same overall healing as paladin.

How much mana would be need for this then? Well if you cast regrowth 80 times with mana cost of 655 we get a result of 52400. Then is the an amount of mana a druid can stomach? Its impossible to theorycraft about the Wotlk mana regen cause we dont have the amount of spirit, int, nor mp/5 that comes from lv80 epic gear. What we can do however is to see how much mana a druid just might have ain TBC content.

Base mana pool = ~11k
While casting mp/5 as 300 = 29k
Innervate with 500 spirit = 6k
Trinket: bangle of endless blessings =4k
Blessings of wisdom: ~4k
Altogether thats = 54k of mana total

Adn this doesnt even include that you would have a shadow priest with VR in group or a shaman with a mana spring totem. So - if a lv70 druid with TBC gear can afford regrowth build then what can a lv80 druid with Wotlk gear do. For instance if we assume that mana regen will be 50% higher in Wotlk then this also means that suddenly heal for 50% of the time and do 50% more heal in general than paladin.

To conclude. It certainly seems that druid is getting another viable heal spec. Thus if a druid wants to be challenged he can choose to roll lifebloom on 5 targets or if he wants to get an easy life he can just choose the "1-button regrowth spam build".

 

Toranshalur

The thing is that with wotlk, blizz is clearly aiming to make the healing classes more varied than the 1 or 2 button spamming of tbc (bit of an exaggeration but whatever), so i think this kind of thing is very likely to be frowned upon, especially if it's at all powerful compared to competing specs. An alternate resto build to 0/0/71 would be great, but how likely is it to make it past the first second patch of live wrath?

 

• Playered

Well a 24/0/44 build featuring Regrowth as it's major spell with the glyph as well might be 'different' and I'm sure you would still use LB & RJ on your tank etc.

I guess it will come down to how it compares to Nourish at 80.

Part of me wonders if the recent downranking change could be used as a justification for 'nagging' them to boost the initial heal of RG and shortening the HoT a tad to allow it to fulfill the 'medium' heal everyone is clamoring for elsewhere but I'm not sure we even need it.

(warning: sleepy math): 1350 spell power / 500 Spi & Int (assuming Improved ToL & Master Shapeshifter & all relevant talents)

Regrowth (keep in mind this ignores the HoT component):-
2.00 Speed / 60% Crit / 33% base mana (-20% ToL)
Normal: 3700
Crit / Normal-Glyph: 5550 (1650~ seed)
Crit-Glyph: 8300 (2500~ seed)

HT:-
3.00 Speed / 10% Crit / 39% base mana (-10% & -5% per HoT)
Normal: 9500
Crit: 14250 (4300~ seed)

RJ+SM: 5200~

Nourish (assumed 20% bonus after everything else is calculated /w HoT):-
1.5 Speed / 10% Crit / 9% base mana (-10% & -5% per HoT)
Nourish: 3600
Nourish /w HoT: 4300
Nourish Crit: 5400 (1600~ seed)
Nourish /w HoT Crit: 6450 (1900~ seed)


Regarding mana currently (assumed estimates)
Base mana at level 80 should be 3500~
Healing Touch (10%): 1229 (restores 68 mana per HoT)
Regrowth (20%): 924
Nourish (10%): 283 (restores 16.5 mana per HoT)


In a period of 30 seconds constantly healing (no haste gear) and assuming 2 HoTs on the target for an equal 20% reduction in cost (and an initial RG HoT for the Glyph).

Spell	Mana Cost..	Total Healed..	Living Seed..	HPM..	HPM+LS..	HPS..	HPS+LS..	Avg Heal	Avg Heal+LS
Healing Touch	10930	99750	4300	9.13	9.52	3325	3468	9975	10405
Regrowth	13860	108000	22500	7.79	9.42	3600	4350	7200	8700
Nourish	5040	90300	3800	17.92	18.67	3010	3137	4515	4705
Nourish*	11200	---	---	8.06	8.4	---	---	---	---

* - a second figure giving it a cost at 18% base mana, same as Flash Heal instead of being similar to Flash of Light.


Should be enough educationally guessed information for some basic comparisons, keep in mind the HoT aspect of RG is ignored up there.

I'm assuming the current Nourish being 9% mana is a bug as it was formerly 600 mana which is around 16-18% base mana.

