Ok I'll buy that the druid toolbox is full, and it really doesn't bother me that we aren't going to receive any love this expansion in the form of a new spell, but could you just maybe take a look at Healing Touch. It’s the one spell that I will never use in a group/raid other then the occasional NS/HT, the cast time is just way too long. We also have 3 talents that directly effect this heal, a possible 12 talent points. Kind of excessive for a class that no longer spans rank 4. I guess what I’m saying is if our toolbox is full is it really fair to count that rusted hammer in the bottom that is only pulled out to bang something back into place.

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Q u o t e:

What was stated is that Regrowth will be the quick flash heal. Nourish will be the Medium go-to heal. HT will be the inefficient large heal (aka also a mana hog).

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The big heal doesn't have to be super inefficient. It just has to take more mana than the efficient heal, but that's okay because it also heals for more. You use the big heal when it's faster than using two of the efficient heals. That only really makes it inefficient when you're overhealing a ton.

Your fast heals will be the inefficient ones, because you pay more for speed. Don't spam those, but use them when you don't have time for a long cast before damage will happen next.

If you're a druid healing a tank, you'll probably use Lifebloom, then Nourish, swapping to Healing Touch at times when the tank's health starts to dip dangerously low. You probably won't cast Healing Touch often on non-tanks, unless they're just super low for some reason (and in those situations, you may need a fast heal like Regrowth or Swiftmend to get them stable anyway).

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Q u o t e:
All this Blizzard handwringing over resto druids continues, meanwhile they seem not to have a care in the world that holy pallies have a ridiculously simplistic healing rotation, if you want to even call it a "rotation."

I really don't understand what got GC so worked up about resto druids, but it's not making for a very fun lead-up to Cata, for me at least. I thought the whole point of the preview was that we weren't going to get new spells but the ones we had would be made to work better.

Yet (except for the extremely long-cooldown tranquility) I've heard absolutely NOTHING about any IMPROVEMENTS to spells we have. Just a nerf to Wild Growth, and delusions about Lifebloom and/or Healing Touch being good tank healing spells.

I'd really like some reassurance that the spells we have will actually be IMPROVED or I'll probably put my resto druid on ice and level another character to 85 during Cata.

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Play what you find fun. We're not going to make druids overpowered in order to attract you to them. :)

Paladins are getting several new healing spells. Druids aren't, so I figured it was worth a little bit of explanation for why we made that decision. The short answer is that we're trying to find homes for all those druid spells that don't get much use. A devious alternative I suppose would be to cut Healing Touch and Regrowth and then make new druid spells to fill in the holes with different names. The druids that are going to be the most sad about the healing changes will be those who like just using the same couple of spells (Rejuv + WG in today's environment) over and over. I can't offer to much to placate them, except that unless you're up against the game's most challenging content, you have a lot more flexibility in how you choose to play your character.

Lifebloom is a good tank healing spell. Sorry if you find that delusional. (If you disagree with that, I assume it's because you put the paladin on the tank and the druid on the raid. That's a fine strategy, but we want to create more room for both classes to branch out.) Healing Touch is not, but that's for several reasons that we now have a chance to address: 1) Certain talents / glyphs / set bonus shore up spells like Rejuv a lot. 2) Healing Touch currently would overheal a lot. 3) Players would currently die while winding up a heal with such a long cast time.

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Q u o t e:
This is egregiously unfair to the poster you quote: the issue is not one of "overpowered" versus "underpowered", but rather a question of whether the class, as people have come to know it and love it over 5 years now, is going to be radically changed, such that people who previously enjoyed resto druids will boot up Cataclysm to discover the class they played doesn't exist anymore.

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The poster said "improve my spells." Maybe he or she meant "make them more fun," which is a goal with which I would agree, but I assumed it meant "make them more powerful."

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Q u o t e:
I think it's a good thing. I don't think though that blizzard wants to go back to you only casting HT or a place where LB was completely dominant. They want to continue what you have going on now, except make a place for all of the heals that are in your arsenal. They aren't going to do that with the druid talent trees and spell selection alone, but also with encounter design.

Maybe your mobility will go down if spells that have cast times start to have a use, but that doesn't mean that suddenly you will stop also using your instant cast hots.

