• Playered

Lifebloom is officially nerfed in WoTLK (for the best I believe):
Although many Resto Druids will complain it really did end up in a state where all the other useful spells simply didn't cut it compared to LB which was rather sad as mostly the other spells were not horribly bad.

It was a similar state to Brainheal and Shamans which you cant deny is laughable at its mundane situation - Paladins can assure you that using 1 spell over and over endlessly for years is nothing but a bad thing, especially as we do genuinely have quite a few other spells to utilize unlike them.

 

Akston

I have been contemplating raiding with a resto druid in wotlk and one of the things that was holding me back was how basically all druids do is keep lifebloom up on as many targets as their haste allows without dropping a 3 stack, which sounded incredibly boring. So i am sort of excited about this change actually. It could definitely make things more interesting.

 

Darian_TruBlade

It sounds like they intend on reducing Lifebloom's coefficient, but not the fact that it stacks. They may change their mind and try something else (like going back to the old "delay the bloom" model). In either case, it sounds like there's going to be more to healing than stacking Lifeblooms, one way or another.

We'll still be rolling HoTs to be sure, if not quite as rigidly. If they have kept things as is (particularly with that Lifebloom Glyph) a Tree Druid would have had absolutely ridiculous throughput. I'm sure someone on the forums will have a hissy fit, but I have to agree that this seems like it's for the best.

 

• Playered

The thread it came from was discussing how LB on beta (R2) was apparently healing less than R1 on live or so.

I doubt anything beyond a weaker (compared to live) co/ef will happen to LB.

 

Soco

Even if it was only healing 700 or so with a three stack in WotLK gear, I would be fine with that. Stick 4 druids in a raid, have them cast nothing but lifeblooms, covering the entire raid with them. GotEM and the Glyph to add 1 second make this entirely feasible. And 700 HPS will still be very powerful at 80, even if normal raiders would hit 15k health.

Could you imagine Kil'Jaden-type fights like this? One other raid healer to patch up big damage, and 2 tank healers, it would be hard to see how anyone could really die outside of some really unlucky/bad things happening.

Look at the fights in Sunwell, only p1 M'uru and Brut do not have pretty heavy raid damage. A strategy that uses druids rolling lifeblooms in such a way is a huge counter to most all of these fights.

 

• giansm

I don't really like to read things like this. Contrary to popular belief, druids do not spend 100% of their time rolling lifeblooms except on a few fights (multi-tank fights, and fights where pretty much everyone is guaranteed to take consistent damage all the time -- think RoS late p3). On single-tank fights with more random raid damage (e.g. the majority of BT and Hyjal, plus the first half of Sunwell) it's better to use a mix of lifebloom, rejuvenation, regrowth, and swiftmend (everything except healing touch). Generally the best thing to do is keep some amount of hots on the tank and use the rest of your attention on the raid. The main reason for this, and for the bad position HT finds itself in, is a combination of two things:

1. Lifebloom is an incredible spell to put on your tanks, and will remain so unless it gets nerfed significantly (like losing 30-50% of its tick size). On live, it's the most powerful hot by a vast margin and it ticks often enough that you can generally count it as added stamina.

2. Our two direct heals, on live, are Regrowth and Healing Touch. Regrowth is wasteful to spam on a single target (both of mana and healing output: you must either spam a lower rank, or lose the HoT); and Healing Touch interacts poorly with tree form and with lifebloom (its 3 second cast time combined with lifebloom's slightly less than 6 second "free time" means that any sort of lifebloom+HT setup will be awkward).

#1 means you really want to keep LB on the tank. #2 means that while doing so, you don't have many options to add direct heals. Thus you see a pattern where druids in single-tank situations roll lifebloom on the tank (and probably rejuv or regrowth too, for swiftmending) and then heal the raid the rest of the time. The upshot of this re: Healing Touch is that it's not a bad spell, but nobody uses it because it interacts poorly with lifebloom and lifebloom is a better spell. If lifebloom's duration was 8-9 seconds instead of 7, or if haste gear was significantly more prevalent, you would probably see a lot more folks using HT (there's still the fact that you can't use it in tree form, but at least it wouldn't conflict with lifebloom so badly).

