• Lifebloom: Mana cost of all ranks doubled. When Lifebloom blooms or is dispelled, it now refunds half the base mana cost of the spell per application of Lifebloom, and the heal effect is multiplied by the number of applications.

World of Warcraft (en) Forums -> [Updated] 3.1.0 PTR Patch Notes


/sadpanda

Well the gaol with SD was for us to gain tanking from another stat. Been talking about this within guild and someone uttered the idea that maybe they want SD to also soak magic damage, which would require a stamnerf. The reason SD is out of the notes is likely because it's not implemented yet, doesn't mean the idea is scrapped.

I always assumed the 2% were for you alone. It's the "what do I get from me bringing a group buff" philolosophy that we've seen of late. Stange thing is we haven't seen it on unique buffs before, only on buffs/debuffs other people can apply as well.

Considering currently it's easy to roll Lifebloom on 2-3 tanks and regen to 100% mana before you have to refresh it, I'm really not buying it when people say that this is a huge nerf to Lifebloom. It's currently half a step away from being free to keep up on a tank, and not much worse to roll on multiple. Blizzard's stated goal is to make people think about how they're healing instead of just mashing buttons, and this does that--right now, if more than one person might be taking regular damage, the answer is obvious: roll Lifebloom on all of them. Refreshing a 3-stack of a 10 second Lifebloom is one of the most efficient heals possible.

The other thing I've noticed about knee-jerk reactions to the Lifebloom change is people reading the first sentence and ignoring the rest. When used as a raid heal, Lifebloom will effectively cost the same mana it does now, plus the bloom itself is getting a major buff, when you consider possible creative uses of it. The only negative change to Lifebloom is the efficiency of keeping up a full stack on a tank, which is currently a minuscule percentage of the mana spent on a fight that's actually mana draining.

I'm pretty interested to see what happens to or for bears in 3.1. There's been a lot of Chicken Little impressions every time a bear change is announced, but nothing catastrophic has happened yet that I'm aware of. Obviously they're still fiddling with talents and scaling at this point--the question shouldn't be, "What will I do when bears are no longer capable tanks?!" but "Will the changes affect our niche, and how?"

This would be a more intelligent band-aid fix for the near term (because honestly, this is what SD felt like to me) -- after playing with numbers and fiddling around on the PTR I simply didn't like the SD mechanic as a trade-off for losing the somewhat 'smoother' mitigation we had from bonus armor. I really do hope they can pull something else out that serves a similar purpose in spirit as SD but works a bit better or alternatively, rework SD somehow.

This looks fine. Assuming as the patch notes say nothing about Survival of the Fittest that we'll be getting our armor bonus back, it's just a 2k-3k health nerf. Our health pools were getting to the point of being ridiculously and unnecessarily large, I'd already swapped out a stamina trinket for an avoidance one in everything except the dragon fights, and was heavily considering dumping my last stamina gems, and I'm not even fully geared from tier 7 content yet. They would have had a heck of a time balancing things as the discrepancy between our health and the other tanks' grew into tier 8 gear. This may get us back to the point where stamina is an interesting stat, as it was while we were gearing for Naxx, rather than something that's heaped so generously onto everything we have that it's just sort of assumed we'll have plenty, as it is later in tier 7.

If we still lose half our SotF bonus too, then bear druids are looking at a serious nerf as of this revision of the patch. They would have to return some other kind of semi-random mitigation like higher avoidance or Savage Defense if they did that, unless they really feel that we're simply taking far too little damage, which doesn't seem to be the case. But I really don't expect that's their intent.

Savage Defense was a fun sounding mechanic, in its way, although it added a huge layer of complexity to our gearing (first time we've ever cared about boss hit size / attack speed). As was pointed out though, the idea balanced completely differently from shield block for a number of reasons, I guess it just either was nowhere near ready or would have taken entirely too much tweaking to balance reasonably well across all gear and content levels.

I don't see it affecting rotations any, except to push LB farther into the back of raid healing spells. I am still planning to raid heal with Rejuv/Nourish/WG while keeping LB+Rejuv on the MT/OT. I would just have to keep a tight eye on the LB timer and make sure to hit it as near to the 9.5second mark as I can.

Thats quite a buff for pvp IMO.

Where is the buff? If you let it bloom with multiple applications, the end bloom is multiplied by the number you had stacked. (x1, x2, x3 respectively.)

The only thing to note is that most "mana back" type mechanics use the base spell cost, and it appears that this is how it is functioning on ptr. So 1 lifebloom is actually cheaper after this change if you are in tree form and let it bloom.

I think the "buff" is supposed to be that you get mana back if you let the HoT Bloom.

I am curious to see that if the bloom results in an overheal you will still get the mana return from the spell blooming. If that is the case, I certainly can see still using it as a raid heal. It will effectively cost the same amount of mana as it does now, unless I am reading it wrong. It costs more for the initial cast it but with the mana return from letting the spell bloom, it will even back out to roughly what it is costing to cast it now.

Does anyone else feel as if some of the changes taking place right now are Blizzard's way of trying to push us to utilize Nourish more?

I do not see how that is a PvP buff seeing the only class that can take off 3x Lifebloom completely was Death Knight, and Plague Strike has never allowed lifebloom to bloom in the first place, not to mention that PS no longer has the HoT removal component. The best case here is a 2 stack lifebloom gets dispelled by priests, and your target gets healed for double the final amount as it did before.

All I see is another increasing cost for PvE healing with marginal, if any, pvp benefits. 50% mana refund only applies to dispells, all of your other lifeblooms will be twice as expensive.