No it’s not a foam weapon, like the balls we hurtled at each other in Elementary School Gym Class. This Nerf Bat hits like a sonofabitch and it leaves welts. Throughout my druid career I have been relatively happy with the decisions of the development team when it came to druids. I was ecstatic when they made Regrowth and Rejuvenation stackable. I sang praises when as the Tank I could do more damage than the DPS, when the nerf to bear form damage came I was still feral but I did not hold it against the Dev Team. Anyone could see that my abilities were outside of the design of my class.
Recently, my sentiment has been changed. When Zul’Aman went live and offered essentially nothing that would help me to fulfill my role, I was a bit cheesed. The fact the there were so few upgrades available to me through Heroic Badges, had me a little discouraged. The most recent news has me downright pissed.
I do not usually participate in Player vs. Player. My 2v2 Team has a total of 10 games under it’s belt. I have exactly one welfare epic from the Battle Grounds. I understand that PvP is a way that many players enjoy the game and I am all for it. I just don’t do it. So the recent changes on the PTR which seem to be an attempt to better balance PvP have me in a snit.
As a PvE Resto Druid I am NOT overpowered. If anything I am a little behind the curve when it comes to raid makeup. I struggle to get my raid spot because Resto Shamans are more efficient group healers than I am (even if they have shit gear), Holy Paladins, have better buffs than I do, and my Guild Leader is a Circle of Healing Priest so he is in love with that style of play.
On the Public Test Realms they have lowered the coefficient of +healing that the Lifebloom ability receives from gear. What does this mean well for a RestoDruid? Well it means that you can expect to see about 8% less healing per tick of Lifebloom (Resto4Life). This is a huge Nerf. If you are the type of druid who has been rolling Lifebloom on multiple tanks (which you should be) then Lifebloom is a massive amount of your total heals cast.
Lets look at the most common Lifebloom spell rotations:
I start every fight with a Rejuvenation on the Pulling Tank so that if there are two Critical Strikes in a roll I can Swiftmend the Tank and Prevent an early tank drop. For the sake of these calculations let’s say that we cast Rejuvenation on the Raid instead of Lifebloom so that if the Mage keeps getting whacked we can rescue them, understanding that many times we actually cast Lifebloom on the raid as well because we are confident that whoever took damage won’t be requiring a Swiftmend. For the sake of argument I examined the first 25 secs of each type of fight thats 13 Casts and 12 Global Cool Downs.
So for our example the cast sequence would be:
- Rejuvenation then three Lifeblooms on the Tank
- Three Instant Cast Heals on the Raid
- Lifebloom on the Tank
- Three Instant Cast Heals on the Raid
- Lifebloom on the Tank
- One Instant Cast on the Raid
That bring us to the 25 second mark. Heres the break down of the four most common Lifebloom rolling situations-
| 1 Tank | 2 Tank | 3 Tank | 4 Tank | |
| Lifebloom | 5 | 9 | 10 | 12 |
| RJ, SM, NS/HT | 8 | 4 | 3 | 1 |
| Percent LB | 38.4 | 69.2 | 76.9 | 92.3 |
In a 1 Tank Situation you would cast 5 Lifeblooms and 8 Rejuvenations or Swiftmends. So Lifebloom is 38.4% of your casts. But in a more common 2 or 3 Tank fight Lifebloom represents a much more significant part of our Spell Casting. In a 3 Tank fight the 8% Nerf to one of our spells is more like a 6.1% Nerf to our Class, a class that was not overpowered in Player vs. Environment in the first place.
See what some other Resto Druids are saying; Leafshine, Moonfire!, Resto4Life, HealerLFG and 4 Haelz
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February 21, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Resto4Life» Blog Archive » ~8% Nerf to Lifebloom, Thunderheart Changes
[...] of Lifebloomer has an analysis of how this change may affect multi-tank healing here. Falx: how is PTR? is it cool? Phaelia: Right now it’s a bunch of Druids flying up in the air [...]
February 25, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Leafshine: Lust for Flower
Don’t Go Nerfing My ‘blooms
Oh noes! Patch 2.4 brings us a Lifebloom nerf! Now, my guildies tell me that it’s just an 8% reduction in the healing co-efficient. But I have no idea what that means. So I’m just going to justify my QQing
February 25, 2008 at 3:03 pm
Mooonfire! » In which I swear mildly. Sorry.
