[Druid] Forum Comments about Druid Healing Come Cataclysm

I was reading my morning dose of blue posts, when I came across a long discussion between Ghostcrawler and forum posters regarding druid healing. I am not an expert on druid healing by any means, but I was struck by a particular poster that Ghsotcrawler had quoted.

The hot topic of the discussion was what buttons a druid presses to heal in current content, which largely consists of Rejuvenation and Wild Growth, and how Blizzard wants to change this for Cataclysm. Apparently there was the notion that only baddie druids would stick to those two spells.

The difference between good and bad healers is really obvious right now. A resto druid who does nothing but casually Rejuv the entire raid is a bad healer on the vast majority of fights (i.e. non-damage aura fights).

Ghostcrawler begs to differ, saying that druids pushing the toughest hard mode content are still rolling majority Rejuvs + Wild Growth and performing adequately, which sounds appropriate for me given what I've read on the matter.

But then the comment that really got me was this:

Nah c'mon. You can at best be a mediocre druid if all you use is rejuv and WG, and it is unlikely that any such druid would find success doing 10 man hards.

As I said, I don't consider myself an expert on druid healing, but I have healed 10-man hard modes, and the vast majority of my healing comes from Rejuv, followed by Wild Growth, with a sprinkling of Lifebloom, Swiftmend, and the occasional Nourish thrown in depending on the situation.

Personally I feel like a baddie no matter the content I heal, just because I don't feel very comfortable as a tree. It's probably the HoT thing. Back in vanilla and TBC I was very happy being able to choose the right heal for the job and managing my mana pool. But when I can't be sure of whether my HoTs will fully tick out I feel like I'm just blowing heals for no reason. If I had to ration my mana pool in WotLK I'd probably be a nervous wreck of a tree.

But if the content I heal is any measure, I'm pulling my weight and doing just fine, relying primarily on Rejuv and Wild Growth. I can find uses for my other spells, but they're limited. For instance:

Regrowth - If I want to pre-HoT a tank before we start I'll toss this on because it lasts a long time while the tanks get into position. I'll also Regrowth Valithria before taking a portal.

Lifebloom - I throw this on the tanks for extra healing depending on the fight or phase of the fight as extra padding. Whether or not I roll it or even stack it depends on circumstances. Usually it just goes up when I have a free GCD and there's little need to HoT someone else, but if that tank's going to take a lot of damage in the near future I try to keep it stacked and rolled.

Swiftmend - While I like this while running 5-mans, I've found it surprisingly underused in a raid environment. I still use it, but many times I find I can count on my fellow healers to get to the severely wounded first. Unless I'm positive I saved a dps with this, its healing feels superfluous.

Healing Touch - Only in emergency in combination with Nature's Swiftness. Does anyone even use it otherwise? A shame since it used to be the old standby for a leveling druid.

So, yeah, I use my other spells. Would my healing be horribly crippled if I didn't? Not really. Not in a raid. And not unless something happened to our holy paladin and he wasn't there for the night and the disc priest or resto shaman got ice-blocked, prematurely faceplanted, or some other horrible thing.

When that happens I toss on the HoTs and Nourish spam the tank, but 90% of the time a resto druid is fine with just Rejuv and Wild Growth.

Honestly, I think it'll be fun to use more spells again. I feel silly casting HoTs all the time whether the raid really needs it or not. I'm sure I overheal like a maniac and it's considered a good practice, because if I don't, someone might die. They might not, but I can't take the chance.

Paladins often get shafted as the two button healer, but I actually feel much more dynamic in my decision-making and actually press far more buttons healing ICC on my paladin than I do on my druid. On a typical raid fight as a tree I will Rejuv, WG, and possibly two other spells (maybe Innervate or a couple other heal abilities). On a typical raid fight as a paladin I will Beacon of Light, Sacred Shield, Holy Light, Flash of Light, Divine Plea, Avenging Wrath, and Judgement of Wisdom, guaranteed. And then maybe Holy Shock and Divine Illumination if needed.

Maybe my paladin won't be constantly juggling all those spells, but they are cast at some point in the fight. Whereas the druid does almost the same thing the entire time.

I'll try to get some Cata moonkin comments in sometime. Seems harder for me to get a coherent post going on that one instead of just dropping one off the cuff.

[Druid] First Pass 31-point Cataclysm Talent Trees

To the surprise of no one, MMO-Champion has the new talent trees up from the latest Beta build. Blizzard says the druid trees aren't as far long as the other classes, so much of this will probably change, but we can at least see where they're going.

Since I've actually raided as all four druid playstyles now, I figure I can probably talk about all four without sounded like a complete idiot (though kitty remains my shakiest), and the changes to all trees are actually relevant to me.

Balance

We can see right off the bat that unpopular or straight dps talents have been kicked out. No more Brambles or Earth and Moon. Even though Lunar Guidance remains in name, it now increases the radius of our Solar Beam and generates more Solar or Lunar energy for our new Eclipse.

I made a preliminary talent spec using the available talents and was pleased to find myself at 36 of 41 points spent, and this was after I'd taken everything I'd considered must have, or even taken talents I would have considered to be so-so just so I could continue up the tree.

For instance, I have a full three points in Genesis now, which is considered fairly worthless for moonkin in WotLK. But when the talents I'm skipping over are Fungal Growth (slowing targets in area of my wild mushroom or expired treants), Owlkin Frenzy (unchanged), and Lunar Justice (mana back from standing in beam of light over defeated enemy that awards honor or exp), is Genesis really that bad anymore?

I spent a full 31 points in the balance tree and those three talents were my leftovers.

On the resto side I spent 3 points in Furor (more or less the same, just with fewer ranks) and 2 points in Blessing of the Grove for increased Moonfire damage. There's nothing deeper in the resto tree that's moonkin specific.

So what to do with my last 5 points? Well, I'd probably pick up Owlkin Frenzy since having situational pushback isn't so crazy anymore and maybe put 2 points into Perseverance in the resto tree to reduce the amount of spell damage taken, since healing's supposed to be a bigger deal now. Or maybe two points into Fungal Growth, because the slow might come in handy.

We actually do have choice, which is kind of nice.

And what happened to moonkin form itself, since it's not in the talent tree? Apparently it's now trainable! Level 40 according to MMO-Champion. That's kinda trippy, and it makes me a wee bit jealous that other druids can /dance in moonkin form without being balance druids.

It might not stay that way though. Ghostcrawler says they're experimenting with whether moonkin form or Starsurge should be the level 10 bonus for specializing in the balance tree.