This effect also explains lifebloom's dominance in general (at least in terms of the percentage of outgoing heals it accounts for). Since it's a very good spell to have on your tanks, and its duration is so short, it restricts the amount of rejuvenations and regrowths you can cast and completely locks out using HT in a way that makes sense. If lifebloom could go on a few seconds longer without needing a refresh, its contribution to your overall healing would go down and your use of other spells would go up. If all that changes is a minor nerf to its coefficient (which is what it looks like now in beta according to the forum, something around 7-8%) then I doubt that would materially affect your desire to use lifebloom on the main tank, which still comes with a pretty severe restriction in time available to cast other spells.

An interesting consequence, if this analysis is correct, is that the lifebloom glyph (1 second increase in duration if I remember correctly) and talented GCD change (1 second GCD on lifebloom) may lead to decreasing lifebloom's dominance.

 

Akston

I was just going on what our raiding druids tend to be using whenever i happen to look at their healing breakdowns so i probably don't have the whole picture. I any case it seems like they are trying to make druids rely more on their other heals which looks like it will add some dimension to druid healing.

 

Norfair

I "already" use every kind of healing spell (save for HT) in between Lifebloom refreshes, I don't see how this will change in WotLK. Druids will still be keeping up a Lifebloom stack on the tank, because it's a waste not to. If they nerf it too hard, Lifebloom will become quite useless. The only change we will see is a decrease in healing output I'm afraid. The idea is good (less "use Lifebloom on the tank or you're not being effective"), but I don't think this will be the solution.

Keep f**king that chicken.

 

grimtage

I completely agree with this guy, as always; he hits the nail on the head.

Lifebloom is powerful, yes, and some people do just spam it and nothing else - we call these guys "bad druids". They are like tanks that spam devastate and nothing else. They aren't using their full potential. Swiftmend is a powerful spell and you can't - simply can't - overlook it.

However, druid healing right now isn't lacking; yes you can keep lifebloom up on your tanks (usually 2) and thus leave yourself 3 to 4 seconds of "free time" between them. Usually only use 3 seconds myself, and with this I do several things. Sometimes I put Abolish Poison on the two tanks when an encounter spams poison damage - that means the poison won't get to tick. Sometimes I put Rejuvenation on the tanks - that allows me to swiftmend next cycle if they need it, or it just puts an even bigger buffer on for other healers. Every so often, I regrowth - this is for those encounters with huge amount of damage output over a long time and I've just done rejuvs on my previous cycle (so worthless to do them again). I can get one in, with no haste, and then next cycle is rejuv, and then I can regrowth the other tank. This leaves many options when there's 2 tanks, and it's great; I love having to make split second decisions whilst I'm waiting for my GCD to come down on what the encounter will offer "in the next few seconds". That's what druid healing is in raids and I don't think it needs fixing at all.

However, 5 mans. There is one tank, and you keep lifebloom on him no matter what - you often keep rejuv up too. That's a use of - on a 6 second cycle - 4.5seconds out of every 12. What do you do with the other 7.5? You either start spamming regrowth on the tank (terribly mana inefficient) or you heal group damage. If the tank is taking too much damage to be patched up by your rejuv/LB, you're pretty much going to have to put your top rank regrowth up and start spamming one of your regrowths - horribly mana inefficient. That's where the druid's problem is - and they fixed it! They called it Nourish, and they added it as a baseline. That's what we were missing. Single tank situations mean that we are terribly wasted, our HoTs can be kept up on 1 tank easily, then the rest of the time we're simply burning our mana on an inefficient and bad heal, because we have no other choice.

We also were missing some kind of AoE heal ability, but there was no real requirement to put it in. I would've rather Blizzard put Nourish as 51pt and skipped Flourish. Yeah, it would've meant tree druids required 51 points in resto, but what kind of tree druid wouldn't already have 51 points in resto? The dream state druids have HT to replace it.

p.s. I know I ignored situations where there are 3-4 tanks, but I'm just hoping Blizzard take such stupid things out of the game - they require you to have 1 or 2 people in your raid for certain encounters that are useless elsewhere. Please, Blizzard, bring a standard! I'm sick of having to tell prot paladins that we can't bring them to some encounters for fear of nerfing our raid too much. Either make them useful in all encounters, or give us an alternative!

 

Sheshonk

Well I’m a little dissapointed we got a nerf to one of our spells in expansion, while other classes are receiving buffs. Makes the nerf even more powerful.

With that being said, I do support the reason for the nerf, I want a more dynamic playstyle. As it stands right now you have 3 types of resto druids: morons who can’t keep triple stack up, average druids who can keep 4 gcd running, and rockstar druids who swiftmend/NS when needed and hot/regrowth the raid for maximum efficiency. Sadly, the difference between an average and rockstar druid is rather small. Why? Because triple stack lifebloom requires little to no thought and gives huge returns.

