The issue with mana regen is that by introducing infinite mana regen early on, it completely eliminates one stat (well, two) from gear choices, because you will never be looking for more spirit or more mp5. This was fine in Sunwell, as the instance is the "end" of TBC, but introducing unlimited mana regen in/before the first raid instance clears reduces the design choices and gear itemisation potential throughout the rest of the expansion.

That's why you have abilities that allow you to burn excess mana into more healing. On live this part is handled by regrowth, and WG looks like it might fit that bill as well. The question becomes what's the base rotation, that is a rotation you can sustain while in blues / pre-raid gear. This rotation will probably be comprised of mostly rejuvs and LBs, assuming mix-mode tank and raid healing which should be the norm. Early encounters should be designed around that healing throughput. As encounters and gear progress, more expensive heals are thrown into the mix. Basically put, standing around doing nothing is Not Fun. Granted, you should not be able to spam regrowths with lvl 80 blues, but it's also not needed.

Honestly, I'm hoping that Blizzard does what it did with Spirit Link for Flourish: give it up as a poor concept.

Paladins certainly needed something like Beacon of Light since they have no ability to heal multiple targets at all. But Druids already have great multi-target healing in the form of HoT - spells that have a huge healing:cast time ratio, but can't be recast on any given target more than infrequently. So when you give a multi-target heal to Druids, you aren't really helping them solo-heal 5-mans. Druids could already heal all those 5-man instance AEs. And, for balance reasons, you can't make a multi-target Druid heal really all that competitive with Resto Shaman/Holy Priest multi-target heals in raids.

The result is that you're forced into a heal that "looks good on paper" but is minimally useful.

I'd say a much more useful 51-pt. talent in the same vein would be an instacast with a fairly hefty price tag that simply refreshed all HoT on the target - exchanging mana for less casting time. It would aid the same sort of 'multi-target' nature since you could use layered Rejuvenation/Regrowth/Lifebloom/Riptide/Renew to perform healing on multiple targets and just rotating refreshing them, and it would be useful in raiding since presumably the mana cost would be balanced based on refreshing just the Druid's HoT (so in a raid, you could have your Shaman/Priest toss up a HoT at the beginning of the raid and keep refreshing it).

You are right about Naxxramas being very low level (I'm talking of 10-man here, haven't been to 25-man). Indeed, I'd go so far as to claim that it's largely a snoozefesh and indeed is certainly easier than Karazhan by a wide margin. In Karazhan I felt constricted for mana almost all the time but this was okay: I was still able to heal significantly more than I could in Nax-40 before then (and I had not replaced more than 2 pieces of gear when I first stepped into Karazhan). Now in Nax-10 I'm healing lots less than in Sunwell and still feeling extremely constricted. No matter which way I try to turn it, the most prominent quality of new Nax-10 is is an almost complete lack of fun beyond the first 2 times. It's like going back to UBRS - level play, the only thing more boring the 3rd time through is The Oculus (but that's probably just me).

So you are correct: Naxxramas does not require us to have more mana regeneration but that just means it's not really fun either. Hopefully a few times through Naxxramas is all it takes to get the significant upgrades and to move on. This leads me to the WG issue: I'd expect a 51-point talent to be fun and useful in a wide variety of encounters instead of just something I cast three times on Loatheb and on trash. One would at minimum expect an AoE hot to be be good in an "aoe dot" fight like Sapphiron.

And yes, mana being constricted in general lowers overhealing. I'm not sure if this is much more of a HOT issues than an issue with all heals.

I know backseat designing is discouraged here, but I have to say the concept behind that is really interesting to me. I think that balance wise something like that would actually need a very long cast time in addition to the high mana cost, but refreshing ripride/Sheath of Light/EarthlivingWeapon/Renew and all our hots would be ridiculously interesting. To be honest, it could function like a resto druid pyroblast and be quite interesting.


Perhaps the problem with Wild Growth is that it doesn't fill a gap in overall raid heal functionality. They tried to make it usable by putting the majority of the healing upfront (Since most aoe damage needs healed now, not later), but that created the clash with CoH/Chain Heal. It also goes against the grain of what hots generally are: preemtive healing.

I imagine the issue they saw with Wild Growth being a normal ticking hot is that all its healing would be overwritten by CoH/Chain heal. Hots are at their core act as maintenence/buffer heals which is why resto druids have always been given such mana efficency for their throughput: a lot of the healing really is wasted.

