Resto Nerfs INC

NERFS?

In case you have been hiding the last week, there are 2 significant changes queued up for raiding resto Druids. The Druid community is quite up in arms. Its not that often that Resto Druids get all bent out of shape. Our raiding Trees are generally a pretty easy going bunch. But oh they are upset now!

NERF 1: MY MANA!

First let it be known that I am a mana pig. I use it, abuse it, and drool over it. Some mobs hits me for 15k damage? Oh, he hit me. Some mob steals like 3 mana from me? ITS ON!!

We are getting our spirit based mana regen nerfed. To the ground baby! Its really the out of 5 second rule regen that is getting nerfed though. I don't know about you, but I really don't get much time out of 5SR. I could probably take it, but don't really need to. Heck, I have become quite fond of spamming the crap out of Nourish lately. Its pretty inefficient on the ol' hallowed mana bar, but its really fast. Its great for sniping raid heals, I mean for keeping the raid alive. With Replenishment, I don't have to worry about mana very much. Add in a Ret Pally, and I just don't have mana issues. Some mobile fights I will have to think about mana, but very few.

So is this really going to hurt us? Well geared Resto Druids? I don't think so really. If anyone, it is going to hurt people in quest blues just starting heroics. Remember how bad mana was for you back then? I have tried hard to forget. Mana pig, remember?

NERF 2: LIFEBOOM

This is the one that has me scratching my head over here. Basically, Lifebloom costs twice as much mana! But wait, if you let your stack bloom, you get half the mana back. Huh?? Who came up with that one?

So what this means is that if you keep rolling stacks up, you are going to take the mana cost in the shorts. Hard. Well well, mana may become quite an issue after all.

However, there is a possible silver lining here, one that takes quite a change of thinking to get in to. Its Nourish. Its getting buffed. Could even be Godly buffed. You know that spiffy little talent that makes Regrowth crit practically all the time? Its going to affect Nourish as well! The crit chance is actually being lowered some, but still, the "wow" potential is high! If you ahve every done some Nourish spamming, you know how quick those heals start flyng when you get a good crit train going. Now triple that crit chance. YEEEEE HAAW!

BUT WHY?

Why the mana regen nerf? Why the Lifebloom nerf? Blizzard thinks both are too powerful. As they watch raids in Naxx. Think about that one a second... Lets imagine for a moment that we are not going to ignore the elephant in the living room, and step back for a more balanced and subjective perspective. Well that will take about .3 seconds for someone with the IQ of a garden salad to come to an immediate and inescapable conclusion:

Naxx is too easy.

Could that be the real problem with mana regen and lifelboom? Nah... couldn't be that. Don't get me wrong, I don't think these nerfs are going to be nearly as horrendous as the doomsday posts on the WoW forums would lead one to believe. I am however totally convinced that they are based on a very faulty premise, and that the root cause is that Naxx is just way too easy.

Wild Growth Nerf: Aftermath

So it has been a little while since the 6 second cooldown was added to Wild Growth, and we Druid folk have had some time to adjust. How much has it affected our healing?

LOLHAELZ?

Let's go back to the time before the nerf. On some fights, it was very effective to simply run around the raid in circles spamming Wold Growth. It required little more from a player than 1 working finger, one hand to move your character, and a pulse. In some situations, it was remarkably efffective. This was what Blizzard did not like.

Take Sapphiron for example. In 25 man, 2 Druids running circles could put out a tremendous amount of effective healing on a raid. No skill or brain required, just run and spam. On Lootavon, er Archavon, it was pretty much the same deal, even though all that group healing wasn't needed.

There were however, and are, boss encounters where spamming Wild Growth was not such a brainless non-decision, where it was actually a smart and effective healing strategy. Malygos, when the entire raid gets tossed and spun is a very good example. Wild Growth saved a lot of lives.

DOOM INC

The fights we were most concerned about were Sapphiron and Malygos. These fights were where WG made the most contribution, and doing those fights without the WG spam sounded like a bad thing.

On Sapph, there are other options of course. Chain Heals by the Shammys of course could play a much larger role in raid healing. My thinking was that we keep a Pally or two on the MT, maybe with a Priest because they are good at healing anything, and the rest on the raid. Sounds good.

Malygos was an even larger source of worry. How would we keep everyone alive? I guess make sure everyone is topped off, cast what HoTs you can, and hope for the best?

AND WE GO!

