Disclaimer: When reading this post, DO NOT use it as an excuse to cry about the sky falling, as the sky is definitely not falling. Please keep comments & feedback based on this post constructive, since problems examined in this post CAN (and likely will) be addressed before Cataclysm goes live. Please do not go EMO on me, as the point of this thread is to get things examined before Cataclysm actually goes live. Thanks!

Druid multi-target heal base mana costs:

• Wild Growth: 55% base mana, 10 second cooldown, heals 5 people, HOT.
• Tranquility: 32% of base mana, 8 minute cooldown, heals 5 people, Channeled HOT.

Priest multi-target base mana costs:

• Circle of Healing: 21% of base mana, 10 second cooldown, heals 5 people, instant cast, direct heal
• Devine Hymn: 41% of base mana, 8 minute cooldown, heals 3 people, channeled spell, HOT.
• Prayer of mending: 18% of base mana, 10 second cooldown, jumps to heal up to 5 people.
• Holy nova: instant cast, 15% of base mana, heals people within 10 yards of caster.
• Prayer of healing: 3 second cast, 36% of base mana, heals a 5-man group, direct heal.

Shaman multi-target base mana costs:

• Healing Rain: 46% of base mana, 10 second cooldown, heals 5 people, HOT.
• Chain heal: 17% of base mana, 2.5 second cast, heals 3 targets, direct heal

Paladin multi-target base mana costs:

• Healing Hands: 40% of base mana, 1 min cooldown, HOT that heals all people within 10 yards,
• Light of the dawn: 21% of base mana, 30 second cooldown, direct heal to all people within 30 yards.
• Paladins also have Beacon of Light to get 50% of their healing done also done to a secondary target with Beacon on them. However, their other AOE-style heals seem to be on long cooldowns.

Druid level 80 mana costs:

• Level 80 mana costs (no mana cost reduction talents): Wild Growth is 1922 mana, Tranquility is 1006 mana.
• Single-target heals that could be used for raid healing: Regrowth is 1223 mana, Rejuv is 874 mana, Nourish is 219 mana.

Tier 2 in the balance tree (which druids can’t get if we pick up Heart of the Wild from feral), only our single-target spells (nourish, HT, regrowth, & rejuv) are reduced by up to 9%.

Priest level 80 mana costs:

• Circle of healing is 811 mana, Devine Hymn is 1545 mana, Holy Nova is 579 mana, Prayer of Mending is 695 mana, Prayer of healing is 1390 mana.
• Single-target heal costs: Renew is 811 mana, Heal is 231, Flash heal is 1081, Power word: Shield costs 733 mana.

From Tier 2 in the holy tree, priests get a mana reduction of 15% on their heal, greater heal, renew, divine hymn, and Tier 1 discipline gives them another 12% mana reduction on any of their instant cast spells (which would include renew, circle of healing, Holy nova, prayer of mending, etc).

Shaman Level 80 mana costs:

• Chain heal: 747 mana before talents, Healing Rain is 2022 mana (1922 mana after talents),
• Riptide is 412 mana, Lesser healing wave is 1186.

Tier 1 resto for shaman has a 9% mana cost reduction on all of their healing spells.

Analysis of what it all means: I don’t have a level 80 paladin to get mana costs for their heal spells. However, with paladins’ current roles being focused on tank healing, the strength of their AOE healing tools is less of a concern than for druids, who typically put HOTs on the tank and then raid heal in the current WotLK design.

With mana problems being something likely to occur in Cataclysm, the class balance of raid healing tools is going to matter, where the people less likely to run OOM while raid healing will be the ones most likely assigned to raid healing.

Looking at the mana cost & tools available, shaman and holy priests are going to make much better raid healers than druids, because the tools available to them allow for fairly mana efficient raid healing, by mixing lower mana cost spells with higher mana cost spells.

Unfortunately, all druids have to raid heal with are either very expensive AOE heals, or very expensive single-target heals. There isn’t anything besides Nourish (a single target heal that other classes are unlikely to raid heal with) that has a reasonable mana cost out of druids’ tool set. We get no additional benefit at all if we cast nourish on non-tanks, as the Lifebloom refresh is likely to only happen if we cast nourish on the tank.

Level 83 druid mana costs: While level 80 mana costs don’t look that out of hand, if you actually take the level 83 mana costs, you can see why the mana costs might start to get out of hand for druids:

• My total mana pool at level 83 is: 34,912. My in-combat regen is 377.
• Druid spell amounts: Wild growth is 5,248 mana. Tranquility is 2,747.
• Single-target heals that could be used for raid healing filler (no moonglow): Regrowth is 3,339. Rejuv is 2,385 mana. Nourish is 600 mana.

