If Rejuvination gets nerfed what are Druids left with? As HoT healers I think we're supposed to have greater efficiency at the cost of HPS. You can see at the moment that HoTs are rarely useful for raid healing (except on certain encounters like Sapphrion of course), because mana is in such abundance that the Priests and Paladins have no trouble throwing a flash heal to whoever needs it, whether the person has a HoT ticking or not. If mana is squeezed as much as people say it is in 3.1 then they will be more reluctant to do that and allow the HoT to tick instead. At least I'm hoping it works out like that, with the recent nerf to lifebloom I'm preparing to spend more time on the raid, I'll leave the tank healing to Paladins.

As for Natures Grace, the only thing that bums me about the change is you can't save the buff anymore. If I used a Regrowth to heal someone and it crit then I had a 10s window to make use of it, which allowed me to score some regen time if I needed. With only a 3s window it's likely that I'll choose to not use it if I don't need to, so the only situation I see it being useful is spamming direct heals on the tank.

Druids will always have to roll lifebloom because it is such a unique way to heal that no one else can cover that zone. Blizzard making it cost twice as much just means we're left with half as much mana to use on other things. That effectively is a nerf to the druid healing class as a whole, not just to lifebloom. So the question isn't: "Is lifebloom overpowered?" the question is "are druids overpowered?"

From my current experience, the raid setup completely defines how much HPM you get as a druid. People can either wait for your HoTs to tick, or they can heal up someone who is HoTed causing your cast to do less healing. So if you have a raid set up so that everyone can see HoTs who can heal, then people are going to destroy your job a lot less. This means guilds who are more organised in their healing will see drastically different HPM than guilds who "free for all" heal. Trying to shove together WWSs and show Blizzard won't prove a thing; what you need to do is show how druids as a healing class will fall behind on the PTR compared to others because of mana inefficiency. I.e.: Have your WWS output healing show you are keeping up with the curve for the first x minutes of a fight, and then suddenly your effective healing drops off in comparison significantly earlier than other classes.

Sadly, this is of course an example - examples are not proof. Blizzard has to do the testing themselves, they need competent resto druids to show them what they should be doing, and then they need to go and do extensive testing until they convince themselves that the lifebloom nerf is either too much, just right, or maybe too little. The fact that this comes at the same time as a mana regen nerf just makes me cringe at Blizzard's lack of forethought.

Can anyone see problems in my logic? I'm open to trying to explain my thought process some more, but basically I think trying to argue that proving lifebloom is inefficient proves nothing; it's the druid class that you need to show is behind.

We are by no means required to roll LB.
In TBC it was a very strong spell (once it stacked) with a good relationship between tank health and HPS [5-6%/tick] which cost very little mana. WoTLK has weakened it by increasing the cost and lowering the heal amount [3-4%/tick] to the point where we quite honestly do it more out of habit than any driven need. Boss attacks themselves (including specials) are generally much larger too which also has a slight negative effect on todays LB compared to TBC.

Don't get me wrong currently it is a perfectly good healing tool for us but it has gone down to the levels where it is a complementary tank heal where it truly is just a 'health buffer' compared to TBC where if you had 3 (x3 stacks) of LB on a tank he was pretty much set to endure quite a lot of punishment without much intervention from other healers.

There are no doubt times where a full set of hots on a tank does wonders but for the most part a reactive Nourish will fare better than a rolling LB but that is partly down to the general level of healing in WoTLK being so strong and burst damage being much more likely meaning you cannot afford to just leave LB to do its job slowly else your tank might go splat.


I am not quite sure what I will end up doing in 3.1 yet but I am strongly intending to test out a more Nourish focused style of healing where LB is either slow stacked and dropped or just used as single casts to augment Nourish when the healing is needed in order to keep overhealing and mana consumption down to as low a level as possible. In all but rare cases I doubt LB will be worth the new cost to keep rolled for very long unless your healers are very stretched and you get the majority of the spell effective (in which case the EHPM will end up equal to how it is right now) but nothing more then more time testing and Ulduar info will be able to answer that.