 

resto4ever

I dont know about this. Take a look what Blizzard did to paladins. Ok they gave them a 51point group heal talent which paladin might us here and there but look what Blizzard did paladins "two button heal" of FoL/HL. We all know that paladin is a two trick donkey. If you see paladin casting its either flash of light or holy light. Blizzard knows this and they didnt do anything about it. Instead they increased the coefficiency of FoL/HL to 2.33 (the normal being 1.89). They didnt make paladins to think about AoE healing with beacon of light but rather they dug them deeper into FoL/HL.


Therefore im not sure if they want to take away the regrowth heal option from druids. You could also ask that "if druids get two separate raid builds and two completely different types of healing wouldnt that be a great thing for druids in expansion"? Hell yeah! I think this would be a remarkable thing for druids to be able to be able to have two different types of healing specs.

The only thing about to be nerffed is actually in the direction of HoT's. By this I mean that look at flourish. Heals over 4400 during 7 seconds for every target and this is just the base heal. To this you add coefficient*spellpower making it over 5k heal anyways/target during 7 seconds. Divide 5k with 7 seconds and you get a remarkable amount of HPS. A HPS almost as strong as CoH and Coh costs what - 4 times more than flourish. So if CoH has HPM about the normal which is ~10 and you have flourish which has HPM about ~23 I definetely think it will be nerffed as hard as the rank1 flourish was. Remember the following "Flourish mana cost decreased from 585 to 450. Amount of healing decreased (Rank 1 now heals 672 HP instead of 1610". Yeah! When the beta will get to lv80 the flourish rank 4 will be nerffed as well. Otherwise the spell would just be too good for group heals. Shaman would be out of job and priest would go back to competing with paladin with his direct heals.

 

Kortar

It certainly be remarkable. It's also very unlikely. Look at Dreamstate right now. Dreamstate is better than full Resto in certain ways. But those certain ways are also ways that Holy Paladins and Holy Priests are better than any Druid build. Given the choice between a build that's no better than second best at everything and a build that is fairly weak in certain aspects of healing but excels in one area, people take the more narrowly focused version.

You also have to consider that there's already a class with two healing trees: Priests. And if Blizzard hasn't managed to figure out how to make two different specs of Priest viable at healing in multi-healer environments, I have little hope they'll manage to do it with Druids.

The difference between Circle of Healing/Chain Heal and Flourish is that the direct heals retarget on every 'tick' (or cast). So instead of laying down a massive HoT that will likely either be wasted or too slow, the direct heals cover the person who needs to be healed when they need to be healed.

Another way to think about it is to consider the fact that in terms of heal/casting time and heal/mana, Lifebloom blows away any single target direct heal. Yet it isn't really a viable heal for healing non-tanks because it has precisely the same problems I outlined for Flourish.

 

resto4ever

In the above post I just used a HPS for regrowth assumed in a post that I had not written. Naughty me cause the results were quite wrong. Heres what I came up with:

Nourish with Crit 10% base:
1.5/3,5 * 1.89= 0.81
2035 + 0,81*1500 = 3250
3250*1,5*0,1 = 487+3250= 3737 (With 10% crit)

3849/1.5 =~2491HPS

Regrowth rank 12 with 60% crit (10% from base and 50% from talents):
(2/3.5) *0,36*1,89 = 0,39
2364 + 0,39*1500 = 2904
2904/2+2904 = 4356 (This is what regrowth gets from the glyph)
4356*1.5=6534 (Crit 150%)
4356-6534= 2178*0,6= 1307 (60% being the crit chance)
1307 + 4356 = 5663 (average hit before living seed)
5663*1,3=7653 (Start of living seed calculation, look next row)
(7362-5663)/15*1.7= ~226 (Living seed doesnt crit cause its a HoT)
5663+226= 5889 (The living seed part)

0.5*0.6=0.3 (60% being the amount of time natures grace recudes from the 0.5 sec casting reduction bonus)
2-0.3 = 1.7sec cast time on average for regrowth

5889/1.7=3464HPS

Here I have taken into account that living seed is more useful if you have a 60% crit build such as regrowth. I also admit that I am a bit unsure at what point the new glyph should be brought into claculations. Hwoever cause it says "initial" I have calculated it in before crit.