Feral (Bear)

The feral tree saw a lot of pruning of "X talent increases the damage of Y ability" as well as any pure damage or stat increase abilities. Feral Swiftness and Natural Reaction stay, but Survival of the Fittest is gone, oddly enough, since bears would still need it to be uncrittable. Mangle is now baseline for ferals, as a reward just for specializing in the tree, so that's not a talent anymore. Primal Fury lost the cat component and now looks like a bear-only talent. Thick Armor remains a talent so apparently the damage reduction just from our mastery alone with not be enough to cover us. We'll still have to spec into it.

Fury Swipes is a new talent that gives us a chance at a free auto-attack whether in cat or bear form, which is nice. Pulverize and Endless Carnage will synergize for more threat since the first does extra weapon damage and gives us extra crit based on the number of Lacerate stacks for a limited time, and the second will allow the Pulverize state to last a few seconds longer.

But the feral tree doesn't feel finished yet.

For one thing, Feral Charge is still a talent, when there is a new trainable skill called Skull Bash that does the same thing. The Brutal Impact talent has similar been changed to reference Skull Bash rather than Feral Charge. I doubt ferals will have both since 2 points in Brutal Impact will already reduces the cooldown of SB to a mere 10 seconds, and having two methods to charge and interrupt would result in a crazy amount of mobility while simultaneously locking up casters (though that would be fun). But then there's also an Improved Feral Charge, so… maybe we will have both?

I didn't find quite the room in the feral tree for a bear spec as I had with the moonkin, with 39 of 41 talent points spent, but that's because I pushed up the resto tree to get Perseverance for the spell damage reduction. If that's regarded as optional, then another 5 talent points are refunded (since both the Tier 1 Blessing of the Grove and Natural Shapeshifter are fairly useless for bears). But then what's left to spent them on?

As with balance, it's easier to say what I skipped over than what I kept.

I skipped over King of the Jungle (same as on live), Primal Madness (which I think has a typo, but generates a certain amount of rage when Enrage or Berserk is used), Nom Nom Nom (pure cat talent), Nurturing Instinct (same as live and still pure cat), and Brutal Impact.

With two points left I'd probably take Brutal Impact. More stuns and interrupts are good, and that would take care of all my points.

Feral (Cat)

I found cat to be freer to spec than bear, even taking what would arguably be filler along the way to arrive at my 36 and 41. For cats the key new talents is the lovable Nom Nom Nom, which allows the player to use Ferocious Bite to refresh Rip during the last 25% of the target's health. Primal Madness will increase maximum energy by 20 during Beserk and Tiger's Fury, so there should be less losing of energy when those are activated at less than optimum times, and Endless Carnage will increase the duration of Rake and Savage Roar, all of which makes the cat rotation more forgiving than its current incarnation.

I ignored all the bear only talents in the feral tree, but I put 1 point in Nurturing Instinct as a filler just to go further down the tree, because with healing being harder, getting more heals as a cat seems to work in my own interest. Who knows. There might even be a need for cats to pop out and heal themselves if a fight gets really bad, and since all cats will have Predatory Strikes just to get to the Tier 2 talents, it'll be possible to make that heal an instant.

In resto I nabbed Furor and Blessing of the Grove, the latter for the boost in Shred damage.

With 5 points left to spend I'd probably fill out the rest of Nurturing Instinct and grab 2 ranks of Infected Wounds since I like the kitty PvP, leaving me with 2 more points I'd probably drop into Natural Shapeshifter because of the PvP. Or maybe I could take Perseverance for the spell damage reduction.

Again, there are choices.

But the tree does feel a little lean for me. There are still talents I'm passing over, but they're clearly for bears rather than usually for bears (like Infected Wounds) because they do not operate in cat form. In the bear spec I made for myself I skipped over talents that still had a bear component to them. In the cat spec, there's nothing not taken that had a cat specific affect.

I'm gonna love Skull Bash in PvP though. Ten second cooldown with talents on a combined spell interrupt/charge that increases the mana cost of the target's spells for the next 10 seconds? Now if only cats didn't have to Skull Bash from a distance so we could reliably interrupt on boss fights like rogues.

For a different perspective on the feral trees I recommend Kalon's write-up at ThinkTank. I agree that a lot of the removed talents did things like boost our expertise and increase our combo point generation, but I'm not as concerned about them because expertise can be fixed with gear and even combo point generation might not be as much of an issue if the numbers are changed so our white damage counts for more or when we do perform a Rake or a Mangle the damage is more meaningful.

Restoration

I'm much less happy as with the resto tree than I am with the others, largely because most of the bottom tier talents really don't have anything to do with being a resto druid in particular. Most of the bonus healing to this spell and that spell is gone, with the higher tier talents introduced in WoLK being pulled in to form the bottom half of the tree, though a few oldies like Improved Rejuvention and Empowered Touch remain in slightly altered forms. Newer "quirky" talents such as Living Seed and Revitalize remain, and there is the new Efflorescence that creates an AoE heal after critting with Regrowth.

But getting back to building a spec, the early talents just feel like filler. Blessing of the Grove's bonus healing to Rejuvenation is the only direct boost to what a resto druid down. Natural Shapeshifter doesn't impact healing at all and Furor effects every form except the caster one. No matter what, the resto druid will be dropping two points in filler off the bat. I suspect this will have to change.

In Tier 2 Improved Rejuvention would be a must have, but its only companion is Perseverance, which feels like it should be optional, except there's nothing else to take at this tier and we've already seen what great options there are at Tier 1, so again the resto druid would be dropping a couple points in filler. Considering that it will no longer be possible to subspec until reaching 31 points in a talent tree, this is quite a concern for someone who wants to level as a healer!

Tier 3 is a bonanza though with Living Seed, Nature's Swiftness, and Revitalize all on the same row. MMO-Champion's calculator currently says that moonkin form is required for Nature's Swiftness, but even if moonkin form is now trainable I'm sure that's a mistake, because balance druids will be unable to get high up enough in the resto tree to use it, and resto druids can't cast heal spells in moonkin form.

Tier 4 only has Nature's Bounty of interest, but because of Tier 3's bonanza I was able to fill more points in there and ignore Fury of Stormrage (chance at instant, free Wrath) which I'm sure is nice in PvP, but I don't do as a resto.

I put full points in the rest of the tree except for Natural Perfection to take me up to 31 points, and then spent 9 points in the balance tree to get Genesis, Nature's Grace, and Moonglow. Swiftmend is probably going away through since that's supposed to be the level 10 ability druids will get just for specializing in the tree.

This left me with a meager 1 point to spent somewhere else, which is maddening because of all the "waste" in Tier 1 and Tier 2. Natural Perfection, with its crit bonus, sounds like a fantastic "optional" talent, but I can't take two points in it without dropping a point from Nature's Grace or Moonglow.

