Following on from the Shaman and Priest class previews, here’s the Druid preview from a healing point of view.

Druid

Spells and Abilities

Now the thing is, Druids aren’t going to get any new healing spells in this expansion, because according to the developers:

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.

I can’t disagree with this; in fact I already feel that there’s possibly too much overlap at the moment which leaves no niche for Healing Touch. The other healing classes will end up with large, medium and small direct heals. Resto already has these boxes ticked and then also has a range of HoTs to choose from.
There will be some tweaks to the spells, to make them align slightly better and to fit the defined roles, but nothing new for this section, so I’ve included a couple of the other new spells that I can foresee Resto Druids using in Cataclysm instead.

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.

I know it talks about giving Feral more utility, but this one is a nice new toy which non-ferals might be called upon to use as well, especially since it has no cost. This would be perfect for helping your group run out of ground-targeted or mob-centred damage when needed, although the 10-yard radius will require some pre-planning on the positioning front for a healer standing at range.

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.

I wonder how long this was referred to as “Magic Mushroom” before someone caved and changed the name to something more family-friendly. Anyway, Druids now get their own Explosive Trap, with a bit of Fire Nova thrown in for added control. The only missing information here is the duration of the Mushroom, but I’m sure it will be long enough for it to be used and not to be too inconvenient.
This could be pretty handy in any case, and it’s a nice touch that it’s been given a 40 yard range so you won’t be running into melee range every now and then like your Shaman brethren replacing their totems.

And now for the Resto spell changes.

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.

If you’ve looked at the other healer previews this won’t be much of a surprise, since every class’s HoTs have been given the ability to scale with Haste and Crit without needing a set bonus or glyph.

Crucially for Druids in particular Haste does not reduce the duration of the HoT but adds additional ticks, which addresses some of the weaknesses of the Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation implementation. As I mentioned in the Priest Preview, it’s unclear whether there will be a threshold of Haste needed to gain an additional tick from the HoT (i.e to reduce the tick interval enough that you can gain a whole extra tick within the fixed duration of the HoT) or if there will be a different solution. One to watch for clarification.

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.

Another change which is expected given the other changes to dispel mechanics in Cataclysm. In summary, all “fire-and-forget” dispels are being removed (Cleansing Totem, Abolish Disease and Abolish Poison) and each class is being given three types of single dispels, one of which will always be a defensive Dispel Magic. The stated intent of this change is to increase the importance of deciding when and what to dispel, a change which is probably for the good, although does feel very strongly like a PvP change. Still, Blizzard does design encounters around the abilities players have, so I don’t see this being much of a detriment in PvE.

Druids are pretty mildly affected by the changes, compared to other classes (commiserations to the Shaman out there), not losing any dispel type and even gaining one.

Talents

Deep breath!

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 knew changing Tree of Life to a cooldown was going to be controversial. There was just no way a change this big would be unanimously accepted. My apologies if being a tree was what really drew you to the class.

We might (*might*) consider a minor glyph that kept the visual of the old tree form in some fashion even when not using the Tree of Life cooldown.

Yikes! This one came at me like a bolt from the blue, and it took a lot of other Restos by surprise as well. Needless to say there has been a lot of writing and discussion about this change. I’ll give you my take, there’ll be plenty of others out there to compare and contrast.

First, as Allison Robert did so well in her WoW.com post this morning, it’s important to consider where Tree of Life came from. Originally the Tree was a response to a low Resto Druid population, and an attempt to take them from a secondary, utility healer into the mainstream. At the time the idea of a hybrid tax was in full force, and it was fine for a Resto Druid to accept limitations on Tree of Life as a balance for their flexibility. Over time those limitations have been steadily removed as the hybrid tax idea has been eroded away, leaving the Tree of Life form as essentially a healing buff an artwork change, and a restriction on the casting of damaging spells in form.

So the primary reason for this change is that being a tree requires the Druid to sacrifice the ability to DPS in order to do comparable healing to the other four healing specs, which is regarded widely as not “fun”. I won’t get into the concept of “fun” because it’s so subjective, but looked at dispassionately it’s easy enough to see how little there is tying the artwork to the gameplay any more. Move a couple of the Tree of Life bonuses into talents or masteries and then Tree of Life becomes, from a theorycraft perspective, an artificial restriction on your choice of ability (a net loss) in exchange for a change in model (neutral).
If you only wore matching armour sets, refusing upgrades unless they came in a nice fetching shade of blue, you would probably be ridiculed by most raiding guilds. While not quite so extreme, choosing to be in Tree of Life form would be a similar choice for form over function (pun intended).

That said, plenty of people will only ever have played a Resto Druid since TBC, and will always have had access to Tree of Life, so this would be a removal of a huge, defining aspect of the class. Imagine a Shadowpriest without the purple glow. I remember one of our Restos in TBC experimenting with a specific build for Zul’Aman which did not include Tree of Life, and it was a real shock.
For this reason, I’d love to see them follow through with their Minor Glyph idea and allow Druids to choose Tree of Life form if they desired. Druids are characterised by their forms, it would be odd to be the only Druid spec without a form.

One highly positive change from this is that resto druids will be given a strong healing cooldown built in to the class, although the developers have not yet settled on what that might actually be. This means your friendly neighbourhood Resto Druid might turn out to be your saviour in a pinch, which is a step in the right direction compared to the unsung heroes of the raid today. You really miss them when they’re not there, but they don’t get many opportunities to really grab the spotlight.

Which segues nicely into:

Tranquility is an emergency heal, and we’ll change it to act more like Divine Hymn.