On Sapphiron, much to my suprise, the difference was neglible. Hey whaddya know, Druids have other good heals too! SNAP!

On Malygos, I ended up assigning 'preferred groups' to Druids and Priests. Of those in range during the flying fun, stick HoTs on people in the assigned group first, then any others you can hit. I spread the Priests out across as many groups as we had Priests, so they could PoH the group when we land.

Worked like a charm! To my surprise, we seemed to actually have less chance of dying than before! Huh?!?! It may have been due to healers paying closer attention, or being more focused. I did make a big deal on vent out of the challenge we would be facing; that probably helped too.

CONCLUSION:

How bad is the nerf, now that we have had some time to digest it, adjust to it, and use it?

Not even an issue at all. And I thought it was going to be catastrophic!

Quick Off Topic:

Added the spiffy new header a few weeks ago! The background is actually a shot of Moonglade. I was messing around with some blurs, and accidentally put one on the wrong layer, the entire background. Before I hit the undo button, I looked at it and really liked the almost ethereal feel it gave, so stuck with it.

I used WoW Model Viewer for the caps of the forms. I liked having them all looking at you as you are looking at them. The eye contact thing seemed cool. Except for the Boomkin. He is either basking in his power and glory, or very unhappy about the insanely low spell power coefficient on Starfall, not sure which.

Druid Predictions for 2009

First let me say that the batteries in my crystal ball went out just yesterday. The timing is uncanny. So I am going to have make all this stuff up.

So without further excuses that I can point back to a year from now when everything I say here turns out to be wrong, in order of the impact they will have, least to most, here are my 5 Druid Predictions for 2009!

Resto will be way overpowered, for a minute.

Ghostcrawler has talked about a healing revamp for all classes, a major overhaul, several times. Although the most dramatic early ideas will get tossed out, some major fundamental changes are going to come down toward the end of the year.

Somehow, someway, Druid healers are going to end up in an overpowered state briefly, like Bears were very early in BC. The nerf, er fix, will come quickly, bringing us back in line with other healing classes. But for a brief moment, Resto Druids everywhere will bask in the glory of God Mode healing.

Bears will become stamina driven tanks.

As we move through Ulduar, post armor nerf, Bears will more and more seek out straight up hitpoints in the absence of the high levels of mitigation they used to enjoy. By the time we get to Arthas (which may not be in 2009), there will be a screenshot floating around the web of a Bear with over 100,000 hitpoints. Said Bears will take atrocious amounts of damage, but will be highly sought after in raids nonetheless. Healers will be using their biggest heal bombs, and sweating bullets.

Cat DPS will flatten out. Badly.

Post Naxx/Sartharion/Malygos, cat DPS will once again scale poorly. Sound familiar? In BC, cats did great DPS through about mid tier 5 content. By mid tier 6, their DPS was so low compared to other comparably geared DPS classes, they became a waste of a raid spot.

I remember topping 6k AP in Hyjal, and struggling to put out 1200 DPS. This was while lesser geared rogues were hitting 2k DPS. Six. Thousand. Attack Power. That was when I hung up the catsuit and went Boomkin.

This will be repeated in Wrath of the Lich King. Scaling, scaling, scaling. Not.

Eclipse will be changed.

Talk to five different high DPS Boomkins, and you will get five diffferent opinions on how good Eclipse is or is not, everywhere from "gotta have it" to "what a waste".

What I would love to see happen, and almost certainly will NOT happen, is this: If you are casting Starfire when Eclipse procs, it gives you the... make sure you are sitting down... the Starfire buff! Same for Wrath! OH SNAP! That makes too much sense. Far better to try to artifically force Boomkins to alternate between Starfire and Wrath in some wacky chase-down-the-proc-ah-crap-I-missed-one-cast-and-GCD-gonna-emo-and-kill-myself-now kind of thing right?

Although they will not use this all too sensible solution, Eclipse will see a significant change of some sort. In the end, after much heated debate and incredibly deep theorycrafting, it will still be no better or worse than it is now.

Power.

While this will be announced but not impelemented in 2009, everything is going to really hit the fan as a result.

Remember how we had +heal and +spell damage gear? As you know, that was changed to spell power.

This will taken one more step. Blizzard will announce that Attack Power and Spell Power will consolidated in to one single stat: Power.

That Pally Plate that gets sharded every week will be great for a DPS Warrior. Hunters will be rolling against Resto Druids for gear! WTB Main Hand Warglaive for my heal or nuke set?