I had originally planned on writing a particularly witty post about gem choices for druids, but then Ghostcrawler released a lengthy blue post, addressing incoming druid changes and I felt obligated to talk about them and to give my opinions about what was revealed. 

I can’t say that this particular post will have a lot of advice, per se, but hopefully people can relate to some of the opinions I have and maybe even a healthy debate can come from this.  I’m also going to suggest that you pre-HoT before reading this one – wall of text definitely incoming.   

Rejuv was too good. We nerfed it. The change got labeled as a bug fix, because technically it was a bug. We didn’t mean to buff Rejuv’s duration but once we did we didn’t think it was breaking anything for a time so we let it stay. For 3.3 we decided it was breaking things and reduced the duration. We understood the confusion this caused with the community by labeling it a bug fix so we changed the patch note to no longer refer to it as a bug fix. It doesn’t really matter what it was called — it was a nerf.

I think this argument could go either way.  Yes, Rejuvenation is good.  But I also think based on the healing assignments that most druids are given, it’s the best spell we have for what we are asked to do.  I don’t know of many druids that are asked to stay on tank healing.  Now we certainly assist on certain fights, but it’s rare that we are asked to focus solely on that.  We include the tanks in our raid healing, but that is usually assigned to paladins and priests. 

The other spells we have, like Healing Touch or Regrowth and to some extent Nourish, don’t make the best choice for raid healing.  It’s far more efficient to spread a number of Rejuvs on the raid and follow them up with Wild Growth, which also allows you to set the groundwork for Swiftmend, if those targets need more attention.

So it’s not necessarily the Rejuv alone that makes it so good.  You have the HoT itself, which is strong and is boosted by talents and an amazing Idol and then the potential for a Swiftmend, a buff to Nourish and also some forms of regen, if you put talent points into Revitalize. 

A guildie of mine had crunched the numbers and deduced that the reduction of the extra tick  really wasn’t a big loss.  We would still be healing for the same amount per tick, with the loss of some global cooldowns.  Meaning the healing per second and healing power would remain the same, but the number of Rejuvs we could blanket the raid with may slightly go down. 

But I do appreciate Blizzard coming forward and stating that it wasn’t simply a “We didn’t realize this tick was there all along” thing. 

In the same patch, we decided to change Gift of the Earth Mother because it was adding a gratuitous amount of haste and at the same time making druids avoid haste where they could. We have been too generous with some of the haste talents that coupled with gear and buffs are causing problems.

I have always had a love/hate relationship with Gift of the Earthmother (GotE).  It was something I initially put talent points in, just to spend the points and I remember re-speccing for PVP one day and realizing how slow my HoTs seemed to come out when I didn’t have those talent points there.  It was very underrated and it became something I noticed I couldn’t do without in PVE. 

In the early raiding scene in “Wrath,” we didn’t have that much haste available.  Don’t get me wrong, we had a lot.  But I don’t feel it was as abundant.  I didn’t picked up my Tier 7 4 piece bonus, because I have never been a big fan of Nourish (more on that later) and I felt there were other pieces that were much better.  Most of the available pieces that were best for me already had a large amount of haste on them.

Pieces from Ulduar continued the trend of resto druid gear still coming with a lot of haste, despite Tier 8 being more crit oriented.  Also, some resto druids were still using spellpower trinkets like the Egg of Mortal Essence or had moved on to Scale of Fates, which both come with either a chance of proccing a lot of haste or that come with an “on use” effect that did that. 

The transition to Tier 9 seemed to cement the notion that druids were being directed to have haste on their gear, especially considering the quality of gear available (specifically cloaks, rings and weapons) that happened to have good amounts of haste on them.  This is strange, because the awesome 4 piece bonus seems to thrive on us having a higher critical strike rating.  It’s certainly not something you should be gemming for or going terribly out of your way to improve, but swapping out some of the haste on the more noteworthy pieces for crit would have been a blessing.

Overall, I would agree that we do have too much haste right now.  I personally have more than I know what to do with.  And while I admit that, I also kind of wonder what would happen if I didn’t have it anymore.  I dread the thought of my HoTs coming out that slowly again and I think this is one change I would really have to experience, before I can comment any further or more definitively on. 

While we didn’t change Gift of the Earth Mother with the express purpose of nerfing druids, it still had that effect. We considered the Rejuv nerf and the GotEM nerf and decided we liked the second one more and reverted the first one. Rejuv is back to 18 sec for 3.3.

I certainly won’t turn down an extra tick on Rejuv and since I didn’t feel the change was a nerf, I feel this is pretty positive.  I do think there is a chance the GotE change could be the more negative of the two, if we aren’t casting as many HoTs or casting as fast as we could be, without all the haste we’re used to.  I’m just going by what I remember happening and what I would think would happen if the mass output of our heals wasn’t there.  Again, this is something I believe could be bad, but I hesitate to say for sure until I see it in action. 

We realize the GotEM nerf hurt PvP Resto druids a lot and that is still something we are evaluating.

GotE wasn’t something I remember seeing in any common PVP builds and it wasn’t something I had room for in mine, though I wish it was.  I’m not sure how true this is.

