Eh, if they wanted to give us some sort of mitigating cooldown, why not just let us cast Barkskin on any target?

Along with the person above me, I have to find this completely ridiculous. Is your guild treating you badly? Do they have a grudge against druids?

90% of the 10 man hard modes are done with 1 druid and 1 holy priest. Why? Because they're the best two healers to get the job done. Admittedly, this isn't 25 man, but saying that we're only good in 10 mans is a bit of a stretch. We have amazing raid healing. Our hot blanketing is more effective in 10 man, but just as useful in 25 man. And our inability to provide the tank with armor isn't going to get us kicked out of a raid.

And how many saving abilities do we need? 3? 4? Swiftmend is arguably a 'saving' ability, and NS+HT certainly is (assuming you haven't glyphed for raid healing). These aren't GS, but they certainly have saved my butt a few times.

That is not the point, we could have a button which healed for 30k health and while amazing it would be of very little use when the tank would get one-shot from the majority of hard mode encounters from generic hard-strike abilities. This is also why Shield (Divine Aegis) effects are superior to that of heal after damage effects especially for the majority of Ulduar encounters - time will tell how things stand in the Coliseum but as far as I am aware they said they would not have so many "CD or die" style bosses but until we see how the hard modes work I would not want to trust them on it yet.


The game in general needs to move away from that type of damage and also from the vast amount of "tank cooldowns" that we have available because while they remain it is very hard to balance encounters to be hard without making them trivialized with heavy cooldown usage.

Our saving ability is Battle Res. Everyone else who has a CD is playing catch-up to that. I don't want another saving ability if that means no BRez (never going to happen, unless they make Ankh sharable via talents and make BRez talented at least, if they go that route than I'd expect an armor booster).

If GC's Q & A left me with one impression: the devs are having trouble tuning fights around us. Not sure why that's an issue with them now, after doing everything to improve us since TBC, and I hope I'm wrong.

While i do agree that Brez should be classified as a "utility" spell, it is also is an excellent compliment to the niche of our healing, which is raid healing. It can be considered a microcosm to how we preform compared to other classes.

We have the ability to resurrect any member, which pairs perfectly with our most assigned role, raid healing. It is the perfect pair for this role because it is a cool down that can be used after the fact, which takes the role of having to 'predict' who will die. By this i mean that yes a priest could turn their GS into a battle rez only if they can predict the death, which, in a raid role, is next to impossible to predict. Both will meet the same end (other than possible mana or buff issues), but the battle rez is more suited for the job.

Now on the other end of the spectrum, healing a tank, GS takes the lead because the damage is predictable. This is where you hit the nail on the head. Brez can be used on a tank, but it is to the job as GS on a raid member, it is ineffective, or less so than other possibilities.

This is why a diversity of healers is needed in all challenging content, because every class and spec brings their own skill to the table. Some will surpass, beyond a shadow of a doubt, all other skills. And that same skill will be surpassed by others in a different role.

The short version is that arguing "this skill vs. that skill", and then coming up with an undisputed winner, does not make that skill inferior in general, but merely inferior in that narrow field of judgment, whereas it might take the cake in another field. Just because druids don't have a GS or LoH does NOT mean that they are inferior in general, but only in the category of "tank CD's. (taking the skills herein mentioned).

Aside from a crit-scaling talent and meta-ToL, I don't think we'll be receiving anything new this expansion. They might alter tranquility and HT, but as stated its low-priority because we don't need it. Since we're in groupthink mode I did have an idea, should hots ever get nerfed across the board to compensate for Chots™ (critical heal over time!).

One huge strength of tree, and arguably an OP aspect of the class, is our mobility without losing throughput. I think a good talent, should hots get nerfed, would be something akin to Surv Hunter's Sniper Training, that is basically a stacking +heal % buff, when you move it either ticks back down or goes away altogether. Call it Nurturing Roots or something like that. It's too easy and somewhat unfair to other healers given current encounters' constant mobility requirement, it would be good to encourage trees to choose smart places to stand that would allow them to stand still and be rewarded for it (fires on hodir, a good shroom on Freya etc). I don't think this is warranted though unless hot spellpower scaling or base healing is nerfed, we have enough throughput as it is. It would make pvp more interesting too, where the decision to kite or tree-tank isn't so clearcut and proper positioning is absolutely crucial.

I really think improved barkskin should allow it to be cast on others every 3 minutes or so, or on yourself for the bonus 10% every minute as usual. They reeeeeeeeeeeally want to give us more variety and tank healing viability because they keep buffing nourish every patch, but without this kind of "out" or any mitigation buff we really can't fill that role. These sort of cooldowns were absolutely clutch in Ulduar, if they're going to continue along with this sort of boss design its really time this should be done to keep things balanced for 10 mans, 5 mans, etc. I always thought this sort of thing should be put on the tanks, but blizzard apparently doesn't think so since they keep nerfing DKs rather than giving other tanks more outs.

As far as a Chot-extension rather than 150% tick, I'd be all for it. One major aspect of druid healing is how consistent our hots are. If I cast a rejuv, I know with 100% certainty that it is going to do about 850 HPS and 15,000 healing. I don't want it to have a 1% chance to do 22000 healing. Nor do I want it to have an 18% chance to do even less than 15k (assuming it was nerfed). Who would actually enjoy this sort of RNG when it comes at the expense of raid members died ("Sorry, you died because I didn't get any Chots"). Realistically I don't see Blizzard doing anything else besides this unless the druid community really came out in droves against it. Hey, it worked for lifebloom... err... wait no. We're at the whim of Ghostcrawler and he's kind of an idiot.

Sans inspiration, shamans are inferior to resto druid for single target healing in every way. Our hps is better, our mana regen is better and our cds are better. And that's before the 3.2 and before speccing/glyphing for nourish. Now toss in superior raid healing, healing on the move, a unique hot niche and you can see why asking for inspiration is not gonna happen.
I have yet to see a reasonable situation to bench a resto druid unless you have more than 2 in the raid.

No, we don't have a damage reduction ability on CD. But, neither do shamans, and the paladin ones are usable by all specs.
We have SM for burst healing which heals for the same as HL/HW and is instant. Nourish has a practical cast time of 1s if spammed and heals for quite a lot (comparable to LHW for instance), with X2 healing on crit that works on overhealing.

The problem with making Nourish hit *much* harder as a baseline for the purpose of MT healing is this: they'd have to nerf hots. If nourish started hitting 2-3x harder, our HPS combined with nourish and hots would be insane and overpowered. Druids aren't meant to be able to fully heal a DPS with one nourish, that isn't our class design. You can't just ignore the fact that our hots are constantly ticking along with lifebloom ticking every second when MT healing. I'm not saying we don't have problems with burst healing, but buffing nourish (more than it's getting in 3.2 at least) is not necessarily the answer.

That's a ridiculous metric unless you're talking about a tank in blues. Nobody has a heal that big.

It's up 100% even with only one rejuvenation going. Also featuring critical hot ticks not procing nature's grace.