On the other hand, if I could get back the points I "wasted" on Natural Shapeshifter and a lesser degree Perseverance, I'm not sure what I'd spend them on. Perseverance I might have dumped points into anyway, but since I didn't get a choice at the end of my tree it feels like appetizing. Natural Shapeshifter I'm sure I don't need as a resto druid, but the remaining options aren't that appetizing past Natural Perfection.

More than the other specs, the resto druid feels like there's no choice involved.

Though it still could be worse. I actually can't figure out a spec with points leftover as a paladin...

In conclusion I'm probably most happy with moonkin, somewhat with bear, less with cat, and least with resto. But all of this is still early and hopefully there will be some more "interesting" talents to make things fun without us having to maximize dps, survival, or heals. I think the moonkin's optional talents like Fungal Growth are the most "fun" of the bunch and it would be nice if the other trees could take a page from it.

[Druid] Settling in as a Tree

I'm still working on that tree thing. After getting Grid set up properly and running a few practice heroics, I jumped into a ToC 10 pug and managed to not embarrass myself. I do, however, wish that I had a bubble like a paladin. Barkskin just doesn't cut it. Faction Champs is remarkably fun as a tree though. Didn't get silenced or interrupted once, and it was really easy to just run around and keep healing. Nerf restos!

The ToC 10 run was blessed with idiots, which in most cases would annoy me, but because I was there to learn how to heal, well, nothing prepares a person for healing bad situations like people getting into bad situations. It's not like I was there for gear.

We wiped 4 times due to various acts of stupidity, such as people not changing the aura around their feet to dark for Dark Vortex on the Twin Val'kyr, or people not getting on or behind ice patches when Anub was burrowing. We cleared everything, but it was far from the cleanest run out there, and it was only ToC 10!

What pleased me the most was that the other healer was a similarly geared resto shaman and I was mostly able to keep pace with him on overall healing. It was a good sign. I might not be a very good resto druid yet, but I may be passable.

My guild got to Lich King again last night, but due to a misjudgement about how much time we had left to clear and a couple bad wipes (so not on farm yet), we didn't actually get to kill him. On the bright side, we got the Blood Queen hard mode down and our first armor token went to our DK MT. This puts us at 3/12 for hard modes.

We'll be starting over with a fresh lockout for more hard modes next Saturday, with the goal of downing Marrowgar and Saurfang, maybe Rotface or Festergut if time allows. Our resto shaman will be there this time, which should make things easier.

I had hoped to do some practice tree healing on our farm bosses in ICC last night, but time and deciding to do the BQL hard mode didn't allow it anywhere except for the Valithria fight. It was our first time four healing it and it went ridiculously fast. I almost caught up to our shaman in pure output. Of course, neither of us got near our paladin. We left our poor priest outside again (his heal spec is disc). I don't think he's ever gone through a portal on her.

I told our paladin that healing as a druid is like using a sprinkler when I'm used to a firehose, but I think I'm getting comfortable with it. I just need some more practice so I can be a proper backup healer.

[Druid] Not the Best First Crack at Heroic ICC

I was waiting to get our first crack at heroic ICC tonight, but when we reached Marrowgar there was something different about me. You see, I was a tree.

Our resto shaman couldn't make it tonight and our paladin healing lead really did not want me to bring my paladin since the role we were missing was our shaman's awesome raid healing. I argued that I'd probably heal better on my paladin, having healed as one since TBC, but the raid agreed to wait while I respecced and regeared myself.

You see, we're a small raid guild with only 11 regular raiders, and we hate benching. When our shaman is missing, we're down to our paladin and our shadow/disc priest who does the uber swapping mania. Two healers aren't enough so I often went on my pally if we needed a third.

But we're doing hard modes now so raid comp in all likelihood matters more, and if I can learn to play resto as adeptly as holy, then it would not hurt as much for a healer to be absent.

Since we picked up a ret pally with a prot off-spec who can fulfill the backup tank role I used Hana's off-spec for, I had offered to look into making a resto set. I built out what I needed in Rawr and read over Keeva's fantastic new resto druid guide.

The only thing is... since no one had responded to my offer on my guild forums, I didn't bother assembling anything because I figured people weren't interested. I'm known for sometimes going a mile farther than necessary, so I chalked it up as more than I had to do.

Until tonight. So I ran around Dal grabbing gear and gems while our raid was clearing trash. After they summoned me our JC/enchanter cut and enchanted the lot for me, and in I went, with jack squat but theoretical knowledge of how to play a resto druid.

HoT the raid, right?

Crap... my Grid's not set up for HoTs because paladins don't need them and as a moonkin I only bothered to add poisons and curses.

Wild Growth when three or more targets can be affected.

You know... that doesn't work so well when everyone's scattered around during a Bone Storm. It requires more heads up healing than I can manage as a nub tree. We eventually got people to be better about staying roughly in the middle of the room though so might not be so bad later.

Convenient keybindings are good.

It would have helped if Nourish wasn't the 7 key, Lifebloom wasn't 0, and my Nature's Swiftness/Healing Touch macro wasn't the 3. Things that didn't matter as a sometimes heal bar for a moonkin turned out to be horrible as a tree.

In a nutshell, I sucked. I didn't even do half the healing of our holy paladin and our disc priest.

It's a very different mentality healing as a druid than a paladin. I can't help wanting to top everyone off, like immediately.

Still, we managed to get Marrowgar to 50% despite the horrible healing on my part, and in the end decided to save him for later. We were making a lot of mistakes, and I think if our shaman had been there we would have been able to handle it better.

So I went back to moonkin and we pushed on to Heroic Deathwhisperer, which we heard could be 2-healed, and she was. She was a one-shot. So was Heroic Gunship. (I would have cried if we managed to wipe on that.)

We were a little skeptical about spending much time on Saurfang, given that most 10-man guilds seems to skip him and come back later, but we gave him a shot and found out that we really weren't doing too bad. We had a heart-breaking 10% wipe as our best attempt of the night.

But because we wanted to kill the Lich King for our eleventh, who sat out last Monday, we switched back to normal and killed him so we could continue with the rest of the instance on Monday.

I'm thinking I might ask our priest to stay shadow on Monday so I can get some tree form practice in on our farm fights.

Final note as a nub tree who assembled her gear too fast: As I was writing this I just realized I still have my feral glyphs in my off-spec. Way to go!

[Druid] Resto Musings

I started to write my post about the druid masteries yesterday and found myself instead writing a post about tree druids, which isn't exactly a point of expertise of mine, so I cut it off and decided I should make a separate post for my leafy brethren.

In the time since I read the Friday evening druid preview, I had the chance to chat with some other druids I know in game to get their takes on it and most of them seem a little baffled by the Tree of Life change. It's kind of been a given that druids shapeshift, after all. But not all of them were outraged.

One of them, who wasn't particularly given to tree dancing (he was a very serious, game-face tree) was just puzzled, not exactly shouting thanks, but not bemoaning the loss of it either. The questions was more: why?

