I'm currently somewhat worried over the movement speed reduction in tree form. If it stays this way treeform may be very situational since usually fights had their most healing intensive phase when there was also a lot of movement, such as sindragosa/bql et cetera. I guess it all depends on whether blizzard gives us a shiny [Glypf of Treeform] to reduce it.

Once you take Genesis, those 5 are gone. Adding more damage to bleeds makes the most sense.

Though I agree the tree looks fun, I don't see much ability to add utility. There are as many "mandatory" talents in this tree as we currently have, if not more (for Cats). You can remove the point I have in Imp. Mangle (and it to feral aggression) and you can swap points out of Imp LotP (and into feral aggression) if you have a druid tank, but I don't see much more flexibility. Thoughts?

Cat DPS Spec

As it currently stands the new Tree of Life is badly designed. The problem with the movement speed handicap has already been covered. However, the real problem lies with the duration and cooldown. Especially for a resto druid trick, 45 seconds duration and 5 minute cooldown are incredibly awkward numbers. Unless the length of the average boss fight is changing drastically, this admittedly nice set of effects will be used generally once per encounter. Most situations where a healing throughput increase are useful don't last very long (about 5-15 seconds). Again, we don't know what the average encounter will be like in Cata, but that leaves a lot of time after covering the extra healing which we will simply be doing unnecessarily increased healing. In short, the design is very awkward.

Fury of Stormrage is worse, though. Its no good for balance because its too deep in the resto tree. Its no good for resto because Blizzard is making mana management harder in Cata. So why would we want to waste part of this resource on piddly damage? Now, if the instant wrath was mana-free AND off the GCD...maybe it could see some usage. But even then, the procs would be fairly sporadic and still only be as powerful as any other untalented wrath cast. My only guess is that it's intended as a PVP talent (although it still suffers from the above issues).

Fury of Stormrage is mana-free if you actually look at the talent with more than a casual glance and as to the concept there is a post here stating their general reasons behind the Priest one and extending to the others. To be honest it seems to be a fair enough idea where healers have a couple of points available to add a little bit of damage if they wish to place them there (utility and all) and if anything I would say it's kind of lacking in that regard for us at the current display.


Tree of Life I agree with you because the numbers seem to fit really poorly and this is even before you see some of the undisclosed effects it provides (ie: Lifebloom) but as those are under NDA and not publicly known I guess it's best holding off on discussion on those aspects for now. Sadly without actual spell information and context to place them in judging talents for healers aren't the easiest things to try and review well.

Nature's Bounty seems too strict at +50% when under 25% and if anything I would rather reverse those numbers so that mentally people will not think "if they aren't under 25% it isn't worth casting RG" which I feel is a valid concern but again hard to fully justify without numbers on spells and general context of the Cataclysm healing environment.

There is also some potential balancing issues with the plethora of linking functions (RG + NG + NB + Deep Healing + Eff + LS) and quite honestly Efflorescence still seems very overpowered unless the healing is split like a Meteor effect although at that point it could be too weak.