So in 30 seconds nourish would heal (takent that other druid HoT's this target) ~75k, when the regrowth heals in 30 seconds ~100k. Anyway lets take Repeace's assumption and assume a mana base of 3500 and also assume that nourish would be 17% of the base mana instead of the 9% it says in the tooltip at the moment (cause this 9% is an absurd number).

Regrowth 29% of base mana:
3500*0.29= 1015mana/regrowth
1015/30*1.7= 58 (new omen of clarity with -8% cast costs)
1015*0,09=91 (moonglow with -9% to regrowth cast cost)
1015*0,20=203 (ToL reduction of -20% of used mana)
1015-81-91-203= 663 mana/regrowth

8.88 HPM

Nourish 17% of base mana:
3500*0,17=595mana/nourish
595/30*1,5 = 30(Omen of clarity)
595*0,2= 119(ToL)
595-30-89=476

7.85 HPM

Thus HPM for regrowth would be ~9 where as it is for nourish ~8. However as nourish is cheaper to cast it is possible to think that nourish makes us an option available where we have a downranked heal from our best heal that would be regrowth in this scenario.

I havent calculated the HoT dependant effects that make nourish better because it requires a scenario where for first there are minimum of two druids in raid, and in addition this other druid woul have to be hotting precisely the same targets that you are noursihing. Perhaps if two druids would MT heal then this would be possible but I take that as unlikely. Therefore I havent calculated nourish with neither gift of earth mother (would make casting cheaper) nor with its innate 20% bonus.

One question also being that "do living seeds stack"? Living seed is a bloom effect that lasts for 15 seconds and if these do not stack then for instance its a big loss for high crit spells (especially regrowth). Also I am heavily assuming that Omen of clarity proc is once/30 seconds. Also I have assumed that the fight in hand is a 8 minute fight making OoC even better.

 

• Playered

Living Seed seems buggy right now, sometimes it will heal you for 0.
When you do a second crit after the first and your Living Seed isn't consumed yet then you will refresh your Seed.

[e] Refreshing doesn't add them together to create a stronger Seed - will test later if it refreshes the old one, the new one or the one with the highest value later.
[e2] Refreshing will use the new value (so it just removes the old one and applies the just triggered one).
[e3] If your previous Seed was stronger than your most recent one it will still replace your old stronger Seed with the newer weaker Seed.

 

resto4ever

To Repeace: Could you try to test the coefficient for flourish in beta? So far we havent got any numbers to play with and I have to assume that we use similar coefficient for flourish than what paladins use for beacon of light. Somehow (dotn ask me how) paladins have come up with a coefficient of 94% for BeoL. This is how I calculated it:

(15/15) /2 *1,89 = ~0.94%

I actually got this formula for BeoL coefficiency from simply taking (spell duration/15) from Over time spells coefficiency formula and then applying the /2 penalty from AoE coefficiency to it. Im not sure if this is what Flourish follows as well but just out of interested in coefficiencies I would like to know how it is calculated.

As well I would be interested to know from beta if the flourish's of two druids can be active on one target at the same time. I know beacon of light doesnt stack but as lifeblooms stack for tank from different druids (meaning that 2*3 lifeblooms can be active on tank) I was curious if this is the case for flourish as well.

 

• Playered

I see no reason why Flourish shouldn't stack - it is just a means of applying a HoT to multiple targets for you, Beacon is unique in how it works though which is why it would not stack.

Someone already posted a video with figures for people to analyze in this thread :P (here)

If I recall correctly with 1342 spell power I was doing roughly 460 at start then loosing about 30 per tick but I'm unable to log on and pull off the exact figures - the video from the post above should be enough for you

 

AmmoBoy

Isn't flourish still suck with rank 1? Hard to test the coefficients unless you're about level 60 still and aren't suffering from downranking.

 

Cube

There is another rank available at 70:
Flourish - Spell - World of Warcraft

While there would be coefficient issues for that rank if the player is 76+, there appears to be another rank available at 75 and 80.

 

lapin

Yes, atleast when I tried resto 1/2 weeks ago at 77, there was just r1 but it didnt suffered from downranking, as it was the only rank ingame (that would be my guess atleast).

 

resto4ever

The new downranking penalty effects the mana cost of the spell - not the coefficient.