Resto druids have a lot of heal spells. Which ones you go to the most is going to be a function of things like set bonuses, idols, your role in the group as well, as well as the encounters themselves. Druids healing the raid currently seem to use a lot of Rejuv and Wild Growth while those healing tanks use a lot of Nourish and perhaps even Lifebloom. Lifebloom still gets a lot of use in PvP. Regrowth has slipped off the radar a little, IMO, but it has been good at various points in LK and I don’t think it would be that hard to bring it back (and we’ll see what the GotEM change does). Bringing it back would probably slide something else down the bar, at least temporarily. We’re pretty much okay with that. Healing Touch (and maybe Tranq) is the only Resto spell for which we’re really not interested in carving off a major raid-healing niche. It still has situational uses with NS or in 5-player dungeons.

Rereading the above, I am making sweeping generalizations a lot. Your mileage may vary and there are a ton of exceptions. One thing that hits me a lot in my position is that players assume the way they do a thing is the way everyone must do that thing. Players exhibit some pretty diverse behaviors and still get the boss down. Keep that in mind whenever you try to adopt the “accepted” or “cookie cutter” spell rotation for any class.

This is the statement I agree with the most.  I agree with their spell usage being based on your assignments and that Lifebloom does seem to be used more in PVP and that the mechanics behind it seem more intricate in that setting.  Regrowth could stand to see more use and it does see a fair amount in tank healing and even some raid healing scenarios (for serious DoT debuffs or effects like Kologarn’s grip, pot healing on Ignis, etc).

It is nice to note the idea of not necessarily going down the accepted route to get things done.  Sure, you have a job to do and your job is to keep people up.  But you shouldn’t feel limited to only do it one way.  There are fights with various gimmicks where doing it one set way, all the time won’t work.  Understanding that versatility and knowing when you need to switch it up is the key to staying competitive in the current raid environment.

Particularly angry druids like to talk about Nourish getting “shoved down their throat” or whatever. We added Nourish because we recognized the druid need for a “Flash Heal.” Healing Touch is too long to cast without NS and both NS and Swiftmend have a cooldown. The hots all do great healing, and they can definitely save someone’s life, but they just aren’t reliable for e.g. someone being focused by faction champions. In the BC era where we basically mandated that druids are just one arm of the healing machine that must also include paladins, priests and shamans it was okay to have a very narrow niche. In a world of 10-player raids, we want you to be able to heal with say 2 Resto druids and a Disc priest. “Hey, I’m just here to hot the raid,” is fine if it works for your group, but that can’t be the only thing that works. (And this applies to all 5 healing specs.)

Particularly angry druids like to talk about Nourish getting “shoved down their throat” … because it was shoved down our throats.

I have never had a problem with Nourish, per se.  I think it is a wonderful situational spell that is very useful, for the occasions that it is suited for.  For anything else, I really don’t think it’s that great.  What I really resented about it was how I feel Blizzard strong-armed us into using it.

They could have taken the stance of “We have this neat spell and you guys can give it a shot when you’re ready and let us know what you think.”  Instead, I felt like I was dealing with a sleazy car salesman who was leering at me and saying “Well, we’re going to nerf Lifebloom, but we have this neat little spell called Nourish.  Have you heard of it?  Nourish – it’s in your spell book right here…”

The druid community still wasn’t too sold on it, so they had to up the ante a little bit.  “The newest batch of druid glyphs will be a waste and you probably won’t want to use any of them – but we did add a Nourish glyph.  Remember Nourish?  And if the glyph really isn’t working for you, we’ll throw in this incredible offer to include Nourish in some talents that you already have and can’t really avoid taking.  Because we know you are going to love, love this spell!”

No pressure or anything, right? 

Now as the last post mentioned, I find Nourish extremely useful in 10 man raids, particularly the hard modes.  I use it quite a bit there.  I also use it frequently in PVP (thanks to all the healing reduction debuffs) and in the odd situation in 25 man raids (i.e. Plasma Blasts during Mimiron, Deconstructor’s tantrum, Incinerate Flesh on Jarraxus, etc.) 

I just feel like it’s something that we could have discovered on our own and that we didn’t need to have our focus shifted to, by reducing the effectiveness of other spells or altering talents to make room for it.  It was fine as is and would have continued to get more attention, as things progressed.  It also didn’t help that many of the early raids in “Wrath” had no use for it.  The healing in Naxxramas, Malygos and Sarth was entirely manageable with what we already had.  I would like to think most druids would have picked up on the increased need for Nourish in Ulduar and ToC, by simply experiencing the fights first hand and picking up on a need for what Nourish could offer.

In closing, it was great to see Ghostcrawler give some insight into the changes and I look forward to experiencing a number of them for myself and to see how other druids deal with the changes. 

Thanks for reading and look for my post on druid gemming in the next week or so.  You won’t need to pre-HoT for that one, I promise.

Tagged as Blue Posts, Gift of the Earthmother, HoTs, Lifebloom, Nourish, Regrowth, Rejuvenation, Restoration Druid, Spells, Talents + Categorized as Druid