Patch 7.2.5: Resto-Druid’s Decline

“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.”
Vincent Van Gogh

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Patch 7.2.5: Resto-Druid’s Decline

Today is June 8, 2017.
Best guess is that this patch will drop June 13, so anything written now is speculation. I spent some time reading the forums here.

We know that Resto-Druids alone of the healing classes are getting a 4% across-the-board nerf to their healing. This is the cause of some concern to Druid healers!

Here is the concern.

1. Now, at the end of Nighthold, Druid healers in mythic raiding are topping the charts. I only heal Normal and Heroic and have never felt like I was the master of the raid.
2. The reason for this is the powerful Shoulder Legendary and our four piece bonus set from Nighthold.
3. Testing on the PTR for Tomb has those raiders transferring their own characters so their numbers reflect the shoulders and Nighthold set bonus. So, in testing, the Druids look over-powered and so must need the nerf (I guess).
4. In patch 7.2.5 the powerful shoulders will be nerfed.
5. Early in Tomb, Druids with their Nighthold bonus sets will look pretty good, but as they progress they will get weaker and weaker in comparison to other healers.
6. Getting weaker will be because we will at first add the two-piece from Tomb on top of our four-piece from Nighthold and drop Legendary pieces in those slots (shoulders). Then, eventually move to the four-piece from Tomb and then still have the two-piece from Nighthold. Then, eventually drop the two-piece from Nighthold in favor of higher powered pieces; perhaps our Legendary pieces after we’ve gone through the painful process of upgrading seven or eight Legendary pieces from 940 to 970.
7. How long will it take to replace our Nighthold stuff, two months? It is over this arc of time that the Druid healer will be slowly, in comparison to the other healer classes, will get weaker and weaker.
8. Looking at the four-piece from Tomb, one can see that they are inferior to the set from Nighthold in design.
9. Conclusion: this will sneak up on us and make us feel worried that we are executing poorly when it isn’t our fault.

It is a disturbing scenario.

One can imagine that Blizzard is keeping it’s finger on the pulse and will fix or erase the nerf if Druid healing is sub-par; not because of our skills but because of their design. Remember that MW monks have been waiting for six months (for this 7.2.5 patch) to get fixed!

I can imagine some distress when we start Tomb as equals-or-better (if indeed Druids are currently over-powered) and then as we progress deeper into Tomb that we get less and less and less until we wonder why are we even here.

The other argument that I’ve seen is an interesting one.
If you are a Heal over Time healer, then your chart numbers SHOULD be really high because you are ticking along for the entire freaking raid! On-the-spot healers should not look as high because they are doing instant healings with big pops of their spells. That anyone would try to balance the over-all numbers to be equal is bad and not factoring in the style of healing brought by the different classes.

Healing by the Numbers Again

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”
Friedrich Nietzsche

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Healing by the Numbers Again

NB: If you spend too much time thinking about it, it might drive you crazy!

Context:
When I was a-huntering in WoD, everyone played Survival while it was the top DPS spec. One of the big lessons was on multi-shot because it had a bleed effect and was an AoE spell. The best way to play was to let those bleeds do their job over time while you might focus on a bigger mob. The temptation was strong to keep multi-shotting those adds to make them disappear sooner.

Overhealing:
I look at my Logs for our Heroic Gul’dan kill. Druid, Shammy and Holy Pally are all overhealing by a massive amount. The top three spells for each healer are between 25% and 50% overheals!

This is nothing new, overhealing is a measured thing on any meter-type addon. What is telling, I think, is that we are not letting our spells run their full course and heal up our players over time — which is our design.

Of course, I can not find the Dev postings from pre-Legion but, as I recall, the intention was that everyone would get used to never being fully topped up. Without Spirit to regenerate our mana, we’d have to be crafty with our resources. Also, tanks would be dependant on outside healing beyond their own resources, leaning heavier on the dedicated healers.

Clearly this is not happening at all. Our blood DK, a tank, often out-heals the healers. We healers will not allow players to not be topped off and will massively over-heal to get them topped off. The initial design did not work out.

Only the highest skilled group of players would see the original design intention. Those players would be under-geared by our standards, avoid the damage with aplomb and healers would allow their spells to run the full course. Resources would be an issue and each encounter would be executed like a well-drilled ballet. Sounds like the World First guys, doesn’t it?