I guess since I read blogs a lot, and most bloggers are quite tied to being trees, my view is a little skewed. Maybe there are a substantial number of players who don't really care either way. So I did some thinking about the history of resto druids.

Back in the vanilla days, restos did not have any special form to call their own. They healed in caster form and that's all there was to it. (Well, except maybe casting Innervate on priests because goodness knows druids didn't raid if they didn't have Innervate for those priests!)

Then TBC came along and Tree of Life was introduced. It had problems at first and not everyone liked it. Only hots could be casted in tree form and trees had to pop out for the occasional Healing Touch/Nature's Swiftness combo or to Remove Curse or Abolish Poison. Trees moved slower too. Nobody PvP-ed in tree form. It just didn't happen. I remember our trees popping out to caster form on Shade of Aran just to make sure they moved away from him in time.

But after some tweaks, trees could cast more spells in form, pretty much all their healing and defensive utility spells. There isn't really a need to leave tree form anymore unless they want to help dps, which isn't what a healer signs up to do anyway. I don't think I've ever heard a tree druid complain about their inability to contribute to the raid's dps. I think I've heard more complaints from moonkin that they can't help spot heal without popping out of form.

So the primary remaining issues that are "annoying" are 1) they can't be CCed as easily, being trees (PvP-only concern) and 2) the druid doesn't actually gain anything by going into tree form.

1) can be dealt with just by removing polymorph immunity. While I've always liked the druid's inability to be polymorphed, it's not like I'd quit playing a druid over its loss. I don't face mages all that often.

2) is a tougher monster. With ferals it's very easy to see what they gain in exchange for everything they lose. They get a whole new resource system (energy or rage) and a slew of new abilities that can only be used in form.

Moonkin gain two raid-wide buffs associated with moonkin form (haste and crit aura), increased mana efficiency thanks to getting mana back from crits, and extra armor in exchange for the loss of all healing spells.

Tree gain increased healing done aura, increased spell power, increased mana efficiency from reduced cost of hots, and increased armor. It's a little less than moonkin, but the parallels are almost the same.

With balance druids, they just get better at what they do when they become moonkin, but becoming a moonkin doesn't make them better than a mage, and a balance druid outside of moonkin form is less than a mage, though they can certainly help heal when desireable (ex: Dreamwalker).

Resto druids similarly become better at what they do when they become trees, and being a tree doesn't make them a better healer than a priest or a shaman. A tree druid out of form will be less effective as a healer, but they could still toss out a few Starfires if they need to help dps down a boss. I still think that a resto druid out of form will out-dps a holy paladin.

Mechanics-wise, both trees and moonkin give up some of their base caster abilities to become the equivalent of a healer or caster dps of another class. It doesn't seem right that trees would be singled out, and if anything, I think there are more moonkin who would like to stop looking like a ridiculous owlbear than there are trees who want to be casters. Not that I want Blizzard to take away moonkin form either!

Perhaps what's really needed is mechanic gain for being in tree form. Cats and bears do completely different things when in form. Perhaps, in retrospec, a spell like Wild Growth could only be used in tree. Or trees could have situational cooldowns that are uniquely tree-like (ex: Taking Root - Temporarily immobilizes the player while something really good happens in exchange).

The thing is... the cat's out of the bag and it's going to be very hard to put it back. After two expansions of having restos become trees it's messing with the status quo, and what has been a core feature of the spec.

To be honest, trees will be gaining a lot by not having to be in form, and I could see potential cries for a nerf bat because of it. It's not so much that they can dps while keeping the same level of healing. It's really because I play arena as a healer, but the single most annoying spell a druid can use is Cyclone.

If there's no tree form, those restos won't even lose any of their healing capability to cast it. No mana loss switching in and out. No loss of spellpower because they're not in tree form. Cyclone will be less punishing for them to cast than ever.

Of course they won't have the increased armor from tree form either, so maybe that'll be something.

In the meantime, I've started playing my baby resto druid again. Dinged 36. It would be nice to try getting her up to 50 so I can join in the annual Arbor Day screenshot parade hosted by one of our fabulous tree druid bloggers, but I'm not sure I can level fast enough for that.

Keeva made a nice poster for the Pro-Tree movement. It's too big to use as a sig on forums, but speaks very clearly about how she and the other trees feel.

[Druid] Cataclysm Mastery Preview

This is a continuation from yesterday's post regarding the druid class preview for Cataclysm. Yesterday's post was getting long so I figured I'd continue with the mastery bonuses today.

Balance

Spell Damage

Spell Haste

Eclipse

Eclipse: We are moving Eclipse from a talent into a core mechanic of the class and making it less random. Balance druids will have a new UI element that shows a sun and a moon. Whenever they cast an Arcane spell, it will move the UI closer to the sun, and buff their Nature damage. Whenever they cast a Nature spell, it will move the UI closer to the moon, and buff their Arcane damage. The gameplay intention is to alternate Arcane and Nature spells (largely Starfire and Wrath) to maintain the balance.

Well, I was right that we would get Spell Damage for one of our masteries, but we got Spell Haste instead of Spell Crit for our second one. I admit I'm a little surprised by it, since this runs counter to the majority of the casters and Wrath has never really played nice with haste, but most of the time, haste and crit can be taken in equal amounts, so maybe we'll just look for more crit on our gear to balance it out.

Having Eclipse be our third mastery is a little disappointing, if only because it's not "new," but I'm a little curious what this UI is going to look like. I currently have a mental picture of one of those tower bars in WG or EotS where there's Horde and Alliance color blocks on either end and the bar in the middle goes one way or the other depending on who's capping, except for moonkin I'm picturing a sun on one end and a crescent moon on the other.

If we're supposed to maintain the balance between the two, what's to stop someone from just twisting spells IS/MF/W/SF/W/SF/IS/MF/etc? Or would that result in no buff at all?

I also wonder how this will make it less random. Will the bar just always be up?

Feral (Cat)

Melee Damage

Melee Critical Damage

Bleed Damage

Feral (Bear)

Damage Reduction

Vengeance

Savage Defense

Bleed Damage and Savage Defense: Feral druids will receive two sets of passive bonuses depending on whether the druid is in cat or bear form. Bleed Damage will be improved for cats. Savage Defense is the current bear mechanic for converting crits into damage absorption and will be improved for bears.