Before the buff to lifebloom where the 2nd and 3rd stacks gained +heal bonus, tree was not the druid heal spec. Instead, it was either dreamstate or moonglow/swiftmend which relied on using heal touch as the main heal. Back then there was a definite art to healing: getting in synch with boss swing timer, cast canceling when you would overheal, and playing the 5 second rule. HoTs were nice and made up roughly 30% of my healing, but they were supplemental spells, not THE spell. Unfortunately, I think we can all agree that druids were underpowered in comparison to other healers at the time.

Whenever I respec’ed tree for 1337 triple stack lifeblooms, I felt I gave up a large, fun aspect of the game, but remained tree to fulfill my raid niche. At times, I want to pound my head off the wall at times because counting to 4 is so boring. Aside from the random swiftmend or NS (since you rarely have time for rg when you need it), you don't care about people's health, you are already pushing your hots to maximum power. If I had a chance to start things over again I would have played a priest during TBC. They have no “I Win” button, they have to be able to analyze the situation and know which spell to use when…all within a split second.

Hopefully by by bringing the gcd down on lifebloom to 1s, opening up all resto spells in treeform, adding two new healing spells (Nourish and Flourish), and the addition of glyphs (HT Glyph is like an entirely new spell) it will create a more dynamic playstyle for resto druids.

Will nerfing lifebloom change this at all? Doubt it. Triple stack lifebloom is a conditional "I WIN" button. You need tanks for it to be good. Even by nerfing lifebloom, you will still triple stack the tanks and then you use remaining gcd on other spells. Nerfing lifebloom coef will not change the fact resto druids will triple stack the tank unless the nerf is absolutely ridiculous (50%ish).

I believe this nerf just hurts resto druid raid viability. I'm not saying resto druids aren't going to have a place in expansion, but I don't see things changing from their current situation where you take 0-2 resto druids to raid. Replenish does not compare to blessings, totems, or even imp spirit. I thought bliz was going to make resto druids so powerful at healing, that they would be worth 1.5 healers (for example), which would open up the possibility of dropping a healer for a dps. Apparently I was wrong.

I realize bliz is trying to get away from raid stacking, but I believe thats an impossible feat to accomplish.

 

Darian_TruBlade

My only critique of gianism is that with GotEM and the Lifebloom Glyph there's a lot more wiggle room available. It's still restricting if you're keeping Lifebloom rolling, but it's shouldn't be anywhere near as onerous.

Outside of that I have to agree.

 

• giansm

That was kind of my point. Like I said in the last paragraph: "if this analysis is correct... the lifebloom glyph (1 second increase in duration if I remember correctly) and talented GCD change (1 second GCD on lifebloom) may lead to decreasing lifebloom's dominance." I meant we'd probably still use lifebloom but we would have more time in between refreshes to do other things.

I did get to that conclusion in a round-about way though, since the post was kind of just rambling thoughts for a while. Sorry about that.

 

Kamileon

I agree with Sheshonk on this one, and I've said before that as long as lifebloom stacking exists our playstyle for WotLK won't change. And that I personally dislike the playstyle.
At first stacking lifeblooms is interesting and unique, but after a long time it makes me feel dumb and like less of a healer. I love to heal, and I have all 4 healing classes at 70, having healed in raids at various levels, the way Druids heal in BC is completely different than how they healed in the past, and how other classes heal, and it's primarily because the best thing we can do is stack lifeblooms on 1-4 targets, depending, and being tied to that lifebloom timer entirely dictates the way we heal, how we can respond to situations, and requires that we spend too much of our time refreshing spells rather than "being rockstars".

The fact remains that a triple stack of Lifebloom on tanks is a powerful tool, we're the only class with anything like it, and we'll be casting it as long as it exists. Having less time spent refreshing Lifebloom, and more free time in a cycle will make things better, but it's whitewash on the situation Druids have in TBC.

 

• Playered

My Lifebloom on Live is ticking +3 per tick more than it does on Beta assuming a 'Resto Spec' and being in ToL form.
If you ignore all the other changes then yes it is rather more significantly nerfed - but if you include all the appropriate buffs to the class as a whole you have a rather minimal loss and the other spells feel stronger in comparison.

