First time poster here - so bear (hoho!) with me I apologise for any noob like assumptions/comments..

We ran a 25 man raid on the PTR about a week ago and after watching in dismay at going OOM (innervate+pot used) after a few minutes when testing out patchwork I went back to the drawing board about gearing/gemming and playstyle.

After some thought, I came to the conclusion that Blizzard seemed to want us to let lifebloom tick off for the mana return because of the added base cost, but when I delved more into the posts here and read through the actual numbers - it doesn't seem this is as efficient as I imagined. The change to spirit based mana regen has also hit innervate hard, and i'm now racking my brains as to what kind of playstyle and raid use blizzard is intendingus for. There's an obvious push for Nourish to become a predominant spell with the upcoming glyph and the current 4xT7.5 set bonus - but with my mana regen currently what it is, I don't see how with full hots up on 2+ tanks I would even have the mana for extra nourishes!

Is blizz trying to assign us more to being a 1 tank + raid healer, or more of a raid healer?

I'm currently used to rolling full hots on 2/3 tanks (3xLB, rejuv, regrowth) and throwing WG around when needed on most encounters, but if I go ahead and do this on the PTR I can say byebye to my mana in a matter of minutes - so I suppose i'm very confused at the moment as to whether its my playstyle I need to change, my gear I need to regem, or just learn to be a lot more mana efficient when raid healing (mana isn't a worry at the moment so I am prone to WGing when there's little raid damage).

This is the talent build I used tonight on the PTR - (*clicky*) I tried out a more rejuv+nourish playstyle to counter my mana problems, sticking to mostly 1 tank + raid healing - i'd just like to hear other druids thoughts on their current builds and how they feel the changes are going to affect them in terms of play style.

To be honest I´m actually looking forward to haveto think a bit more about my mana and who I want to toss a heal on and not. Most fights atm are utter jokes healingwise and I haveto pray for someone to mess up bad so there can be some crisis or other I can avert with good play. What I hope however is that this spirit change won´t go overboard and make it a stat you place really low on the priority scale. I simply like spirit being an important stat on my gear.

We actually only had 5 healers when we were having a go on patch. I get what you mean about them wanting us to bring more - nerfing mana regen and increasing spell costs is a good way to go about it I suppose.

And I agree with what you said Ploppy about the having to think thing - my mana regen is off the scale at the moment, I can't really go oom unless I try. I am looking forward to the challenge in that respect, I just hope druids are still intended to be the hot class and are able to do so despite the increased mana cost of lifebloom, rather than blizz wanting to change us to a more caster like healing class.

Has anyone had any thoughts on regemming to counter the changes? I thought about gemming more for spirit initially, but after trying the General last night i'm thinking Int might be the way to go, because of the regen it still gives and also the larger mana pool which would be helpful on him specifically.

You seem to imply you were attempting to keep up "full hots", which I presume included a rolling Lifebloom?

If so, it is crystal clear that Lifebloom is not meant to be rolled at all anymore. It is possible that you could afford to keep it up on a single tank for some encounters. It is less clear whether a single tank with a rolliing Lifebloom and 50k health is even an interesting target to roll a bloom on.

Just confirmed that the FFF/iFF bug still persists in the most recent PTR build. I do hope that they fix it; FFF is very useful for applying threat to mobs when you are out of melee range. It would seem to be a simple thing to separate the damage component from the debuff so that the damage can still apply without overwriting the moonkin's Faerie Fire.

Heals can proc OOC. Cooking fish feasts can proc OOC. Remember that caster specs use OOC as well. Therefore it makes sense that FFF should proc it. However, I think the proc "loss" is pretty trivial (one potential proc in 30 or so seconds when energy is low) compared to the benefit of not having to worry about it dropping off.

In feral forms, OOC only procs off autoattacks. This was changed way back in 3.0 or something.

(If it did proc off FFF, 10 extra chances a minute to proc OOC is pretty good for kitty, I'd say. You realistically only get 70-80 or so attacks in per minute, and an extra 10 is a noticeable increase in the number of chances.)

GC said that they didn't want druid healers to be able to keep up rolling hots on 2 tanks and be able to raid heal. Based on that I'd assumed we could do 2 of the 3.....rolling hots on 2 tanks, or hots on 1 tank and raid heal. Does that fit with your experience on the PTR?

No question the nerf is necessary. I've run 2 instances and 1 10-man Naxx raid as a tree. I never dropped below 50% mana at any point. My healing set consists of heroic drops, a few badge pieces and a couple of regular Naxx drops I got for offspec. No T7 gear at all.

People seem to be focusing on the total area swipe will hit rather than "will swipe being 360 degrees make it easier to pick up mobs?"

Basically I see a couple different scenarios:
1. Mobs are rushing at you not necessarily well grouped: New swipe better
2. You and another tank are tanking things, resulting in them not being that close together: Old swipe better, but who cares, his mobs are his job not yours. If its important for both of you to have threat on each other's mobs, stand together better.
3. Mobs that don't move into melee range to hit you: New swipe better because you can stand in the middle, and who cares if you have your back to them, can't dodge shots/spells.
4. Someone pulls agro on 1 trash mob, you turn to mangle/maul it: new swipe better as you don't completely stop generating threat on the other mobs.

I must agree with you there. No target requirement grouped together with being 360 degrees and 8 yards radius? Looks awesome on paper!
The buff to FFF is also very welcome (getting 700-800 hits unbuffed), on the other hand it makes the bug even more annoying
I hope the 8 yard fix will make it to next push so we can give it some proper ingame testing, but more importantly we should try to make blizzard fix the FFF bug once and for all (how hard is it to split damage and "sunder" effect?)
It should have been fixed back in beta and we all know it. If it doesn't get fixed now, who knows when the next chance will be?

There has been link given by Maeltne a few posts back for US, once european forums are up I'll search for the bug report and link it here.

As for IFF x FFF x Misery, rather than separate the damage portion from the -5% armor debuff, I would separate the +3% hit from the -5% armor debuff...

That meaning that IFF checks spell hit against Misery, but -5% armor just checks with itself, meaning we can always apply faerie fire, no matter what debuff is there and renew the armor debuff.

If they fail to do so, to separate the damage portion from the -5% armor debuff is a workaround, but a simplier solution and not as good. (we might not have a -5% armor debuff up on the boss).

As for the Resto discussion, I do prefer resto how it is on 3.1. The mana usage, the new lifebloom, the options on hots or casting. As kawari (I think) asked about builds, I would use this one: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?drui...&version=9684#, that is because I find casting ht, nourish and regrowth fun, using hots a support.

All they need to do is make imp ff apply a second effect just like misery does. Misery goes up when the sp attacks, its not like a hidden effect on SW P like imp FF is. They could just call it nature's misery or something. Then the armor debuff and hit debuff are completely separated with no cross check.

The dumb thing is it's the situations where you'd most want to pull with FF (where you're trying to carry some rage from one trash pull to another but not aoe tanking, otherwise you could just use starfire then moonfire) are the situations where you can least afford to not be able to use a rage free threat move.