We see in each encounter the potential for raid-wide damage destroying half of the players. And we can not allow that. So we over-heal and every healer does it; from the normal dungeon pug to the top mythic raid.

The healing numbers are skewed and are not telling much of a story. If everyone is over-healing then what could it possibly matter who the top healer is on the charts? The top healer is so anal-compulsive that he is topping off even the 95% healed. I would guess that ALL healers are a bit anal-compulsive; especially if they are looking at charts which we all are! Egads!

It would be tough for anyone to tell me to get my healing numbers up when Efflorescence is cooking along with 61% overhealing. In that case, I’m not doing anything but dropping a circle off cooldown.

As healers we will always be balancing the actual fight experience against the charts. It is as if we are playing two different games at the same time. If you think about it too much, especially overhealing, it might drive you nuts!

Legion: Healing Classes

“Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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Legion: Healing Classes

One of the killers for me in WoW is that some people know more about the game than I do. They are smart people, for sure, but seem to be able to grasp the much bigger picture by looking at a lot of information and drawing conclusions. The sub-set are the not-so-smart guys who come to the wrong conclusion yet feel that they must have their moment on the soapbox too.

In Legion, the healing numbers are much more balanced. Resto-Druids do not need to be benched in favor of a different class. Still, by class design some healers will be specialists in a sense.

Paladin Healers will excel at tank healing, this is Easy Street for them.
Shaman will be desirable for their cool downs.
Disc Priests bring some decent DPS, perhaps just enough to tip the scales on leading edge content.

One comment from the forums:
It appears that pallys and shamans may be the top doggies for Legions, at least that’s the feeling in my guild, and so the rest of us will be fighting for the remaining x spots where hopefully x is at least 2.

It has been noted that in the Legion Class Beta forums that Resto-Druids (as of June 26, 2016) have more pages on feedback than any other class. You can visit page 29 here, currently the last page.

Resto-Druids will be strong tank healers but it isn’t Easy Street. We have some powerful cooldowns but they are not frequent. Our through-put should be very good as we “heal over time” with our Mastery being the juggling act. We have some bad ass utility in our Affinity Talents. Our weakness could be the slow ramp-up time to get cooking.

Variables for Resto Druid will be our (eventual) four piece bonus sets which will likely force a Talent build and the size of the raid. Resto-Druid in a 20 main raid is crazy clicking to stack HoTs for mastery under a mana starved environment: I hope they fold some help into the design during Alpha/Beta.

I wish there was a published page that summed up the strengths and weaknesses of each healing class; so I could look at it and stamp it into my mind. The weakness should never be an excuse as we are much more balanced. I guess, I want to know what the expectations are for each kind of healer so that when I am teamed up with players I know what our team excels at doing.

Example: two pally healers and a resto-druid.
Answer: assign each pally to a tank and let resto do the raid healing.

Y’see, I don’t play pally healer but I can see that Beacon is straight up designed to be a tanking thing.

On The Other Hand:
Resto-Druids will be excellent in 5-man dungeons. Our stacking mastery is so strong that there is (currently) talk of putting a three HoT cap on our mastery; which would suck. Even with a cap, seeing a Resto Druid show up in your dungeon or on your Mythic + Dungeon group should make you feel exhilarated.

The Healer Tax

“True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.”
Kurt Vonnegut

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Mass Resurrection: Gone!

Mass-resurrect your party with Failure Detection Pylon. In Legion, only healers can mass-resurrect.

As an Engineer, the Failure Detection Pylon will be a handy toy. A bit like the Monk tank who can put some kind of statue out in the hallway to reset the boss, it has it’s own unique flavor.

As a Healer, I am one very unhappy camper. If we wipe in a raid or dungeon, I will be the one trudging back. My old raid leader called it the Walk of Shame and made everyone walk back but you know and I know that in general, everyone will take a break while I have to run, run, run back to resurrect everyone.

It is as if, by extension, that it is the Healer’s fault that we wiped and has to pay the punishment fee by walking back. I am unhappy, I thought that we were all in this together.

I read a lot about WoW on many sites. No one has talked about how guilds are being ignored in Legion. It is fucked up and I don’t like it. I think the designers at Blizzard are making a mistake. Adding social media does not make an equal correlation to having a supported robust guild support system.

