So the incessant whining about "I want a REAL rez" may screw up stealth runs. (The point of stealth runs being that you can bypass a lot of content, but you're operating on the edge, since more than a very occasional death will mean a (slow) stealth back to the party. Tradeoffs. Which most players seem unwilling to do.)

The dev panel talking about PoH, and I believe CoH, said that it would target the lowest-health people in its area of effect. I think it's safe to assume at this point that all target-capped AoE heals will be smart-targeting.

As far as Flourishing the entire raid successively... even aside from the cooldown, there's the problem that the heal may or may not target the same people a few times. While the healing from Flourish itself will make people less ideal targets for Flourish you may still have one group more than an initial tick's worth of flourish behind another group in health, and it's pretty much up in the air how it may interact with full-health targets. Even five druids would have a tough job keeping the whole raid ToLed with flourish.

Regarding stealth runs: Expect more stealth-detecting mobs placed in unavoidable chokepoints.

PoH will target nearest people. CoH to lowest Hp people. So they have two different mechanic to area heals.

As someone who suggested a Flourish kind of heal in the class feedback thread, I was absolutely thrilled to see it implemented. It was very heartening to see blizzard actually read the class feedback thread and implement an idea suggested by myself and numerous others.

I would be flaty amazed if blizzard did not cap the % coefficient for flourish. With three trees in the raid (extreme but it gets the point across) Assuming it has a coefficient of 0.49 (0.43 from 1.5s cast, 10% from gift of nature, 4% from new talent) PLUS another 108% from 3x rejuv, lifebloom and regrowth leaves us with an absolute monster of a healing spell getting a coefficient of 1.01, almost as much as greater heal gets. If lifeblooms stack seperately, the coefficient jumps to 1.33 making it the largest HPS and HPM spell in the game.


Also, I might be alone on this one, but I felt very underwhelmed with Replenish. The only time my rejuv ever spot heals is when I swiftmend it, or when someone is taking peroidic, predictable, non life threatening damage (as in, damage that won't kill someone with three seconds of no healing); low level stacks of arcane buffet, flame burst, meteor slash, blood boil, ect. In each situation, CoH/chain heal could jump and over ride it.

At best it seems like a situationally usefull talent.

About the topic of stealth runs, I currently and almost daily, do stealth runs of all three coilfang instances in about an hour. I dont really see how the OOC rez will help with the stealth runs. If one person dies we can almost always rez them (2 druids at least for tank and healing). Also steath detect mobs at choke points really dont stop stealth runs, unavoidable stealth detect mobs in agro range of several pull stop stealth runs.

I really hope that they keep instances stealthable to some degree (even with shorter instances) as I really do enjoy stealthing instances.

* Improved Tranquility: Now also reduces cooldown by 25/50% and reduces threat by 30/60% (as opposed to 50/100% currently).

This still does not really improve the ability enough in my eyes.
When we first got the new 10 min version in TBC it was really useful as a strong once-off heal which any Druid could use (Hello DLKazzak) and was situationally useful, but for Resto Druids it was still mostly 'meh' and never really improved beyond that.
5 mins is still far too long to bring it into an ability which would get more usage than it does now, I'll estimate a 2-3 min CD (for Resto only) would be needed for it to enter the realm of viable healing spell that can be relied on.



* Nourish: Heals a friendly target for 1550 to 1800. Heals for an additional 12% for each Rejuvenation, Regrowth or Lifebloom effect cast by you active on the target. 1.5 sec cast.

This spell is interesting, but being for your own HoTs only somewhat ruins the ability/synergy it had to allow a Tree + Hybrid combo which would work amazingly well with each other in raiding although it would of had very high potential to become insanely overpowered with more than 2 so fair enough I guess.
Regardless it's still something we have asked for and will be very nice to have outside of raiding, can't really complain about it that much.



* Living Seed: When you gain a critical effect from your Swiftmend, Regrowth, Nourish or Healing Touch spell you have a 33/66/100% chance to plant a Living Seed on the target for 30% of the amount healed. The Living Seed will bloom when the target is next attacked. Lasts 15 seconds.

This seemed much more interesting when there was the extra talent which added 5-15% more crit on your spells, without that talent this one becomes much more lackluster.
It's something nice to have as a 'bonus' but nothing you would count on or gear around right now.