Honestly it wont be a huge downfall of Lifebloom or anything... it will just not end up so incredibly strong in relation to other spells toward the end of WoTLK.

 

Sheshonk

After thinking about this for a bit, our rotation actually doesn't open up that much. With the addition of shaman's 51 point Spirit Link talent it allows damage to be split among 2 other characters. That means in a boss fight that requires 1-3 tanks, you have to keep 3 triple stack lifeblooms going thanks to spirit link. So in a single tank situation where we once had 4.5 seconds open to do whatever we want, we now have 4 seconds. For a two or three tank situation we will be better off, but still kinda disappointing nonetheless.

 

• giansm

I don't know if I'm alone in this but I actually really like the lifebloom mechanic, at least when it's on only one tank. Choosing when to refresh the stack (do I cast this extra spell now which means I have to refresh the stack in the next one or two GCDs, or do I refresh the stack early which will free up the next three GCDs) makes any boss where you are split between the tank and the raid into a series of fast paced decisions and forces you to be very conscious of what damage might be coming up. I agree that on live servers it gets tedious with more than one tank, since you aren't as free to make choices, but with a slight extension in duration it shouldn't be that bad with two tanks.

About the Spirit Link issue, I'm not really sure what to make of that. I haven't really been keeping up on the shaman thread so I don't know what they have been saying about it, but my feeling is that it would be very strange if that ability was allowed to "work" on raid boss MTs. It would require balancing the encounter around it, and since it's so powerful, it would make it extremely difficult to raid without a resto shaman (not just any shaman -- it's a 51 point talent). I don't think there is any precedent for that with any healing class. Forgive me if I missed some announcement about what this ability was intended to do, but my guess was that it would end up being more for temporary heavy raid damage (like Encapsulate) and not for main tanks, probably through messing with the "link is broken" thresholds to make it pretty much incapable of holding up to boss damage.

 

Sheshonk

Spirit Link...

Originally it broke once a set amount of damage was taken, but no longer, I'm definitely seeing it possible to keep 100% uptime.

Think about the hardest tank hitter in the game currently: Brutallus. Let's assume worst case scenario: a stomp (6K) follow by two unmitigated hits (10K and 4K). A blow for 10K is not going to pop the spirit link unless your tank was already under half health (which is hard to do now that spirit link mitigates 50% of the damage). This turns a near auto wipe situation into smooth sailing with only 10K damage on the tank.

For run of the mill heavy hitters like Supremus, a druid and shaman could comfortably heal the fight. I guess this is a bad example since Supremus can already be done with 2 healers, but hey, spirit link completely trivializes the encounter.

Furthermore Aff lock's shadow's embrace 5% mitigation (with the demo lock nerfs might actually be a viable spec) and Disc Priest's Grace (6% mitigation and +6% healing done) tank healing becomes even easier. I'm pretty sure these will stack seeing as one is a debuff on the mob and another is a player buff.

Also, imagine who you place the 2nd and 3rd spirit link on. Placing it on a class that gains some sort of gain to healing received: lock (I forget if the 20% heal was entire removed on their armor), Rogue (Quick Recovery), or Cat Druid (Nurturing Instinct). Alternatively, it could be placed on classes that gain benefit from taking damage: warrior (rage gain) or pali (regain mana from being healed).


So there are a couple ways I'm taking this...

1) Bliz hasn't thought about spirit link in raid environments.
2) The 2 raid slots going to death knights are coming from healers, so huge buffs are necessary to allow the same amount of tank/raid damage.
3) Raid encounters are not going to be based upon tank damage and instead based upon gimmick and raid damage.

 

Akston

Seems like making lifebloom only usable on one target at a time would make things a lot more interesting. At the same time it would probably severely nerf druid viability.

 

• giansm

I tried to find some information about how spirit link actually works, but all I could find was some folks complaining it was buggy. I hope I'm not missing something, but from the tooltip I think the most important question is: does the 30% threshold apply before the damage is shared or after? If it's before, that pretty much rules out using spirit link in any serious MT situation (since they routinely get hit for more than 30% of their life). If it's after, then yes, it does seem like it would be a very difficult ability to balance around.

My feeling is that Spirit Link makes more sense working the first way (basically can't use it on raid MTs) since the alternative means that hard hitting bosses will either be trivialized by a restoration shaman, or (if balanced for Spirit Link) impossible without one. That seems like an extremely bad situation for the developers to put themselves in and I don't see why they would. I imagine Spirit Link being used mostly as an arena talent, and in raids for things like Encapsulate, Dark Barrage, AoE tanking, and off tanking.