Go ahead and relax, I’ll run back to rez you. /dbm break 4

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Resto Druid Legion: Raiding Talents

I look to the future because that’s where I’m going to spend the rest of my life.
George Burns

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Resto Druid Legion: Raiding Talents

Today’s Date is: Feb. 5, 2016

Remember, the designers want us to succeed.

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Healing considerations:

• Being assigned Tank Healer
• Being assigned Raid Healer
• Even damage vs Spiky damage
• Stack up big cooldown damage
• Raid composition with other healing specs

Every Druid healer has the same spells. Picking the Talents to compliment their role is the flavorful experience.

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For Tank Healing:
Focus on the Tank with healing on the team.

• Tier One: Cenarion Ward Protects a friendly target for 30 sec. Any damage taken will consume the ward and heal the target for [ 879.9% of Spell Power ] over 6 sec.
• Tier Five: Soul of the Forest When you cast Swiftmend, you gain Soul of the Forest.
  Soul of the Forest increases the healing of your next Regrowth or Rejuvenation by 200%, or increases the healing of your next Wild Growth by 75%.
• Tier Six: Cultivation: When Rejuvenation heals a target below 50% health, it applies Cultivation to the target, healing them for [ 108.4% of Spell Power ] over 6 sec.
• Tier Seven: Stonebark Reduces the cooldown of Ironbark by 30 sec, and it increases healing from your heal over time effects by 20%.

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For Raid-wide healing:
For heavy raid padding spread across all of the team.

• Tier One: Germination You can apply two Rejuvenations to the same target
• Tier Five: Abundance For each Rejuvenation you have active, the cast time of Healing Touch is reduced by 5%, and the critical effect chance of Regrowth is increased by 5%.
• Tier Six: Spring Blossoms For each Rejuvenation you have active, the cast time of Healing Touch is reduced by 5%, and the critical effect chance of Regrowth is increased by 5%.
• Tier Seven: Flourish Extend the duration of all of your heal over time effects on friendly targets within 60 yards by 6 sec.

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For Big Time Damage:
Raids with the stack up and get pounded experience

• Tier One: Germination You can apply two Rejuvenations to the same target
• Tier Five: Incarnation Shapeshift into the Tree of Life, increasing healing done by 15%, increasing armor by 120%, and granting immunity to Polymorph. Functionality of Rejuvenation, Wild Growth, Regrowth, and Entangling Roots is enhanced.
  You may freely shapeshift in and out of this form for 30 sec, at which point the shapeshift expires.
• Tier Six: Inner Peace Reduces the cooldown of Tranquility by 60 sec.
• Tier Seven: Moment of Clarity Increases your maximum energy by 30. Your Omen of Clarity now affects the next 3 Regrowths.

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With time, you’ll find your favorites and tend to ride them through most encounters. How different each boss is unknown.

Guides will tell you which Talents are best. They won’t break down assignments, encounters and composition. Learning the Talents and choosing by event is the best way to go.

Happy Healing!

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Resto Druid in Legion

“…But our princess is in another castle!”
Super Mario Bros

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Resto Druid in Legion

brez me, bro.

Today’s date is Feb. 5, 2016 — things can change.

Things can change but they won’t change much, the Devs have been pretty happy with Resto-Druid design. I could quibble, but I love my healer!

At first blush, the spec is getting a lot of flavorful quality-of-life improvements. Good things and some fun things.

• Balance Affinity for DPS (or feral or guardian).
• Ursol’s Vortex is a spell now (baked in) and Hurricane can be cast several times, stacking up for more damage.
• Thorns is back! It lasts 30 freaking minutes; back are the days of racing through mobs and pulling them all, standing in heals and casting hurricane! So, so very much fun.
• Mark of the Wild, the raid buff may be changing == stay tuned!

But, we are healers at heart.

There is a synergy between talents. One can choose to be very bursty or focused more on tank healing or overall raid healing or even five-man dungeon healing.

We will learn our talent tree well, I’m positive. We might find a favorite set of talents but we’ll probably be malleable.

The big change to see is the change in our Harmony.

Mastery: Harmony: Your healing is increased by 5% for each of your Restoration heal over time effects on the target.

You might think that is keeping very busy but there are a LOT of HoTs in our toolkit. Even Ironbark on the tank counts as a HoT.

