So, now it looks less deadly. I still have to convince people in instances that standing in it is good, but that’s going to be a problem for all the class’ effects that are ground-targeted.

In terms of the spell mechanics, the healing it is doing is about 400 to 500 per tick at level 83, which actually makes it sorta average in terms of power, which I think is probably fine since it’s a talented bonus to regrowth, and NOT it’s own spell. Keeping effloresence from being overpowered is really important, because it would be a shame if we were encouraged to spam our flash heal (regrowth) until OOM as our primary healing strategy.

However, a 4 yard radius is really too small, because most of the time, the AOE heal effect is only going to hit one person. I think an 8 yard radius would be better.

In the current build (12803), regrowth’s crit rate is 60%  from talents, before gear. This feels like a talent bug to me because it really makes regrowth overpowered as a spell compared to other class’ flash heals, and compared to the other healing tools we have available. Either that 60% crit rate is supposed to be on people below 25% health, OR they need to have a lower (maybe around 20%) bonus crit rate that we have all the time. Leaving it at 60% before raid buffs or gear means that it will devalue crit as a stat, because it gives you a pretty low soft-cap for crit before it does nothing for Regrowth (and that is really what Blizzard has been trying to avoid by removing all the crit & haste bonuses from the various class’ talent trees).

So, in conclusion, effloresence in the current beta build has:

• Okay graphic
• Okay amount of healing done
• Too small of a radius
• too high of a regrowth crit rate

If they increased the radius & fixed the regrowth crit rate bug, it would be easier to evaluate the talent. As it is, I’m already spending too much time focusing on one of our many talents. However, having Effloresence be good without being overpowered will go a long way towards us being able to have our actual problems addressed, rather than just having regrowth + effloresence carry us through being a 1-button spammer through Cata.

Recently (as in late last night, or early this morning) I got suckered recruited into being a moderator on the Moonkin Repository’s forums, to help out with keeping things running smoothly. (The position comes with a free can of troll repellent, or so I hear).

In addition to adding me as a moderator, there are other changes up for discussion related to TMR. The most exciting of which (that impacts a lot of my readers) is the possibility of expanding into having a restoration druid & feral druid forum, in addition to the currently existing moonkin one. These new forums (after some discussion) will likely be separate forums that are all cross-linked together (so, you would have something like: the moonkin repository, the resto repository, and the feral repository – or whatever the name of each forum would be).

There is one discussion going on in the WoW druid forums. There is also additional information in the original post on TMR, as well as more recent updates about conclusions made from the feedback they received. Please go and express your opinions on the idea (either positive or negative feedback is welcome). You can also give your opinion on what the new forums should be named.

Also, if the resto & feral forums DO go live, we’re going to need the support of other resto & feral druids to help with increasing publicity, generally posting there and being helpful, and potentially even volunteers to help moderate those forums.

If it’s something you think we should do and something you think you would visit, please let me know. I know one person expressed concern about the resto forums possibly stepping on the toes of other forums like the Plus Heal forums, however I haven’t seen a big resto druid presence on the plus heal forums in a while.

It’s going to take some time to get a resto & feral forum up and running, but I will make sure to post updates here as things develop.

So, what do you guys think? Are the new forums a good idea? bad idea? Is a new feral & resto forum something that you would use, or think the community needs?

However, in Cataclysm, they have moved to a system where there is going to be positional healing, and you’ll have to stand inside of “good” ground-covering effects. However, Effloresence’s graphic is a little bit over-done, so now it looks like a slime puddle, especially if you have more than one stacked on top of each other.

Also, Effloresence is down to a 4 yard radius, which looks big, except that it’s really not.  So, the beta forums have reports of tanks & DPS moving out of the effloresence procs, because they didn’t know what it was, and it looks more like green lava or Putricide’s slime pools than something beneficial.

The instant-cast regrowth is working in tree form now, which is why some of my pictures are in tree form.

So, please don’t move out of effloresence, or it won’t heal you. /sad face

Personally, I think the graphic may need to get toned down a bit, so it looks less like something designed to kill you (especially when you stack up a couple procs in the same place, like I did for the last picture). Just about anything else in the game I’ve seen resembling effloresence is something that’s going to kill you if you stand in it. I’m not sure they want to train people to sand in green lava, and then move out of the other green lava that has a larger effect (slime pools in ICC and such).

