Hey, not a problem Paininabox. At very least it made me go back and check my math.

And you will not get an argument from me Erdluf. Slow Stacking will be by far the most mana efficient method. However, the higher variance and the average loss of 1/3rd of the healing throughput will make this a hard pill to swallow for many.

As far as the GCD loss, currently 1 our of 9 GCDs are used to refresh Lifebloom, We are then looking to be using 3 out of 12 to Fast Stack (or 1/4th of our GCDs) (alternatively 4/36 currently and 9/36 for ease of comparison). Over a course of a fight this means that we will use 2.25 times the amount of GCDs to 'maintain' Lifeblooms on a target.

Alternatively, in practical application, we are looking at the time frame loss of a single Regrowth cast per 12 second cycle. Largely this comes into play while figuring out a pure min/max scenario. If the tank really needed that extra Regrowth cast, it is likely that the 9k+ hit from a bloom would have negated it, allowing you to stack Lifeblooms as normal. In a worst case scenario, that cast could have been used to throw a raid heal. This being said, these is no hard and fast rule stating that you MUST stack 3 Lifeblooms as fast as possible. Lifebloom still remains fluid. It’s not as if they are changing Lifebloom to a 3 second cast timer with a 12 second duration. You can still heal the raid member if you like.

I know the front page post specifically warns against this and I do apologise for raising the issue. I shall edit this out if people would prefer:

If the Lifebloom change goes life as is coupled with the mana regen changes, can we really afford to immediately discount the ~100 MP5 and 120 SP from a Dreamstate build (based on 1k INT). These both scale very well into new tiers of gear with Dreamstate/Lunar Guidance.

Based on Playered's post of a few pages back, that would bump our available mana reserves up by ~5.9% on a 5 minute fight with proportionately greater returns as the fight lengthens. Napkin maths gives me 1 Spir = 0.528 MP5 vs 1 INT = 0.5515 MP5 before factoring in INT's contribution on mana pool (which decreases with fight length). So, to me, the real question is what are we losing?

GCD time:

For a caster at the current soft cap of haste we'd have a 1.2sec GCD on instant HoTs. In a slow stacking scenario that penalises us by 0.2 sec every 9 or 2.2% (as opposed to 5/5 GotEM) per target we put LB on. Hypothetical RJ on each target incurs 0.2sec every 18 penalty for an additional 1.1%. So for three tanks we'd be wasting 10% of our GCD time due to the loss of GotEM.

Living seed/Replenishment/WG:

We pretty much can't access these talents in a Dreamstate build but the overall loss is minor when considering rolling HoTs on multiple tanks but ranging to quite severe when thinking of raid healing.

Summary:

Dreamstate might be worth investigating for Druids who are still tasked with rolling multiple LB stacks on tanks but the GCD pressure coupled with the loss of WG will make them unsuitable for raid healing.

Lifebloom changes suck , but wouldn't it be beneficial toward the use with every Omen of Clarity proc? A little tough to watch for each Omen of Clarity proc , but the plus side is about 450 free mana

watching for OoC procs is a bit tricky but I believe there is some addon that yells "OMEN READY".
Though not sure if it's such a big nerf, sure you can't *roll* it nonstop, but then, why the spell wasnt just called "Life" before? )

I welcome the changes, along with the changes to nourish via Nature's Bounty + glyph how it will turn out.

7 seconds is a long time to wait on a heal. With all the other wack-a-mole micromanagement I just am not looking forward to having to time my blooms as well. As it is now I don't use LB on anyone but tanks because the bloom is overheal. I always kind of viewed the bloom part of the spell a pvp thing for dispells, in my experience its absolutely useless in pve except for Loatheb. I understand they are trying to give us more options, but I don't know why. I was under the impression GC wanted to move away from the wack-a-mole model of healing, as well as making it so anyone can heal using the default blizzard UI, but I feel like this change moves us away from both of these.

This change doesn't feel like its going to make druid healing any more fun, its just going to give me more stuff to think about in the middle of a boss fight. So now I'm going to be watching Grid even more intently than before and still have to stay out of the fire.

