When you need burst healing there's no second to NG (plasma blast, solo healing thorim tunnel, too many to list..). Some people can drop it, I tried for a couple weeks, its just too good in certain situations. I don't plan on picking up t9 until the 258 pieces, so here's my spec:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

After that I'd drop revitalize and NS for the crit.

11/0/60. Nourish will be so good in 3.2, you can't NOT get it. Having Empowered Touch in your build will be nice for the 20/40% increase. In my current build, I'm probably going to remove the points in Nature's Grace into Subtlety granted I won't use Healing Touch anymore.

Well, you can get 1 point into Empowered Touch "for free," since there is a floater point in 3.1 specs. The question is where to get the second point. In my opinion you don't want to cannibalize this point from NG or Living Seed. This is because the whole point of Empowered Touch is to buff Nourish and NG and Living Seed are both there to buff Nourish as well, making it a kind of robbing Peter to feed Paul thing. I would either drop 1 point from Revitalize or drop Nature's Swiftness. Possibly drop 1 point from GotEM if you get a lot of haste in 3.2.

Yeah those are not bad ideas. Wonder how it would be without NS? I go long periods of time without using it, but when I need it-I really need it. I guess the safest bet would be Revitalize.

When you consider maybe 10% of your healing done on a typical fight is done by Nourish (and this is a very generous estimate for Ulduar) an additional 8-10% of that results in a rough 1% healing boost from 2 talent points - not exactly an outstanding investment and I doubt we are fully aware of what our primary spell usage is going to be in 3.2 either which clouds some of the results.

You have to think how you use Nourish too because if during times of emergency you tend to spam Nourish (or Regrowth) for a couple of casts then NG will no doubt result in higher/faster healing output whereas if you use it as a spot heal (...) occasionally then ET might be a slightly better use but at that level I doubt it matters much if you have points here or not.


Being roughly 8-10% better is not going to make the majority of problems regarding Nourish vanish although this talent incorporation was one of the things I did mention quite a while ago as a means to enhance Nourish to be more useful, however this was before the numerous other changes they have done to the spell since.

You can see how their initial intention of "give them a Flash heal with a Druidic twist" has sort of lost its way as they passed through beta into live and even now they are still uncertain of how to turn this spell from something we tend to mock frequently into a solid tool we can all appreciate like Swiftmend for example.

Personally I would have had the base "target has hot" boost being an additional 20-25% critical strike chance as for the most part that incorporates better with it being a "target is a tank" than a "you must have a hot for this spell to be worth casting" of which I believe the former is closer to intended than the latter. Balance the initial heal to be the intended level for being cast on a random raid member who took damage so that the base purpose is on solid foundations.

One trap they need to stop falling for is that nothing they can do with Nourish will make critical strike rating useful for us and to stop trying to concoct some perverse design to try and accomplish this. I guess we will see from Blizzcon if they are going to reveal any snaps of information from 4.0 where more grand designs and balances are able to be established or just stick to 3.3 information which might at least have some critical strike changes finally but who knows.

Depending on how much haste you stack, the best place for that point to come out of MIGHT be GotEM.

Talent Spec

If you didn't have the 541 haste needed to support this, then I see no reason to NOT go with 1 point into Empowered Touch. Nourish is turning into a wonderfull spell with these changes, adding to our versatility, but our our unique gifts at this point lie in our ability to use our hots. I would assume that most of our healing will continue to be through our HoTs. The only other place I could see to take a point would be from Revitalize, but I personally am in love with the passive raid utility this currently gives us. I wouldnt touch Living Seed or Nature's Grace. Living seed is boaderline worthless if it doesn't proc off every crit.

Think about it, at 2/3 LS that gives me a 66% chance proc rate off of a crit, I have roughly a 50% crit chance. If I have a 3/3 LS, this means that 50% of my casted spells will give me a Living Seed. Now, lets drop that number down to 2/3 (66% chance) 50% crit chance * 66% Proc chance = 33% chance to give a living seed from my cast. This leads to less consistancy (bad) and less throughput (also bad). Now, like I said, as much as I love Revitalize, our first jobs as healers is to make sure people stay alive. Once my haste gets near 541, I should be using the provided spec.