What we do now: mushroom, lifebloom, rejuve and wild growth are already in our rotation — so nothing is changing except the painful need to keep Harmony up and the boost we get for doing more and more healing!

Harmony won’t stay at 5%, as you gear up this number will increase. Potentially you could see your heals riding at 60% over a long period of time!

Innervate is back! It is a free ten second run of heals at no cost — blow all of your cooldowns for free. You can cast it on other healers. I can see some Shammy Healer who thinks he’s amazing asking “Innervate me, bro”.

The tanks had better love me. Ironbark with the Stonebark Talent and rolling Lifebloom on top of a nice padded mushroom is some major tanking love!

Context and Perspective
The first pass through these talents makes me want to jump for joy. A big dollop of fun on top of a yummy talent tree will make Druids very good at padding the raid team — BUT, those thoughts are based on how I play today.

If mana is an issue (no Spirit!), I won’t be as free-wheeling with my spells.

In Mist of Pandaria, there were designs for huge bursty damage in which the raid team would stack up for a pounding. In Warlords of Draenor, the damage is much more even while still having some hot spots for big heals.

In Legion, while I don’t know, I imagine we’ll be back to “stack for a pounding” for our times of big bursty healing on everyone: otherwise, we’ll simply be out of mana.

They’ll have to design some mana regeneration time into the raid design.

I’m very pleased to see that some spells work much stronger “outside of a raid”. They are folding into the tooltips even now for dungeon healing.

In conclusion:
It will be totally fun to Resto-Druid heal in Legion. We will continue to do what we do best: run HoTs and sustain a raid plus decent tanking love.

Healing in Legion

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Sigmund Freud

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Healing in Legion

Today’s Date: Feb. 4, 2016 — Legion is a long way off!

I’m reminded of when our guild first began dungeons in Wrath of the Lich King. It was Utgarde Keep. We were in either the new questing greens or min/maxed Kara raid gear.

After every pull, we had to sit, eat and drink. If the dps didn’t bring their own food, they had to be healed by the Healer who would have to sit back down and drink again. Mana regeneration was slow, very slow, in that early gear.

Loading screens remind us that we can now eat and drink at the same time! That was from Wrath of the Lich King.

Today we could not imagine stopping after every pull. After a tough boss maybe, but not after every single pull on a group of mobs.

I wonder how well Dungeons will be designed in Legion. Dungeons will offer gear that is almost as good as raiding gear, a big change from Warlords of Draenor. There will be a lot more emphasis on dungeoning, for sure, part of our weekly life-style. Looking for that one trinket to drop …

I can see mana management in a raid with two other healers over a five to twelve minute raid encounter. I can see that it could be part of the fun as a healer.

In a dungeon, there is one healer. How can the management of mana for the entire dungeon run be part of the fun — say 20 different groups of trash and 5 to 7 bosses?

Our Spirit will be gone in Legion. Our mana bar will fill up with a steady but slow tick, tick, tick.

We might want to learn First Aid after all!

Healing in Legion

“Sometimes, we are literally watching. Sometimes, you could be fighting a dragon, and there could be an invisible gnome flying in mid-air, overhead, looking down at you. … Gnomes. Specifically – only gnomes, actually. No other races, just gnomes … watching your every move, and laughing at you when you wipe.”
Ion Hazzikostas alias Watcher

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Healing in Legion

Today’s date is: Feb. 2, 2016.

It is early, very early in Alpha.

As I understand it Tanks are going to be nerfed. They will no longer be their own independent fiefdom standing with back-against-wall and fending off the Big Bad while the followers to the leader pick off adds.

Tanks will still take constant damage but will need healing. Healers are being re-designed to specialize in Tank-healing. Big heavy-duty raid-wide spells like Tranquility are being nerfed or come with a very high cost.

Healing spells from the past (which is still today) like Beacon and Shield which skewed healing to the degree that if you didn’t bring a Disc Priest you were “doing it wrong” according to Watcher — are being nerfed.

Mythic Raiding on a hard-core level demanded a Holy Paladin, Disc Priest and “one other” to be successful — that is changing too.

Of course, there are many questions since it is very early in the development of this next expansion. Healers will be given “meaningful” (their word, not mine) DPS which will help with leveling through zones and leveling up the center-piece of this expansion: the Artifact Weapon.