I won't comment on it any more until I find some more concrete information on how it's supposed to work, though. This is all too speculative.

It wouldn't necessarily. It would stop us from being overpowered in situations with 3+ tanks, but even in single tank encounters druids can perform very well.

Anyway, regardless of that, if your goal is to reduce the amount of time druids spend rolling multiple lifeblooms then it's probably best addressed through encounter design rather than a fundamental change in the spell's mechanics. By "encounter design" I mean things that are not really conducive to rolling 3-4 lifeblooms: single tank fights; fights with multiple tanks, but where they change often enough that the time required to ramp-up a lifebloom stack is not worth it; fights with multiple consistent tanks, but where you must spread so far out in a room that one person can't heal everyone. That sort of thing.

 

Shakes

Spirit Link hasn't worked in any beta build yet, as far as I'm aware, so you're not going to get any concrete information. There was a blue post saying that it was intended to be a core PvE as well as PvP ability though, so I very much think it is intended to be used on the tank, and not just for gimmick fights.

There are currently a hell of a lot of fights that do not involve tanks getting hit more more than 30% of their life in a single hit, and that's before WotLK where crushing blows will be gone, disc priests will be able to reduce incoming damage by 9%, and there will be multiple ways to get the affliction lock 5% physical damage reduction. I really don't see any other way to look at it than spirit link will be pretty powerful at controlling burst (and compensated for by the fact that resto shaman otherwise look like pretty poor healers). With the mana pot changes, and the increased spell costs, perhaps the raid design will be moving away from tank getting burst and more towards healers running out of mana as a failure mechanic?

 

Brinas

I really hope not. Not only will that make for having to bring more healers, but SP will be even more OP. I play a shadow priest (as well as a resto druid), but I don't want to see 5+ on every raid. I think that blizzard is trying to get more towards 1 of each spec in each raid system. So ideally there would never need to be more than 5 healers in a 25 man, not counting hybrid abilities.

I think they just nerfed mana pots because it was getting out of hand. I mean who really wants to have to chug a mana pot every 2 minutes?

One thing I anticipate being a problem with spirit link and 3x LB rolling is positioning. It doesn't sound like it will be as predictable who gets the other parts of the link as people think. I read it as "target the tank and 2 people are auto linked to him if in melee range", which means more healing to the rogue, enh shaman, and retadin. Which means the "if %" portion of the ability might be happening more than expected. Not to mention you can't roll lifeblooms on 2 of 10ish potential targets and hope the link lands on those 2 every time.

 

halmmar

Except they nerf the mana-gain down to 2% from 5%. SP will still be good, and I sure hope the encounters won't be balanced so that you need 5 of them just because they nerfed the mana-gain. I'm pretty sure you'll be able to run 25-man without a single shadow priest.

 

Shakes

I'm guessing given the way they seem to be going with abilities (ie the whole one of each spec stuff) that bringing two shadow priests wont give you any extra mana regen over bringing one, the regen will not "stack".

If they're going the mana management route (and I'm not saying they are, it's just the current data suggests they might be) I think it will be along the line of having to manage what you cast more like pre-BC, not stacking the raid with mana regen.

 

Kortar

Actually, the right answer is: two Holy Priests. Binding Heal is a nice heal. In the situation with Spirit Link it's completely overpowered - it perfectly matches the damage configuration of Spirit Link, and it's ridiculously high throughput/efficiency.

Realistically, it would take 4-5 other healers to replace those two Holy Priests for tank healing. In all likelihood, the combination of your two Holy Priests occaisionally tossing non-Binding Heal on the raid and the Resto Shaman who only has to refresh Spirit Link occaisionally using Chain Heal would constitute the entire healing complement of your raid.

This leads me to believe that either Spirit Link will distribute damage pre-mitigation or it will not have anywhere near 100% uptime.

 

Brinas

Seeing how this would be extremely OP not to mention make many off tanks upset, I'd assume the former is correct.

I assume spirit link will work exactly like Nalorakk' Brutal Swipe or Halazzi's Saber Lash except on 3 targets instead of 2 making positioning much more important. But depending on the range of the link, the 2 extra targets might not be very predictable. If you have to be basically on top of the tank then it's predictable. If it just randomly selects 2 targets within 10 yards, then it might be any melees. Predictability of the link would determine the viability of rolling 3 LBs.