Major change to Lifebloom, part 2

Q u o t e:
Why would they lock it?

Most threads stop at 500 posts. Sometimes we extend that. While we generally prefer to have fewer threads on the same topic, I am not sure that one is worth extending beyond 1000 posts. We were starting to see a lot of "I didn't read all of the previous comments," responses, which in my mind, makes the discussion harder to have.

We can continue the conversation here.

Q u o t e:
Blizzard's development cycle since 2.4.3 has been consistent with a mindset that is terrified of mana efficiency and regeneration. Their models are starting to show them the geometric growth potential of increasing throughput while increasing regeneration. After 3.1, the most efficient spell in the druid's toolbox will be Rejuvenation, and as such it will bear the brunt of future nerfs.

We don't mind Rejuv being so efficient, in part because it's a slow heal. You can't just use efficient heals and you can't just use high throughput heals to be effective. That's why you have an arsenal of healing spells.

We nerfed Lifebloom rolling because it could provide a lot of HPS and was also efficient enough to do so on multiple characters at once.

The main counter to that stance seems to be that hots overheal a lot or are squished by aggressive direct healers. Those are valid points. But at the same time, we are asking healers to be more efficient with their mana and to care more about overhealing. In that environment, we thought that Resto druids would be too good.

Q u o t e:
If I cast it once on a random person in dalaran, who isn't in a group with me, and then they ran away too far, I don't get the mana return, even though my log shows that it bloomed. However, if I cast it on someone close, it does give me the mana back.

We think there may be a bug on the PTR where the target sometimes gets the mana return instead of the druid. If you cast it on yourself it should work correctly.

This isn't our intent and we'll get it fixed.

Q u o t e:
How about you double the mana cost, but make Lifebloom refund 3/4 of the mana when it blooms or is dispelled? That way, it will still be a huge PvE nerf, but will probably balance out in PvP.

Then I fear rolling would be dead. You would always want it to bloom and we do want to keep rolling as a viable strategy, so long as it is expensive to do it on multiple targets at once.

Q u o t e:
We aren't rewarded for overhealing though and some fights require you to be overhealing excessive. Patchwerk & Brutallus comes in mind because you have to constantly bomb big-heals in order to land before the big strike.

Totally. And it is going to vary on fight to fight. But it is hard to make players care about mana if overhealing isn't something you care about.

Q u o t e:
I don't know if you'll read this far in the thread, GC, but hope you do.

Yes, I read all these threads. I try not to post responses like this very often because then players start to wonder if I am not reading any thread that lacks a response. But I understand it's a controversial change so I wanted to reassure you that we are listening.

Please keep going.

Couple of things:

1) A few players have suggested decreasing the duration of LB instead. This isn't something we are likely to do. Having LBs of 10 sec allows druids to spend GCDs on something other than just LB. It's not that we want you to only ever cast LB. We just want it to be mana intensive to do a lot of LBs while doing everything else. We were worried clever Resto druids would stretch out their mana by just focusing on LB rolling on multiple targets. On mana intensive fights, this would be the only way to play as Resto and possibly make the harder encounters easier than we intended. You should be able to heal without running OOM. If you get to a point where you have to heal a lot (i.e. there is A LOT of damage hitting the tank or the raid) then running OOM should be a risk. Make sense? In any case, we think the longer LBs is a good quality of life improvement and not something we are likely to tinker with at this point.

2) If you look at the parses for groups beating on the Patchwerk test boss in Ulduar then Nourish is a great deal of Resto healing. However, if you look at the parses of the actual boss encounters, you see things like Rejuv, then WG, then LB then Nourish. On fights with less area damage that will obviously be different. Furthermore, we still have some tuning to do and guilds still have some experimentation to do. In other words, I would not read too much into the numbers. But there are some numbers.

Q u o t e:
You are talking pve, pve isn't the issue with lifebloom it's pvp. And its not just lifebloom for druids in pvp its everything, very little offensive ability, and we cant handle the burst. I am gonna repost from my other thread since this one seems more popular.

Yes, I am talking PvE. There is a LB PvP thread that was just below this one when last I looked.

Obviously several druids are making the claim that LB is not fine for PvE so I would not be so quick to dismiss them.