#0 - Nov. 8, 2008, 1:42 a.m.
OK. Wild growth and Circle of Healing are nothing alike and must be "dealt" with differently. A severe limitation of wild growth is the fact that it does not stack and does its healing over time rather than directly. This poses many situations where shaman and priests greatly outperform druids, and I'm not just talking about effective healing meters. Say a group of 8 players takes damage and all of them are reduced below 35% health. We can safely say at this amount of health they are at a high risk of death. Shaman can quickly bring them back up by alternating players with chain heals. Priests can do it even quicker by spamming CoH. Druids can cast wild growth twice so all 8 players have the hot. Unfortunately since it does not stack and these players are still in quite a bit of danger from dieing by another AoE we now have to switch to our single target healing spells. It ends up taking druids the longest to heal up in a scenario like this. Also there will be a much higher incidence of death for the druids targets. If another AoE hits these players again in a short amount of time the players that didn't get their single target heals from the druid are SOL and dead on the floor, while all of the shaman and priests groups are alive and well from their unhindered AoE spells. Our AoE HPS per player is capped due to wild growth not stacking whereas shaman and priests are not limited in this regard. When things start to get dicey we can't simply spam wild growth over and over again on the same group of players... we just have to hope they survive and that the other healers can cover them. I do like wild growth and its mechanics though. We are druids, our heals are fundamentally different than the other healers. But these disadvantages outlined above are reasons to reconsider a heavy nerf to wild growth when it doesn't really need one. ATM wild growth druids are putting out some good effective healing numbers in my guild. Our effective healing ends up being higher than shaman while lesser than CoH by a significant margin. But again, I'll emphasize that effective healing is not everything there is to healing... our primary concern is keeping people alive and not a cold rotting corpse on the floor of a dungeon. I feel that both shaman and priests have significantly better aoe healing ability when the time arises where players are getting low and death threatens. Players being alive > effective healing numbers.
CoH is in a ballpark all of its own right now. It lacks all of the limitations of wild growth and doesn't suffer from diminished healing per person like chain heal does. On top of all of that CoH priests have a significant lead on the effective healing meter in my guild, and I imagine in almost every other raiding guild in WoW where the priests play with their hands and not their feet. So please don't lump together CoH and WG they aren't even close to being balanced to one another.
As it stands these AoE heals need to be evened out a bit more. Wild growth could be removed from the earth mother talent and have a GCD of 1.5 secs with 0 haste rather than its CD of 1 sec with the talent. CoH needs its cooldown lengthened between an additional 1 to 1.5 secs. Shaman's CH casttime should be reduced by 0.5 seconds(maybe a little bit more, I'm not sure how lvl80 itemization works out for shaman and their ability to stack haste.) The shamans other spells could probably use a bit of love as well: riptide :P.
Anyway, please don't ruin this new spell! You've given resto druids a quality tool that we'd like to keep.