Another way to grab the spotlight. It’s great to see Tranquility getting some love and some recognition that in its current implementation it isn’t the valuable raid-saver it could be.
Homogenisation? Probably, but I’m not going to complain too loudly because I think Divine Hymn is a really nicely-implemented spell.

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.

If I’m reading this correctly, it means that when you land a critical heal with Regrowth, you also place a ground-based AoE healing zone down. Cool, especially since Regrowth is being positioned as the Flash Heal equivalent. It will be interesting to see how many of the buffs to its crit chance Regrowth gets to keep after the talent cull, but in any case this could be quite a powerful effect.

I imagine it as roughly comparable to a Shaman’s Chain Heal: often now a Shaman will Chain Heal off the tanks to heal the melee, or Chain Heal into a group of DPS in danger (Pact of the Darkfallen springs to mind); in the future a Druid can Regrowth a tank and add healing to the melee, or Regrowth a player in an AoE damage zone and add healing to the others in the same predicament.

The big question will be how much it heals for, to decide if it’s worth casting Regrowth until it procs, in the same way other healers work to keep Inspiration or Ancestral Fortitude up today, or if it is regarded as simply a bonus when it does. With the Wrath mindset the former seems most likely, but that does seem slightly at odds with the Cataclysm philosophy of mana-management. Then again it will probably be situational, and where it matters enough it will be used and where it is less valuable it will be neglected.

Masteries

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.

The third mastery bonus is an improved and baked-in Glyph of Rejuvenation, but with no breakpoints (i.e. it will scale smoothly with health, rather than just turning on below a certain percentage) and applying to all HoTs.

In Wrath the Glyph of Rejuvenation has ended up a bit forgotten, because people just don’t stay at low health for long enough to make it worth the glyph slot. In Cataclysm though this will be changing a lot, and these effects could be a very powerful boost to healing output.

A lot will depend on the discipline of the healing team as well though, to trust that players on low health have HoTs on them and will be healed up and not to snipe with a quick Flash Heal. However I’m hopeful that Blizzard can manage to make mana sufficiently constrained that this will be as necessary a part of how healing will operate in Cataclysm as it once was.

There is no detail on the sort of scaling we will see, and I don’t imagine this will be fixed until we actually have some dungeon or raid encounters to test on the Beta servers and can see how things play out. It needs to be significant enough to be able to quickly and effectively “rescue” someone on very low health (meaning getting them out of one-shot territory), while not so strong that no one with a HoT on them can ever die because it heals for more per tick than anything the encounter can throw at you.

Conclusions

On the face of it the loss of the iconic Tree of Life form and the relative of new toys (except for the new cooldown, which is somewhat under a cloud) is a bit of a disappointment, but actually a lot of thought has gone into better-refining the role of the Druid and giving them the tools to do the job Cataclysm demands.

The beauty of hybrid classes is that they do have access to the abilities of other forms, and dealing damage with Wild Mushroom and possibly using an AoE run speed buff from Cat form are great new tools for Druid utility in groups.

Plus the potential to save the raid with a revamped Tranquility and the chance to beat those Shaman at the cluster-healing game with Efflorescence are both nice thoughts to hold on to.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Cataclysm Class Previews – Summary
• Cataclysm Class Previews – Paladin
• Cataclysm Class Previews – Shaman

Following on from the Shaman class preview, here’s the priest version. I decided not to split Holy and Discipline out, it only overcomplicated things.

Priest

Spells and Abilities

Heal (available at level 16): Introduced at a low level, the “new” Heal spell will functionally work much like a down-ranked Greater Heal did in the past, adding more granularity to your direct-healing arsenal. If you need to heal someone a moderate amount and efficiency is an issue (making Flash Heal the incorrect spell for the job), then Heal is what you want to use. Heal is intended to be the priest’s go-to direct-healing spell unless they need something bigger (Greater Heal) or faster (Flash Heal).

Swap “Heal” for “Healing Wave” and this could be a copy of the Shaman change. Again, it’s a way of providing a standardised basic toolkit with a range of spells to select from, and allowing the extra class-specific abilities to be more fun and diverse.
While it looks like homogenisation, and it sort of is, it allows the class-specific abilities to be less homogenised since the basic bread-and-butter healing can be covered by any class.

Inner Will (level 83): Increases movement speed by 12% and reduces the mana cost of instant-cast spells by 10%. This buff will be exclusive with Inner Fire, meaning you can’t have both up at once. Inner Fire provides a spell power and Armor buff; Inner Will should be useful on a more situational basis.

I played a Warlock for a while, and this looks just like the Demon Armor/Fel Armor mechanic, especially since the “charges” mechanic is being removed as well. I imagine Inner Fire will be standard as now, and when Bonestorm or some other effect requires you to run around for a while you switch to Inner Will.

Given that Inner Fire had turned mostly into a passive spellpower buff in WotLK, this is a nice step in the direction of giving abilities a bit more flavour. Note that

Leap of Faith (level 85): Pull a party or raid member to your location. Leap of Faith (or “Life Grip”) is intended to give priests a tool to help rescue fellow players who have pulled aggro, are being focused on in PvP, or just can’t seem to get out of the fire in time. Instant. 30-yard range. 45-second cooldown.

This is the biggie, and there’s been lots of reaction to it.
The gut reaction of a healer to being given something like this, especially given the way it was described in the class preview, is “so now DPS standing in fire is my problem too?”. It was mine too. Tanks and healers already often bear (or feel they’re bearing) the majority of the responsibility in dungeons and raids, and this does sound like ratcheting up the responsibility one more notch.
I’ve talked about this before: while DPS do need to perform well to meet soft or hard enrage timers, and there are unhealable situations where DPS can kill themselves, generally the responsibility for a wipe to Berserk falls collectively on the DPS group, and only after the fact, while the responsibility for a tank death or mob not being picked up is often attributable to one player, immediately.