[...] on the same page, why is this post about Lifebloom? Well, I’m not the only one who’s talking about this, but here’s the down-to-earth, nitty-gritty [...]
February 25, 2008 at 3:53 pm
lifebloomer
I would like to take a moment to thank Tesia from Boulderfist for her complimentary post on the Class Forums and for sharing my thoughts with the community.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=4665536054&sid=1&pageNo=14
I appreciate it.
February 28, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Taemojitsu
http://wowwiki.com/Healing_Comparison says it all.
A druid can benefit from 187% of their +healing (approximate; the SPS and coefficient numbers in those charts don’t take into account %-based increases from talents or crit heals) from a 1.5 second cast. In comparison, a priest or shammy, using the same 1.5 sec GCD, will benefit from just 43% of their +healing on a 1.5 sec FH or LHW.
The only class that even comes close to this spellpower-per-time-spent-casting rate is shaman using chain heal; and even then, they gain 175% of healing only using a 2.5 sec cast, about 60% of the scaling of a 3-stacked lifebloom… except that they have to use 2.5x the mana to achieve that level of scaling.
Basically all scaling is broken, a few overpowered heals stand out simply because they scale better and Blizzard isn’t going to bother fixing them… Lifebloom is just one of them. Shaman are useful only because they can get shadow priest mana batteries letting them spam at max thruput for the entire duration of an encounter. Druids complain about they can’t increase their healing thruput with more mana regen, since Lifebloom’s cost is so low… but that’s only because Lifebloom is so imba-ly efficient compared even to well-scaling HoTs that there’s no point in using those other heals!
The druid ‘niche’ is efficient healing on multiple targets without needing a mana battery. Other classes cannot fill this role. Nerfing Lifebloom scaling (and it’s only a tiny nerf after all… proportionally, the HoT should be getting around a 15-20% coefficient or less) will not eliminate this feature of healing druids… at the very worst, it will just mean that druids will have to start using other spells more frequently and will require more mana regen in raids. Other healers already require that extra mana regen (from a spriest, etc) so will not change druid usefulness, just the stress put on the entire raid.
February 28, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Taemojitsu
*oops, it’s even worse than that. Chain Heal scales at 175% (tho actually 175% * 1.3, given talents.. while lifebloom is xxx% * 1.1 from) compared to normal scaling of 100% within the spellpower system (aka every 3.5 sec); not 175% per cast. So, you’d compare 125% at 2.5 sec for chain heal, vs 187% for 1.5 sec for a druid.
Or 4 stacks of lifebloom at 109% SPS each, for a total of 440% SPS, vs the 175% of chain heal. Either way you get the same numbers. Lifebloom is beyond fine, even with the nerf; druids for some reason just do not understand this.
Besides: the original design of Lifebloom meant that stacking the HoT was not a primary healing option… instead it was an ALTERNATIVE to wasting a bloom on a target at full health. It was reactive, stacking the HoT was not something you’d normally do but only when things did not go as expected, or when you wanted to reset the bloom so it went off 7 seconds later at the appropriate time, instead of too late or too soon, as a counter to spike damage.
The scaling coefficient of the HoT tho makes this an efficient option. So this means druid healing lacks choice or variability, instead it’s just boring where you spam lifebloom every 6 sec on different targets and that’s the most efficient thing you can do. Why you enjoy a single-spell playstyle, instead of one where all your spells were useful, is beyond me. (Well actually it isn’t, it’s when people enjoy big numbers more than playing skillfully using different tactics, sort of like obsession with items in a computer game.. but this is counter to my rhetorical point so~)
February 29, 2008 at 10:06 am
lifebloomer
Taemojitsu,
I have to take exception to your post because you are overlooking one major factor of Lifebloom rolling. In order for LB to be mana efficient it must be maintained throughout the fight. Many, MANY of Lifebloom’s ticks on the Tank are wasted. In fact Lifebloom doesn’t even tick when the target is at full health. So when Druids look at their combat logs they may well see that Lifebloom was only 40% of their healing done even though it was approximately 75-90% of their casting. Don’t try to tell me that the scaling on Lifebloom was too high I have to keep spending my mana on a spell that only heals 50% of the time, by design.