I find the Nourish changes to still be lackluster. I appreciate the effort Blizzard is putting in to make it better but at the end of the day, as Playered said, "When you consider maybe 10% of your healing done on a typical fight is done by Nourish (and this is a very generous estimate for Ulduar) ...".

I agree that we have to see what comes but generally speaking Nourish still doesn't float my boat. In a normal case scenario if your tank healing is strong and your cast-time raid healers are strong, Nourish still has little application beyond tank patching when Mend/NS are on CD and perhaps absolute emergency healing to a raid member if mend is down (I do not, under most circumstances, use NS on anyone other than a Tank or someone in a critical role which permits me to be very liberal with mending as needed). I will ignore the PVP implications of the changes, since they are not applicable to this thread.

Typically speaking if multiple people are taking damage that require Nourish, PoH/CoH/CH (ignoring WG for a moment since it is a HoT and therefore does not have the healing per landing burst of the other spells) are all better options.

If one person is taking a lot of damage, I'd likely be doing RJ -> mending them to full, and then stacking 1-2 LBs for the bloom effect and then ignoring that person if that damage is non-continuing (ex. Napalm on Mimiron). If the damage will remain, say your ranged tank on Mimiron - I'll eat the mana cost of rolling on them, mending as needed, perhaps with a RG to apply another HoT.

That said, despite that I still find Nourish to be underwhelming it's not as though I *NEVER* use it. I think the 11/0/60 spec makes the most sense, Nature's Grace has fallen by the wayside since it was changed. Amping NS HT is never a bad thing, and for the few times I do cast Nourish it will be a bit better.

I will not be glyphing for it (for PVE).

The sad thing is that until hots are nerfed across the board for us direct heals are never going to work properly and this is before you even consider making hots able to crit which requires a further base nerf to compensate for the gain. The decision to do these things are no doubt held back because of the huge backlash they will face if they attempted to further re-balance our healing patterns to incorporate more direct healing and as a result we are stuck in a limbo.

I don't think things were that bad in 3.0 but 3.1 neutered RG and LB from our primary/secondary spells leaving us with the two "most effective" spells (RJ/WG) to pretty much dominate our healing utterly and Nourish still hasn't managed to escape the tertiary position in our arsenal despite their best efforts to enhance it.

It would be nice to be able to think they would spend the time to address the key roles our spells are meant (and do currently) fill and properly designate them but I think the behemoth issue that is mana will end up consuming a lot of their focus for the 4.0 changes which will leave the class in roughly the same state it is now.


Perhaps it is not best to ponder too much about this kind of thing before even the expansion is announced or even just Blizzcon information is known but with the inevitable alpha already bouncing around the frustration of being unable to attempt to fix or constructively discuss the systemic issues within the class (and healing in general) is slightly wearing.
Hopefully the healer specific changes that have been hinted at over past year will be significant enough to provide a catalyst to fix some of the issues which plague us most problematically but only time can tell.

@Playered: They already nerfed Lifebloom, that's not really why we stopped using it but I can see them doing the same to rejuv. It's a shame, really, as their vision of tree in 2.0 was my favourite.

I robbed the point out of Nature's Bounty as each point is 5% crit and that is by far the least healing increase in the whole tree from my experience, I know it's a "rob Peter to feed Paul" but if Paul gives you more reason to feed him, I say **** Peter and his 5% crit. Plus you also get it back from 2p9.

I got zero OoC procs during Vezax today. I doubt it was extremely bad luck (and I was definitely meleeing), I think it was nerfed. Enhance Shamans healing Vezax was nerfed so it's likely we were too. However, Vezax hardmode was nerfed, so overall little difference. Did I miss this in the patch notes/elsewhere?

Unrelated: I love the new Innervate!

I'll be rolling the same spec until I get enough haste to drop a point in Gotem, at which point I'll move it back into Revitalize.

What do you think about this build ?
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?drui...&version=10179

Full raid buffed i need 430 haste rating to be capped on hots and nourish (with NG proc)
In facts, i trade 3% crit for 3%haste.

Relying on NG for capping hots gcd is a bad idea. Just get 5/5 GotEM until you have the haste to drop points in it. I'd say the best place to drop points from would be ... NG itself. Either 13/58 or just 11/60 for imp barkskin.