I wonder if redesigning it to hit 10 targets with a longer duration would be a more effective implementation more in the flavor of druid maintenence/preemptive healing. Just balancing the ticks out and increasing the duration would make it useful on tanks as a 5-target heal, particularly if its mana efficiency is bumped slightly for not having so much up front. And in hateful strike/saber lash style fights it becomes a powerful tool.

Making it closer to a more traditional hot would also make resto druids the most efficient aoe healers in continuous moderate aoe damage fights, a niche that no one really fills efficently at the moment (Though Prayer of Mending is ridiculously powerful in those situations).

I understand the design goals by making it more upfront, but all it ends up doing is being compared to CoH instead of being allowed to stand on its own as a unique spell. I agree that it shouldn't be so powerful that it's the only viable build, but it should actually add to the toolbox in 25-man raids as opposed to being relegated to 10-man duty.

Chain Heal was the Shaman's bread and butter. The expansion is heavily encouraging them use a far greater variety of their healing arsenal. It'll still see plenty more use than, say, Prayer of Healing but won't be used as much as it is on live.

I don't think it's particularly unfair, therefore, for Resto Druids to get something equal or better than Chain Heal as a 51 pt talent. The point isn't to have a spell that can do all of the AoE healing by ourselves, but to have a heal that allows us to contribute to that effect in a meaningful way. As it stands WG does not accomplish that.

The fact is that it isn't just some people who are considering speccing away from WG. Beyond those in this thread who have expressed the opinion that going into Balance is better, you have such high profile Resto Druids as Phaelia from Resto4Life and Bellwether of 4Haelz echoing those thoughts.

I'm all for there being options. I thought it was neat that Druids had Dreamstate and Tree of Life specs for healing (even though they were equivalent in strength). The problem is that, at least in the context of the expansion, going deep Resto seems like less of an option and more of a handicap.

I think the issue people are pointing to in saying things like "well hots will be more useful for raid healing because mana will be tight" is that currently hots are usually undercut when used as raid top offs. Nearly 100% of the time if you cast a lifebloom on some random person that's missing 2k hp that isn't in danger or anything, there's about a 95% chance some flash of light or chain heal will top that person off because the paladin or shaman has 0 fear at all that they'll run OOM and regret that useless heal. Even if your paladins can actually configure grid to show them that the person has a hot and doesn't need topped off, the 1% chance that warlock was going to take damage again before lifebloom topped them off is worth the mana because mana is virtually unlimited. And the issue isn't unique to shamans and paladins topping people off under hots. Anytime I have a free GCD I just cast a hot on someone no matter what hp they're at. I just try to guess who is the most likely to lifetap, SW, take an aoe, or whatever and never let a GCD go unused. I barely even notice that I have a mana bar.

I see myself respeccing a lot for different fights. Like for an archimonde style fight, I'd love to have WG, GotEM and just do everything i can to proactively keep the melee alive through the fires. I wonder if i could put out enough healing with WG, hots, and maybe a coh once in a while to let the melee just stand in the RoF dpsing full out on azgalor. Then for a fight with just a tank taking damage, WG is useless, GotEM is useless, replenish is fairly useless, so go deeper in balance. I really can see each fight being about picking which 31+ resto talents are actually useful, then dumping everything else into balance. I really wish I had 1 more point to play with so I could get full imp tree and full dreamstate. I'm picturing something like that being my default build, then swapping to get wild growth for a few fights.

Suggestion: Make WG work less like a short rejuv on 5 targets and more like an aoe PoM. Basically make each tick hit the original target and the lowest 5 people in range. That does nothing to change the theoretical healing, and everything to make it work better with chain heal and coh, while still keeping with the primary druid role of keeping hots on the tank. Then you just refresh WG on the tank and it provides a buffer of health to the melee around him. It also solves the idea of what happens if everyone is full hp.

You've brought up a point that I hadn't considered. Blizzard is aiming to make mana a much bigger concern. It may be that the OCD topping off crowd will have to curb their enthusiasm or be worthless halfway through the fight. This may apply to Druids as much as any other class, but it should give out HoTs more room to be effective. This doesn't help WG, but it should at least make Rejuvenation/Regrowth more useful.