Vengeance: This is a mechanic to ensure that tank damage (and therefore threat) doesn’t fall behind as damage-dealing classes improve their gear during the course of the expansion. All tanking specs will have Vengeance as their second talent tree passive bonus. Whenever a tank gets hit, Vengeance will give them a stacking attack power buff equal to 5% of the damage done, up to a maximum of 10% of the character’s unbuffed health. For boss encounters we expect that tanks will always have the attack power bonus equal to 10% of their health. The 5% and 10% bonuses assume 51 talent points have been put into the Feral tree and the druid is in bear form -- these values will be smaller at lower levels. Remember, you only get this bonus if you have spent the most talent points in the Feral tree and are in bear form, so you won’t see Balance, Restoration, or Feral druids in cat form running around with it. Vengeance will let us continue to make tank gear more or less the way we do today -- there will be some damage-dealing stats, but mostly survival-oriented stats. Druids typically have more damage-dealing stats even on their tanking gear, so the Vengeance benefit may be smaller, but overall the goal is that all four tanks do about the same damage when tanking.

Cats get increased Melee Damage as expected, but they don't go down the Melee Haste route of the enhance shaman, fury warriors, or combat rogues. Rather, they get Melee Critical Damage like assassination rogues. The third mastery is the boring but practical increased Bleed Damage, which pretty much means: Don't forget to refresh Mangle, not that you ever did forget, did you?

The first two bear bonuses, Damage Reduction and Vengeance, aren't really a surprise since the other tanks had them. Savage Defense being moved to a mastery is though. I'm just not sure why. It already scales pretty nicely with crit and attack power, but supposedly it's going to be made "better."

I admit I'm more interested in seeing what the tweaks to cat rotation and additions to bear tanking will be like than the masteries themselves.

Restoration

Healing

Meditation

HoT Scale Healing

HoT Scale Healing: HoTs will do increased healing on more wounded targets. The mechanic is similar to that of the Restoration shaman, but with HoTs instead of direct heals. In Cataclysm, we anticipate druids using a greater variety of their spells so there is a distinction between healing and HoT healing.

Healing and Meditation were givens again, after seeing the other healer previews. HoT Scale Healing is nice though, if only because hots are better at providing a cushion for injuried players than bringing them back from the brink of death.

One of my favorite things in arena is when we catch a resto druid druid and his dps unawares, so the druid doesn't have a chance to hot him up before the kill. A dps could be maddeningly close to dead and not die if he has a full suite of hots on him. But if he doesn't have anything and the HT+NS combo is on cooldown that's a dead dps.

Of course, this means that resto druids will now be even more annoying in arena.

[Druid] Preview's Up! Changes Are... Interesting...

Well, some of what I expected came true. Some didn't. I'll just go through everything though as the preview brought it up.

New Druid Abilities

Thrash (Level 81): Thrash deals damage and causes all targets within 10 yards to bleed every 2 seconds for 6 seconds. The intent here is to give bears another button to hit while tanking. Talents will affect the bleed, such as causing Swipe to deal more damage to bleeding targets. 5-second cooldown. 25 Rage.

Stampeding Roar (Level 83): The druid roars, increasing the movement of all allies within 10 yards by 40% for 8 seconds. Stampeding Roar can be used in cat or bear form, but bears might have a talent to drop the cooldown. The goal of this ability is to give both bears and cats a little more situational group utility. 3-minute cooldown. No cost.

Wild Mushroom (Level 85): Grows a magical mushroom at the target location. After 4 seconds the mushroom becomes invisible. Enemies who cross the mushroom detonate it, causing it to deal area-of-effect damage, though its damage component will remain very effective against single targets. The druid can also choose to detonate the mushroom ahead of time. This is primarily a tool for the Balance druid, and there will be talents that play off of it. No cooldown. 40-yard range. Instant cast.

As a sometimes bear druid, there's a lot to like about getting Thrash. It's another multi-target attack spell, will buff damage from Swipe with talents, and give us another button to press to prevent multi-target/ heroic tanking from getting too monotonous. The name makes me think of sharks in the water, but... maybe that's just me.

Stampeding Roar seems kind of weird to me, since it sounds like the bear/cat is scaring their party members into running faster. While I can think of instances where this would be useful, it just doesn't like something you do to people to you like. (Unless it's angry feral raid leader who wants people to stop dying in the fire.)

Wild Mushroom... made me laugh, because... well... I'm a getting a magic mushroom. It's an absurd spell to give an already absurd-looking creature. I'm sure there will be jokes about moonkin and their magic mushrooms, but if any spec could get away with having those, it would probably be us since we're already ridiculously plush owlbears.

I just have odd mental pictures of myself detonating mushrooms around the corners of dungeons... Engineering done moonkin style?

Changes to Abilities and Mechanics

All heal-over-time spells (HoTs) will benefit from crit and haste innately in Cataclysm. Hasted HoTs do not reduce their duration, but instead add additional HoT ticks. Haste will also benefit Energy generation while in cat form.

Unlike the other healers, Restoration druids will not be receiving any new spells. They have plenty to work with already, and our challenge instead is to make sure all of them have a well-defined niche. A druid should be able to tank-heal with stacks of Lifebloom, spot-heal a group with Nourish and Regrowth, and top off lightly wounded targets with Rejuvenation.

We want to add tools to cat form and depth to bear form. If a Feral cat is going to fill a very similar niche to that of a rogue, warrior or Enhancement shaman, it needs a few more tools -- primarily a reliable interrupt. Bears need to be pushing a few more buttons just so the contrast between tanking and damage-dealing is not so steep.

Barkskin will be innately undispellable.

We will be buffing the damage of Mangle (cat) significantly so that when cat druids cannot Shred, they are not at such a damage-dealing loss.

Druids will lose Abolish Poison with the dispel mechanics change, but Restoration druids will gain Dispel Magic (on friendly targets) as a talent. All druids can still remove poisons with Cure Poison and remove curses with Remove Curse.

Oddly enough, they mention that hots will benefit from haste and crit, but not dots. Oversight? Though moonkin aren't as dot heavy as a warlock or shadow priest, we dot more than say an ele shaman or a mage. It seems poor to not give it to us. [Edit: Ghostcrawler clarifies in a later post that dots will be effected.]

As far as the resto changes do, I like the toolkit as-is. I don't think we need another healing spell. Mind, I've never raid healed as resto, but with three kinds of hots, a quick heal, a super big heal, and an AoE hot I think we have a pretty good toolkit, and now restos will be able to dispel magic. I also like that all druids will keep the ability to cure poison and remove curses, and we won't be like the paladins who are losing their cleansing abilities if they aren't the healing spec.

For the feral end, I'm looking forward to get a reliable interupt. It's kind of annoying that cats fill a rogue-like niche, except that we can't interupt. I've been on ToC 25-man runs with my feral and have been told to help with interupts because the rogues in the group were failing, but I can't reliably do it because I need to make use I have at least one combo point up and it's on the GCD.