Some feedback from the quick 10 we put together last night:

1) I will say that we were going through a learning curve on this fight so the damage profile that I experienced may not stay the same next time around when people better learn how to avoid the incoming that can be avoided. We were also ranged heavy dps which may have some effect.

2) We started working this with 2 tanks (DK, Paladin), 2 Healers (Paladin, Druid) and 6 DPS (5 ranged, 1 melee). We weren't really going for an optimal setup, we just grabbed 10 to check it out. On the first couple pulls, we were a bit surprised by the incoming (at least I was) -- especially the 2 worms but even from the Magnataur. I finally asked if it had an enrage timer and found that it didn't so we had our boomkin swtich to secondary talent resto and things went a TON smoother. At least until everyone starts figuring this out, 3 healer setup would be advised imo. How this translates to 25s, I'm not sure -- maybe 6 healers -- not sure how many tanks we'll need -- 2 may not be sufficient depending on how much impale and his damage get amp'd for 25s.

PHASE 1: On Gormok, Impale will require the tanks to swap after so many applications. Be aware however that, even after it's been taunted off, the other tank will continue taking heavy bleed damage for the next ~30 seconds. You will need to keep rolling heals on them. Incoming on this phase is fairly heavy. I found a good position for this to be in the center (15-20 yds range from Gormok to avoid stomp). This let me reach all ranged DPS that were scattered in a circle around the arena to avoid clumping for fire hits. For 25s, we may want to quadrant heal with tank healers in center and raid healers spanned around with ranged dps. 10 yd split or so is vital due to Fire mechanic. Between Fire and Gormok output, this is where I consistently was rolling the most hps -- things gradually ease up. You may use your innervate at the end of this phase (remember 3 mins now and half mana bar) so that it's up again later. Maybe this will be easier when folks get better at avoiding fire, tanks get taunt rotations down better, etc. but this is what I experienced yesterday.

PHASE 2: Once we got positioning down and learned to manage the worms, this wasn't too bad. Burning Bile and Paralytic Toxin don't do that significant damage and we were healing through Paralytic Toxin at least as frequently as people were running to someone with Burning Bile to clear it. It may make sense to just DPS and heal through it -- maybe not. We kept spread out -- if we do decide to clear Toxin instead of heal through it, it may make sense to stay a bit tighter to shorten distance to run to someone with Burning Bile. We killed Gormok every time and actually died to this phase 2 times before we sorted it out. The two wipes we took to these guys were due to bad positioning, worms not getting picked up after going underground and people getting 3-shot in the span of .6 seconds, key folks being out of range on heals, etc. We also didn't swap our boomkin to resto until after the second death to these guys and that definitely helped phase 1 mana retention and healing in this phase.

In terms of dps split and enrage after one dies -- we dps'd both of these guys simultaneously -- we thought about putting melee on one and ranged on the other but, as mentioned, we were ranged heavy so we just split dps and tracked health. We did this really well one time (died within 5 seconds of each other) and not so well the other time (closer to 30 seconds from one another). Enrage didn't seem that bad though on the 30 sec apart one so maybe you could dps one first then the other if desired.

PHASE 3: You get past the first two phases and this one is crazy simple (at least from healing output perspective). As long as people keep a decent spread and don't get caught in Arctic Breath en masse, raid incoming damage is fairly light. This may have been because we were a ranged heavy comp and your experience may differ if you are melee heavy. After the knockback, it's pretty easy to throw some rejuvs on people and actually have some time to DPS Icehowl during the stun. As a note, if you are DPSing him during the stun (or just standing around regenning), do so at a diaganol. When the stun is over he will flip 180 and frost breath. Also, if you are the one he targets for his charge, strafe the heck to the right or left as soon as you have the ability to move or it's game over. We actually did die to him once but that was because, while I had seen videos, I didn't understand that charge mechanic. I went splat and he enraged (so dead healer plus enraged boss didn't end well). Second attempt -- after I clearly demonstrated to everyone what not to do -- was easy peasy.