GC's stated intent is to make the decision to re-roll the LB an interesting choice. The current numbers have a very slap-and-dash first draft feeling to them, a lot of "doubled", "halved", "tripled" going on, so I expect the version that ships will be tweaked. But just doing some napkin math on this I can see how the decision process is beginning to form.

For my quick math I assumed a 10 sec lifebloom at 2400sp/20% crit slow-stacked with 2t7. At each 9 sec mark, you make a decision to roll or bloom.

At each decision point, these would be the resultant overall HPS and MPS for the period from when you started the stack to the bloom, based on how many casts before the bloom. I've ignored some base multipliers since I'm more looking at relative numbers than absolute.
1 casts: HPS = 406h + 398b @ 24 MPS
2 casts: HPS = 620h + 419b @ 26 MPS
3 casts: HPS = 827h + 427b @ 26 MPS
4 casts: HPS = 922h + 323b @ 39 MPS
5 casts: HPS = 980h + 260b @ 48 MPS
6 casts: HPS = 1019h + 217b @ 53 MPS
7 casts: HPS = 1047h + 187b @ 57 MPS
8 casts: HPS = 1068h + 164b @ 60 MPS
9 casts: HPS = 1084h + 146b @ 62 MPS


where h is the effective healing% of the HoT and b is the effective healing% of the bloom. h is determined by the type of damage your target is tanking. I noticed a lot of discussion about what this number might be the last few pages so insert whatever you think the consensus is. My feeling is it'd around 30-50%. Ideal situations like the add tank on S3D might approach 70% and poor situations like patch MT might drop to 20% or less.

b is determined by how accurately you can determine how effective the bloom would be at that time. This takes a lot of skill and creates the interesting decision point. It looks to me like you'll basically have a strong incentive to bloom the 2nd or 3rd stack. At 1 stack the HoT is negligible while past 3 stacks, the HPS plateaus while the MPS rises sharply. For ideal HoT situations (S3D add tank) I will probably still roll as long as I can and save the bloom for emergencies. For poor HoT situations (slow, hard-hitting bosses) I might just weave single LBs in with a rotation, never intending to stack them. But I think most of the time, I'll bloom the 2nd or 3rd stack depending on how much deficit the target has on the 2nd stack. Where mana is not too constricting, waiting for the 4th or 5th to try and get the best bloom looks more attractive as well.

Regarding the changes to LB and Nature's grace...

I'm not minding the lifebloom change as much as I thought I would. On our council kill last night, I purposefully let it bloom on the Steelbreaker tank 3-4 times after a fusion punch to save my swiftmend for something more reactive. Although the bug giving the mana refund to the target was a real PITA. If they would only shave the nerf down to 50-75% increased cost and kept the bloom mechanic, I'd say the spell is perfectly tuned.

On Nature's Grace, I like the change given that nourish is now our regrowth and was going to be largely wasted or skipped in a resto build as a .5s/haste mechanic. As it stands now I'm using Nourish 1-2 times every 10s in between hot rotations if a WG isn't needed for the raid. I'll assume that 500 haste is relatively easy to attain with the new gear and we will be able to drop 1-2 points of GOTEM in order to pick up revitalize/seed, in which case the proc would bring our instants back down to a 1.0X cast time, or even sub GCD. As it stands I wasn't looking forward to nourish clipping like wrath. Now one nourish/RG crit will guarantee to buff the next 2-3 casts, this makes the 25% crit nerf more palpable. It's a nice buff for balance too.

Currently I'm using Firecracker Salmon (46 spell power)exclusively for raiding. I'm wondering if this is going to change come 3.1.
I was thinking of possibly using Cuttlesteak (40 spirit), but I'm not sure if that would yield a greater buff than Mighty Rhino Dogs (16 mp5).
What do you guys think?

40 spirit gives you more mana then 16 mp5 even with 100% time in FSR and only getting one innervate. Intellect, as mentioned above, gives more then both.

As far as Lifebloom goes, I'm currently loving the amount of blooms I'm getting on PTR. 10-14k blooms are nice. Granted it's not terribly predictable, but tossed on a MT I'm finding it's the way to go.

3 LB the MT, RJ / WG the raid. Nourish as needed. Also since I never really abused the 5SR in the first place, not having any mana issues whatsoever. Loving this patch so far.