I can agree to some extent, although it shouldn’t be forgotten that Hand of Protection and Hand of Salvation already exist and are often used to help less aware players. Perhaps these are also lamented, but I don’t hear much about them.

I’d prefer to look at the positive sides.

Firstly, this is another good example of getting healing eyes off Grid/Vuhdo and onto the game world: to use this tool effectively, you’ll need to know who’s in trouble, or who’s going to be in trouble soon.

Secondly, there’s a 45-second cooldown on the ability. You won’t be able to rescue every DPS from every flame patch, so I don’t think there’ll be a massive dependency developing. But if someone does happen to make a mistake, you have the ability to save them, once. I’d love the ability to save a Sindragosa wipe by yoinking out the one person who hasn’t spotted the out-of-position Frost Beacon near to them in the confusion, or to stand off and extract the Defile target from the pack on Lich King Phase 2.

Finally, although it’s not totally clear it’s possible this will be able to break roots/snares, effectively spreading part of the Hand of Freedom buff out into the raid. Not every DPS in fire is oblivious, and not every snare is a benign annoyance.

I don’t PvP much, so I won’t comment on the probably legitimate concerns about losing control of your character to a random party member. For PvE though, I can see that it would introduce a moment of confusion, and probably disrupt your rotation so it will need to be used carefully, but if I’m using a 45-second cooldown on you then a small break is probably the lesser of two evils.

All HoTs and DoTs will benefit from Haste and Crit innately. Hasted HoTs and DoTs will not have a shorter duration, just a shorter period in between ticks (meaning they will gain extra ticks to fill in the duration as appropriate).

This is a huge change, and one which I am very pleased to see. Allowing HoTs to scale with gear as well as direct heals do is a massive boost to them, and the extra ticks mechanic as opposed to just shortening the duration is a beautiful counter to the problem with effects like the Glyph of Renew or Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation.

This may introduce another soft-cap for haste though, where you want to reach a certain level of haste to get an extra tick. For example, if Renew currently ticks after 3, 6,9,12 and 15 seconds, then in order to get an extra tick you need the tick time to be 2.5s, which means 20% haste. This gives Renew ticks at 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5 and 15 seconds.
However, extra tick or no, the throughput of the spell will scale smoothly, the extra tick just provides extra mana-efficiency. And 20% haste isn’t an unreasonable goal anyway.

While we want to keep the priest’s role as a well-rounded healer, we also want to make sure the class is a viable tank healer, which is something priests moved away from a little in Wrath of the Lich King. Greater Heal will probably be the tank-healing spell of choice, though we’ve also discussed giving Discipline a second shield so that they have a small shield to cast on lots of different targets, and a big, more expensive shield to cast on a tank or anyone else taking a ton of damage.

I’ll agree with the sentiment in the first half of this statement. Discipline is generally seen as the “tank healer” spec, but try swapping your Holy Paladin for a Disc Priest in heroic ICC (or heroic Northrend Beasts when it was new) and then tell me about “bring the player, not the class”. I’d be happy to see a bit more love given to Priests’ tank healing arsenal.

As for the differentiated shields, I actually like that idea as well. 10k shields are nice and all, but they’re also expensive. Bubble-blanketing WotLK-style simply wouldn’t be viable in a significantly more mana-restricted environment. But being able to pre-shield with lighter bubbles during quiet moment, while keeping the big guns for the tanks or people with specific debuffs, that appeals a lot.
This is all under the assumption that DPS will be taking hits more on the 40% than the 80% level in Cataclysm. Otherwise we’ll need the big guns anyway.

Divine Spirit and Prayer of Spirit will be removed from the game. As Spirit will be the primary mana-regeneration stat, we don’t want it to vary as much between solo, small group, and raid play. Blessing of Kings and Mark of the Wild will not boost Spirit either.

Not a surprise at all. Matticus predicted this a while ago, and the logic given here is pretty sound. Even now the difference in regeneration between a 10-man and 25-man raid can be quite surprising, I’m all for making the experience more consistent.

Mana will be a bigger consideration for all healers. We aren’t trying to make healing more painful; we’re trying to make it more fun. When the cost of a spell isn’t an issue, then casting the right spell for the job is less of an issue because you might as well just use your most powerful spell all of the time.
We are, however, getting rid of the five-second rule, because we don’t want to encourage standing around doing nothing. We’re also going to cut back on the benefits of buffs such as Replenishment so priests (and all healers) don’t feel as penalized when those buffs aren’t available.

(My bold for emphasis)

The first part of this is not news. We have known for a while that we will be more mana-restricted in Cataclysm, and I don’t think many people would argue against this change. The other two points are more interesting.
Skipping to the end, cutting back on the benefits of Replenishment is long, long overdue. Replenishment is so powerful now that Intellect is the only sensible regeneration stat and has been pretty much since T8. The trouble with stacking Intellect for regeneration is that it leaves you in such a poor state if for whatever reason your raid doesn’t have any, or enough, Replenishment to go around. As with the removal of Spirit buffs, this should go a long way towards a more consistent experience.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the value of buffs and synergy, especially in an MMORPG, but no one buff should be quite so dominant.

The removal of the five-second rule is something that has been rumbling along for a while. I’m a little nostalgic for the days of using clearcasting procs and Inner Focus to buy Oo5SR time, because reacting to those things was one way to differentiate yourself as a healer and demonstrate your skill. I take issue with characterising that sort of play as “standing around doing nothing” when in fact you were constantly evaluating to decide when to jump back in and when to stay out and regen. But with the boost to Meditation in 3.1 and the high relative value of Replenishment compared to Spirit-based regeneration the five-second-rule has felt increasingly redundant.
Perhaps the harm in leaving it in is the potential for some players to obtain big gains from gaming the 5SR. If the design philosophy is to return to OOM rather than Berserk timers as the factor which ends attempts, you might want that time to be fairly controllable.