Buffing Mangle (cat) will be sweet too. Most fights it's possible to get around to the back of the boss, but sometimes it's hard, either due to bad tanking, the boss not cooperating, or there's a void zone/fire/slime puddle right where I would like to be standing. Admittedly though, I'd like this the most for PvP. Other players are less considerate about letting a cat druid Shred them from behind if they can help it.

New Talents and Talent Changes

Tree of Life is changing from a passive talent to a cooldown-based talent, similar to Metamorphosis. Mechanically, it feels unfair for a druid to have to give up so much offense and utility in order to be just as good at healing as the other classes who are not asked to make that trade. We are exploring the exact benefit the druid gets from Tree of Life. It could strictly be better healing, or it could be that each heal behaves slightly different. You also will not be able to be banished in Tree of Life form (this will probably be true of Metamorphosis as well). Additionally, we would like to update the Tree of Life model so that it feels more exciting when you do decide to go into that form. Our feeling is that druids rarely actually get to show off their armor, so it would be nice to have at least one spec that looked like a night elf or tauren (and soon troll or worgen) for most of the time.

We want to make the Feral cat damage rotation slightly more forgiving. We do not want to remove what druids like about their gameplay, but we do want to make it less punishing to miss, say, a Savage Roar or Rake. The changes here will be on par with increasing the duration of Mangle like we did for patch 3.3.3.

Balance druids will have a new talent ability called Nature’s Torrent, which strikes for either Nature or Arcane damage depending on which will do the most damage (or possibly both), and moves the Eclipse meter more (details below). The improved version of Nature’s Torrent also reduces the target's movement speed. 10-second cooldown.

Restoration druids will have a new talent called Efflorescence, which causes a bed of healing flora to sprout beneath targets that are critically healed by Regrowth.

We plan on giving Feral cats and bears a Kick/Pummel equivalent -- an interrupt that is off the global cooldown and does no damage. We feel like they need this utility to be able to fill the melee role in a dungeon or raid group, and to give them more PvP utility.

We want to make sure Feral and Balance druids feel like good options for an Arena team. They need the tools to where you might consider a Feral druid over an Arms warrior, or a Balance druid over a mage or warlock. Remember that the PvP landscape will probably look pretty different for Cataclysm with a focus on rated, competitive Battlegrounds.

Okay, now for the part that has the resto druids up in arms, and with good reason! Tree of Life is going to change into a cooldown! No more grumpy, hotting trees running around? I don't think the player base is going to go for it. Ever since Tree of Life came out the restos have really made that shape their own.

The argument about having at least one spec that can show off armor is pretty weak to me. I don't think anyone is going to choose a spec based off that, and restos like being trees.

I've never heard a resto complain they're giving up a lot to be who they are. Truthfully, a bored resto druid who wants to help dps a boss would probably outdps bored holy paladin trying to do the same (because goodness knows I need a good set of circumstances to break 1200 dps on Gillien). Sure they have to drop tree form, but they can. Restos are still competitive in arena as well, popping in and out of tree form as needed, just as any other druid might with their own shapes.

I will say this. I have a baby resto druid that's now level 36. If it looks like this Tree of Life change is going through, I'm going to make sure I level her far enough that I can chain run some instances as a tree before that goes away. I like the trees.

The rest... is okay. Ferals will get some PvP love, hopefully (I want to get back into PvP with Darkker for Cataclysm, especially with rated battlegrounds). So will balance druids.

It's too early to tell exactly what Nature's Torrent or Efflorescence are going to do other than add some more damage (perhaps as another nuke?) or more healing (maybe additional hot on top of the regular hot?).

I'll cover the masteries tomorrow.

[Druid] Well, the Class Preview Isn't Up Yet, But…

The druid class preview isn't up yet, but after seeing the warlock and priest previews there are at least a couple things we can expect for moonkin.

1) Improved Faerie Fire will no longer effect hit.

Why? Because Misery won't. The priest preview says that Blizzard doesn't want people to have to plan their gear based on who they have in the raid (I wonder if that means the draenei racial hit will be going away too?), and while being a moonkin this has never affected me, I know warlocks and mages who kept two sets of gear, or a trinket like Dying Curse, to swap in and out depending on whether or not they had a moonkin or shadow priest with them.

Earlier Blizzard has said something about moonkin getting a spirit to hit conversion so we shouldn't have to worry about having to make up hit by grabbing cloth gear or putting points into our talent trees. Spirit won't scale with buffs like Blessing of Kings anymore, and the priest preview says Divine Spirit is going away, so we shouldn’t have to worry about suddenly getting a lot of hit we don't need after the raid buffs up. Mark of the Wild won't affect it either.

2) Dots will automatically benefit from crit and haste.

With both warlocks and shadow priests getting this, there's no reason to believe that moonkin won't either. The way dots are going to work for those classes is that haste will allow more ticks of the dot to get in rather than shortening the duration of the spell because the dot ticks faster. This means dots won't have to be refreshed any more often than they would with zero haste. Moonkin dots were never affected in this manner, but resto druid hots could be through the Rapid Rejuvenation glyph.

This might also prevent some of the issues higher level moonkin are seeing in ICC (and formerly saw in Sunwell) where the power of their dots vastly diminished as their gear improved, to the point where it was debatable (or not even worth it) to keep dots in their rotations.

What else might be store for us?

We can expect one of our mastery abilities to be spell damage. Warlocks get this across all three specs, and so do shadow priests and ele shaman. We'll probably get spell crit as our second mastery bonus, since shadow priests, ele shaman, and two of the three warlock specs do.

The last mastery bonus will probably be something unique to us, since each of the warlock specs gets a bonus based on what their tree focus is (shadow dots for afflication, fire damage for destro) and the ele shaman have the very specific Elemental Overload. Given our penchant for changing forms, I wonder if it will be tied to something about being a moonkin, so the bonus won't apply if we're currently in another shape.

I haven't a clue what we're going to see for the feral and restoration trees, aside from masteries that can be gleaned from the other class previews.

One of the feral masteries will surely be Vengeance for tanking purposes (the warrior preview says all tanking specs will get it), possibly Damage Reduction since prot warriors got it, and possibly Melee Damage since arms/fury warriors and enhance shaman have it. I seem to remember Blizzard posting something to the effect of "if in cat form, then these mastery bonuses and if in bear form than these mastery bonuses" but I can't seem to find the post at the moment.

Oh here we go… thank you Kalon for the link on your blog.

Ferals will have passive bonuses that say Cat: melee damage done, Bear: damage reduction. For death knights we have a different plan in mind that we’re not quite ready to discuss.

So if Melee Damage and Damage Reduction are paired together as the one set of feral form trade-offs, I wonder what cats will get paired with Vengeance. Maybe Melee Haste? Fury warriors and enhance shaman get that. Armor Penetration is also a possibility. Arms warriors get that. And then the third ability will be probably something cat specific and bear specific, hopefully with a flavorful name that makes it sound like we're chewing on our enemies.