Will this “meaningful” DPS translate to raids for healers as still meaningful?

Will the raiding encounters reflect this changing design philosophy?

Will healing be fun and not an exasperating chore?

We long-time Healers are a unique group. Of all the millions of players in this game, we are the only ones who put the group ahead of the individual. We don’t even have decent measurement tools to study our efficiency.

I think it is crucial that as they nerf the Healing classes that somehow they also make us powerful heroes. We are studs, tough guys and compassionate. We are zealots when it comes to our healing class and also zealots in protecting the raid team.

Praise Elune that gone are the days of the First Finger to point after failure was the healing. Healers always got blamed first and I don’t see that (much) anymore. Those were cold dark days with little defense.

When the Raid is done, thank your Healers. We are not only being hit with the Nerf Bat, we are still responsible for you to make it alive.

Legion Healing

“Every one is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is. Love is a
sacrament that should be taken kneeling.”
Oscar Wilde

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Legion Healing

Seeing Legion way (way) down the line, it is fun to follow how the changes are being tried and, best of all, the “blue posts”.

A “blue post” is when a Developer joins in the forums with a knowledgable response. Almost always it is a defense because players spin out of control when they don’t have information and begin making huge assumptions.

Healing is being nerfed (again). In this version, we no longer have Spirit as a secondary. Spirit is gone. Mana regen will be ticks on the clock, scary. I have never wanted healing to be solely about mana management (sorry).

Blue Post:

• 1) It’s definitely still intended that you consider mana costs in choosing heals. I wouldn’t agree with the characterization that any changes (recent or otherwise) reflect an abandonment of this. It’s widely accepted among players that mana became overly abundant at high ilvls in past expansions, which did in some cases undermine the resource management aspect.

I cherry-picked the above from a much larger post.

What I see is players complaining now about being bored healing. They are stupid whiny assholes. They are pressing for “meaningful” dps to fill their bored empty little heads.

The reason they have so much mana is that everyone has finally learned all the fights and mastered the movement.

You hear no mana complaints on progression nor do you hear about bored healers. It is the 20th Archimonde kill that is smooth and on farm and it is their own fault for re-doing content to the point of boredom.

Stupid healers ask:

• Similar to the above, it is less about power and more that it feels bad to be asked to justify why your spec should be brought when another spec brings X ability and not have an answer.

Have mercy on our Devs! They are reading that whiny stuff every single day.

Resto Druid Legion

“Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.”
Malcolm X

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Blizzard Designers – What are they thinking?

Before Warlords of Draenor came out, I read up on Druid healing. Gone was my five minute mushroom with its big boy bloom. Mana would be an issue because they wanted it to be more “exciting’. I think even in their articles they put “exciting” in quotes, knowing that it was a con.

I’ve enjoyed healing in WoD. It never bothered me to run out of mana, I could still cast Rejuvenation. If we were to that point, we were hanging on our finger-tips as a team.

I love the design overhaul each expansion. It is like getting a new game within a familiar game.

A year from now, we’ll be wondering “what were they thinking?” I very much remember being pissed at the Oregorger fight because it was a Pac Man layout and theme. I felt it had no business in my fantasy game. Others were quick to say that they loved it, which is good, very good.

It is early in the Alpha for Legion. The game designer Celestalon posted Tank & Healer Ability Tuning. It forwards the philosophy of the future of healing, tanking and their synergy.

Tanks are pissed, lol. They have been extremely independent in WoD. I see it myself, I don’t worry too much about my raid tanks — they take care of themselves just fine.

But, the designers are right.

I miss my relationship with the tanks. In past expansions, they were “my tanks”. Or even one player might by “my tank”. I took ownership of their health and over time we’d get a rhythm for success in our playstyles.

I am very much interested in having meaningful spells. As a Resto Druid, I need to anticipate a lot: I hope they give me “oh no!” heals too.

It is a big project to keep working on. In MoP, the fights led up to huge damage points where we’d have to stack and plan and heal. That smoothed out in WoD. Next, the tanks will have to learn to take damage which means not huge spiky damage but even damage — I hope it doesn’t get too bland!

In a year from now, I’ll be grumpy and wondering what where they thinking? Or … I’ll be strong and powerful and healing as a champion of Azeroth.

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