In combat, at level 83: I can last for about 20 seconds worth of healing if I cast nothing but wild growth & regrowth (no buffs, with talents, no innervate). I last 25 to 30 seconds casting rejuv & wild growth (no buffs, with talents, no innervate). In 5 minute fights, we just won’t have the mana resources in raids to work as raid healers because Wild Growth will drain our mana pool too fast.

Wild growth with rejuv & regrowth weaved between them is not going to work for AOE healing for druids, because all 3 are really mana intensive heals. While my mana pool is also larger, the smaller base mana costs for other healers’ spells (besides shaman’s healing rain) makes druid healers at a mana cost disadvantage in Cataclysm.

Conclusions & suggestions for improving:

While I’m not usually one to freak out over the current state of Beta, I would like to highlight the fact that druid AOE/raid healing tools need a second look.

The best thing to do would be to make Wild Growth cost A LOT less mana, so that we can use it every time it’s off cooldown. If Wild Growth is going to stay prohibitively high, then druids need another multi-target heal in our toolset (like chain heal that shaman have, which costs less mana than druids’ regrowth, rejuv, & wild growth). Spamming mana-expensive single-target heals between refreshing a super expensive AOE heal is not going to work as a healing style. Thus, druids are not currently a good choice for raid healing in the current class design, due to not having a lower mana cost raid heal that we can weave between our more expensive raid healing tools. Instead, all of our raid healing (AOE and single-target HOT) tools are prohibitively expensive for us to work as raid healers in the current Beta design.

Instead, we have pretty strong tank healing tools, so we’d be assigned only to tank healing, where we will save Wild Growth for Omen of Clarity procs, because by level 85, the mana cost is going to be prohibitive to cast it without an OOC proc.  Even tree form’s cooldown encourages us to spam our mana-expensive flash heal (regrowth) without a mana cost reduction on it, with tree form not having an effect for Nourish.

If we could proc effloresence from Nourish, then Nourish could possibly be used as a raid healing tool – however, effloresence is highly unreliable, and when it does proc, people could always accidently move out of it without knowing. We can’t use lifebloom as a raid heal, since lifebloom can only be on one person at a time, so our mana efficient heals don’t work as raid healing tools right now.

Another fix for resto druids could be giving us more mana reduction talents in the resto tree somewhere accessible, so that we will be able to be a competitive raid healer. Moonglow could also be moved to Tier 1 Balance, so that it’s more accessible to restoration druids (with Nature’s Grace moved to Tier 2 balance instead). Reducing rejuvenation’s mana cost could also work for helping to keep resto druids raid-heal viable – However, it would encourage druids to use the same rejuv/WG-spam that we do now (though there is not much breaking this trend in Cataclysm, anyway, since Wild Growth costs too much for us to spam regrowth between refreshing WG).

Now, they want us to have to make choices about how to not run out of mana. However, I don’t feel like we have a choice – because I don’t think Nourish will work as a raid healing tool, so at this point I feel like we have to focus mostly on tank healing, without AOE healing for druids being something very viable compared to shaman or priest AOE healing (with druids probably still being ahead of paladins on AOE healing, due to paladins having such high cooldowns on their new AOE healing tools). There is plenty of time for Blizzard to work on mana costs, and GC may be mad at me for looking at class balance this early. However, I think that looking at JUST mana costs of AOE spells is a focused enough feedback report that it was worth doing. I’m also not sure how base mana will scale for shaman & priests from 80 to 83, since I don’t have a level 83 priest or shaman. I also don’t know what class balance will actually look like at 85, and I don’t know what plans Blizzard has in store for future talent builds.

So, here’s what we know so far (DOTs & crit – hase? Yes, please!):

First, they seem to have made a similar DOT mechanic change across both priests & warlocks. I expect druids to benefit from this, as well, and I’ll be pretty mad if we don’t:

• (from the priest review): All (priest) HoTs and DoTs will benefit from Haste and Crit innately. Hasted HoTs and DoTs will not have a shorter duration, just a shorter period in between ticks (meaning they will gain extra ticks to fill in the duration as appropriate).