Has anyone calculated the difference on mana regen between Darkmoon Card: Greatness (taking into account the 45-sec internal cooldown) and the Majestic Dragon Figurine.

I am finding that the Majestic Dragon Figurine does give me 180 extra spirit for 10 seconds whilst casting, but surely if I gain a constant 90 spirit as base with the Darkmoon Card: Greatness, and on top of that the proc of 300 for 15 sec, it would mean greater mana regen. Is anyone able to confirm whether in fact, I am calculating this correctly.

If I have to believe the wowhead comments, the greatness cards will have a ~33% uptime at best, meaning on average an extra 100 spirit. This is 190 spirit on average as compared to 180 of MDF, so they are about similar if you count in "late procs" and such.

However, the MDF will give you a more constant spellpower buff compared to the greatness card, which for healing is a plus. Then again in 3.1 Innervate won't give you a full mana bar anymore, so then you can get more mana out of the greatness trinket if you use Innervate during a proc.

You should use the Intellect version (with Spirit proc) for the Darkmoon Card too but all this information should be in the trinket thread.

On Sartharion 10+3, I definitely agree with your assessment of GCD lock and often not having time to restack LB if you let it drop off. However, I don't think I have quite the mana troubles you do. I use 1 pot if nothing has gone wrong by the time the 3rd drake lands, and usually I have to blow Innervate when dps is working on the 3rd drake. I still have plenty of mana by the end of the fight though, after Innervate. Maybe it's because we have different roles.

We run with a holy paladin who heals the drake and add tanks with beacon, while I heal the Sarth tank and the raid. Mostly I just keep up LB/RJ on the tank, with HT after breaths. For the raid I heal with RJ, or WG during Twilight Torment. I actually heal the fight specced for Healing Touch with the glyph. Since mana isn't a serious issue, I really enjoy being able to land my heals less than a second after casting; it's saved people many times.

Being that we're in GCD lock for the fight, The regen changes won't affect our performance. However, the Lifebloom change may take some adjusting. Either we 1) let LB bloom and restack for a loss of GCD and/or HPS, 2) we take a significant mana hit by keeping LB rolling, or 3) we don't use LB at all. Personally I'm leaning toward options 1 or 3 for 10+3.

Why would you do OS103D after 3.1 hits? I guess there's still the drake, but apart from that there's no reason to continue to do that headache of a fight.

We'll have to change our healing style when there are multiple tanks, since it's really no longer viable to roll a stack on more than one, maybe two at a time. We can make up for this in other ways since our spellbook isn't limited to just the one heal, but I don't think it will change so drastically that we drop lifebloom entirely out of our arsenal. It's still a good spell, it's just no longer the one button cure-all it is right now.

I also don't know why we're talking about letting a 3 stack bloom and then reapplying it. A completely unpredictable 10k heal is never as good as a constant 1300+ tick, and keeping a 3 stack on one tank isn't overly taxing on your mana pool. I like the new bloom, but I still see letting a stack fall off as an error on my part.

Am I missing a point or is the end result of casting and letting it bloom slightly more efficient for mana purposes (assuming bloom) than it is now?

Having not raided as a resto druid until 3.0 might have helped my experiences because I don't really see Lifebloom as that great of a spell. The other side to this is that I'm usually healing raid and very rarely healing tanks unless it's Sarth, so I don't really bloom as much as some of the people here. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm thinking that slow stacking isn't/won't be necessary. Even if you roll bloom on two tanks now it doesn't really tax mana. So I'm just going to state outright that rolling Bloom (currently on live) on two tanks isn't a problem and therefore come 3.1, even keeping it up on 1 tank will be fine. As it stands now, it fits a niche well now (only used as a buffer, great for keeping up tanks who take spiky damage).