Talents

We want to improve Discipline’s single-target healing capacity. One key is to make sure shielding isn’t always a more attractive option than healing.

I’m not totally sure what this one is driving at. Is this talking about pushing Disc back onto tanks and away from bubble-blanketing? If so, bring it on, it can’t come soon enough. The Lich King on 25-man is a bit of a snooze-fest.
If we’re talking about spot-healing then that statement is true as long as 1) a second hit will kill the player without an intervention, and 2) a bubble is instant while a heal takes time. In WotLK this is generally the case, so we shield then heal.

How will this be implemented? You can eliminate condition 2 by giving us an effective instant heal, but I don’t think that’s likely, or you can eliminate condition 1 by giving players more survivability in general, which is probably the way things will go.

Discipline will finally be getting Power Word: Barrier as a talented ability. Think of it like a group Power Word: Shield.

The closest analogue to PW:B is the DK Anti-Magic Zone, but it has some important differences, such as a way to counter it in PvP (since it absorbs all damage, not just magical damage).

What can I say? This has been on the table for a long time, and I’m extremely excited by it. It will take pride of place on my bars, and Mass Dispel will have to shuffle down a place!

More seriously though, this is a very nice ability to have available, and more importantly it will help to keep our heads of Vuhdo from time to time. This is a recurring theme in the healer changes so far, and one which I’m very much in favour of.

We want to make Holy a little bit more interesting to play. One new talent will push the Holy priest into an improved healing state when he or she casts Prayer of Healing, Heal, or Renew three times in a row. The empowered state varies depending on the heals cast.

The idea behind the Holy “cast three in a row” talent (it’s called “Chakra”) is that we’ve always positioned Holy as a versatile healer. This talent lets you shift into different modes. If you need to be a tank healer, cast three single target heals and your single-target healing is now better. Cast three area heals, and you can be a temporarily specialized group healer. We’re going to try to play this mechanic up with a cool UI to try to get that “I’m almost in the zone” feel. We’ll let it apply to as many types of spells as we can, perhaps even Smite for those times when nobody’s taking damage.

There’s been some rather mixed reaction to this one, but it certainly sounds interesting and I’m keen to see where they take it during Beta. I do wish they’d change the name though, I’m a Priest, not a Guru.

The mechanism sounds interesting though. I imagine you might have an aura one way or the other, and a buff which stacks like Serendipity does as you cast the other type of spell until it changes your aura.

I’m not sure why Holy needed such a new and different dynamic though, but maybe that’s the Disc in me looking jealous.

Masteries

Discipline
Healing
Meditation
Absorption

Holy
Healing
Meditation
Radiance

Absorption: Improves the strength of shields such as Power Word: Shield, Divine Aegis, and Power Word: Barrier.

Radiance: Your direct heals add a small heal-over-time component to the target.

The Discipline mastery is hardly a bolt from the blue, although very valuable, but the Holy one is really nice-looking. This should be a nice boost to throughput, or help with topping off the raid when a large heal would be wasted.

Conclusions

On the whole there’s some exciting stuff in store for Priests in Cataclysm. I’m really looking forward to playing with Power Word: Barrier and Life Grip, and I’m intrigued by how Chakra (grating already…) is going to turn out.

I do wonder if I’ll find myself feeling the pull of Holy again in Cataclysm. Holy already has more “toys” than Discipline, and it looks like getting more come Cataclysm. Let’s just say I’m glad I have dual-spec and can try out both.

Possibly Related Posts:

• The First Cataclysm Raid
• Disciplining the Lich King
• Cataclysm Class Previews – Paladin

Blizzard has begun posting the current state of their thinking regarding how our classes will be evolving into Cataclysm, as a series of Class Previews. These are preliminary and should in no way be construed as a promise, but they do show the directions in which they see the class moving which is valuable insight.

I’ll take them class by class, picking out the more important or interesting bits, and there will be a summary post looking at the big picture once the dust has settled.

Shaman

Spells and Abilities

Healing Wave (level 4): While the shaman already has an ability called Healing Wave, we’re adding another spell to the class’s direct-healing arsenal and giving it a familiar name. The current Healing Wave will be renamed Greater Healing Wave, and the intent is for the ‘new” Healing Wave to be the shaman’s go-to heal. Lesser Healing Wave and Greater Healing Wave will be used on a more situational basis.

In line with previous statements on the subject, this is a step closer to giving every class a more standardised toolkit with the class-specific things being the “fun” extras. I expect a little bit of concern to arise about increasing homogenisation, but on the whole making sure every class has a decent set of basic tools is a positive, especially given the increased prominence of 10-man raiding and heroics over time.
I’m not convinced Shaman needed a middle-of-the-road direct heal, but I’ve not raided on mine for a while so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.

Unleash Weapon (level 81): Unleashes the power of your weapon enchants for additional effects (see below). A dual-wielding Enhancement shaman will activate the effects of both of their weapon enchants. Instant cast. 30-yard range. 15-second cooldown. Undispellable.

Here are a few examples of effects we’re considering for this ability:

– Windfury Weapon – Hurls a spectral version of your weapon at a target, dealing 50% weapon damage and increasing the shaman’s Haste for the next five swings.
– Flametongue Weapon – Deals instant Fire damage and buffs the shaman’s next Fire attack by 20%.
– Earthliving Weapon – Heals the target slightly and buffs the shaman’s next healing spell by 20%.

