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Q u o t e:
Anyways I am going to start off saying that Blizz did implement 2 new spells to our inventory of healing pew pew but they have changed the way a resto druid is going to play if something isn't changed soon be it with patch 3.0.2 or WotLK. I am going to go over 1. Lifebloom(what makes a resto druids these days a resto druid) 2. Wild Growth( Flourish if I slip it in) 3. nourish 4. Healing Touch now in ToL form 5. mana regen and how badly it is broken not only for us but other healing classes to.
All my points are made from a PVE perspective focusing on raiding not PVP/ questing/5 mans

1) Lifebloom: what was the bread and butter for resto druids in BC. As in Pre BC resto druids were one of the least sought out healers. That one spell alone made druids into viable raid healers finally even though we still couldn't AoE heal like Resto Shamans and CoH priests in MH/BT/SWP but we still could bring something to the table. Now 3.0.2 and WoTLK as it looks at the moment as there have been no changes to Resto druid for the last 2-3 patches after the huge nerf bat hit us, Lifebloom CANNOT be used on multiple targets for long periods of time making the spell in-efficient and only worth casting on the person soaking the most damage(another words the shifting focus into making druids solely tank healers). With the way Lifebloom sits right now resto druid more than likely not get to many raid invites for progression runs by guilds as they can easily swap in a pally/priest/shaman to be able to out heal/outlast a resto druid. This trend will continue in WoTLK if not changed.

2) Wild Growth: ONE OF THE MOST WORTHLESS 51 PT. TALENTS IN THE GAME. Yes I just said that. Why can a holy priest invest into a 41 point talent and it is a better AoE healing spell than we have??? It shouldn’t be that way if it is equal to what a CoH priest can do I would be happy and I am sorry but when the big first tick only pops for 474 HP and the small one at the end hits for 223 6 seconds later the talent isn’t worth picking up. Either scrap it and give us something else or return Flourish but put I’d say a 6 sec CD on the spell so it can be spamable as that is what people were complaing about the Spamming of the spell. Plus Flourish is a better name Wild Growth is a boring name

3) Nourish: this is a nice spell if you want to single focus heal or wish you were a priest or pally spamming flash heals everywhere. But once again I will state that in a PVE raid environment I don’t want to focus on 1-4 health bars and that is it. I like to immerse myself and raid heal and the tanks at the same time. Druids are known to create buffers in our HoTs so when the tank takes huge spike damage he is already getting healed and gives the direct healers more time to get big heals off on the tank without the tank dying to a boss’ regular hit. But the way yall implemented the spell is good I can see it being good for PVP to as it has a short cast time and I usually get 4-5k noncrit and 6-7k crit heals with a hot on the target. Also if the raid leader needs the resto druid to help direct heal tanks this spell is efficient enough to do it. Overall leave this spell the way it is.

4) Healing Touch in ToL: well it’s nice to see this change but how often are you really going to sit there and cast healing touch? With 97 haste, and all the haste talents in the resto tree, and healing touch talents the spell still takes 2.97 seconds to cast. Still way to long but is a good oh crap button when you NS+HT and now it won’t pop you out of ToL which wastes our mana now. Nice little change but not much weight to it. And the glyph for HT sucks all it does is make HT useless compared to nourish.

5) Mana Regen: All healers has this dreaded problem right now. Before you say well we gave raids replenishment or w/e it is called don’t yall nerfed that spell to much to. It was .5% of max mana every second and now it is .25% of max mana per second. The first variation was great as the raid would get to the last 4-5% of the boss and than I would finally be oom or close after I popped my innervate and mana pot. Now with the .25% I am stuck looking and wondering crap I am oom and the boss still has 13-16% health and the other healer is oom to and the raid group dies. Now the replenish or w/e it is called not only effects us but effects the dps to that relies on mana except of course locks as we just simply heal them back up once they tap. Since it effects our dps to they do less dps at later stages in the fight and well the boss doesn’t die or barely does. The people I do Naxx 10 man with are mostly in the SWP guild I am in on live so we have the skill we all been playing since original WoW beta or release except for I think one who started right as BC came out. I understand yall want the game to be challenging but when you take bosses that are hard to do not because of skill but the simple fact everyone goes oom that has to do with the mechanics of the game and Blizz that is your end.