But your suggestion for WG would make it very useful. Having it act more in the vein of the Holy Light glyph would be ideal. You can select 1 target to heal directly, and four nearby targets will also get the HoT's healing based on their need. So long as there are people within 15 yards needing healing the number of wasted ticks will be minimal. That sounds like the 'smart' heal we've been looking for.

There is, however, more potential for being overpowered. Without an implementation that counters it, you could cast WG on multiple people and effectively double/triple/quadruple stack the healing. That might be fair enough with the current mana cost and healing of the current WG, it's hard to say.

The suggestion is definitely worth posting the the Beta/PTR. I'd recommend you do so.

I can not get into beta at this time and am having a hard time finding information about professions. I was wondering if there is 2 that will be more useful than the others. Currently on the live realms I was enchanting and alchemist for the ring enchants and the alchemist stone, then I dropped enchanting once I had the good rings and went leatherworking for drums as well as being able to make the healing chest pattern. Right now my plan is to relvl enchating once the expansion comes out for ring enchants and I'm trying to figure out which of the other professions would be the most useful for resto.

There is a WotLK profession thread in Public Discussion with the information you seek.

I really don't see much hope for Nourish for a while. If they improve it much, it will effectively trump Paladin flash healing and we'll have way more tools they they do. It's already arguably worse than Regrowth and they won't make RG worse they've said. It's an ability I've always wished I had (I'm an ex-pally so I'm just used to having a 1.5s heal) but never really needed. As a lvl 80 spell it's quite unsavory.

It already synergizes well with our other spells. Perhaps if it added an increased heal component or reduced mana cost on next spell cast (similar to talented Greater Heal for Priests and Holy Light for Pallies) it would be an interesting twist to our "rotations." The only other likely possibility is that a wicked Glyph becomes available for it that makes it worthwhile.

Hopefully with the new push of glyph testing we'll see some changes. Maybe it just needs even more talents to affect it.

Right now I see Nourish as "something to spam while clearing trash you have cleared before"

Is it really topping the healing meters what makes 1 second ticks effective? My opinion has always been that 1 second ticks gives the tank a buffer against burst damage. A boss with a 2 second swing timer gives us 2 ticks before the next swing. A low health tank gets 2 1k+ ticks before the next blow. This often buys the time for A rejuv, regrowth swiftmend and other classes healing spells to land. A simple example, but I have always loved the druids stabalizing effect on a tank, not the fact that druids can get a high rank on healing meters.

The problem is that WG is clearly not designed to be used as a major tank heal. The front loaded nature of WG's healing heavily discourages using it preemptively as one normally does with HoTs on tanks. As such, it's usefulness as a stopgap until other heals land is almost non-existent. Your first instinct when a tank needs an immediate heal is Swiftmend, rather than casting a heal which will still take a full second to land for less.

Not sure if this has been brought up in this thread, but has anyone noticed that the proposed gear for resto druids have an undue amount of crit and spellhaste as part of their item budgets? Is this just for Nax, or will gear continue to have comparatively useless mechanics?

Best we can really hope for is that Blizzard makes the mechanics of crit & haste better for restoration. Personally I'm not that worried about haste, it's decent as long as it stacks with GoTEM.

Crit isn't as bad as it used to be, what with Living Seed and possible Nature's Grace builds. It probably still won't be worth seeking out, but it's not like it's worthless. As for haste, the Earthmother reduction from a few pushes ago made haste worth it for our instants and, don't forget, Regrowth benefits greatly from haste.

What does crit gain from live to wotlk? Living seed and a rarely-used flash heal? That's not even close to pushing it to worthwhile status. Regrowth, which will probably be the most used spell that can actually crit, comes built-in with a 60% crit-rate, so the additional benefit of crit rating is meager at best.
There isn't a single point of crit on our healing gear on live, and with good reason. I see no motivation for trees to pick up crit, and no reason for it to be included on our set gear. That said, a much healthier solution would be to increase the value of crit for druids, as that would play better with the gear homogenization scheme. This is a major concern as it seems top-level items will have spellpower, haste and crit.

If they do not severely nerf the Regrowth glyph and we become mainly regrowth spammers in Wrath, it seems to me like crit will still be a pretty good stat to make sure that Nature's grace procs really often. At 60% crit you could still get some long strings of non crit heals which will feel pretty slow.