Interesting. For Restoration at least it seems like a good way to add another dynamic element to a spec which can drift into a rotation mindset at times. I suspect the size of the heal will be comparable to a Flash Heal or Lesser Healing Wave, similar to the way Surge of Light works for a Priest currently. One more to add to PowerAuras, anyway.

Healing Rain (level 83): An area-effect heal-over-time (HoT) spell that calls down rain in a selected area, healing all players within it. There is no limit to the number of players who can potentially be affected; however, there are diminishing returns when healing a large number of targets, much like the diminishing returns associated with AoE damage spells. This should give Restoration shaman another healing tool that improves their group-healing and heal-over-time capabilities. 2-second cast time. 30-yard range. 10-second duration. 10-second cooldown.

I’ve been wondering when this sort of effect would turn up, since we have plenty of ground-targeted AoE damage spells, but no similar heals. Good examples of times I wish I had access to something like this would be Pact of the Darkfallen (aim it at the central point), Lich King Phases 1+2 (great for clearing up Infest when we’re all grouped up) and Sindragosa (on the melee throughout or on the ranged in P3).
The best bit is that (currently) it doesn’t seem to be channeled, which means that in theory it won’t be a terrible inconvenience to maintain a “healing well” for the bulk of a fight, either over the melee or for players to run to if they take random damage. This will be highly dependent on the mana cost and the AoE cap, of course.
I’m slightly jealous that Lightwell didn’t get the same fire-and-forget treatment.

Rohan at Blessing of Kings made the excellent point that this is a departure for most healers in that it requires you to target the game world, not a coloured box. Having played the Mass Dispel bot on heroic Faction Champions, I know how different the fight looks from that perspective and know too well the tunnel-vision you get when Vuhdo becomes your world.

I’m also curious to see the animation they go for. I picture falling leaves, like the flutter you get from some heals already. I really hope we don’t end up with a sickly green Blizzard…

Anyway, more of this type of thing please!

Spiritwalker’s Grace (level 85): When this self-targeted buff is active, your spells are no longer interrupted by movement and possibly even by your own attacks. This will give shaman of all three specs another way to heal or do damage when it’s necessary to move in both PvE and PvP. Instant cast. 10-second duration. 2-minute cooldown.

Healing Rain has the “wow!” factor, but this one has so much potential too. Shaman in particular have been hamstrung in the past by great difficulty healing on the move, so this is a nice acknowledgement. Putting it on a moderate cooldown says, to me anyway, that while the developers recognise this as a shortcoming of the class, they would rather you work around it where possible, rather than just giving the class more Instants or HoTs.

Matticus expressed doubts about the cooldown being a bit long. I can see where he’s coming from, since most boss abilities are on shorter timers than 2 minutes, but I think this is meant to be used more selectively. Compare it to Divine Hymn: I’d love to use it on every Bloodbolt Whirl on Blood Queen Lana’thel but the cooldown prevents me, so I either use it when I feel the raid is in most danger, or coordinate with a fellow priest to use one per phase. More coordination gets my vote every time.

My wonder is if the 10-second duration will come down for PvP reasons once beta testing gets properly underway. Only time will tell.

Restoration shaman and other healing classes will need to pay attention to mana more than they’ve had to during Wrath of the Lich King. Spirit will be the Restoration shaman’s primary mana-regeneration stat.

I doubt this is news to anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock for the past six months, but yes, every healing spec will now use Spirit and the Meditation mastery (see below) to regenerate mana. This is essentially a non-issue, really just a change of name for the regen stat.

We’re making changes to which classes and specs are able to dispel magic, diseases, curses, and poison, largely for PvP purposes. Shaman will have Cleanse Spirit as a baseline ability, but it will only remove curses. Restoration shaman will have a talent that will improve Cleanse Spirit so that it also removes magic. Shaman will no longer be able to remove poison.
Cleansing Totem will be removed from the game, as we want dispels to be a decision for players, not something done mindlessly. To that end, all dispels will cost slightly more mana, and you will waste the spell if you cast it when there is nothing to remove. (Currently, the dispel is only cast when there is something to remove, which encourages spamming ‘just in case.”) We will balance PvE dispelling with this new model in mind.

Oh boy, the dispels change. I might get round to dedicating a post to this, but the short version is that of the five types of dispel in the game (offensive magic, defensive magic, curse, disease, poison) each healing class will be able to dispel three, one of which will be a defensive magic dispel.
Shaman will keep Purge (offensive magic), all specs will be able to remove curses with Cleanse Spirit, and Restoration Shaman will be able to remove defensive magic with a talented Cleanse Spirit.

Along with this normalisation, all “dispel-over-time” abilities such as Cleansing Totem, Abolish Poison and Abolish Disease will be going away. Personally I’m neutral on this change: there’s only rare times when this mechanic is valuable, and as long as content is balanced around single dispels I don’t see a problem.

Talents

Spirit Link will likely be worked back into deep Restoration in some form. The idea is that you will be able to link targets together so they share damage. When we had previously tried to implement Spirit Link, it was hard to balance and a little confusing. However, we really liked the concept — and so did players — so we are trying to bring it back.

I never got to play with the old Spirit Link so I can’t comment on how awesome it was (or wasn’t) but this sounds like it would be quite handy. Something like a Hand of Sacrifice but with both ends targetable, so you could have a vulnerable player linked to an off-tank, for example.
I can see how it might be hard to balance though. If you have a situation where a random ranged DPS can become a tough tank by sharing damage, what do you do if your raid doesn’t have a Restoration shaman? HoS is balanceable, but would Spirit Link still be as amazing as it sounds with a short duration or low transfer percentage?