Resto druid masteries will likely mirror the healing priest and resto shaman masteries with Healing and Meditation being the first two masteries, for more healing power and for mana regen, and then something druid-specific for the third one. Since druids are commonly considering to be the hot masters, I'd take a stab at it having something to do with hots.

It would be pretty cool if the resto mastery worked like the new warlock dots where if you reapply you don't clip any remaining ticks; you just add to the duration of the spell. Hots could keep rolling for forever!

[Druid] Round Holes Keep Looking for Square Pegs

I've still been spending time on Darkker. She's my primary outlet for when I want to play WoW and not be on my mains. Since I quit the battlegrounds I've been playing her more or less once a week. I also have a third druid who is too low level to introduce at this point, but part of the reason for having the two of them in addition to Hana is to experience what it's like leveling with each of the specs. Hana leveled balance, Darkker is feral, and the third is a baby resto.

But the funny thing is… instance groups seem determined to mess with both my druid alts. They're round holes that keep looking for square pegs.

Since reaching Outland with a full bar of rested XP, Darkker has been burning her way through quests and instances. I've noticed that healers are extremely in demand (no doubt in part due to the large number of death knights) as I've been randomly whispered at least three times to see if I would be willing to heal Ramps or some other instance. I generally declined on the basis of not having a decent healing set, though one time I just bluntly said I was feral. (Not that I think a feral can't heal a leveling instance, but I was tired and didn't want to type out that I didn't think my healing set was up to snuff because I'd have to heal off-spec.)

I think it's certainly possible for me to heal Ramps/BF/SP/UB if properly geared, but quite frankly my healing set was kinda stinky and I haven't healed anything on Darkker since… I don't know. RFD maybe? I don't remember what I did on that run. If it wasn't RFD, maybe SFK? In any case, I didn't want to endanger the party with a healing set that still included about five pieces of feral gear. I know where my heal buttons are and I know how to heal, I've done it before on Hana during oh-crap moments when a healer died and it was going to be a wipe if I didn't help out, but it's not a position I felt suitable to be in.

I did eventually enter a Ramps and two BF runs, as a tank though, and it's kind of funny how much more sophisticated the pulling in those instances are vs. the dungeons in Northrend. BF especially requires a lot of LOS pulling to get the casters to come over just right. I felt like such a classy tank doing all this LOS pulling, proud of making sure the mobs clumped up where I could get threat on them and they wouldn't run amok around the party (and especially attacking the healer). I just don't get that in Northrend. In Northrend all I usually worry about is threat, and even that isn't much of a worry.

Darkker is specced PvP-cat and I haven't felt the need to change it (especially given that I'm leveling her on a PvP server), but tanking was perfectly fine. The extra mitigation talents are definitely not needed for a leveling instance. She's now looking to do SP and UB and I'm hoping to actually get to dps one of them. Tanking's fun, but I haven't had a chance to dps an instance since I got Mangle and I'd like to see how I do. Of course, I'll probably get a bunch of new whispers asking if I can heal.

My resto druid is ironically having the opposite problem. She got into a budding RFK run where there were three of us and no tank. Out of frustration (because I just wanted to run an instance) I said I would tank if they could find a healer to replace me. They did, and with the exception of the priest (who was leveling shadow) they were terrible. As a resto druid bear tank I was the #1 dps in the party. That's how bad it was.

It wasn't just the not-dpsing part, but the warlock who feared even after we told him not to, who wouldn't use curse of recklessness to stop runners even though we asked him to, and on top of that used his Eye of Kilrogg to scout around and perhaps even purposefully aggroed another pack of mobs since he was having his Eye jump around next to them.

We wiped, priest and I started over with a new group, and we picked up a warrior who wanted to tank and an actual resto shaman so for this one I went kitty. Two people leveling healing spec in the same group? What was the world coming to? We don't even have dual specs available at this level. But this second run was really smooth, no wipes, and I even got a new piece of feral legs for my solo-ing set. My dps was pretty cruddy as a resto kitty, but if the "tank" wasn't using a two-hander I might have beaten him. It's RFK though, so playing off-spec and using two-handers is fine.

And really, it's always been what I liked about being a druid in vanilla WoW. I merrily filled in any role asked of me because spec didn't matter until you started raiding. It wasn't optimal, but it got you through the instance.

But I can't help wondering why my feral keeps getting asked to heal, while my resto spends her instances as tank or dps (she ended up dps-ing SFK as well, her last instance). Does something happen between the old world and Outland? Is it because people are less willing to off-spec heal in Outland? Is the influx of DKs so huge that they outweigh all the leveling healers from the old world? Do all the leveling healers give up before they get to Outland?

My resto druid won't be going to Outland anytime soon, so I don't know what's going to happen to her when she gets there. Maybe she'll be asked to tank still. It could just be a server thing. Maybe her server just has a healer glut and Darkker's does not, but it'll be interesting to see. I might try pushing her to Outland before Cataclysm comes out, just to enjoy the old world content one last time, but maybe it'll be fun to leave her in a strategic place in the old world and see if she winds up in a chasm or the bottom of a lake (okay, maybe that's a bit mean).

[Druid] 3.2: Balance Buffed, Feral Nerfed, and Mix for Resto

So now I've had the weekend to digest that mammoth list of details Blizzard has called the 3.2 patch notes. I won't quote everything here. There's the official site for that.

Things all druids can look forward to the next patch are the new bear and cat forms. I'm rather pleased with the tauren druid forms. Even if I'm not sure how much I'll like them, even the worst of them looks better than the ones we have, but I also feel for my night elf brethren whose bears have sideburns and whose cats wear bracelets and strange neck dongles. I liked the night elf cat form the best of the old models and if I was a night elf I'd be sad to lose it.

All leveling druids will be happy to get travel form at level 16 and flight form at 60. I have a baby resto that is at level 20 (yes, I'm insane enough to have started a third druid and level it resto no less) and my feral is 59, a hair away from 60. Faster travel will always be appreciated, especially for my feral, who is located on a PvP server. (Eat my tail feathers, gankers!)

Also of use to all druids is the change to Innervate.

Innervate: Duration reduced to 10 seconds, and cooldown reduced to 3 minutes. This means each use of Innervate will give half as much mana as before, but it will be available twice as often.

Sure, it'll cost another GCD in a long running boss fight, but the flexibility more than makes up for it. I usually don't need the full benefit of my Innervate in a raid, so now I can use one cooldown on myself early in the fight (to top up) and then have another one available later on when a healer is more likely in trouble. Also, for a longer fight I'll be able to use Innervate a third time.