This is going to make haste a very desirable stat for resto & moonkin if this change really does go through. It will go a long way to making crit more desirable for resto druids if all our HOTs can crit. If it’s not in Friday’s preview, I expect to still see it by Cata for at least moonkin. For now, I can just do the guessing game. I would be really happy if this was a sweeping change that effected all classes, and not just a couple of them, really. The problem with haste before is that it made HOTs & DOTs last for a shorter period of time, so there was a pretty huge cost/benefit ratio, which would be going away with this mechanic change.

Priest & Shaman both got new lower-level abilities:

This is actually really promising, because it means they thought about re-balancing classes at the lower levels, in addition to giving interesting tools at the higher levels. I posted a long time ago about lower level abilities, which I thought druids needed to make the earliest levels more fun. So, I’m hoping they’ll announce something about druid lower-level abilities. While it seems that they focused more on healing spells, they did do one change for Enhancement shaman for leveling damage purposes.  Also, since bear is losing (the current version of) maul, it’s likely that they will announce & further clarify what maul’s replacement ability is for having a button to mash while leveling 10 to 20 (or, maybe they’ll give us cat form earlier – one can only hope!). What they’ve discussed as the new mechanic for maul won’t be the same kind of spam-able ability that it is now (and would work better if there was other buttons at level 10 to push).

Shaman and priest both got movement & escape utility abilities:

The most interesting change I saw out of the previews is a shaman ability, where they seem to be introducing the “cast on the run” mechanic:

• (Shaman Ability): Spiritwalker’s Grace (level 85): When this self-targeted buff is active, your spells are no longer interrupted by movement and possibly even by your own attacks. This will give shaman of all three specs another way to heal or do damage when it’s necessary to move in both PvE and PvP. Instant cast. 10-second duration. 2-minute cooldown.

Moonkin have been asking for mechanics similar to this for a long time (ie. in Burning crusade, we asked to make meleekin more viable with being able to cast while attacking in melee. In WotLK, moonkin made a big push to get the “spells no longer interrupted by movement” mechanic – neither of which we ever got). I’m happy to see that Blizzard is putting this into the game mostly because it’s no longer an impossible thing to ask for. I’m also really excited for my resto shaman alt that is lacking mobility.

They are also giving two movement-utility abilities to priests (one makes them move faster, and one lets priests pull raid members out of fires). This makes me hopeful that they will give moonkin some sort of ability or mechanic that addresses our movement issues (and if they don’t, this will be one area for us to continue working on).

Other ability predictions & conclusions:

• We know that Gift of the Wild & Mark of the Wild is losing the spirit bonus. (as stated in the priest preview)
• Healing ability changes for shaman & priests lead me to believe that they probably plan to make Healing Touch more viable as a healing tool, and possibly adding another direct healing tool for druids, as well.
• They are getting rid of the “5-second-rule” for mana regen after casting, but still want mana to be a concern for healers. This was talked about in the priest preview & generally should apply to resto druids.
• Moonkin should still be getting a talent that turns spirit to hit rating (they told us previously, & it showed up in the Shaman talent preview).
• We haven’t seen any melee previews yet, so there’s not much I can say about bear & cat at the moment. However, I will focus on bear & cat as much as possible between now and Cata’s release. I know that feral druids have lost a lot of the strong voices from their community over time, and so I’m willing to be the champion for all druid specs. I’m an equal-opportunity druid!
• Regardless of what the preview looks like, it will be more of an appetizer than a complete meal, meaning that it will really be hard to analyze changes like these out of the context of actually seeing them in-game. A lot of things (like Eclipse) looked great on paper, but didn’t feel so great in practice.
• If I am able to secure a beta invite, I will work really hard testing the druid mechanics in-game as much as my time will let me. Even if I don’t, I will still work really hard at giving feedback to the developers and to the larger druid community, because that’s what I do. I’ll mark any class mechanic posts with the “Cata class mechanics” label (or something similar), and if I’m going to post about non-mechanic things (ie. world changing, lore, or whatever), then I’ll make sure I warn about spoilers at that point, too.

All my gearing frustration, however, just makes me want Cataclysm to come sooner. So, lets take a look at what has me so excited about gearing my moonkin in Cataclysm.

Here’s a quote from my post at the Blizzcon Class pannel:

Reforging – Customizing gear. Relatively cheap. Given to blacksmiths, leatherworkers, tailors, Jewelcrafters, & Engineers. Reduce one stat for more of another (some restrictions apply).

Now, there are tons of items right now where I go: That would be great except that it has X stat instead of Y stat. We could turn a spirit-heavy resto item into a spirit-light moonkin item (since we were told no spirit for moonkin).