Your assumption that Druids should require a mana battery is also flawed. Most raids take one Resto Druid, Tree of Life aura is only applied to the group the tree is in, typically there is not room in the main tank group for a shadow priest as well, nor would it be effective to have a shadow priest group with only one other caster.
This is a huge nerf because it will limit our ability to do our current job in raids, limiting spike damage so that the other healers have enough time to get their flash heals off. If we were to start “using our other abilities” we have to completely abandon the role that we are necessarily filling.
March 1, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Taemojitsu
Every single class has huge amounts of overheal in raids. The HoTs that do not tick on a target at full health are equivalent to all the heals that a paladin or priest or shaman uses, that ends up hitting a tank that was already at full or nearly full health. WWS makes this so easy to check… personally I think it’s absurd that healing classes tend to end up with around 40-50% overheal, because it means they’re spending almost twice as much mana as is ‘optimal’. But that’s the way the game is… most likely because the high avoidance on tanks these days increases the variance on damage taken in the negative direction, as opposed to the old style in early WoW of increased spike damage in the positive direction from crits and crushing blows.
WoW could be designed to avoid these high avoidance values, thus leading to more predictable damage taken (instead of miss, dodge, parry, dodge, HIT HIT, dodge, parry… etc), but that’s not the topic here. Druids are by no means underrepresented in raids. This can be very easily shown:
http://wowwebstats.com/?search=illidan
Now, maybe shaman are a bit OP, because of the high base thruput of Chain Heal as well as its scaling which is better than most other heals (but significantly less than even nerfed Lifebloom!). But other than that, druids have about the same representation as any other class, maybe even more than some others; hunters look like they might be the worst off, tho maybe it’s just that encounter. But druids are, and will continue to be fine. Just look at it this way: 8-10% less healing for Lifebloom ticks means that 8% more of your ticks will go off, instead of ticking on someone who’s already at full health.
March 4, 2008 at 2:56 pm
Darian
“Just look at it this way: 8-10% less healing for Lifebloom ticks means that 8% more of your ticks will go off, instead of ticking on someone who’s already at full health.”
That’s an incorrect assertion.
The 8% that is missing is more likely to be healed by another healer than it is to be scooped up by additional Lifebloom ticks. This is at least true in the case where it is being stacked on tanks to smooth out spike damage.
I don’t find your arguments compelling, but I do appreciate you making them. Personally, I’m more interested in the angle of whether the increased mana regeneration from spirit will offset this by allow Druid to be less picky about their healing rotations.
March 5, 2008 at 8:02 pm
Taemojitsu
[quote]The 8% that is missing is more likely to be healed by another healer than it is to be scooped up by additional Lifebloom ticks. This is at least true in the case where it is being stacked on tanks to smooth out spike damage.[/quote]
[i]this[/i], and other arguments about how “a paladin or priest will use a 1.5 sec cast making druid HoTs placed on a target be wasted”, are just about e-peen! If the paladins and druids have the mana to burn, let them!! It just means beating the encounter will be that much easier, since YOU, the druid, will have more mana to use on your more ‘inefficient’ abilities like Regrowth or Rejuv to set up a swiftmend.
The only reason to get upset about someone ‘stealing’ heals from you is healing e-peen meters. If your guilds worries about such things in deciding whom to bring to a raid, maybe it is your guild that is the problem, not the coefficients on your spells.
I have seen many druids post about the usefulness of non-LB heals, such as you mention, Darian, and how these other spells are too often neglected by LB-spammers. Ofc there are always the retard druids claiming that every heal except LB would be 100% useless even with infinite mana, but I think greater viability of a wide range of spells is always a good thing for a class, it means that the incompetent players get weeded out and lets the good ones shine.
WoW is just too obsessed with “buff”/”nerf” these days. /shakes head
March 5, 2008 at 11:41 pm
Taemojitsu
*edit: I have revised my opinion of the whole HoT vs direct heal situation, and it basically comes to this: druids have the potential to do as well as any other class in normal healing that consumes large amounts of mana and focuses on healing up damage that is actually inflicted. However, the particular mechanics of LIFEBLOOM, and lifebloom alone (not other HoTs!) make this kind of adaptability impractical, because it’s just too inefficient to let a 3-stack of lifebloom fall off. This means you can’t properly react to damage, and it also means you can’t ‘waste time’ setting up HT pre-heals to cancel if your target hasn’t taken any damage, the way you used to be able to pre-TBC and the way some other classes still do; instead you are ‘forced’ to spend your entire time renewing LB stacks to achieve maximum efficiency and average thruput.
