More Druid changes on the 3.1 PTR, part 2

MAIM: This ability is now considered a stun, and shares a diminish category with all other stuns. It no longer has a chance to break from the target taking damage. Duration lowered to 1 second per combo point.

We've already discussed the Maim change, but the expanded notes here give a better sense of what Blizzard intended. As I've previously observed, the nerf (insofar as it is one) seems mostly aimed at slowing the lolmelee juggernaut in arena. Maim was previously an Incapacitate effect and thus not subject to the same diminishing returns as Bash and Pounce. While your abiity to "stunlock" people is getting a significant nerf, one of the strengths of a stun (as opposed to an Incapacitate effect) is that the amount of damage done to the target won't break it.

The duration change is a new one, however. It's a more significant nerf at fewer combo points -- as of now you get a 3-second Incapacitate for 1 combo point -- and is going to incentivize Druids to stay in form as much as possible to build CP's on a target for either a worthwhile defensive or offensive stun. With all feral healing and Cyclone in caster form, that's not necessarily a good thing. Thoughts from feral PvPer's?

LIFEBLOOM: Mana costs of all ranks doubled. When Lifebloom blooms or is dispelled, It now refunds half the base mana cost of the spell per application of Lifebloom, and the heal effect is multiplied by the number of applications.

/poke poke

How ya doing after that bear nerf, buddy? Did it hurt?

/poke poke

/prod prod

How about now?

Ghostcrawler explained the reasoning behind the nerf/buff in a forum thread here. Where I differ from Blizzard on the issue is that rolling Lifebloom stacks on multiple tanks requires a fair amount of type-A multi-tasking on your end unless that's literally all you're doing. If you really are doing nothing more than rolling Lifeblooms on your tanks and letting the rest of the heal team pick up the slack on burst damage and raid healing, you pretty much fail at being a tree -- and there's no way you'll come within a mile of topping the heal charts unless the rest of the heal team fails as well (in which case the raid's probably dead and who came first on healing is a moot point).

I consider Restoration Druids to be the healing equivalents of Affliction Warlocks. They keep their DoT's up, we keep our HoT's up, and we are enormously effective and efficient at our respective jobs only as long as we continually refresh our spells when needed but not before. That requires a certain degree of skill, experience, and -- let's be honest -- the use of mods to watch what spells are ticking on whom and how quickly. On many fights, trees have the added difficulty of watching HoT stacks comprised (ideally) of more than just Lifebloom on multiple tanks, whereas DPS is typically focused on only one target at a time (unless they're using AoE abilities). And, if you're any good at your job, you're sneaking in direct heals to compensate for burst damage or account for a DPS who, say, got a little too close to Sapphiron's tail. Letting a Lifebloom stack bloom, however, is still a serious and costly mistake in PvE content. You waste time, mana, and GCD's re-applying a full stack, in addition to risking the lapse of whatever other HoT's you have running on that target or elsewhere.

If Blizzard is truly planning a number of multiple-tank fights where Lifebloom would have been overpowered in relation to the capabilites of other healing classes (and I have to wonder; there's been a lot of complaints on the forums as to the current overpopulation of tanks in relation to the raid slots that are actually available for them), then it's reasonable to reexamine the spell's design. Their intent, I assume from what I'm reading from GC here, is to make you prioritize which tanks will receive the stacks and which ones can't -- or how much you can actually do outside of rolling Lifeblooms on 2+ tanks, if you even roll them at all. My fear here is the return of multiple-add fights in the model of Moroes, High King, and Illidari Council -- because that's going to be sheer hell for a tree. Either you resign yourself to running OOM at some point in the fight and depend on the DPS' ability to end the encounter before that occurs, or you limit yourself to one or, at most, two tanks to roll LB stacks on and make the healing job more difficult and the damage "spikier" on the other tank or tanks.

From a PvP perspective, however, this is a significant buff in all respects barring mana cost. HoT removal in the current season is destroying Druids and their partners alike, to the point where queue-dodging versus Death Knight teams is a sad but common practice. Other classes will still be capable of removing Lifebloom even after DK's lose the ability to do so, and this punishes the purge rather more heavily than is the current case. Not only will the Druid gain some mana back on the bloom, but successive stacks of LB will punish a purge by healing for more. Between this and the efforts to nerf RNG stuns and the strength of DPS in arena, this may be enough to put Resto back into contention as a viable arena spec.

Actually -- I'm kind of worried that the Lifebloom change is too strong for arena. Once you've got 3 stacks up on yourself or a partner, the other team basically has to forget about purging it and will have to CC the Resto or burst the partner down. With the added resilience of Season 6 gear, the latter tactic is going to become more difficult. The doubled cost of Lifebloom may be enough to balance this, but Nourish is also getting considerable buffs in 3.1. Resto has done poorly in Season 5; I expect it to do much better in Season 6, in much the same way that Druids did significantly better in Season 2.

One more thing; will the Lifebloom change actually have the effect of making multiple trees more valuable for a raid? One of the bigger complaints concerning Resto Druids and Priests is that they just don't need to be stacked the same way that Paladins and Shamans do. Paladins bring different auras and buffs and Shamans bring different totems -- trees bring HoT's, the +healing buff (that doesn't stack),and MotW (doesn't stack). If it's not particularly mana-efficient for a tree to run a full Lifebloom stack on more than one tank, but the stacks are too valuable to give up and do too much to cushion dangerous burst, this incentivizes heal teams to bring multiple Resto Druids. Especially if a Resto is occasionally (or frequently) allowing Lifebloom to bloom (probably to overheal most of the time, as Syd cynically observes) in order to get mana back, that's a massively complicated thing for one person to manage if they're attempting to do it on more than one tank. Hrm.

Just as an FYI, this nerf doesn't actually seem to have gone live on the PTR just yet -- as of testing a few minutes ago as I write this (3:30 PM EST on Saturday), Lifebloom still costs 14% base mana and does not return mana upon blooming.

Patch 3.1 brings us Ulduar, dual specs, significant changes to all the classes, and more! We've got you covered from top to bottom with our Guide to Patch 3.1.