They could also make the radius larger than the graphic, so that when people move out of it, they will still benefit from the heal.

I would discuss the other actual problems with the talent, but it’s hard to figure out what is intended versus a bug in the latest patch, so I’m avoiding making a blog post about it for now…

Moonkin Form Ghostcrawler’s post (click here):

At first we were trying to make it more of an option, so that cuddly-hating Balance druids could choose the spec without the shapeshift. After much discussion though, we’re going to go back to a Balance druid = Moonkin Form design. We’ll put some more damage into the Moonkin Form.

So, part of the problem that people had with moonkin form in Cata was that there wasn’t enough damage tied to it. With Furor giving the same int bonus in & out of moonkin form, that made it even more true (at this point, moonkin form is basically just an armor bonus & the group haste buff on the current beta build). So, it sounds like they’re going to have to make moonkin form more useful by adding more damage back to the form. That should make it something people still want to use. They did increase the damage portion tied to Master shapeshifter, but I think they should tie some damage increase directly back into the form.

Tree form’s movement speed debuff – GC’s post (click here):

I suspect we won’t end up keeping the snare on Tree of Life. We knew that we could try snare and then remove it. We would have a hard time trying no snare and then adding one. Our intent was to make you think about when was the best time to push ToL rather that just hitting it the second it’s off cooldown. In practice though we just think it feels crappy so even if it accomplishes our goal, it’s probably not worth it.

Part of the problem with the tree snare is that it doesn’t just make us have to think about when to use it – it makes the form dangerous to the guild’s progress if we use it at the wrong time. We should be choosing to use it when we need to do more healing, not when we know we’ll have a chance to stand still for 45 seconds (how often does that actually happen?). I’ve been saying for a while that I wanted the snare reduced or removed. I’ll be happy if it goes and we can actually choose to use it at the points in the fight when we need to do the most healing.

Changes to restoration Tier 1 & 2:GC says for the feral druids that:

“We have actually swapped Furor (now in Feral) and Heart of the Wild (now in Resto).”

In addition, Naturalist is now in Tier 2 restoration (reducing the cast time on nourish & healing touch

The latest talent announcements have done a good job of increasing the number of useful talents that are early resto tree so that now you get to make actual choices in your early talent decisions. There are still probably too many passive healing bonuses in the resto tree, but now you at least get to choose the talents. Beta talent changes are usually a slow process. One step at a time.

Resto discussion about AOE/raid healing in the forum threads by GC (click here):

As far as the AE healing goes, it’s definitely something to keep an eye on, but we’re not worried about it yet. We are trying to cut back (yet again) on the dominance of the smart AE heals. The cooldowns of CoH and WG need to stay high. We do have some room to lower the mana cost on WG, and probably will.

I personally think Wild Growth would work better at around a 35% to 40% mana cost, depending on what level 85 mana pools look like (ie. it would still take a big chunk of mana, but we would still be able to use it when we need it).

The fact that they want us to use less Wild Growth, however, is exactly why I wanted another AOE (non-smart) heal added to druids’ spell bar. The neat thing about Healing Mushrooms would be that we’d have to target it at a spot on the ground, rather than targeting people.  That would give druids the type of AOE healing tool they are giving to other classes (things that makes us have to watch something other than health bars), but it would have it’s own unique feel by using the same Detonate mechanic as the moonkin version.

It could also be possible to redesign tranquility to something we could use once every 1 to 3 minutes, rather than being limited to once every 8 minutes (ie. in a 15 minute heroic 5-man, we get to use tranquility like twice at such a high cooldown, making it something that we’ll even forget to use because the cooldown is so long).

On Rejuvenation:

We don’t like prehotting (or pre-shielding) as a general strategy. On certain fights where you know that the damage is going to come fast and furious then maybe it’s appropriate, but we don’t want the current LK style to continue. I’ve healed a lot as both Resto and Disc, so I know the power of prehealing, though it’s not as if you need first-hand experience to understand how useful and powerful it is.

On the other hand, if a lot of people take damage at once, we have no problem with getting a Rejuv out on several of them at once, and a lower GCD will help there. It’s still possible to screw that up (by which I mean we want healing to have some player decision-making as part of the gameplay) by using too much mana on Rejuvs or casting too many Rejuvs when the situation called for something else.