So, I did some digging around, and here’s is some info I’ve been able to dig up on reforging:

It’s too early to go into a lot of detail on the new features, but the basic idea here was to make an undesirable drop possibly more desirable. It still shouldn’t compete with gear that is actually itemized for you.

As an example, letting someone turn stamina into a dps stat is something we’d be unlikely to do (or at least impose a lot of restrictions) since that lets you turn an undesirable stat for most characters into something good.

Think of reforging more as a consolation prize or as a way to work around things like hit caps, and not the kind of thing that clever players are going to be able to use to vastly min max their character power.

Along with this one here:

Imagine reforging could work like enchanting, where there are specific recipes that everyone knows. Example: “Converts Spirit into 50% equivalent hit rating on gloves.” I’m not saying it would work like this, but something along those lines would be pretty comparable to existing features.

I still think that being able to turn spirit into a DPS-friendly stat, or changing hit rating into another stat (OR adding hit rating to an item if needed) could be a very powerful use fo this feature. I would like to think that they would design Reforging so that hybrids like moonkin (who they never really want to design specialized gear for) will benefit a lot from this kind of change. We don’t really need to change stamina into damage dealing stats, but we will benefit from being able to turn healer gear into DPS gear.

What stats moonkin should want in cataclysm:

• Int (will give spell power), hit, haste, crit, & the new mastery stat.

What stats resto should want in cataclysm:

• Int (will give SP), spirit, haste crit, & the new mastery stat.

So, the theory would be that moonkin could potentially take the healing gear with spirit and turn it into something worthwhile for us, and resto could take something without spirit to turn it into something with spirit.

But there’s always a catch. Here are the Potential Problems:

• It may only remove half of the unwanted stat, leaving gear with half the unwanted stat (ie. hit or spirit for caster leather). So, that gear really would be sub-optimal and perhaps make the reforging system not actually all happy like I first thought it might be.  This would leave Blizzard still having to make leather without spirit on it for moonkin, as we wouldn’t be able to remove all the spirit from healing leather.
• EDIT: It may also potentially be designed take more than it gives back, IE. taking all the spirit but only giving you half the value back in another stat, which would mean the item ends up not really being a replacement for well-itemized gear for that slot. If you have to do this for half your gear for end-game raiding, suddenly you are losing out on an awful lot of stats you could have had with better itemized gear in the first place.
• If Blizzard has further incentives for classes to use their highest armor type (in this case, leather for druids), moonkin may be more prohibited from wearing cloth than we already are, and the reforging system may have raid leaders being more reluctant to let moonkin take cloth drops. Add to that the fact we can’t roll “need” on cloth from 5-man dungeons, and things may still be tricky for moonkin to gear up in Cataclysm.
• Blizzard has a long history of not wanting to make item drops that only one spec of one class will want to wear. Since Moonkin & elemental shaman are niche-specs that tend to not be super abundant in raid groups, I’m betting that these two specs will still have a hard time gearing up in Cataclysm raid dungeons, since Blizzard may see reforging as the best way to let us turn healing gear into DPS gear, which could potentially leave moonkin with really still sub-optimal gear and no way to turn all the junk stats into stats we want.

Conclusions:

Reforging has the potential to be a great opportunity for Blizzard to deal with specs like moonkin & elemental shaman that can’t just DPS in healing gear (and shouldn’t heal in hit rating gear), but don’t otherwise share gear with anyone else.

However, the only way for reforging to fill this role is if ALL of spirit or hit rating can be removed from an item and converted into a wanted stat for other specs that share the gear. Otherwise, Reforging is never going to let casters and healers share gear, and will leave us with the same problems with gearing that we have right now. It also needs to give back enough of the wanted stat so that you aren’t losing huge chunks of stats if you are forced to reforge rather than be given good options for your gear. These may also be the only two stats where removing all of it from an item should need to be an option. I’m sure melee classes would benefit from being able to remove all the hit from an item, so that they could turn hit-rating pieces into something useful for them after they reach the hit-cap. In this case, everyone could win.

I think my shaman is suffering from something that Shields UP describes in a guide to mastering shaman healing: “Many shamans new to shaman healing fail at choosing the appropriate spells for the right situations.” I believe this is true, even for my shaman. I have mastered how to choose the right druid heal for the right situation, but for my shaman, I feel a little like I don’t have enough tools, so I just tend to button-mash whatever feels right at the moment, which isn’t living up to my potential. The guide at shields up has a lot of really great advice about learning shaman healing, with links to additional resources in the post that can help you with choosing the right shaman heals.

