There goes Wild Growth

This kind of thing comes up a lot, where players see us messing with cooldowns and assume it's a nerf instead of our trying to give them room to actually cast more spells.

Raising the cooldown on spells like Wild Growth and Circle of Healing are good things for healers. It's one of the few* things that will buy you GCDs to actually cast other spells. With a 6 sec cooldown, you really only get to cast maybe 3-5 other spells before you need to hit that magic button again.

Let me put it another way... if there was no cooldown on Wild Growth would you ever hit another button? The frequency with which druids use it today suggests the answer is: not often.

* - an alternative is to make the mana cost so extreme that you're making a very bad decision any time you use Wild Growth or Circle and 5-6 targets aren't seriously injured. I'm not sure that would be any more fun though. You don't always have the precious seconds to analyze the situation and calculate how many players need instant healing. It's one thing to guess whether your fast or big heal is more appropriate on a target. It's a little trickier to do that for multiple targets at once.

In before "It wouldn't be overpowered if we didn't do raid damage" and "Well we come to expect nerfs when all of our overpowered spells get nerfed." :)

Q u o t e:
where's the "in before you get pointed out as stupid for saying druids would spam a hot that doesn't stack anyway and would do no extra healing, just reset the duration"?

You would definitely want to spam it when there were more than 5 players around. Because WG does more healing up front, it's also sometimes beneficial to overwrite the slower ticks at the end.

(You would want to spam CoH in all cases of area damage. With no cooldown you would probably use no other buttons but CoH and PoM on many fights.)

Q u o t e:
and the "in before saying it's like adding a one minute cooldown and healers saying that's ok, it gives us a chance to cast our other spells"

Spells need to be distinct in order to have a reason for players to cast them. If spell A healed the same and cost the same as spell B, then what is the point of B? Spells without cooldowns generally can't be as powerful as spells with cooldowns, or else you would never have a reason to use the latter. It would be easy to make a 1 min cooldown heal that was overpowered. It would also be easy to make a 1 min cooldown heal that was useless. The challenge is in making that spell something you're happy to cast when available, and ideally not the second it's available but when it's the most useful.

I know some players can't see beyond "nerf!" and there's not much I'm going to be able to do to change their minds. Other healers will hopefully understand that the goal is to make healing more interesting and fun for them by letting them choose which of their many heals to use instead of having one heal that can solve so many different problems. Sometimes you literally need to heal 5 or 6 players at once to prevent imminent death. Perfect job for WG / CoH. Not every situation falls into that category though and in those cases where it's just several players below 100% health, the smart AE heals don't have to be the only option there.

Q u o t e:
"You won't be able to spam or you'll run out of mana."
"But you'll spam this, so we need to increase the cooldown."

I addressed this with my first post in this thread (I think). We could just make the mana cost so high that it's prohibitive to spam. What could very well happen though is healers spam it anyway, run out of mana, and then say there's no way for them to heal without using the spell and that the mana cost is just too high. You can argue that's still the right answer anyway. I concede that that might be the way we go.

In the case of say Flash Heal vs. Heal, there's a pretty clear alternative. There isn't a clear alternative to Wild Growth other than just tab targeting Rejuv on several different people. Nor are we crazy about giving druids yet another heal to be the fast, inefficient AE so WG can be the efficient AE. We think it's better just to design an environment in which you don't need to AE heal as often and get a chance to use your other heals in the meantime.

To those players who say they don't want to cast a lot of different spells, I'm a little perplexed as to what you thought you were getting into with the Resto druid. Surely you thought there would come a day when we'd try to make those other spells attractive again or else cut them. :)

Q u o t e:
I think the concern is more where Druids will fit in. Not that a given raid will try to fight the healers with their specialized tasks. Druid healing has switched gears many times and many are just wondering where it's going to go this time.

We'd rather your choice of healer be more about style than niches. Niches haven't proven great for dps or tanks so I'm not sure why they are good for healers.

Q u o t e:
The problem with this statement, from a druid's perspective, is that if someone needs to be healed *right now* or die, a HoT isn't going to save them. Even with something that ticks as fast as Lifebloom or WG, if the situation has degraded that far then a HoT is the wrong tool for the job. HoTs are good for proactive healing, not reactive.

Okay, let's examine that statement a little further though. What you're saying is that we're putting you in a situation where no matter what you do that you're going to fail. We are asking you to heal 5 or 6 players at once and refusing to give you the tools to let you heal 5 or 6 players at once. So the only possible outcomes are that nobody gets to do instances at all, or that they will just do it without druids. I would hope both of those outcomes seem like things we would be unlikely to let happen. Despite the balance discussions that rage on this forum ranging from the legit to the near-hysterial, I hope we can all agree that there are an awful lot of all five healing specs out there being reasonably successful. We're not going to tolerate an environment in which nobody brings Resto druids (or any healing spec for that matter) on dungeon or raid runs.