They should perhaps look into Nature's Splendor and the Lifebloom glyph and remove both of their duration increase instead because not only does it naturally lower the HPM and make it less efficient it also makes multi rolling the spell much more consuming to maintain as 3-4 seconds out of every 7 would be used to keep it up which puts a further limit on doing other things while tank healing.

I really dislike their method for the Lifebloom change because it feels so awkward, like a cop out means of "fixing" the problem where just like for Assassination Rogues they made the last talent just give more % damage boost to solve their lacking DPS instead of sorting the problems which cause the lower damage.


[e] Dreamstate is still bad for a reason and if at any point it becomes viable I will remove the "restriction" from the opening post of the thread.

That was the opposite of my logic.

If we are tied down to rolling 3x LB on 3 tanks (and RJ) then we are GCD limited from doing anything else pretty much.
If LB only lasts 7 seconds per cast instead of 10 seconds then it is healing 3 ticks less per cast = less efficient.
If we double roll LB/RJ there is very little time available to do more raid healing beyond a WG and perhaps a Nourish every so often.
If we do only a single LB roll (+RJ) on the MT then we have much more accessible time to raid heal because we have more GCDs spare to use.

Not to forget that mana is still going to be much harder to throw around recklessly so even a 3 tank roll will most likely end up draining us at a substantial pace.

It also gives more chances of the bloom happening in PvP, but generally it just seems like a more acceptable means of doing exactly what they want without violating Lifebloom in bad ways.

Just to clarify a little more (please correct me if I am misunderstanding you Playered):

Rolling LB on 3 tanks (and RJ) and still having free GCDs to raid heal/regrowth/nourish is an issue for the developers. To combat this they are making LB cost way more mana, when they could just reduce the time LB lasts, if LB has a shorter duration you will not have as much time to cast other things aside from your LB stacks.

Seems a legitimate concern, at this point all they are doing is making us value regen more, so at a certain level of spellpower you would start focusing on regen so that you could maintain enough mana to keep your rotation enough. In essence they are just creating a wall between the rotation druids want to use and what we can do, and at some point there will be a breach in the wall that will let us have enough regen and Spellpower to keep doing what we do.

Now, if they reduced the LB length you are back to being limited to a certain number of GCDs that will cap out relatively low (easy enough to reach the 1sec GCD with haste from gear).

I started a post on WoWhead forums (Druid Forums) about the Lifebloom change. I wrote there suggesting one of 3 things being done to current PTR Lifebloom to make it a bit more useful:

1. Let us control the Bloom in some way.
2. Reduce the Bloom to around how it was before, or a bit more but increase the ticks of the LB Hot.
3. Give us a way to get something back from the Overhealing of the Lifebloom (thinking a percentage of Mana)

I think option number 3 would be the most fun/different from what we currently have while still retaining the intended nerf: Not being able to ROLL lifebloom on several targets, this would still lock us several GCDs to be able to "mimick" the roll of lifebloom like it is on live now.

This is not wishful thinking, this is just a suggestion on something I think might improve lifebloom while not making it overpowered.

I really agree with this, it would have been a much more elegant change (especially since that's how lifebloom was originally designed). Perhaps Blizzard has a bias against reverting talent design changes -- in which case an alternative is to make Nature's Splendor increase the mana cost along with increasing duration (so at least druids have a choice of paying the mana for flexibility of tank healing + doing other things by speccing appropriately).

I kind of like this mana cost and duration increase idea for the glyph and talent. In BC you could keep up max 3-4 lifebloom stacks due to gcd, and when they gave of GotEM and 3 potential more seconds, that increased the potential to 7-9stacks, which is 2-3 times as many potential stacks, along with decreasing how often you have to refresh. An increase in the duration and mana cost would be like a trade off.

In fact, this makes me think differently about the change to Lifebloom cost in 3.1. In BC you could roll lifebloom on 1-3 tanks generally. If you rolled on 3 that was about all you could do(depending on your latency), or you could roll lifebloom and rejuv on 2 tanks and get a couple spot heals with your spare gcds, or you could roll on one tank and spot heal or put extra heals on the main tank.