Also, for my feral brothers I hope blizz finds a way to give yall more mana since that won’t give yall any intel on the gear or even a tanking set of gear.

But for the love of god fix Resto Druids and most importantly fix the Mana Regen issues with all classes if you have to let us chain chug mana pots no one asked to nerf that.

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Q u o t e:
Having done my first 25 man since the Wild Growth nurf, I have to say I'm still kind of pleased with my resto druid's ability:

1. Lifebloom does need to go back to being a good spell. I'm not saying its worthless now, but its a shame it got 2 new ranks and does less now. On the flip side, I find myself not caring if it blooms. In fact, I cast it on people just for the bloom now, since a crit can be 4000-5000 with pvp gear. I prefer it the old way though.

2. Wild Growth is very situational. I use it when I get a Clearcasting proc, or in odd events like Loatheb's short healing window. If I had something else to put that 1 talent point in, I would.

3. Nourish is pretty worthless. The only reason I would cast it is if NS and Swiftmend are on cooldown. Even then, I'd probably still cast regrowth. I haven't looked at other classes to see if it heals on par with their 1.5 sec heals, but I would assume not. It needs to heal more for less mana for me to use it. Maybe if it healed more for EACH HoT on the target instead of just one. I know there's a glyph, but that glyph spot goes to Regrowth - a useful spell.

4. Healing Touch in ToL form is cool because I don't get bumped out when I use Nature Swiftness + Healing Touch. I otherwise still won't cast this spell. Maybe I'll find an odd situation out there where I would.

5. My mana regen wasn't too bad in a 25 man setting. Having all PvP gear, I figure that's a dang good thing. I think a majority of our mana problems stem from "making up for" our inexperienced healers in the raid. They heal for less, so we have to spend more mana.

In my experience, Resto druids are still the top healers given normal situations. When we can predict where the damage is going to be, we preempt it with our HoTs and end up doing a considerable amount of the healing. When it comes to AoE healing or spike damage, we have issues. If NS and Swiftmend are on cooldown we don't have those nice 1.5 sec spam heals everyone else does. Nourish doesn't do it. Wild Growth doesn't do it for AoE (except maybe a 5 man).

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Q u o t e:
I think Kahakai gave pretty good explanations.

We nerfed Lifebloom because it was just too good. It just healed for incredible amounts at good mana efficiency that other healers would have had trouble matching. It's much more fun to buff spells than to nerf them, so we try not to let any of them get out of control. But sometimes it happens.

Nourish and Wild Growth are both situational. We actually tried hard not to hand out new healing spells that needed to be put into a normal rotation. Nourish is good to use when healing a tank, either in a 5-man or a raid. It seemed less effective than Regrowth probably because the Regrowth glyph was too generous. Sometimes you can't wait for that Regrowth tick.

Wild Growth isn't intended to make you an awesome group healer. Shamans and Priests are awesome group healers, but can't hot the way a druid can. What Wild Growth is intended to do is let you heal a group when you are the only healer, or heal a group in fights (usually boss fights) where you don't have an opportunity to distribute hots to everyone. Without going into a lot of detail on new bosses in case you'd spoiler averse, there are bosses in Naxx and then the Malygos raid itself where you periodically can't get a bunch of heals up and yet the raid is still taking damage. Wild Growth is really helpful in those situations.

We think mana effeciency for Resto duids isn't too bad at the moment. You'll struggle in situations where you have to throw out a ton of heals quickly (as you should) but recharge when you can afford to take a break. Having someone with Replenishment greatly helps. Remember, we do want you to run out of mana. If we didn't want mana management to be part of the game, we'd just cut the cost of all your healing spells and call it a day.

What we don't want is A) your healing to be worse than other healing classes because you run out of mana too fast, or B) the fights to dish out more damage than you could ever have enough mana to heal. If either of those starts to feel like a problem, please speak up. But just running out of mana is going to happen. We aren't trying to prevent that.

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[ Post edited by Driftwood ]