So the two relevant questions that come into mind would be am I struggling for mana and is Lifebloom required to be kept on multiple tanks at once? In current content right now, will that change much? I can only think of two fights where there is enough spiky damage to validate multiple bloom roll, Patchwerk and Sarth3d. In both cases, there is another healer there to help and I usually end up throwing a RJ&RG and that's enough to help with the second tank I help heal. For Patchwerk, I am always on the add tank and act more as a buffer using blooms for hatefuls. With two tanks, I roll bloom on the first tank more as a courtesy (and to pad charts), than what is really needed to be honest. Even in an optimized fight where it pretty much will tick every second on two ticks, it came out second for my breakdown behind me spamming regrowth like a madman. This number should've been less as one of our MT healers DC'd before pull. More on Sarth below.

As for the first question, with this change would changing healing styles really be necessary (for mana purposes)? As a raid healer (most of the time), the most mana taxing fights for myself are:
1) Maly
2) First half of Sarth 3d
3) Saphiron
The things these three have in common is that I'm mostly Pre-RJing every GCD and that there is a lot of raid damage that occur constantly. Lifebloom will not affect how I heal in either case 1 and 3, but for 2 it's a little tricky. The only reason Sarth3D is tough for myself is that I spend time bouncing between both the add and drake tanks and focus more on what needs more help (too many adds or both drakes down) as well as try to RJ the raid when I can. For the 30 or so seconds when both drakes are up and the OT has a lot of adds on him is usually the hardest part for me to heal, but I don't think it so unbearably mana intensive that I will need to slow stack/ let blooms fall off for the 30 seconds required to down them.

So what will the Lifebloom change mean for me? Nothing. It will neither affect my playstyle (heavily RJ oriented), my healing priorities (needing to keep a stack on a tank constantly, 2 if I foresee big damage incoming). As far as the death of multiple tank blooming goes, unless there is a fight that is long and heavy consistent raid and multiple tank damage, I wouldn't worry about it yet.

The only thing I'm confused about is didn't they say previously that they wanted us to continue to roll blooms and that they didn't want giant chunks of mana to come back at once (a la pre-replenish days)? Wouldn't the simpler solution just to have been if bloom gave us a smaller percentage (say 5%) every tick (max at 10 ticks, thus 50% return) rather than a giant 1000ish return after 30 seconds (assuming slow stacked)? It would actually require some sort of attention in contrast to the fire and forget method... a role that RJ quite handily occupies for me right now. Assuming the change goes through, wasting 3 GCDs every 13 seconds seems like a very poor design choice.

The only thing that i am worried about is the timing on letting the Bloom drop. Its really nice if the tank just took 20k and it blooms before the 1.5sec Holy light comes in from the holy paly, but that very limited situational heal is near impossible to control. Maexena is one place that it can be used, time it to bloom on the Main Tank while everyone is stunned. Or if you are the only healer on a certain assignment and all other healers are GCD locked on their assignments. But the only place that happens is in really tough 10 man fights where the number of healers is limited, like sarth3d 10man with 2 healers.

Even Sarth3d 25man there are not a lot of occasions where every healer is GCD locked. So a cover heal is bound to come in from someone else even if you are assigned to that tank. This is not a problem as the healing team as a whole needs to help where they can if their own assignments are not taking huge damage. But it does force us into a very bad situation with LB.

Someone above did the Napkin math on it, after Lifebloom reaches its 3rd stack, refreshing it starts to increase its Mana per cast drastically. If your tank takes a huge spike of dmg at 5 seconds left on lifebloom, then you will not wait for it to bloom, you are going to swiftmend/nourish spam to top him off. 4 seconds later your tank is full so you are not letting it bloom but you are refreshing it again. Efficiency starts to drop dramatically.

The problem with telling yourself that you are going to let it bloom when there is minimal overheal, is that you get into a pattern. every 9 seconds you do a check on the HP of you target. If it is full you refresh. Every time you refresh after the first 3rd stack, you are wasting 360 odd mana that you cannot get back from the bloom effect. The other side of the coin is to always allow a bloom at the 3rd stack regardless of the targets current Health Points. 90% of the time that will be an overheal of 80+%. So its efficiency drops drastically as efficiency must not be calculated on raw heal but effective heal.

Personally i will be using Lifebloom to take advantage of the 4T7 set bonus on Noursih and the proposed glyph. Keeping regrowth and rejuv on the target, and applying 1 lifebloom then nourish either until i have to refresh another hot or until lifebloom drops off to re-apply it. I see very limited use of 3stacked bombs with paly healers around. And they are far too restricting on unpredictable damage.

