The Opinion of Tree - Take it or Leaf It

#0 - Oct. 15, 2009, 4:36 p.m.

This is a multi-opinion post - so bear with me .. ill try as best as i can to not make this a wall of text, however, i am in between classes and typing fast after reading the t10 / 3.3 changes

now let me start off in saying that, yes, trees have become very efficient healers. However, and correct me if i am wrong, there, now more then ever, seems to be a hierarchy of resto druids.

you have druids that are amazing - you have druids that just seem to hot blanket - and you have druids that should definitely reroll.

the reason i am saying this is that i have run, over the past 3 weeks, several raids where there were multiple resto DRUIDS. [i am comparing druids ---> druids atm, not to pallys or shamans, or priests]

And these druids were within 50 points of my gear score [yes i checked] . however their healing was so spread out. on most fights i am consistently above 5k, but on shorter fights i go over 7k hps easily and have topped out over 9k hps - the other druids in the raids were barely hitting 3k hps and were almost at the bottom of the healing meter.

now dont take what i am saying as my ego talking. i will tell you right now that i have been blown away by other resto druids. and now i will also say have been completely destroyed by hooly priests.

i am now looking at the druid t10 compared to t9 as well as to other classes in what blizz wants to do in 3.3

resro idol t9 : rejuv procs a 234 sp increase
t9 set bonus [4p] : gives rejuv the ability to crit

blizz response : we did not intend for druids to use rejuv as much as they are .

did i miss something ? that's like giving a child a lollipop and saying that you didn't intend for them to eat it.

do some druids do nothing but roll rejuv on the raid - yes .. are they lower on the healing meter then another druid optimizing all their spells - yes.

my first question would be ... WHAT DID YOU EXPECT TO HAPPEN.

with the priest t10 :
Priest
â€¢2 piece bonus - Your Flash Heal critical strikes cause the target to heal for 25% of the healed amount over 9 sec.
â€¢4 piece bonus - Your Circle of Healing and Penance spells have a 20% chance to cause your next Flash Heal cast within 6 sec to reset the cooldown on your Circle of Healing and Penance spells.

dont you think that 75% of all priests are going to gravitate to FOL spam >> COH spam?

not the smart ones mind you, but the other 75% that are simply spamming raid.

what is the response going to be ? 'we didnt intend for priests to use COH as much as they are'

Back to the Resto Dru for a second :
we all know that pvp ruins pve .... prediction within 4 weeks of 3.3 , if not sooner

all classes complain that r-druid hots are too much to eat thru atm w/ a respectable amount of resil. Now you've given rejuv the ability to scale w/ spell haste - i GUARANTEE that you have pvp resto drus take some pve pieces to get their haste as high as possible ... and have that 2.2-2.5k rejuv tick to the point where your attacks arent making a dent.

is this a QQ .. no .. i have not been disappointed by blizz yet. It just truly seems that Blizz do not know where to place resto dru's in the grand scheme of things.

i have outhealed every other class .. and have been outhealed by every other class. imo - it doesnt have much to do with balancing the class as much as it has to do with people spam-abusing one heal [on any class] and calling themselves a healer.

imo - there is a HUGE HUGE diff between a healer , and someone that rolled a healing class.

was the change to Gift of the earth mother needed - imo - yes

do i think that in reaction you will see tree dru's dropping either [seed of life] or [revitalize] and going into Celestial Focus - yes.

do i wish i had time to finish my thoughts =] yes .. but i have to go back to class.

Ghostcrawler

#18 - Oct. 22, 2009, 6:19 p.m.

I'm not sure why so many players who want to disagree with us on class design miss some of those posts where we attempt to clarify our position.

To put it all into one place:

1) Rejuv was too good. We nerfed it. The change got labeled as a bug fix, because technically it was a bug. We didn't mean to buff Rejuv's duration but once we did we didn't think it was breaking anything for a time so we let it stay. For 3.3 we decided it was breaking things and reduced the duration. We understood the confusion this caused with the community by labeling it a bug fix so we changed the patch note to no longer refer to it as a bug fix. It doesn't really matter what it was called -- it was a nerf.