Perhaps even more than my balance druid, my feral alt is going to like this change. Feral mana pools are so small that the current version of Innervate is overkill, but running out of mana as a PvP feral is a real possibility with all the shapeshifting and spot healing a good druid does. You can tell who the bad ferals are in a battleground because they never shift out to heal themselves, even when combat is over.


Balance Changes

• Balance of Power: Now reduces all spell damage taken by 3/6%, rather than reducing the chance to be hit by spells by 2/4%.


• Eclipse: The Starfire and Wrath buffs from this talent are now on separate 30 second. cooldowns. In addition, it is not possible to have both buffs active simultaneously.


• Owlkin Frenzy: Now also restores 2% base mana every 2 seconds for the duration (10 seconds) in addition to its current effects.

If Balance of Power wasn't tied to spell hit I wouldn't have taken it, but the chance to be missed has no doubt factored into my survivability at some point or another. Though there will no longer be an increased chance to be missed, the overall damage I taken will still be less (making this change a buff) since the flat percentage of damage reduced is higher than what would be missed. It's nice, but not a reason to increase the desirability of this talent from a raiding perspective. I think it's probably more of a PvP change since feral has had similar avoidance chances changed to reductions.

Eclipse is a flat out buff. Now as soon as one eclipse is down we'll try proccing the other. This will also make us less dependent on mods such as Squawk and Awe to track how long we should be casting our chosen nuke during the internal cooldown. We'll always want to be swapping nukes after eclipse anyway. I'm sure there will be an inflection point where it will be desireable to change nukes without proccing an eclipse (say you're trying to get a lunar eclipse, but Wrath isn't cooperating and the lunar cooldown is almost up), but the less mod/theorycraft-inclined player will not suffer as much if they choose to just twist eclipses as they come.

Graylo did bring up a good point in that this means the Starfire and Wrath idols become outdated with the Eclipse twisting. Will one be better than the other anymore? The solar and lunar eclipses have pulled about even to each other depending on gear/latency with Ulduar. Is it really any good having an idol that only affects half of our new rotation?

The change Owlkin Frenzy is a bit odd to me. I'm not sure why it exists. Generally I expect some kind of synergy between the different benefits provided a buff (if there's more than one), but I don't know what the connection is between increased damage, no spell pushback, and mana back. If a moonkin is getting hit, does that mean it also needs more mana?

I'll be the first to admit I am the worst moonkin a person could possibly challenge to a duel (as in I'll lose so fast you'll wonder how the hell I can possibly be competent at the rest of the PvP I do), so I'm probably not the person who should be commenting on this talent, but I think it won't make much of a different in arena, and probably not in battlegrounds either. If my arena team is on a moonkin we don't care how much mana it has. We don't drain. How many times is a little extra mana regen going to help a focus-fired moonkin stay alive?

It seems this change would shine the most when the moonkin is being hit by splash damage, where it's taking damage but isn't likely to be immediately killed. PvP moonkin will no doubt have this talent anyway and derive some benefit for it, but it still seems an odd combination to me.


Feral Changes

• Mangle: Ranks 4 and 5 base points reduced by about 11%. Scaling from attack power unchanged.


• Rake: Ranks 6 and 7 base points on initial and periodic damage reduced by about 7%. Scaling from attack power unchanged.


• Rip: Ranks 8 and 9 base points and points per combo point reduced by about 6%. Scaling from attack power unchanged.


• Savage Defense: The animation for gaining this buff will no longer make the bear stand upright


• Shred: Ranks 8 and 9 base points reduced by about 10%. Scaling from attack power unchanged.


• Swipe (Cat): Percent of weapon damage done reduced from 260% to 250%.

If you're not sure whether or not you use the affected kitty ability ranks, they're all abilities gained from levels 71 and 80. Clearly high level cat dps is being nerfed, but pre-WotLK leveling cats should be all right. My guess is that both ranks had to be nerfed or the highest level rank would not be much of an improvement (or maybe even weaker) than the previous rank.

I'm not sure if the Mangle nerf affects both bears and cats, since that would affect bear threat, but I'm pretty sure it affects cats given everything else that is cat-specific. The Savage Defense fix is nice, but cosmetic.

The puzzling thing is that Ghostcrawler said that they're trying not change cat form so that it's useless in the hands of lesser skilled players. The cat form "rotation" is incredibly complex as is right now, leading to amusing flow charts such as the one linked here. This nerfs the dps for all players, but hurts the bad players as much as the good.

Good raiding cats have to be positionally aware of where they are relative to the boss as well as managing an incredibly complex set of buff/debuff/DoT priorities. There are mods to help with the latter, but the players who go to the effort of finding those mods are often the hardcore players who least need the help.


Resto Changes

• Lifebloom: The final heal that occurs when this spell blooms has been reduced by 20% on the base and on the spell power coefficient.


• Empowered Touch: Now also increases the amount of bonus healing effects for Nourish by 10/20%.


• Improved Barkskin: No longer provides dispel resistance to all effects on the druid, but now reduces the chance your Barkskin is dispelled by an additional 35/70%.

And Lifebloom is nerfed once again. I used to use it a lot while healing as balance for 5-mans or as the occasional backup raid healer during TBC, but these days I only toss it up if I already have a rejuv on the target and I feel they need a little more healing. I nearly always expect that Lifebloom will bloom on anyone except possibly the tank, and the bloom is a nice heal I've come to count on. It costs only a single GCD put out, and heals for a nice amount some seconds later. Perfect if you don't expect your target to die in the time it takes to bloom.

But it's been nerfed. I suspect this was largely a PvP nerf since I don't recall hearing that Lifebloom blooms heal way to much in PvE, but resto druids can be insane in arena. Squishy resto druids aren't a problem, but a well-geared one with plenty of resilience can take a lot of punishment with minimal impact to its ability to heal. Even if you incapacitate them for a few seconds, if they have hots up, their teammates are still getting healed.

I suspect Improved Barkskin is being nerfed for the same reason. Keeping the Barkskin itself is important for the druid, that's why they use it in the first place. No one wants their emergency button purged off of them. But this way it'll be easier to get rid of the hots and supplemental buffs that the druid may have.

In what appears to be the sole buff for resto, Empowered Touch is a talent is going to affect Nourish as well. Since the advent of tree form (which at the time could only cast spells with a HoT component to it) Healing Touch has fallen to the wayside, making this talent lackluster; more of a filler for lack of anything better to put points into. Healing Touch might be macroed to a Nature's Swiftness for a big emergency heal, but it's a long cast compared to anything else in the druid's arsenal.

I'm not sure that the bonus to Nourish will make the talent that much more appealing to resto druids, seeing as some of them have taken to Nourish like burning hot oil being poured down their throats, but that said, restos do use it (I've seen them doing it in arena!), so this talent should get some more usage, or at least a second glance.