If you were a raid healing regrowth spammer, the idea of giving up a fair amount of plus heal for crit is interesting to me so you could really consistently hit hard with the initial heal, are able to kick them out fast due to nature's grace, and are leaving seeds all over the raid that pop when the next raid damage takes place. And there will always be all those targets to swiftmend

I wish they would lower the CD on swiftmend now that lifebloom is nerfed so hard...10 second CD would be awesome.

Is anybody quick enough with math to give a ballpark on how much plus heal you would have to lose to get to say 75% crit on regrowth?

Edit: hmm looked at gear and it seems like it would be prohibitively expensive to get our crit up to around even 70% on regrowth. Maybe it is a bad stat if you can't really count on grace and seeds the vast majority of the time you are casting regrowth.

To increase the crit of regrowth from 60% to 70% would need 459 crit rating at level 80 which in terms of item budget is worth about 550 spell power (~1035 healing in TBC terms). For virtually any druid healing style, this is just a plain bad trade.

If my memory serves correctly, DPS casters should look at *hit* around 2000 spell power and for crit much much later (depending on multipliers, of course). Almost certainly resto druids will never reach a gearing level where crit is "worth it" - even considering that fewer stats on items is more expensive, it would still be better to just slap on more spell power.

EDIT: dug up a few more precise numbers now that I had more time. I used healing:damage ratio of 1.88 and spell power item budget of 6 spell power equaling 5 stat points. 45.9 crit rating for 1% crit.

Taking a look at the big picture, I think there's pretty good synergies between all of our new/different talents, changed itemization, and Nourish along with our other spells.

We can get 7% crit just from talents. 4% on Nourish/HT at the very least.

Our HoTs last longer, giving us more time in the interim to buffer them with casted heals, which gives us something to do and more control over our healing/mana pool. The crit from Living Seed gives us a reactive heal that's acceptably reliable (assuming a 25% crit rating at lvl 80 on regular spells and ~75% on Regrowth). So now instead of having 3 HoTs ticking constantly (even if they don't have to) and eating into our mana pool, we have 3 hots ticking, time in between to land crittable spells to give us a reactive heal (depending on the coefficient and spell you use, could be around 1400) that will do even more to prevent dmg spikes. Our GCD on ours HoTs is shorter, so we can start into our cycle quicker and be more flexible.

Nourish serves the purpose of being a crittable spell that you can cast within cycles. Depending on its coefficient, it could land for as much as 4800 (~2000 base, +2000 +heals, times 1.2 for a hot) and plant a living seed for 1400 (.3 x 4800). All in 1.5s. That's prolly what you'd want to cast if you already have RG ticking. There's little doubt that they will change the RG glyph. It's out of whack similar to how Seal of Crusader was out of whack when Vanilla first launched. Either that or they will balance the other glyphs around it.

Please correct my math if it's incorrect. I haven't seen any coefficient numbers on Nourish yet and am not in the Beta, so I don't know when the coefficients factor in.

And we Still have Swiftmend available. There's many times looking back on BT and Heroics that I'd have wanted to Swiftmend more than one person in the raid and Nourish essentially gives me that capability. I can cast Nourish, and as soon as it lands, Swiftmend someone else at the backend of the GCD.

Where WG fits into all that I wouldn't speculate to say yet. We're more like priests in that we can have multiple healing styles and plenty of tools in the toolbox. It's just a matter of the job that needs being done.

I believe the coefficient of Nourish is ~108% of spell power. Even without glyph, regrowth is generally superior to Nourish due to high crit chance and ToL discount. Unless nourish is improved or regrowth nerfed, I really don't see much room for it.

Living seed is calculated from the actual value healed and overhealing is not counted in while the extra from crit is. Thus if nourish was to hit for 4800 you'd get a 7200 crit which produces a 2160 living seed (if there really was 7200 effective healing done). Using living seed pre-emptively is quite difficult though as the target would need to have already taken damage for seed to heal for more than zero health.

I think itemization in wotlk is based heavily on the "unification of gear" concept.

Moonkins are generally starfire-happy casters, who will be wanting a lot of crit in wotlk, with the new moonkin effect which replaced the.. GO MOONKIN HIT WITH YOUR HAPPYSTICK version. However, restoration druids were always about maximizing our HoT HPS, which meant stacking "spellpower".

If we look at what they're doing to warlocks' DoTs .. are they going to do the same for HoTs?
Will we be seeing HoTs critting, and also leaving a small Living Seed proc when HoT ticks crit?

It might be interesting to see them go in this direction, but I just want to go back to doing what Trees do best.