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.

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.

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~

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

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.

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.

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.