The problem is that our alternative to rejuv is regrowth, and regrowth costs more mana than a rejuv. So, if we are raid/AOE healing, and rejuv is actually the lowest mana cost of our tools that we can actually use, then putting rejuv on someone is always going to be the lowest mana cost choice. So, I still haven’t figured out what that “something else” we’re supposed to do would actually be.

At the point where rejuv is costing too much mana, we’re probably not going to be assigned to raid healing because we just don’t have the right tools for the AOE healing job if we’re not supposed to pre-HOT the raid anymore. We need a reactive AOE healing spell that heals more than one person at a time. The instant heal through talents on rejuv is so pathetic that it won’t really make more than a drop in the large health pools that people have. Regrowth with Effloresence is not going to flesh out our toolset enough, due to Regrowth costing a ton of mana (ie. we can’t spam it 4 or 5 times just to get efflorsenece to proc). We can’t force a regrowth crit because we don’t have a cooldown that increases our crit chance.

I still can’t figure out how druids are supposed to fill an AOE/raid healing role in 25-mans or 10-mans, since Blizzard is trying to discourage the only AOE/raid healing strategy we have. In a raid healing role, druids have no alternative to stacking rejuv & regrowth on multiple people. Just being able to rejuv-spam faster still leaves us with rejuv-spam. I don’t see how they can make rejuv, regrowth, & Wild Growth healing on the raid any better than what it feels like on Live right now.

We won’t really be able to use Nourish or Healing Touch very much as an AOE/raid heal, because it only heals one person at a time (and it will almost always make a heck of a lot more sense for chain heal or some other AOE heal to be used instead of single-target heals). Nourish & HT & lifebloom are part of our tank healing toolset that will never really be that great for raid healing (so they’re always going to make up a tiny % of our healing done when we’re assigned to raid healing).

The only real solution is to introduce a new AOE healing tool to our healing strategy, because giving us more AOE healing tools is really the only way to get us to use a wider selection of tools for AOE healing (which is exactly why shaman & paladin are getting new AOE healing tools in Cata).

On not having enough buttons to push:

Usually the feedback we get from druids is “I have these heals that I never use,” not “I don’t have enough heals.”

This is actually driven by the fact that druids have a lot of tank healing tools, but don’t have enough Raid/AOE healing tools. So, when tank healing, we have been using a lot of spells in WotLK, but since Paladins are more dominant in tank healing, druids tend to just be support tank healers, where we put HOTs on the tank and then spam rejuv & wild growth around the rest of the raid. So, if we’re tank healing in Cata, we will be using a lot of spells. However, for raid healing, we only have a few buttons to push in Cata (regrowth, rejuv, wild growth, swiftmend, & tranquility). While 5 spells seems like a lot, I still predict seeing regrowth & rejuv make up at least 80% of our healing done, with wild growth’s % of healing done dropping and being replaced by regrowth’s healing.

People don’t generally sit around coming up with what new spells we would need – because in WotLK, the pre-HOT strategy is great, and we’re viable in WotLK for raid healing. In addition, some healers are perfectly happy spamming one button all day long, so people never ask for more tools because they’re happy being one-button spammers. Druids tend to not use their tank heals while raid healing, and since we don’t have a big enough AOE/raid healing toolset, we tend to not push many buttons while we’re AOE/raid healing (and before WotLK, we would have NEVER been assigned to AOE/raid healing in the first place).

“Again, if the good healers were rewarded for their diversity, then everything would be peachy. The problem is that healing badly works really, really well. You may have a slight advantage over the “bad healers” with your strategy, but only a slight one. The ability to run yourself out of mana by casting inefficient spells when they aren’t called for will help the situation all by itself. Someone who casually Rejuvs the entire raid when people aren’t taking damage will just be OOM.”

The problem is that resto druids don’t have a reward for using a diverse spell toolset if we are AOE/raid healing. We’ll either have people dieing because we can’t heal more than one person at a time, OR we’ll have to do enough pre-HOTs and we’ll run OOM. I don’t see an AOE/raid healing role for druids that allows for smart choices to be made – because druid HOTs only work well if we start healing people at a higher % of health than people with direct heals would start healing them. Since druids don’t have a direct multi-target heal, we have to HOT people early & often in order to fill their massive health pools back up.