Ancestral Knowledge will boost mana pool size, not Intellect.

With the Mastery system, we’re also considering removing a number of talents that grant passive bonuses, such as Mental Quickness, Improved Windfury Totem, Mental Dexterity, Call of Thunder, Tidal Mastery, Purification, Nature’s Blessing, and others, to allow players more freedom to choose more interesting talents.

Not much to say on these, but they’re here anyway, for completeness.

Masteries

Restoration
Healing
Meditation
Deep Healing

Deep Healing: Your direct heals will do more healing when the target’s health is lower. This will scale to damage (e.g. someone at 29% health would receive more healing than someone at 30%) rather than have arbitrary break points.

I never really got into Test of Faith on my Priest, so at first glance I wasn’t especially taken with this Mastery bonus. On the other hand, part of the reason I never got into ToF is that players tended to go 100% –> 20% –> 100% in a couple of GCDs, so you may or may not actually realise the benefit of the extra healing. With players staying at lower health for longer, this could turn out to be much more valuable.

I’m also intrigued by the lack of break points. Does this mean that you get a (tiny) increase in healing even comparing 98% with 99% as well, or is there an upper limit? The way it’s worded suggests the former. Combined with Chain Heal’s “smart heal” nature, this could easily work out to be a significant buff for Shaman throughput.

Note also the appearance of Meditation, to convert a proportion of your Spirit-based, Oo5SR regeneration into Io5SR regeneration.

Conclusions

Looking at the list, it looks like being a good time to be a Shaman. Healing Rain is a great new toy, and the big bugbear of mobility has been addressed to some extent with Spiritwalker’s Grace.

On the negative side, RIP Sentry Totem.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Cataclysm Class Previews – Summary
• Cataclysm Class Previews – Paladin
• Cataclysm Class Previews – Druid

A short post, mostly for historical reference, looking at how the 3.3.3 patch has affected healing for the four classes.

This patch mostly focuses on PvP and bugfixes, but there are a few small changes which will affect PvE healing.

Priest

Changes

The big change for priests is that the Tier 10 4-Piece Set Bonus has been changed. This has been discussed elsewhere already , so I’ll refer elsewhere for the detailed discussion. The short version is that the proc to reset the Penance or CoH cooldowns is gone, replaced by a flat increase to Power Word: Shield of 5% and to Circle of Healing of 10%.
Personally, having played as a Disc Priest with the old 4-piece bonus briefly, I think this is a slight loss to flexibility and 10-man Disc healing, but probably a boost to 25-man healing which is more bubble-heavy. Shame they gave us this at the same time they changed Incanter’s Absorption though.

Also applicable to Disc Priest is the fix which adds PW:S to the list of abilities affected by Hellscream’s Warsong / Strength of Wrynn, along with Sacred Shield for Paladins.

The change to Renewed Hope, giving it a 60-second duration, up from 20 seconds, but a 15-second cooldown, is part of a general change aimed at reducing the constant refreshing of on-proc buffs, and reducing the chance of these buffs falling off. Basically a neutral change, although it may have minor performance benefits. MSBT is breathing a sigh of relief anyway.

Bugfixes

• Lightwell: Tooltip change to reflect that any friendly player can use the Lightwell
• Divine Spirit: Fixed a bug preventing this spell from overwriting Prayer of Spirit correctly
• Renewed Hope: Applying this spell no longer causes combat pet abilities to trigger a global cooldown.
• Glyph of Power Word: Shield: The heal produced from this glyph is now more correctly treated as heal for purposes of procing effects that are caused by heals, such as Divine Aegis and the weapon Trauma.
• Glyph of Prayer of Healing: This glyph will now always heal all affected targets by the correct amount.

I’ve not noticed these causing trouble personally, but if you have, rejoice!

Known Issues

There is a new bug which has arisen, which can cause Spirit of Redemption form to be lost upon casting “certain spells” (Source). Expect a hotfix soon.

Edit: As of March 27th, the 3.3.3a patch, this is fixed.

Bati from HolyNovaNow has spotted Divine Aegis being credited with unusually high amounts of healing (>30% of total, for a start) in WoL reports. This might be a problem with WoL and a slightly changed combat log output, since WoL can only estimate absorbs.
On the other hand, she also runs with multiple Discipline Priests per raid, so it’s possible WoL is simply failing to separate out the DA absorbs and crediting each Priest with some or all of the DA caused by other players.
We’ll have to see how this plays out.

Paladin

Changes

Generally all’s quiet on the Paladin front. The only change is the addition of Sacred Shield to the spells affected by Hellscream’s Warsong / Strength of Wrynn.

Bugfixes

• Divine Guardian: This talent will no longer incorrectly modify the tooltip of Sacred Shield
• Lay On Hands: Tooltip clarified to better explain this ability’s interactions with Divine Shield, Divine Protection and Hand of Protection

I presume the latter is clarifying the 30s shared cooldown hotfixed in over the last few patches.

Shaman

Changes

As with Paladins, very little has been changed for Restoration either.

It might be worth noting that Flame Shock has been buffed to allow the DoT component to crit and to be affected by haste, so it might be more valuable to DoT up bosses between heals.

Bugfixes

• Earthliving Weapon: Fixed a bug where the glyph was not boosting Earthliving proc chance.
• Tier-10 Restoration 2-Piece Set Bonus: Rapid Currents will no longer be consumed if Nature’s Swiftness is already active.
• Tier-10 Restoration 4-Piece Set Bonus: The heal-over-time effect from this set bonus now works correctly with the weapon Val’anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings. In addition, to prevent confusion, the heal-over-time effect has been renamed Chained Heal.