So, in order to achieve directed healing versatility, druids are forced to give up large amounts of healing efficiency because of the particular way Lifebloom works. However, the base cause of this is still the scaling of the Lifebloom HoT component.
good nerf, bad nerf, etc I personally don’t care: a nerf to Lifebloom does mean slightly reduced effectiveness, yes. But you still have situational advantages over other class, after all few raids have as many shadow priest batteries as they might like; and more importantly imo, any nerf to lifebloom HoT scaling is another step in the direction of increased usability of other druid heals. If you play for fun, you should not mind this nerf. If you play for healing meter e-peen, well~
March 6, 2008 at 7:50 am
lifebloomer
I’m glad to see you are starting to come around Taemojitsu. My question for you is this- Should druids continue to roll Lifebloom on the tanks to prevent spike damage that can and does lead to wipes, or should they try to “cast other spells”?
If I am rolling Lifebloom on two tanks I still cast: Rejuvenation, Regrowth, Swiftmend, Natures Swiftness and Healing Touch. But I because I only have 4 seconds to spare in my cast rotation I can not spam Healing Touch (cast time of 5 secs) and roll Lifebloom on two Tanks. If the developers intention was for me to spam Healing Touch they would not have made it take 2 Seconds longer than our other spells allow.
If the eventual goal is to put spell haste on druid gear so that we can fit Healing Touch into our rotation then what are we expected to do until this gear hits?
Why would I try to play in the style of a Paladin when my spells aren’t designed for it? Who would take a Paladin that had a permanent Curse of Tongues debuff? If I try to direct heal that is essentially what I am. I don’t care about the meters so much as I care about being effective. I’m sure that if I wanted to even with this change I could own the meter. Thats not what I’m after I’m trying to offset enough damage on the tanks so the Direct Healing Classes have time to do their job.
March 6, 2008 at 1:51 pm
Taemojitsu
Healing Touch has a cast time of 3.0 sec when talented
It would be possible to fit one into a rotation of two LB stacks, altho if you had to cancel due to your target being at full health you would have wasted those entire three seconds, with no opportunity to try to re-cast again until you’d renewed your two stacks. So yes, you do not have any casting versatility under the Lifebloom mechanics.
I can suggest two things: first, if there are resto druids in the raid, other classes with ‘fast’ heals should not worry about healing up small amounts of damage on non-tanks. A druid can plop down a LB and heal it up easily, while other classes such as paladin or priest are MUCH more effective if they use their quick heals on damage that is time-sensitive, i.e. on the tanks.
Second, try a different playstyle than what you normally do! I did a little math, and it seems that while previously a 3-stack would do ~4600 healing per cast (with about 2000 +healing) compared to ~3150 for a single cast non-stacked + bloom, now it’s more like 4300 vs 3100.
So see how well you do with a different rotation on the tanks: DON’T stack Lifebloom, just single-cast it and treat it like rejuv: something you renew after it falls off. So keep Lifebloom up on all tanks, keep Rejuv up, use Regrowth reactively against spike damage as well as SM, then just keep pre-casting HT’s and cancel them if they’re not needed. You lose a bit of guaranteed, efficient but nonreactive heals from the lifebloom stacks, but you gain a huge amount of intelligent healing placement with HT!
You might be surprised, and either way it’s a change of pace.
So no, it’s a nerf any way you look at it and nerfs aren’t fun, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still have fun in the game.
March 6, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Taemojitsu
stupid smilies~
:P
:)
March 6, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Taemojitsu
The situation where this would not work is when multiple tanks take large amounts of spike damage concurrently; in this case the immediate, multi-target healing of stacked Lifeblooms is still preferable to large, pre-casted, but single-target heals. So maybe the broken scaling of lifebloom isn’t so bad.. it’s not like you can destroy a class by giving them a spell that’s too powerful, after all ;)
March 6, 2008 at 8:50 pm
Blizzard Loves Druids » Omen of Clarity
[...] Sioban: This Nerf Bat hits like a sonofabitch and it leaves welts … Nerf to one of our spells is more …. [...]