Devs: It's not too late to reconsider Nourish

#0 - March 8, 2009, 1:55 a.m.

I understand the design behind Nourish. I think it's an interesting idea and can see why Blizzard wants to try to develop it. The spell itself isn't the problem. The problem is that they want the wrong type of class to use it.

Druid strengths have always been mobility, the ability to provide a buffer through HoT's, and being able to cast instantly (sans the risk of silences, cast time slows, etc.). With those strengths came some mandatory drawbacks.. you had to manage your HoT's well because you were relatively limited in your ability to respond to someone whose health dipped really low, and managing your HoT's on multiple targets took a level of skill.

Nourish has a cast time. You stand still and spam it. It's the opposite of versatile, in that it has strict requirements to be fully useful and is limited in the absence of said requirements.

Druids aren't unhappy with Nourish because it's a bad spell. They're unhappy because it represents a change in healing style towards one that is more spammy, less skillful, immobile, and has little synergy with our existing spells.

Nourish is to a Druid what a 6-second, channeled, unable-to-crit heal would be to a Paladin. Or what a Riptide Swiftmend would be on a Shaman. It's just out of place.

We had Healing Touch, Regrowth, and Swiftmend (along with their Glyphs for added versatility/choice) for situations where Nourish is now being made the go-to spell. If you really, really think about it honestly.. there was no reason to add Nourish, let alone give it such a mandatory/forced place in the Druid toolbox.

There are dozens of other types of mechanics Nourish could be given and yet preserve the Druid healing style. Make it an instant-cast, short cooldown spell that heals for a certain % of each HoT on the target. Or have it speed up a Rejuv/Regrowth, having the remaining ticks tick every second (to use up the HoT's quickly when needing to deal with spike damage). Or maybe make it work like Pestilence and spread HoT's to a second target. Maybe make it heal for a percentage of HoT's on the target immediately, and then refresh (or just add a set amount to) their duration.

Just please, please reconsider destroying HoT-based healing. And yes, we ARE talking about destroying HoT-based healing. What else would it be when we're intentionally removing the ability to LB multiple targets, removing much of the incentive to cast Regrowths (decent front-end healing via *reliable* crits), and leaving HoT's as nothing more than a mandatory setup for the mandatory, must-cast Nourish?

You've done too good a job on creating Druid versatility, mobility, and HoT management to ruin it chasing viability for one new spell.

Ghostcrawler

#8 - March 9, 2009, 3:50 a.m.

We're not trying to push druids into being Nourishbots. Druid hots continue to be very good. The only thing that has changed is we wanted to make it a little harder to sustain mana indefinitely while throwing out lots of hots.

Nourish is there because sometimes hots don't cut it. Sometimes you are healing a 5-man or healing a tank or another situation where the healing per second of the hots may not be sufficient.

So far on the PTR we have seen druids using Nourish when only the tank is taking damage, but we've seen them using all of their spells on normal raid encounters, and last I looked, the healing from Nourish was down below Rejuv, WG and LB. We'll continue to monitor the numbers coming in though.

Ghostcrawler

#157 - March 11, 2009, 4:31 a.m.

Referring to PTR parses in the abstract doesn't help us much. If you link them, then all the druids in the thread can comment on whether what they see is to be expected or if the player in question needs to L2tree.

I see a lot of "I will only cast Nourish" and "Nourish is a waste of a GCD." It is unlikely both are correct.

Ghostcrawler

#188 - March 11, 2009, 7:09 p.m.

Q u o t e:
GC, are you really seeing people saying that in the PTR, Nourish is a waste of a GCD?

No, I'm just saying that there are a lot of predictions being made in this thread. Predictions do have some value as does theorycrafting in general. Parses from players who have tried out the changes on the PTR have more value.

Saying something like "We don't need to test it. We know what the outcome will be," is a weak argument on almost any topic.

We have tested it. We think we know what will happen too. But we like to see real-world (heh "real" world) data to see if it meshes with ours. There are a lot of WoW players and sometimes they do things we don't predict. Maybe a spell looks good initially but turns out to be too hard to use. Maybe some conflagration of set bonuses, glyphs, talents and group buffs propels a spell to do a lot more than anyone predicted.