The top one seems pretty major to me. I’d not come across it as a problem, so perhaps it was limited to certain circumstances.

Druid

Changes

No noted changes to Restoration.

Solo players might be interested to note that Nature’s Grasp now has three charges, although as far as I know it can still only affect one target at a time. I might actually bother keeping the buff on myself now.

Bugfixes

• Hurricane: If a Druid begins casting this spell while in Bear Form, Dire Bear Form or Cat Form, the spell will now cast as normal instead of immediately cancelling the channel.

No mention of Tree of Life Form. I’ll have to check if the fix has been applied across the board or not. It would be great if this is fixed though, for those boring heroics with 6k GS tanks AOE-tanking rooms at a time without the common courtesy to take damage!

Edit: tested and confirmed that this works in Tree Form as well. Bye bye /cancelform macro!

• Lifebloom: The final bloom heal from this spell can no longer trigger talents, trinkets and set bonuses for the player being healed.
• Tranquility: The combat log tooltip for this ability will no longer spuriously claim a range of 100 yards
• Tree of Life Form: Corrected a misspelling in the tooltip.
• Tier-10 Restoration 4-piece Set Bonus: The Rejuvenation effect caused by this set bonus can now be overwritten by the Druid’s own Rejuvenation spell casts. In addition, the combat log tooltip for this Rejuvenation effect no longer spuriously claims it requires Tree of Life Form.

Little need to comment on these. I’ve not had the opportunity to play with Druid T10, so I can’t comment on the last bugfix.
The first change is interesting. Heals like Lifebloom and Prayer of Mending still seem to retain a few obscure holdovers from the old implementation where they were “cast” by the player they healed, and they get unearthed and fixed every now and then.

Encounters

Not much in the way of encounter fixes either, although the biggie is that the Pact of the Darkfallen on the Blood Queen Lana’thel encounter has been changed to tick twice as often but half as hard, to “make the removal of the spell a bit more responsive”. Sounds like a good change to me, and reducing the impact of that big smash if the three players were close but not close enough can only be a good thing.

General

Basically things which aren’t strictly healing changes, but things I pulled out as interesting.

The most healing-relevant change is that a number of on-proc raid buffs have been made passive and longer-range. Shaman totems and Paladin auras are excluded though, by design. Reducing combat log or combat text spam can only be a positive thing, as is making the coverage of these buffs more consistent.

Beyond this there are a few quality-of-life changes I particularly like:

• The Argent Crusader’s Tabard apparently no longer has a 30s on-equip cooldown. And only six months too late! Still, better late than never.
• Minimizing the game client while auto-following another player will no longer cancel the follow command.
• Raid marks can be used without being in a party.

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• The (Not So) Short Guide to Discipline 4.1
• Disciplining the Lich King
• Cataclysm Class Previews – Paladin

Something that’s varied a lot over the course of my raiding career, across a number of guilds, is the way the healing team is organised and healing resources are allocated on a fight-by-fight basis. This post will be a potted history of my healing experiences through TBC and WotLK, and a look at the broad approaches I’ve encountered.

My Experience

The early days

When I began healing 25-man raids properly in mid- to late-TBC the raid team was mostly decided by looking at who was online at the time and allowing for decent balance if we had too many healers on the night. At this time we took two priests along where we could with typically the newest, or lowest-geared, speccing 23/38/0 specifically for the Improved Divine Spirit buff. Holy Paladins at the time were highly sought-after because of their ability to heal essentially forever, while Druids would be juggling triple-stacked Lifeblooms on up to three tanks.

The raid leader, who was also the healing leader for a while, would assign healers carefully based on the fight. Typical assignments would call for a healer per tank, usually a Priest or Paladin, a Druid would roll HoTs on the tanks, while the Shaman and spare CoH Priests would be assigned to “raid heal”, spamming those AoE heals on anyone with a deficit.
Looking back on those days, it felt that you first covered your tanks, then made sure you had a Druid (it really mattered to have one, but usually no more), and then the raid healers made up the numbers.

Possibly because of the slower pace of the fights, and the importance of mana conservation at the gear levels we were raiding with (T4 with a smattering of T5), healers often cross-healed in support of other people, and we all knew each other’s strengths, weaknesses and preferences.

Early WotLK

Raiding Naxxramas was a strong crossover point between the more organised style, which was necessary for learning the encounters while healers were relatively underpowered (in terms of mana regeneration and throughput) and a less formal style of assignment once content was being overpowered and encounters were more familiar.
Having become raid and healing lead by this time I made it my business to understand my healers for their individual differences again, especially since, compared to TBC, the class balance made less difference than the players themselves.

With the addition of Beacon of Light a Paladin became more-or-less mandatory: when every encounter uses more than one tank the Paladin effectively becomes two tank healers for the price of one. Druids were able to shift away from constantly maintaining Lifebloom stacks and were able to devote a lot more time to raid healing through Rejuvenation and Wild Growth. Typical assignments would have a Paladin on the tanks, a Druid on the raid, and the other healers assigned as needed to meet the demands of the fights.

Ulduar

At this time I moved to another guild for a short time. This guild took a very different approach to raid composition, switching raiders in and out for individual fights depending on the fight and the needs of the characters for drops from the boss.
Healers were assigned to tanks or to positions in the room, and those not explicitly assigned were assigned to heal the raid. Logs were kept for all fights, this was when WowWebStats was not yet defunct, and used to check who was healing whom.

Unfortunately this guild did not last very long, and I joined a new guild in time for the end of Ulduar and the release of ToC.