2) In the same patch, we decided to change Gift of the Earth Mother because it was adding a gratuitous amount of haste and at the same time making druids avoid haste where they could. We have been too generous with some of the haste talents that coupled with gear and buffs are causing problems.

3) While we didn't change Gift of the Earth Mother with the express purpose of nerfing druids, it still had that effect. We considered the Rejuv nerf and the GotEM nerf and decided we liked the second one more and reverted the first one. Rejuv is back to 18 sec for 3.3.

4) We realize the GotEM nerf hurt PvP Resto druids a lot and that is still something we are evaluating.

5) Resto druids have a lot of heal spells. Which ones you go to the most is going to be a function of things like set bonuses, idols, your role in the group as well, as well as the encounters themselves. Druids healing the raid currently seem to use a lot of Rejuv and Wild Growth while those healing tanks use a lot of Nourish and perhaps even Lifebloom. Lifebloom still gets a lot of use in PvP. Regrowth has slipped off the radar a little, IMO, but it has been good at various points in LK and I don't think it would be that hard to bring it back (and we'll see what the GotEM change does). Bringing it back would probably slide something else down the bar, at least temporarily. We're pretty much okay with that. Healing Touch (and maybe Tranq) is the only Resto spell for which we're really not interested in carving off a major raid-healing niche. It still has situational uses with NS or in 5-player dungeons.

Rereading the above, I am making sweeping generalizations a lot. Your mileage may vary and there are a ton of exceptions. One thing that hits me a lot in my position is that players assume the way they do a thing is the way everyone must do that thing. Players exhibit some pretty diverse behaviors and still get the boss down. Keep that in mind whenever you try to adopt the "accepted" or "cookie cutter" spell rotation for any class.

6) Particularly angry druids like to talk about Nourish getting "shoved down their throat" or whatever. We added Nourish because we recognized the druid need for a "Flash Heal." Healing Touch is too long to cast without NS and both NS and Swiftmend have a cooldown. The hots all do great healing, and they can definitely save someone's life, but they just aren't reliable for e.g. someone being focused by faction champions. In the BC era where we basically mandated that druids are just one arm of the healing machine that must also include paladins, priests and shamans it was okay to have a very narrow niche. In a world of 10-player raids, we want you to be able to heal with say 2 Resto druids and a Disc priest. "Hey, I'm just here to hot the raid," is fine if it works for your group, but that can't be the only thing that works. (And this applies to all 5 healing specs.)

Hope that clears things up. :)

Ghostcrawler

#85 - Oct. 22, 2009, 9:30 p.m.

Q u o t e:
Was there any thought to making Regrowth our flash heal instead? When WotLK came out, that was what Regrowth was used for, and as Regrowth had always been the closest thing we had to a flash heal, it just seemed natural to use it this way.

This would have been another way to go. The main reason we didn’t is it would just put more and more pressure on the up-front part of Regrowth and de-emphasizing the hot part in the name of rapid healing. At some point you'd reach a spell that was basically a flash heal with a trivial little hot stuck on the end for flavor. We tried to get the similar you-care-about-hots vibe with Nourish by making it heal more with hots but still heal all at once.

Q u o t e:
Is there any thought towards changing lifebloom to allow us to keep it at 3 stacks in a fight? Lifebloom was in many ways balanced for 3 stacks in WotLK, but as soon as you reach the third stack right now you need to let it drop, or lose a huge chunk of mana. This causes lifebloom to heal for an inconsistent amount on the tank, and spend over 2/3rds of it's time up weaker then it was balanced to be. It also causes a gap in the tank healing where the last one bloomed, and you haven't yet applied the new stack.

We haven’t yet come up with a design for letting this be an option (and to be fair, it is an option) without rolling LBs on multiple people becoming the best way to heal again. We could do something like let you have 3 stacks total (divided among different people if you’d like) or let you only cast on one person. Those restrictions might not be fun though, and they’d have big PvP implications.

Q u o t e:
Because a few idiot Priests spoke up and said, "Oh my, PoH is OP. What an elephant in the room". They need to take a page from Druids and never ever make any kind of reference to being OP.