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Wasselin has it right. It's not really a strong design to have the "I'm the good mobility healer!" because then either you're underpowered on non-mobility fights, or you're average on those fights and overpowered on mobility fights.

I can understand if you're just really, really attached to your character. Believe me. We're not going to make anyone unviable in the expansion. But we are also taking this chance to fix some of the problems that have developed in the healing game. I understand that change can be scary, but it can also bring about good things too. The game would stagnate if we were too afraid of change.

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Q u o t e:
Please see the underlined portion. We already make use of all our spells. Every single one of them. In some fights we completely change up how we heal the fight based on how the damage comes in. Sometimes we have to pre-hot, sometimes you have to reactively heal, other times you need to nourish spam a tank because a paladin had to run etc. etc. There is a use for every single tool we have for healing. Even the not often used HT gets some shine on it in high HPS situations like what was required in hard mode anub'arak.

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Nots, I understand the point you're trying to make but I worry this is one of those situations where you and I are just perceiving the world differently. It's not as simple as which spells you cast (particularly you individually). It's a combination of how effective you can be with a limited number of spells, how the strength of certain spells can pigeon-hole you into a certain healing role and exclude you from other roles, and what various druid healers, especially the best ones, do in the live game. A lot of information goes into coming to conclusions like this. We draw some straight from the raid parses, but others come directly from correspondence with druid players.

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Q u o t e:
I totally agree that I don't want to play the way you're describing. However you and I are reading the same things and coming to vastly different conclusions about what's being promised for Druids in Cata. My parse on GC's words leads me to believe that the design goal is for all of the spells in the Druid's toolbox to have a solid and well-defined role, with plenty of spectacular uses for Rejuv, LB, and WG just as much as HT, Nourish, and Regrowth. Your parse leads you to imagine a world in which Druids sit there and fire off Healing Touches 'til the cows come home, with Rejuv and WG relegated to the dustbin. I think that's a badly mistaken interpretation.

It sure would be nice for GC to come in and adjudicate the dispute over the meaning of his words! ;-D

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We're not getting rid of the notion of druids using lots of hots when healing. We think that's an important part of the spec. There are some players who want to cast almost nothing but hots though, or some players who don't see anything wrong with the strategy of trying to keep Rejuv up on as many targets as possible whether or not they are taking damage. We want druids to make more *decisions* about which spells to cast and which target to heal. Some of you claim you do that today, and that's great. We want to reward you more for being good at that.

There are several heals that are just doing too much work individually in the current game, which makes other spells seem relatively pointless by comparison. Rejuv and Wild Growth are two of them, but so are Circle of Healing, Power Word: Shield, Holy Light, Flash of Light and others. It's not that the numbers are just borked on those spells (though they probably are in some cases). It's just that the current environment really rewards over-reliance on certain spells. We think the Cataclysm healing game will be more dynamic. There will be fights that emphasize efficiency and fights that emphasize triage and I'm sure there will still be fights that emphasize quick timing and spamming -- just hopefully not as many.

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Q u o t e:
If druids have all 3 of the heals everyone else has, but also have valuable HoTs, then aren't they simply superior? Given that GC has repeatedly mentioned that the developers feel druids use REjuv and WG to the exclusion of all else (I do not endorse this notion, by the way), this seems very unlikely.

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It doesn't have to be that cut and dried. Holy paladins today have the smallest toolbox but are generally conceded to be the strongest tank healer. The best druids can be those that know the difference between whether Rejuv is sufficient to bring someone up or whether you need to drop a Regrowth on them as well. If you're not on particularly challenging content, then you can probably use whatever spell you want and be able to still get through.

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Q u o t e:
They don't want Druids to become Paladins. They want Druids to be able to tank heal, and not be so amazing at raid healing.

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More accurately, I would say we want it to be okay to put the druid on the tank and the paladin on the raid, instead of feeling like your two paladin 10-player raid is doomed to failure. We also want druids to value haste and mana regen more, pay more attention to who is injured compared with focusing so much on pre-healing, and get more use out of historically neglected spells (Tranquility and Healing Touch being the most glaring examples).

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Q u o t e:
Nobody calls raids because of the types of healers they have log on. We've called plenty of raids but we never called on because of the type of healer that is online. So you are being overly dramatic with that.

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I'm not so sure about that. Even if they go, they still probably feel underpowered compared to having the "right" healers (whatever that means).