It’s because we don’t see a niche for it, while meanwhile buttons like Healing Touch get removed from bars or used only with NS.

Healing Touch is getting added back to our tank healing toolset in Cataclysm. However, using single-target direct heals as part of our AOE/raid healing toolset sounds generally rediculous. Due to raids needing healing assignments to reduce the amount of overhealing, the niche that is needed to fill is an AOE heal that we can choose instead of single-target HOTs or wild growth. We need one more multi-target heal that we can choose to use if we don’t want to run OOM trying to keep people topped off at 100%. If multiple people drop below 25%, druids have no way to get both people out of the danger zone in one GCD, and they are going to either die or need to be healed by someone else. So, to be able to be a reactive healer, druids need a reactive multi-target heal that we do not yet have, which would allow us to sometimes avoid pre-HOTs. Without a NEW direct AOE spell, there will be zero difference between a good & a bad druid AOE/raid healer, because we’ll just be assigned to tank healing when pre-HOT raid healing isn’t a good healing strategy.

So, lets take a moment to step back and look at the bigger picture of resto PvE healing in Cataclysm. It is still early in Beta, but I can still talk about how things are shaping up now (based on the data we have as of build 12694). However, a lot depends on what happens over the next several months, so it’s too early to let our weaknesses get us down.

What are PvE Resto druids in Cataclysm?

Some druids are worried about losing our HOTs, but Blizzard still has their focus set on them. Here is the description you see when choosing talent trees:

Uses heal-over-time Nature spells to keep allies alive, taking on the form of a tree when the need is most urgent.

So, our focus is still on our HOTs. However, rejuvenation & lifebloom won’t be the only buttons we push in Cataclysm. So, lets look at the tools we have:

Tank Healing as a druid in Cataclysm PvE:

The tank healing role has the most clear set of tools and comes together really well for druids.

• We have Lifebloom, which we will keep rolling on a single tank, since LB can only be on one target now.

• Rejuvenation will go on all tanks, since putting HOTs on multiple tanks is part of what druids do.

• Regrowth will be the fast flash-heal on tanks, in addition to being a HOT we should keep up on multiple tanks. Regrowth will be used when we need a fast heal and as a HOT. In this way, it serves a dual purpose role in our tank healing toolset.

• Nourish is a long cast, mana efficient heal. This is going to be our go-to spell to make sure we don’t run out of mana. It will also refresh the duration of lifebloom, so that you won’t have to cast lifebloom as often (though you will still have to refresh it directly some, since Nourish’s cast time is so long).

• Healing Touch has made it back into our healing toolset, since sometimes we will need a healing spell that hits harder than Nourish. HT is going to be a long cast, mana expensive tool, where we will need it when we need to heal up a big chunk of our tank’s health pool.

• Swiftmend is our instant-cast, short cooldown spell that requires a regrowth or rejuv to be on a tank (which is why our HOTs should be on all tanks at all times when tank healing).

So, tank healing will still be: keep HOTs on tanks, cast direct heals between HOT refreshes. I think this toolset will work great, and that we will be using a large variety of spells as tank healers in Cataclysm, and this will be a lot of fun.

Raid/AOE healing confusion:

While we have a very clear tank healing toolset, our way of being able to deal with raid damage done to targets has not really changed in Cataclysm.

• Wild Growth is a mana expensive, 10 second cooldown spell, that we won’t be able to use every 10 seconds due to mana costs.
• Rejuv will still be one of our primary AOE healing spells, although it’s a single-target spell. We’ll still have to use it proactively to have HOTs on targets to be able to swiftmend, and it will have an instant heal component when we put it on someone already taking damage
• Regrowth is going to be a raid healing tool, where we will gain an AOE HOT from an Effloresence proc when regrowth crits. We have a talent that increases the crit chance for regrowth on targets at low health, so Regrowth will be our go-to spell as a reactive HOT on people who are close to dieing.
• Swiftmend will be what we use after a rejuv or regrowth if we need more healing on the target
• Due to mana concerns, we’ll still have to sometimes cast Nourish, but hopefully we’d only cast nourish on tanks when we’re having mana issues and need to take a break from raid healing
• The best thing happening is that Tranquility is being changed, so that it will be more viable in Cataclysm. However, tranquility is still an 8 minute cooldown, meaning that we won’t get to use it very often.