If you are doing that, you might as well slow-stack to 3 (e.g. reapply up to 3 stacks as lifebloom is about to drop, but then let it drop at 3 and start again), it's more HPS for the same mana cost (and only 2 extra GCDs per 24-27 seconds).

It was stated that 10 man raids are balanced around 3 healers. In fact I believe that resto druids are targetted specifically to push for the 3 healer setup since we excel at healer-low environments due to the high HPS and HPM of hots. We'll see how effective that is, especially with external mana sources - namely feral druid innervating a tree, or stacking DPS shamans for mana spring (that stacks, right?). I wouldn't be surprised to see innervate becoming self cast sometime in the near future.

PTR Field Testing: XT-002 Deconstructor (Heroic)

I'll be the first to admit I was extremely worried about the LB nerf on top of the OO5SR nerf. But after downing Deconstructor on the 3rd attempt, most of my worries are relieved. I rolled LB/RJ/RG on the MT only and raid healed. As for mana, it got a little tight at the end on the last two attempts so I switched to slow-stacking LB when the boss was around 10%. I never ended any attempt completely OOM and gave away my innervate to a boomkin on the 1st attempt. The closest I got to OOM was 5k left. In the end, my fellow druid and I still topped meters every attempt (it helped that Tranquility has very nice use during Tympanic Tantrum).

Could I have rolled LB on 2 tanks, probably not without handicapping my mana left for raid healing. But facerolling LB is not what I want out of this game. All I care about is balance among healing classes. I worry about holy pallies who, from my POV, are unaffected by the nerf and work off an infinite mana supply.

GC stated he wanted us to force us into decisions on LB rolling usage. It felt good in there. I had to mind my mana and switch to slow-stacking LB at the very end when it felt tight. My fellow druid said the same thing, mana regen didn't feel as tight as he anticipated. Some boots dropped with haste on them and we agreed that we would probably both take those over Rainey's Chewed Boots (mp5) with regen in consideration.

Wait, you said you rolled LB on the main tank, so who were you slow stacking it on at the end?

He changed from 3 stack rolling into slow stacking for the MT healing in the end.

I can echo what was said above. I wish I would have ran logs, but forgot. However, last night I had very little mana issues after I adjusted to the changes. The first attempt I went with how I am used to healing(constantly rolling on MT as well as aggressive raid healing) and I ran OOM quite quickly. However, after that attempt I was a LOT more cautious about "wasting" casts(IE I canceled heals on people that got healed up before my nourish/regrowth/etc finished) and refreshing lifebloom(I was actually doing what GC said... Watching to see if I should let it bloom or not). I also found that slow-casting lifebloom was the "best" way to do it.. at least for deconstructor(raid damage was heavy).


I still topped all meters(no priests in the raid); not that topping meters is the most important thing.


Honestly, the increased mana to lifebloom may be a pain in the short run, but it did make me a more alert and tactical healer.


My only major complaint is innervate. It regens VERY little mana now and I was a bit surprised that I went from getting mroe than a full bar of mana on live to about half on ptr. I do not have the innervate glyph, but for mana intensive battles I may pick it up(and definitely drop regrowth glyph).

Nourish has become my go-to heal for raid healing/tank healing. Lifeblooms dont tick fast enough and with the added changes to nourish its a perfect flash heal. However, with the mana back from lifebloom I was finding myself often times throwing 1 lifebloom on people that were 90-95% health and just letting it pop.

All in all, after thinking the sky was falling its not near as bad on ptr. If you havnt given it a shot yet, I would. It took me one encounter to adjust to the changes. We even hit the enrage timer(on purpose) and at that point I was still at half mana with my innervate up.

So, when you guys all talk of the "slow-stacking" technique, do you throw up a LB every 8-9 sec instead of put up the 3 stack right away, or just throw up one, let it bloom, rinse and repeat?

Also, if you are doing it the way that I think (1 every 8-9 sec.) don't you get to a point where its rolling and then do you make your choice to let it bloom and then start over?

Just looking for some clarification, thanks!