Many 25-player raids have all 4 classes and perhaps even all 5 healer specs. It's really more of an issue for the 10-player raids. Early on in LK it was a big consideration for 5-player dungeons. Holy paladins were pretty convinced that they couldn't heal Halls of Lightning to the extent that I took the unusual step of offering them a strategy that could work for them. We love class diversity. Love it. But diversity can't come at the expense of being able to play. When you start to see stuff like "LF heals - no paladins" (assuming the issue is perceived paladin weakness on the content not full on paladins) then that's a problem.

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Q u o t e:
Unless I've seriously misinterpreted the topics I've read, I believe Resto Druids value Haste quite highly right now — the only thing they prize more is Spellpower.

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It's better now, but GotEM and Celestial Focus (and talents of that ilk in all specs) still provide too much haste such that its realistic to get capped. Any class with so much vested in instant spells risks not valuing haste as much as other casters. That's okay to a point, but a big focus of Cataclysm is not to have these situations where players dismiss as junk gear that is targeted for them because one of "their" stats (meaning things like crit and haste for a healer, not hit or Agi) become excessively devalued relative to another stat.

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Q u o t e:
The Holy Light + glyph technique you suggested at the time had only just appeared on Sath. Until then, paladins still relied a lot on Flash of Light. So you actually suggested that casual players be aware of top-level raiding techniques, with the right glyphs on top of that, just to beat a 5man encounter.

That's not fine. I had done the Loken encounter on both my newbie druid and newbie paladin at the time. There was just no comparison.

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I'm not sure what your axe to grind here is, but you're agreeing with me. Having a healer be overly week on a fight like Loken isn't acceptable. Having a healer that is overly specialized at one aspect of healing to the point at which they can't do another job isn't either. We have to balance class diversity with the ability to do the job. Both are extremely important and can occasionally be mutually exclusive, so there is going to be some tension there. We'll all keep seeing "I need X's ability to do my job" posts right next to "don't homogenize me, bro" posts on every class.

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Q u o t e:
Are steps being taken to avoid having 10 man hard mode fights that are perceived as requiring specific types of healers? (Ex: How like a disc priest trivializes a big part of the LK.)

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It's not the goal that you bring X or go home, even for hard mode fights. Lich King though is arguably the toughest fight we've ever made and the pressure for raid stacking is going to be greatest when that's the case. We'll do what we can to combat it, but at the end of the day there will still probably be fights where one tank, dps or healer class has an advantage over another. To some extent it's probably that or just not make very, very hard fights. When the fight where one class or spec really shines is the final boss or the perceived hardest boss or whatever, there is going to be some drama. In my experience though it's often the player who have no realistic shot of attempting that content who tend to complain the loudest. It's a slap in the face and all.

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Q u o t e:
This is a non-sequitur, and a worrisome one at that. It's the sort of evasive answer one sees when the answerer wishes to avoid conceding, but wants you to understand they're not actually contesting the issue.

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I don't feel it was an evasive answer. The question posed was: won't the healer with the most heals be the strongest? I don't think that is a universal truth. It would be trivial to make paladins able to out-heal any kind of hot, if that were the design. It's not. The design is that the healers are about equal overall.

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Q u o t e:
You didn't get my point though : sometimes, you need to take a step back and look at the game from a casual player's point of view. Someone who doesn't read the forums everyday. On these forums, people are geniuses : they know everything about the game. But outside, it's different : you can still find rets who equip spellpower gear.

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Okay, fair enough, and I agree with you. A very small minority of our players post on forums or even follow daily news on the game. When I'm posting here I'm speaking to the players who are actively looking for information, but I don't pretend for a moment that it gets out to everyone.

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Q u o t e:
The statement I labeled a non-sequitur is in italics; In the original question, the issue is how druids can be balanced in Cataclysm, if they have the same trinity of heals that all healers have, as well as "valuable HoTs". In other words, the question is how valuable HoTs can be if healers are all in possession of the same trinity of heals (as they have been stated to be in Cataclysm). In response, the statement was made that this is not "necessarily" so, and an example is given from current content.

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I'm still not following you. Disc priests can have the trinity of heals and also valuable absorbs. Resto shaman can have heals and also Chain Heal. The druid hots certainly aren't free healing. They have mana and GCD costs.