ToC and ICC

In a strong contrast to the previous guild, the raid team is set a day in advance, although it may change if short-notice factors prevent everyone from being online for the raid. Unless someone goes LD for an extended period the team is the same for every fight on a given night, and generally there is no particular focus placed on aiming for a specific composition. The guild has 8 healers, all of whom are regular attenders, so there is a relatively high degree of continuity.

The typical culture in this guild is not to assign healers explicitly unless it becomes necessary for some reason. Generally healers have ‘default’ roles which we fulfil: Paladins divide the tanks between themselves and their Beacons, the Shaman Chain Heal through the mêlée, our Druid defaults to Rejuv-blanketing, the Holy Priest takes on the raid healing on the ranged and I tend to either assist with the tanks or bubble/spot-heal the raid, depending on the number of Paladins that night and the damage coming in. These are only broad roles and there is a lot of fluidity.

Specific fights may be assigned specific healers, once it has become clear that healing is the weak link. Some examples recently have been Heroic Northrend Beasts, Heroic Faction Champions and Sindragosa Phase 3.

Assignment Schemes

In my relatively short time healing raids, a mere two and a half years, I’ve seen a number of systems for assigning healers. Each has advantages and disadvantages, and different reasons for their use. Here’s my take on the general concepts.

Specific (Strict)

Typically this means that every person will be assigned a target or set of targets (maybe groups or roles (i.e. mêlée or ranged)) which they will be expected to heal almost exclusively. Excessive cross-healing is frowned upon because in theory the assignments have been designed to be close to optimal, and too much straying from the assignments could undermine that optimisation.

Except for quite specific fights where this is the obvious approach to choose, such as Heroic Anub’Arak, because several people need focused healing and the limitation is GCDs, this approach depends on the assigner having good information about the fight and the healers, and skill at setting up effective assignments. It also depends on the healers having trust in the assignments and not straying, as well as good feedback from the healing team to help refine the assignments quickly.

The advantages are generally higher accountability and higher predictability. If everyone has an assignment, then that gives a raid leader or healing leader a starting point for analysis of a death, whether the cause is healer distraction, insufficient healing assigned, excessive damage taken or the dreaded ‘RNG’ that person should be in a good position to understand the causes and offer advice.

Specific (Loose)

I distinguish this from the strict approach in the degree to which the healing plan is tuned in advance, and to which cross-healing is tolerated or encouraged. While a strict system might assign raid healers to specific groups or camps, the loose system will simply assign three or four raid healers and allow them freedom to cross-heal and play to their strengths. Alternatively this scheme might include four assigned healers and one or two ‘floating’ who can heal as they see fit.

This approach tends to work better when the damage is changeable or spiky, as the inclusion of floating healers, particularly if they are different classes or specs, allows for healing to be redistributed on the fly to react to a changing situation. It also transfers some of the mental load from the healing assigner to the healers, and can be more empowering for the healers, they may perceive a strict system as respecting their instincts less than a looser system.

The downside of this, compared to a stricter scheme is that typically the ‘base load’, the healing required throughout the fight, such as standard boss swings and raid auras, is only just covered, so there is still the potential for problems if the floating healing is not distributed correctly. This relies on the floats anticipating or reacting to each other’s healing output.

No Assignment

This sort of scheme works on the basis that your healers have default roles which they fall into automatically, and that they can and will cross-heal freely to ensure that heals go where they are most needed.
Generally this is not the chaos that might be imagined. Despite healing specs having been brought much closer together in WotLK compared to TBC, each spec still retains an area in which it specialises. Paladins are best-used on tanks, Shaman are well-suited to healing closely-grouped raiders, and so on. With a non-pathological raid composition and intelligent cross-healing this can be quite efficient for many fights.
This also allows healers to play to their own strengths, gravitate to the role they most enjoy playing, and values the healing corps for their ability to work as a team and react appropriately.

Note that under this scheme specific people can be assigned to specific tasks as needed, this is just the exception rather than the rule.

The downsides to this are a higher degree of unpredictability during a fight, and lower accountability for deaths.

During a fight the damage may shift from one tank to another, or the raid may take a large damage pulse, standard events in any fight. With a stricter assignment scheme there are players specifically assigned to patch these holes, while in a much looser scheme it is quite possible that everyone or no one will switch to patch these holes. What’s more there is an amplification effect which can occur where too many healers, including the tank healers, switch to heal up a large raid damage pulse, which can leave tanks abnormally low; as a consequence tanks may needlessly use cooldowns, and it may be that raid healers throw emergency heals onto the tanks, leaving the raid without heals. And so on.

When someone does die, what often happens is that every healer can point to the productive healing that they were doing, just not on the person who needed it at that moment. The raid as a whole has adequate healing available, there was simply a breakdown in coordination; this is often chalked up to bad luck or a one-off, and the wipe gets written off and nothing is learned.

Conclusions

Having healed under all three of these schemes, I have to throw my weight behind a Specific assignment scheme with a relatively small degree of floating. None of these schemes are perfect, but the accountability of a scheme with more explicit assignments appeals more to the raid leader in me.

The number of healing failures I’ve experienced in recent months due to incorrect assumptions about who is supposed to be healing whom has thoroughly disillusioned me of this way of doing things. I’ve played with a very cohesive healing team in the past, and know how it feels to be able to predict their play and cross-heal seamlessly, but whether it’s because of playstyle differences, or because of the pace of encounters and healing these days this approach just seems to be ineffective at the moment.

The bottom line though is that every healing team needs to find a way that works for them. There should be no stigma associated with using assignments, in fact it shows that the raid leader or healing leader cares and wants to understand their team. Finally a healer should not be afraid to ask for assignments if they seem to be needed, or offer to set them up if there is no natural healing lead.

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• Helping Out
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