Shaman healing used to just be all about spamming chain heal. However, mindless chain-heal spamming is just as ridiculous as only rolling lifebloom is for druids right now. Burning Crusade one-button-spamming healing strategies just doesn’t work anymore.

Another great resource for learning about shaman healing is the guide over at slash hug. This guide goes into the basics of talents, spells, addons, gear and stats for people who are new to playing a resto shaman. While written back in May, I think it’s still fairly up to date & relevant.

These two are good starter guides. What else do you use for learning shaman healing at level 80? If I dig up some other guides, I may re-edit this post to add some more.

I haven’t done the shooting horde bosses with my new toy yet. I’m waiting for later when it’s not as popular so I can sneak into the cities with my stealth druid.

Have you gotten all the Winter’s Veil holiday achievements yet?

I do, however, have a shaman (Lissiel) that I played for a while during Burning Crusade. I had a couple months where I just didn’t like rolling lifeblooms and being at the bottom of healing meters, so I rerolled the king of all BC healing: The shaman!

I healed raids several months as a resto shaman in Burning Crusade, and my druid became my non-raiding character for a while. I did really good as a chain-healing shaman in my raiding group, and I was much happier. A number of months later, due to the improvements that resto druids underwent for WotLK, I faithfully returned to my druid, and left my shaman mostly abandoned as I raced into Northrend’s frozen lands.

So, over this year’s Thanksgiving break, my shaman finally hit level 80 – mostly out of boredom waiting for patch 3.3 to hit. However, I had leveled up as Enhancement most of the way from 70 to 80, so I hit 80 with mostly level 70 gear left over from BC raiding (and only some quest blues as healing upgrades).

The new instance mechanics have made it really easy to gear up my shaman alt. I melee’d my way through a handful of heroics, and came out with pieces of my melee and healing sets. Nothing spectacular, but good enough.

This week, I was called on to use my healing spec (which I had set up when I hit 80). I had my new spec, the glyphs I had bought off the AH, and thought that I was all ready to go. However, what we were going to run was the “normal” versions of the brand new Icecrown instances. Not really the best place to be trying out your healing spells for the first time in a year.It was difficult for me to figure out how all my abilities and talents actually worked together. It was an all guild run, so I didn’t have to worry about embarrassing myself in front of PUGs (otherwise, I would have just healed on my druid).

I died a lot as I learned how to heal with my new healing style, while also being pretty under-geared at the start of the night (I was equipping any caster item that dropped over the night, and had a couple good upgrades by the end).

My biggest fail was that I hadn’t put the minor glyphs into my resto set that were in my Enhancement set, so I didn’t have the Ankh’s that I needed to self-res. So, when I died, I couldn’t self-res because I didn’t have it glyphed in that spec, and I hadn’t needed reagents for it because my Enh set glyphed it a long time back. Eventually, I had to take a quick Reagent run during our night of dungeon crawling.

Over the course of the night, I was able to re-learn how to heal on my shaman again. However, the best way to get better at playing a character is just to jump head-in (hopefully with a supportive group of guildmates), and just start healing!

One of the nice parts of the random dungeon system is that it won’t let you into an instance if your gear isn’t up to par for doing that content. So, you can try to queue up for things at your level (you may want to start with normal dungeons before heroics). I had to do more than just chain heal, and I learned that I could riptide the tank to boost my chain heal, and then cast 2 lesser healing waves that crit more, and then I could probably cast another chain heal or riptide again after that, and so on.

There is some general advice for making the transition, which transcends what class you are playing. These points became really obvious to me as I picked up a new character that I didn’t already know really well.

When you are leveling up and want to start healing at 80 is, what you do need to do is:

A) Get healing gear as you level up, and don’t try to heal in melee gear or something silly like that. You can also run some instances as DPS and pick up spare healing upgrades until you know the content and have the gear to succeed.

B) Make sure you have the talent spec, reagents, and glyphs necessary to do your job right.

C) Set up your UI so that it’s possible to do what you want to do.

D) It helps if you dual-spec into healing from earlier, and get practice as you level up. This is why I added a dual-spec healing guide for 40 to 79.

E) Practice, because practice makes perfect! As much as you can try to prepare by reading guides and such, only really getting in and playing with your spells will allow you to develop your healing style. Start with easier dungeons and work your way to harder ones.

I have an enhancement spec & a resto spec. I’m working on getting them geared up, and such. I’ll be doing some more shaman research soon and I’ll probably do a shaman-related post or two over the next few weeks as I work on gearing up that character some more on non-raid days.