So basically, I think if we could roll lifebloom on 3 tanks and nothing else with the changes, I would be okay with that. And I think Blizzard should be also. They were unhappy with how powerful lifebloom was in BC, but lifebloom went from healing over 1K hps in BC, to around 1500 in our best gear now, which is a much lower percentage of our tanks' health and the incoming damage. And of course I don't mean I only want to roll 3 lifeblooms, I mean if a maximum of 3 rolls was obtainable that would be acceptable to me.

I just don't see that rolling LBs on 3 tanks to the exclusion of all else as a effective healing strategy. I don't have experience in 25 man, so perhaps it might be there, where there's a bit more room to play with personnel and roles, but in my experience, in 10 mans, I don't see it working.

I very much like the idea of removing lifebloom from Glyph and NatSpl. The GCD would then be my limiter so I'd only be able to roll it on a single tank. Alternatively, having mana cost coupled to duration is also a good idea. I'd like to see NatSpl changed to extend LB by 1s, and the glyph to 2s but 50% more mana. Or something like that.

This is exactly what should be happening. If there are 3 tanks you have to make a decisions.

1. Will all three tanks be taking damage on a regular basis to warrant me using my limited time to just Lifebloom/Rejuv?
2. Would it be better to just roll 3 LBs on the MT and let a single rejuv help on the OTs and focus on keeping regrowth/nourish going on the MT?

See, right now you can do #1 and #2 because LB lasts so long, all Blizzard wants is for you to have to choose between the two, which is totally fair. I just don't think increasing mana costs is the right way to make us choose. as I stated previously all this is doing is forcing us to focus more on spirit/mp5 so that we can continue to do both of the above without running oom.

Please, let's not go back to TBC and 7-sec cycles of Lifebloom. It was awful to be limited by such a short cycle back then. Increasing the cycle to 10 seconds really made healing as a druid so much more interesting as there are more choices to make between Lifebloom cycles, instead of just having 2-3 options.

Even if they revert Lifebloom to 7s it won't be the same as TBC since now we have 6 gcds in each cycle compared to 4-5 back then. In fact a druid rolling LB+rejuv on 3 tanks with a 7s lifebloom will still have 9 gcds free every 21s which is plenty for raid healing.

It's 1 gcd more per cycle compared to Sunwell. And we also have more spells now, so of course it's not exactly the same, but it would still feel like that... not being able to Swiftmend most of the time without having Lifebloom fall off and that sort of thing. I disliked it and certainly hope it will not be the answer to our overefficiency "problem".

What about simply putting up a limit as to how many LBs one could roll in general on the raid? 3, no more. If you'd cast a new one on a different target, the first one you would've cast would simply disappear. Just a suggestion though.

It's not just one extra gcd, rejuv lasts 18 seconds compared to 12s @ level 70. Also, in case you're just rolling LB on 3 tanks, we went from 2 free gcds (assuming 5-gcd cycle) to 3 on live (assuming the pretty fictional revert to 7s), which is a 50% increase. Not to mention maintaing a 5 gcd cycle back then was a lot more stressful due to the gcd being higher than 1s which left less spare time.

The easiest way would be to simply tack on an increased mana cost for each second that you increase the length of Lifebloom - as most of us can't bear going back to a 7 second Lifebloom, that's the easiest way for Blizz to increase the mana cost of Lifebloom without saying "we've increased the cost of Lifebloom by x%."

Frankly, Lifebloom was designed around a 7 second cycle. Which is fine. They realized that Druids weren't using anything else because it was so strong, so they nerfed it and gave it a longer time (through talents) to let us use more of our toolbox.

If they aren't happy with Lifebloom's HPM but still want us to use our toolbox, they should just have a tradeoff of +1 second = 10% more mana or something.

I agree with you completely. When the 3.0 change was announced it was a very elegant solution for the largest problem the blizzard dev's had with Lifebloom, It's built in time constraints often led many druids to not cast Regrowth (2s to cast out of a possible 6 second window) or Healing Touch (3.0s Cast time). We now have have lifeblooms that can last 9 or 10 seconds. It might not seem like much on paper, but those extra 2 or 3 seconds a druid gets to play around with leads to far more options when it comes to spells cast. Taking the duration back down to 7s would simply drive druids back into a fairly limited healing cycle of Lifeblooms, Rejuvenation, and probably now Wild Growth.