Q u o t e:
Along with the fact that too many smart heals has made healing devolve, and raid encounter design evolve into blind spam fests.

I understand some of the hate for smart heals, but really consider the alternatives. Either the group heal picks the closest people, it picks random people, it picks the people in your group, it picks everyone, or it picks the most wounded people. For an instant spell with a cooldown and a fair amount of HPS, the smart heal seems like the only way to go. Now you could turn WG into a different spell. You could make it not instant and have it pick near players, but then you're really looking at something more like Chain Heal. The cast time alone would probably cause druids to cast fewer types of heals not more.

Q u o t e:
Do you ever sleep?

Sleep is for the weak!

Q u o t e:
I guess I simply don't understand what Wild Growth's intended role is supposed to be in our healing arsenal.

In Cataclysm, use it when 5 or 6 players take a lot of damage at once. This would typically be when a boss uses some type of large AE. If it's a really nasty raid-wide damage aura, you might need to use it. If it's a lower level damage aura, then hots should be great at keeping players standing. If two players are injured then you'd be better off tossing Regrowth or Nourish on one and then the other.

Q u o t e:
Well actually Nourish is a damned good fast heal. Healing Touch is slow and has no synergism with any other druid spells and GC has said he's happy just having it attached to NS for emergencies.

We're happy with HT's role in Lich King, but come Cataclysm, you'll probably be using it more, especially for tank healing or to bring someone up who is severely injured (but not about to die in the next GCD).

Q u o t e:
The part I don't like is the pretty consistent hints I've seen that we're going to have to accept more group members dying on our watch and that "it will be like Heroic Pit of Saron before everyone outgeared it."

You shouldn't have more players die. That should only be a problem if you make exceedingly bad choices in which spells you use and run out of mana lot. The Pit of Saron comment was more that there should be a risk to approaching large pulls with the strategy of AE tank and Blizzard them all down. If your group does that, then yeah they'll probably die, and there isn't much any healer can do to save them. That's not because the healer is too weak. That is because the group is too stubborn and / or lazy. :)

Q u o t e:
"Thoughtful and deliberate" was the healing model intended for Wrath, if you'll recall. What we actually got was neither BC nor what it was intended to be. In any system as complex as WoW, emergent behavior happens.

This is fair to an extent, but in retrospect we also blinked when players complained too much about steep mana costs. We should have kept the heals more expensive, and the incoming damage in PvE and PvP would have been adjusted accordingly. That's why we are over-emphasizing mana costs so much this time, because we don't intend to blink.

Q u o t e:
Sad people are still posting in here like its going to make a difference. He obviously is already speaking for us, telling us the things we do and do not want. We can argue as much as we want in this topic, but none of it seems to be changing his mind. 20 pages of people posing concerns and him saying, "Its what you want, trust me".

Q u o t e:
They have an idea and are not going to let a little thing called facts get in the way of the implementation of that idea. Healing is going to be nerfed to the Stone Age while everyone else gets to play hero.

No QQ, please. If you don't think your posts are contributing anything then please just don't make them. I'm willing to read through a 20+ page thread if there is actual feedback on class design here. I don't want to read about how you feel neglected or how you don't get to have enough design influence into the game, and my suspicion is many other players don't either.

I'm not going to address this point again in this thread. I ask that you stick to the original topic as well.

Q u o t e:
I'm still not clear where you are going with resto druids specifically, though- in particular why you maintain that we already have a good tank healing rotation when no guild in their right mind would choose a resto druid over a holy pally for tank healing. If we're going to be going into Cata with druids offering present-day lifebloom and healing touch to compete with holy light, I think a guild officer would be committing gamer malpractice by taking the druid ahead of the pally.

Right, my point though was that you do have a good tank healing rotation. In a world in which druids were the only healer, you could put druids on the MT and druids on the raid and do fine... probably a lot better than trying to do the same thing with a Disc priest or Holy paladin.

In Cataclysm, we'd ideally like for you to put a druid on the tank and a paladin on the raid if that works better for your group. I agree that would be raid malpractice (usually) trying to do that today. :)

Q u o t e:
I remember Vanilla and healing too sitting all the time waiting for mana to regen after every pull it seemed. I am in complete agreement with you if the game goes back to sitting and drinking after every pull I can tell you this much i wont be playing a healer it sucked to have to make a choice oh this person dies or that person dies take your pick one person is dieing because I dont have enough mana to heal both.

We're changing the 5 second rule to just be an out of combat rule, so you can regen your mana pretty quickly in between pulls. You'll likely want to still drink before boss attempts (even in a 5-player dungeon), but that's typical even today.