* Replenish: Your Rejuvenation spell has a 5/10/15% chance to restore 10 Energy, 4 Rage, 2% Mana or 10 Runic Power per tick.

Rather happy to have the T3 bonus back, it was really nice and a unique incentive to use the RJ spell more often, can't speak a bad word of it.



* Gift of the Earthmother: Reduces the global cooldown of your Rejuvenation and Lifebloom spells by 0.1/0.2/0.3/0.4/0.5 sec, and causes your Healing Touch and Nourish spells to refund 1/2/3/4/5% of their base cost for each healing over time effect on the target.

I have an issue with the haste component even when I think of it as two seperate talents in one, it needs to be lowered to 0.25-0.3 sec else it will cause conflicts with gear and force people to alienate enhancing and utilizing other spells.



Overall im quite pleased with how Blizzard have treated Resto Druids in WoTLK, talent thinning, spell enhancement, weaknesses improved and fun stuff.

The only grey area for me right now is how the Healers will justify themselves in WoTLK raiding, we still do not really have any notable reason for more than 1 Resto Druid beyond healing output (re: Priests).
While im rather happy about the raid-wide ToL aura, unless it stacks (which would be really awsome/overpowered?) then the old Barks Blessing would of been far more useful in terms of giving raids an incentive for bringing more than one of us, I guess we will see how things pan out in the Beta when we know the direction they are trying to take with Raiding but still.

It all depends on the fight tbh. A resto druid puts out magnificent healing at M'uru P1 or at KJ f.ex, every fight where you have constant damage or a steady flow of DoTs on the raid is where resto druids are kings. The stackability of druids get granted by your unique spells rebirth and innervate. Hopefully you'll want 1 of each spec in a raid however.

With the merged damage/healing components on gear I could definitely see a raids healing squad consisting of 1 holy paladin, 1 resto druid, 1 resto shaman, 1 disciplin priest, 1 holy priest and an elemental shaman helping healing at those oh-crap-moments.

The following applies to raiding druids mostly.

Doing the math, compared to a druid with 308 haste rating (20%), this spell will be a 25% increase in healing output from LB and rejuv. Assuming these spells are 60% of a druid's healing in WotLK, this would make the talent a 15% increase in healing output. However, I believe the only new spell that will see wide use is Flouish, and with a 6 second CD, I believe LB and rejuv will still account for 80% of my healing in WotLK, as they are about 100% in Sunwell fights. At 80% of healing being done by LB/rejuv, the talent becomes a 20% boost to total healing output.

Then, consider that a druid will no longer have to gear for haste they can go straight for plus healing again. They will also get more regen that haste gear usually lacks compared to 'normal' gear. Since regen may once again be a factor for druids in WotLK (Lifebloom doubled in cost, spirit regen function changes with level increases, casting many more spells through this talent) these factors are important to consider. And although the other benefit to direct healing spells with this talent is very small, it cannot be totally discarded.

All things considered with this talent, I would say it is the best in the game (including other WotLK talents we have seen) for any healing tree. Yes, some one or two point talents are better than it point for point, but since there will be 10 or more spare points after grabbing every core resto talent one should probably look at the whole benefit when comparing. And when you do that, I believe there is simply nothing better.

I also wanted to say I think Flourish is great even with a 6 second CD and will shore up the raid healing abilities we and pallys lack. I can't wait to tank the melee boss(es) that will only aggro from healing spells (you know they are coming). Replenish is pretty bad as is, it has situational, small, and very random benefits at best.

Assuming it procs of every tic, healing or not and also assuming a 10k mana pool, its about a 40mp5 effect added to your rejuv. Some unknowns, but it might turn out powerful.

I also read some earlier version where it was affecting flourish, which seemed overpowered. They might just look at other spells they can add it to, like regrowth for example or adjust the procrate if it stays rejuv.

10k mana pool is wrong.

The waters restore 13.2k mana over 30 seconds.

Obviously its wrong. But if i would have said 20k mana pool and 80mp5 someone would have commented "but thats lvl 80 values". I think putting such easily scaling abilities into perspective of lvl 70 is better for grasping its usefulness than having to explain the whole lvl 80 scaling for one small comparison.