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Q u o t e:
Has there been any discussion about adding a damage mitigation spell or death preventing CD spell for the two healing class/spec that do not have them? Specifically a spell that can be used when dealing with situations that healing spells can not effectively handle. One that is not based on race or class, but it actually available because they are a healer.

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We'd prefer not to give a version of every single tool to every class. In some cases, we think it's unavoidable. Everyone needs a fast heal of some kind. As I keep saying, it's a narrow line to walk to make sure healing classes are more or less interchangeable without the classes literally having all the same abilities. Flexibility and diversity are both very important and they sometimes collide.

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Q u o t e:
Please link a blue post or other official preview that says they are "giving druids more power in non-mobility fights." I THOUGHT that was what they intended when I read the Cata previews, and I assumed that in the days and weeks that followed we'd be reading a GC post about how they were making this or that healing spell work better for single-target heals. Instead we get GC posts about how Lifebloom is a great tank healing spell just the way it is, and about how *suppress giggle* Healing Touch can be a good emergency heal. And we get an outright nerf to our strongest group heal Wild Growth.

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Miscomm. In Cataclysm Healing Touch will be a good emergency heal. It isn't really now outside of situational use with NS. Yes, we want to give druids more power in non-mobility fights. We need to diminish all healers deficiencies but also make them not as dominant over other healers in their ideal situation. Otherwise, there is always going to be pressure to bring say a paladin for tank healing, but never for raid healing.

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Q u o t e:
Regarding the bolded part, it's curious you're interested in preserving very, very hard fights (H.LK is awesome) but are ready to nuke 25 man difficulty by equating them to their 10 man variants.

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I'm risking a derail by saying this, but it's very possible to have hard 10-player fights, and we've had some cases in Lich King where the 10-player fights ended up being more difficult than the 25-player versions. Players who consider 10s to always be easy mode are probably running them wearing 25-player gear. *That* problem is going away.

We like to offer the occasional very challenging fight, and we'll still do that in Cataclysm. We recognize that for some raiders that's really the content they are interested in. Those fights absolutely put enormous pressure on class balance and utility though.

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Q u o t e:
Is it poor design to say that Disc Priests are the absorption healers, simply because they are vastly more powerful than every other healer on "absorption" fights and less so on fights where it matters much less?

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No, I wouldn't say that. I would say it's bad design when you cancel your raid because you can't find a Disc priest that night, or ask one of your awesome priests to respec Holy if they both want to play Disc that night (since they don't stack well). Paladins will never be hotting as much as druids hot. That's what I would call style or kit. We would like paladins to raid heal and druids tank heal more though. That's what I would call niche or role.

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Q u o t e:
After looking at the quote in the post directly above mine, it looks like you are right in your interpretation of GC's intentions vis a vis Healing Touch. He doesn't plan to make it better relative to Holy Light, he just thinks the Cata health pool circumstances will let us get away with casting comparatively bad heals.

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No, not really. I think you're just evaluating the changes too much through a lens of current cast time, mana costs and actual healing numbers. All of these are changing. At the moment in 4.0, Holy Light is actually filling the efficient heal niche, so Healing Touch would outheal it by a lot but cost more.

I may have said this before (or said something that managed to confuse the issue), but it's not necessary for the big heal to take longer to cast than the efficient heal. It just has to cost more and heal for more. So Healing Touch can be efficient *if* there is that much damage to heal. If you are overhealing then by definition you aren't being efficient. On the other hand, if you try and cast two of the medium heals (likely Nourish, though with a bit more kit because of the hots) instead of Healing Touch then you are just wasting cast time. On the other hand, Nourish does benefit from hots, so whether or not you have hots on the target might further drive you to cast Healing Touch instead.

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Q u o t e:
But then druids also have lifebloom, rejuev and the hot portion of regrowth. Basically they either get to be better than the other healers or just flat out worse under anything but the ideal situation.

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Those spells all have costs though (mana and time among other things). Maybe you can Swiftmend a Rejuv instead of using a Regrowth at times, but then Swiftmend is on cooldown. You can use a stacked Lifebloom on a tank, but then you are tying up so many GCDs on that tank that you can't heal other players.

You can argue it might be harder to play a druid than a healer with just the three (fast, medium, bomb) heals, but then nobody is really that simple any more... not even paladins. :)