Off topic, but I want to dispel the notion that if forum posters somehow keep overpowered spells a secret that we won’t catch on. We actually know what spells you cast, yanno?

Q u o t e:
It's noticeable with healers because really, all five of us have pretty different healing styles. And mixing and matching healers allows you to play off of one anothers strengths and weaknesses. You could run dual RDruid for a 10 man, and it would work. But you would be better served by duoing with a different healer.

Ultimately, we would rather you bring 10 different classes than triple up on a few. There's a reason the game has so many classes and we want to see them all out there. However, we also realize that sometimes that just won’t happen. Maybe you can’t find a paladin that day, or maybe you have two Resto shammies that you really enjoy having in your raid. In those cases we don’t want you to call the raid or have to tell one of the shammies to stay home. Our goal was to give you guys more flexibility without making the healers total carbon copies of each other. I think we’ve done pretty well in that regard for LK.

Q u o t e:
Because they love Druids. Druids are the most powerful healer in the game, and yet they're the only class Blizzard will take the time to comment about. The most annoying part is whenever they do talk about Druids they seem to be making excuses in their defense. Whenever they talk about Priests it's to make excuses as to why they shouldn't be better. Although, to be fair that hasn't actually happened in quite a while.

Enjoy your ban. This is not a helpful comment, and I suspect you know that.

Q u o t e:
To comment on this, the GotEM change hurts when dealing with target swaping and chain dispels. With dispels you can't put up enough lifeblooms to out heal the damage (it is already really close) and on target swaps you can't get heals in fast enough to keep a person up. These are already a resto druid's weak points.

I'd suggest 2 things: Increase the bloom on lifebloom to where it was in 3.1 so spam dispels don't hurt as much, and put a 30% lockout reduction in either mid resto or low balance depending if you want moonkins to get it. That allows casted heals to be more of an option instead of lockout=dead.

A more likely change is something like letting GotEM keep its current (PTR) functionality but also letting it reduce the GCD of just Lifebloom.

Q u o t e:
Fact 1: they confirmed that they didn't want Druids to spam Rejuv on 15 people.

Nope. I must have said something that made people think we felt that way. If so, my bad. What we don’t want is for keeping Rejuv on 15+ people to be so effective. Part of my post above was to try and explain our point of view in hopes that druids would somehow grow out of the notion that Blizzard loves some druid spells and hates others.

Ghostcrawler

#95 - Oct. 22, 2009, 9:58 p.m.

Q u o t e:
Just curious, but why is one of these things more ok than the other? LB spam vs. Rejuv spam I mean.

Too much spamming of any one spell isn't ideal. It often means the spell is too good, but the devil is in the details.

At a very high level, you have to put Rejuv on lots of people. Even at an 18 sec duration, you can't put it on everyone in a 25 so you either pick at random, or hot your friends, or hopefully hot the folks most likely to take damage or who have taken a little damage. Rolling LB on 2-3 tanks requires less decision-making. When the little number starts getting down low, you refresh the LB. You aren't monitoring the situation or deciding who to target. You just hit the button.

Now, various healers will claim that's how they heal or that's how the class that they think is overpowered or the class they are trying to disparage heals. It depends a lot on your gear and the encounter as to whether e.g. the paladin can spam HL on the tank like a robot and literally do nothing else.

Ghostcrawler

#149 - Oct. 23, 2009, 1:50 a.m.

Q u o t e:
That topic is many pages long. The longest in the healing forum, and they still haven't got a straight response about updating it. So I feel like druids should still keep it up and let Blizzard know that their old and not updated forms for resto are unacceptable . Though I no longer play my druid that seriously because of this neglect that Blizzard has been having for their forms.

Please don't approach any thread here, even those that we start as needing "a straight response." That is just an unrealistic expectation for a community of our size in forums this active. We read every post. That's all we can really offer.

It's not even fair to say "Well, this is a really, really important issue," because every class has a long list of those. We read the feedback. If we agree then you might eventually see a change. But the list of what we want to do with WoW is very, very long.