I might be missing something but that's generally it. I'm linking the WWS below for those that want to look at it. It's hardly textbook but, as mentioned, were still figuring everything out. Also, I use Nourish a ton more in 10s than as opposed to 25s where it gets used very minimally.

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

Separate topic, but probably worth noting -- the deaths to XT Hard Mode later in the parse were due to that fight's mechanic changing. Bomb bots etc were spawning heavy despite placement to one side. This may be bugged, it may be intended, but it's something you might be dealing with next time you see him so be aware.

Well, killed the new boss today. Seemed much less raid healing intensive-at least for this guy. I haven't seen the wmo reports, but from recount I actually used Nourish alot. I think Living Seed was like 4% of my healing lol. I only had 1 point in ET and might pull another one out of NB. If the rest of the fights are like the first guy I thinking I might actually glyph Nourish.

Anybody else have this same experience? Oh the pally changes sure gave them some power:/.

Edit: this was 25 man and we used 3 tanks, 2 resto druids, 2 holy pallys and a holy priest

We had 3 tanks switching the impale on 25 man. They switched after 2 stacks cause that stuff hurts. We just had the poisoned people run over to the buffed guy to get it off. At first we were splitting the dps and then just decided to kill the poison guy and heal thru the 50% damage buff, which wasn't that bad. Phase 3 was pretty simple, just spread out and watch the boss for charging. He will face in the direction he is going to charge. Also, spreading out to minimize that frozen thing really helped.

Pro tip: Have your tanks get three stacks of the bleed, taunt off and BOP them. Removes the bleed. Did this tonight in 25m, was a slight learning curve but the damage is very low once you get used to it. We used 5 healers.

You can see full overhealing ("Mayfax gains 0 Health from Mayfax's Lifebloom.(848 Overhealed)") in the combat log now so once the parsers have been updated we should be able to get some solid figures about how much they overheal.

I guess this is a good time to be finding this sort of information out in order to make some more informed decisions about how to move forwards in 4.0.


[e] Some basic info (via Recount) shows that on average on Mimiron (25) hard mode my RJ and WG end up at around 70% overhealing but this is also a raid with 3 Resto Druids which is bound to raise the overhealing by each slightly. Lag is interfering with being able to test this properly sadly.

[e2] Each Druid on the kill also had a pretty balanced 70% overheal 30% effective on RJ and WG. Some additional figures of other (hard mode) bosses and of 1 and 2 Druids in the raid would be useful.

Anyone have any more info on a good way to heal this fight now since the cc nerf? What were other guilds doing to help with the changes?

Same for us. Kind of a bummer that OoC didn't even proc off casts. With the changes to shammies and pallies in the patch they were able to take more of the healing load than previous kills, so it helped to balance out my lowered output. His HP nerf definitely helps, too.

I'm sure I'll be refining my strat further in the future, but for our Vezax hardmode tonight I mostly used RJ on the tanks, and only refreshed it when they were injured (utilizing 4piece heal), as the tank can go so long without taking any damage it is a waste of mana to keep hots up 100%. I used SM any time the tank dipped below 50%. I gave them a RG during Animus because both tanks take steadier damage, and the RGs last halfway to forever. Most of my mana was spent on the raid, touching up the initial Mark ticks and keeping people healthy during the Animus with RJ and WG.

We didn't do this tonight, but next week I will be suggesting that we divide the raid healing (common enough on other bosses) to cut down on overhealing.

I look forward to seeing how everyone else deals with this change.

From GC today:

"We managed to get in a hotfix today that allows periodic healing ticks that were going to overheal entirely to go ahead and fire. Previously they did not fire. This means that effects that were able to proc from HoT ticks that did some healing can now also proc from HoT ticks that overheal completely."

Unless I'm reading this wrong, does this mean that revitalize will proc off all HoTs, even if it is 100% overheal?

If so, does this suddenly make revitalize viable?

Seriously this question belongs in the stupid/simple questions thread.

Revitalize is always worth it despite the fact it sadly does not directly show you bonus healing on your precious meters and it has always worked on full overheal ticks regardless of this change with both RJ and WG. The people who tend to ignore it are generally the "intellectually challenged" who love Celestial Focus+Dreamstate and who really have very little knowledge about the game beyond what is their own personal benefit.