Speaking of Wild Growth, I started crunching some numbers about its possible benefit to both mana users as well as the other DPS classes (Warriors, Rogues, Feral Druids, Death Knights). I think it's benefits could be astounding. If people are interested I'll post some numbers so I can gain more input, but I was seeing a DPS increase anywhere from 3% on Warriors to an 11% increase on a Frost Death Knight. I have my preliminary findings already on my Guild's website, but at the moment its very imcomplete and could use work.

I looked into this today, and what you say seems to be true: once the tick for the initial lifebloom is set, it happens every second regardless of when the stack is reset.

Here's a filtered WWS log that demonstrates this:
Wow Web Stats

From this log, we can also calculate the efficiency of the lifebloom.
Disclaimer: I don't know whether this fight is actually a reasonable fight to draw statistics from--but it's good to demonstrate the technique.

* Lifebloom is first cast at 52'17.438. From there on out, we see a log entry somewhere in the 360-422ms range for every second that lifebloom ticks.
* The initial lifebloom stack expires at 54'28.454, for a total uptime of 2'11 = 131 seconds. Therefore we expect 131 log entries for lifebloom, as the final frame should have a Lifebloom tick.
* Patchwerk's first swing is at 52'19.500. This means that 2 ticks are wasted due to occurring before the start fighted, leaving 129 ticks to account for.
* After 5'19.500, I manually count 31 entries before the bloom entry at 54'28.454. Thus, 98 ticks are skipped due to the target having full HP
* For 31 active ticks, each tick heals for a raw amount of 1490hp -- a total of 46,910. Of this, 5298 is wasted due to overhealing.
* Lifebloom is cast a total of 18 times from initial application from bloom.
* The final bloom is for 3714, and is wasted entirely due to overhealing.

Thus we can calculate a few things:
Mana spent: 366 * 18 = 6518
Effective healing done: 41612
Effective HPM: 6.384
Effective HPS: 41512 / 129 = 322.6

We can also use these numbers to quickly calculate the theoretical throughput of Lifebloom in optimal conditions.

Assuming fast-stacking to a triple stack, a 2'11 lifebloom roll that is refreshed exactly at the 9 second mark requires ceil((131 - 2) / 9) + 2 = 17 casts of Lifebloom to maintain. Allowing for the first 2 ticks to waste due to preparation time, it will tick 129 times for 1490hp and bloom for 3714, none of which will overheal.

Mana spent: 366 * 17 = 6518
Optimal healing done: 129 * 1490 + 3714 = 195,924
Optimal HPM: 30.06
Optimal HPS: 195,924 / 129 = 1518

Lifebloom efficiency: 6.384 / 30.06 = 21.24%

So in this example fight, we are seeing the druid achieve only 21% of 'reasonably optimum' performance off of Lifebloom. Is this good efficiency in practice? Is this particular fight reasonable to measure performance? I don't know. We would have to perform this analysis on several fights to get a ballpark answer.

EDIT:

Realizing that the above fight is probably not a great example, I redid the calculations using a recently posted Patchwerk-10 I found on WWS:
Wow Web Stats

This fight is a 2-healed 10-man Patchwerk with Paladin + DK tank, Paladin + Druid healer.

Start: 54'42.094
End: 56'09.063
Duration: 1'27 -- 87 ticks
Lifebloom casts: 13 (+2 setup)

Activations: 47 x 1077 = 50619
Blooms: 3039
Overheal: 249+931+266+1055+1074+338 = 3913

Effective heal: 49745
Effective mp: 5490
Effective HPM: 9.012

Optimal casts: 12 + 2
Optimal heal: 96738
Optimal mp: 5124
Optimal HPM: 18.88

Lifebloom efficiency: 47.73%

Again, this shows that the realistic performance of Lifebloom is far, far below the theoretical optimum.

Thanks for doing this, Jurik. Though there are some flaws in the data used, thus throwing you off from true, you can't be faulted; there really isn't a better way at this point. Maybe with some real data, Blizzard will see how much waste there is on lifebloom. I had a feeling the numbers would be way way low, and you've just confirmed those suspicions. Much appreciated.