The only change for druids in terms of raid healing is that we get to introduce Regrowth into the Rejuv/WG spam. So, now we have Rejuv/Regrowth/WG spam. This is the area of healing where we still fall short. Since our current style of Pre-HOT for raid healing isn’t supposed to be what we do in Cataclysm, I’m still not sure how this is going to come together, so raid healing is where I have gone on a crusade to save druids.

So, in conclusion, we have a great tank healing toolset, but we don’t have a good raid healing toolset. We have a ton of choice, flexibility, and fun in our single-target healing toolset, and we really don’t have a good multi-target healing toolset. We’ll have to see how this shapes up, but I could easily see druids going back to WG/Rejuv pre-HOTs around the raid just for lack of a better thing to do in Cataclysm, and that would make me sad.

But what about tree form?!?

Tree form is going to be a cooldown in Cataclysm. What the tree form cooldown needs is:

• The slow needs to be changed to be about 20%, rather than 50%.  We’re supposed to use tree form when the healing gets tough, but the healing is always the toughest during times where we need to be moving.
• Instant-cast regrowths becomes incompatible with a 50% slow that requires us to stand still, and thus tree form’s limitation prevents us from being able to benefit from the things designed to allow us to cast on the run.
• In addition, the limitation of lifebloom to one target (and nourish refreshing it) prevents the lifebloom bonus (applies 2 LB’s on a target instead of 1) from being useful, based on how it is worded. If it allowed us to keep LB on 2 targets instead of one, that would be more helpful for PvP, but that seems to be unlikely how the wording is intended.
• Maybe tree form could help us not run out of mana. A mana cost reduction would allow us to spam regrowth & wild growth (the only worthwhile healing spell boosts we get from the talent). Right now, tree form seems to be designed to make us run OOM faster.
• My focus right now is on making the tree form cooldown better, rather than fighting it’s becoming a cooldown. Right now, the cooldown isn’t quite right, but it’s close. My hope is that by the time Cataclysm comes out, they’ll have a nice tree form that we’ll want to use, rather than the currently somewhat confused tree form design.

Seeing the forest through the trees:

• Druids have a great interaction between HOTs and direct heals in Cataclysm for tank healing.
• Druids don’t have a good AOE healing toolset, and this is a particularly troublesome area of weakness that needs work.
• Tree form as a cooldown may be great when Cata comes out, but we aren’t there yet, and there is still a lot of work to do.
• The Beta is being patched every week, and so it’s too early to freak out or abandon the class. Instead, we need to focus on how to fix the things that are coming up short.
• We still do have a strength in HOT healing, and it’s a strength that Blizzard wants us to have. We’re going to be good healers in Cataclysm, but we still have a long way to go.

First, it takes 40% of stat A, and turns it into an equal amount of stat B. So, if I had 92 hit rating on an item, it turned into 56 HIT & 36 haste (56+32=92).

So, reforging is not going to be good for healers to turn Hit gear into healing gear, because you would still waste an incredible amount on Hit.

Also, when reforging, you can’t turn a bad stat into a stat that is already on the item:

So, lets take my Frozen Bonespike here. It had 59 spirit & 59 crit strike rating that I could reforge. However, in the list of stats to reforge, I could not choose either spirit or crit. If the item didn’t have spirit or crit on it, however, I could still reforge into those stats. This basically prevents people from being able to over-stack in one stat.

I could, however, drop my hit rating pretty significantly by knocking down every item with hit or spirit on it. Being able to avoid having so many spirit & hit pieces, however, would be so much easier.

So, at a 40% conversion rate, Blizzard is still going to need to make some leather caster gear without spirit on it, so that moonkin druids are not constantly way over the hit cap, or they don’t have to reforge every item (since almost every item I was wearing had either hit or spirit, including a lot of my set pieces that now having hit rating instead of spirit).

Here’s what the reforging UI looked like when I chose to turn spirit into haste rating:

After you choose “reforge”, it would show up with the new stats in your inventory. My stat character sheet was a little bit buggy still, so they do still have some kinks to work out of the system.

While reforging is nice for minor tweaks, it will NOT be able to make up for a lack of well designed gear for each class & spec.