What seems to be primarily bothering the design team is that WG is too easy to use. You make a good point with Tranq being channeled and having to make the trade-off to use it. Look for a buff to an ability with a significant downside – perhaps effloresence, with its set area.

What I’d do (disclaimer: I’m insane) is to create a new glyph that reduces the cooldown of Wild Growth whenever Swiftmend is cast. Adds a new glyph choice, improves WG again, and makes druids tear their fur out because it ties their lower cooldown to a long CD ability that they might have used to stabilise a tank or similar earlier.

In re: tranquility for chim feud, tranquility isn’t really better than PW:B (~100k? damage mitigated per spit x 3 in 10man, 250k? damage mitigated per spit x3 in 25) or aura mastery (slightly less, but close). You have to keep in mind that since it is channeled, the druid is locked out of casting useful spells for ~6.5 seconds, which is maybe 90k healing lost.

It certainly wasn’t a bad cooldown, but it’s no better than the cooldowns that other classes bring, (and poor Holy has PoH to fall back on, until 4.3 when they get a Tranquility of their own). The key thing that made druids weak for the fight was their lackluster single-target healing for spits (until you had a shitload of SP, nourish was flat-out insufficient) and their ongoing lack of single-target mitigation abilities, which was key for heroic. And of course, back when we were progressing on the fight, Tranq was an 8 minute cooldown.

What people are saying is that without a clear edge in the throughput department or design tweaks to make them attractive in other ways, druids will find themselves on the sidelines in cutting-edge raid situations.

(had the same problem at one stage )

On topic… Tranquility during Feud phases made druid healers pretty awesome on Chimaeron. High throughput makes druids the single best choice to pair up with any other class, and that seems to actually be the niche that blizzard had in mind. You may never heal a raid with only druids, but at the moment not taking any at all puts the raid at a disadvantage on a pure throughput footing.

@Miilika: Yes, I agree that with 2 different healing specs, priest should have plenty of healing tricks. But, like druids, once the fight starts you are locked into one spec and your off-spec toys should be weak / borderline unusable. I will draw your attention that in commenting on how Holy’s toolbox is overflowing, I mentioned only Holy-specific tools. I didn’t mention the many tricks that Disc priests have at their disposal. And I don’t think because priest is “less” of a hybrid than druid is a good reason to make them superior to any other healers in endgame.

Also, if you think it’s annoying when RLs ask you to respec because Holy doesn’t have a necessary tool for the fight at hand, imagine how annoying it is when a RL asks you to reroll a different healing class or sit out because Rdruid doesn’t have a necessary tool for the fight at hand.

@Beru: I totally agree with your hypothesis that druid never fit into their Cata-era healing paradigm, and that’s why we’ve been all over the map with nerfs and buffs here and there.

And I think part of the reason we’re strong in T12 and weak in T11 isn’t even that our healing has gotten that much stronger, but rather the fights in Firelands dictate that efficient, slow AoE healing is acceptable on most fights. If we needed burst AoE healing a la Chimaeron or tank cooldowns a la Nef, there would be a totally different story. But since so many fights are favorable to our healing tools this tier, plus the fact that our main raid CD shows up on healing meters…we’re getting a nerf.

The real question of course is what kind of healing will be required for the roadblock fights in T13. If they make fights where WG is pretty useless then this whole thing is a nonissue.

Am I able to do my job, yes. But I can’t help feel that I would be far more beneficial to my guild if I started tank healing with my pally or priest alt. And now if I go back to raid healing I question whether I’d even be a good choice for that in 4.3 because in 4.2 right now while I do feel I have an advantage in fights that we have on farm, I feel I’m no more capable of pushing my raid past those wipe points than any other healer when its me and only me pumping heals into 8 or our 10 raiders. So I see my class as substandard in tank healing and ok in group healing in my world of always progressing, and I can’t give farm content any weight in my calculations because that’s like balancing classes based on how well they solo Molten Core. So that’s 4.2 and now I look to do even poorer than poor at tank and ok at raid in 4.3.

But no, I refuse to switch my main, I enjoy playing this game the most as a druid and I don’t want to re-earn all those achievements but I guess as a 10 man progressive raider I do a disservice to my friends because of that. In the end Blizzard will get it right, they always do, but I just don’t follow the logic in taking us back to a place where they themselves stated we were broken. Maybe the quick response raid healing situations won’t be in t13 content and it will be all ok, but I’m still waiting on equality in the tank healing arena, I’ve been on hold on that call for a nice long while now.

My issue with burst healing is that I cast wild growth and put some rejuves up and that’s it, I have to sit there and wait for them to tick out before I can output anymore healing unless I start casting long single target spells that in many cases in the past I didn’t have any time for before people started dying. Do I put out a lot of HPS, oh yeah, the other classes can’t compete purely on that statistic but very ofter those targets won’t be alive to receive that healing. I couldn’t dump all the extra mana I was sitting on into something like prayer of healing or chain heal when the situation necessitated it and these are fights where the damage comes in faster than using tranq or ToL will allow for. I saw this in ZA, I see it in Domo when healers are going out for seeds I have all this mana and people are dying because I can’t convert it fast enough. I rely on a heavy hitting WG because its the only thing I can do and that’s really a big part of this nerf talk. Ghostcrawler said that WG does too much healing for how easy it is to use, I can’t argue with that point. The problem is that its the only tool I have to choose from in many situations so what am I supposed to do? Nerf WG, but then give me a PoH type spell that I can sacrifice a bunch of my mana for when the damage comes in so quickly.

So, druids kick butt on the healing meters and what does that mean? We’re the kings of farm content, but when it comes to progression content in 10man where I have no back up other than tranq I don’t have encounter saving tools, things that will allow you to survive those wipe points. pallies, disc priests and shamen have more useful raid cooldowns and well holy is in a pickle, but they’re getting tranq now. At least Holy priest have a group mana burn as well as disc priests and shamen. When it comes to tank healing, I just can’t compete. I can do the job, I can make it work, but I’m not the man for the job (all other things being equal) and no guild is going to be heavily recruiting me for a tank heal spot for progression content unless they have no choice. But speaking of choice, did you hear about the cool now druid healing glyph the devs are going to give us? Its called the “Glyph of the empty slot”

I’d like you to clarify a bit more on how we lack on single target stabilization. Like any other class, we also have to stop casting something to move, thus we use rejuve, regrowth and swiftmend when we are on the move. This is what makes druids great for mobility, especially with our ability to float LB on tanks. I play a holy paladin as my other healer, and paladins don’t get that, other than holy shock and WoG. In this sense, paladins are more limited than druids are when it comes to healing on the move and we get to be more creative with our spells. I can’t speak for other classes as I haven’t played priests or shamans at the max level.

On your next point about burst group healing, I feel we are stronger in this area than you make it out to be. WG work really well with Efflorescence, and you can nourish following up on your hotted targets. You also forget about ToL, this is also great for dealing with group healing. I am not sure what more we can really ask for to fix the problems you have presented here. Yes, we have long casting heals, but so do other classes. Take paladins for example, they have Holy Radiance, Beacon of Light for the tanks, and then the rest, they have to cast direct heals just like we also have to after casting WG/Swiftmend to bring a group back up without using any healing CD’s. I’m sure it’s the same thing for other classes, they’d have to use their aoe heals and then, follow up using single target heals.

I don’t mean to blow the discussion off tangent but I wanted to comment on this.

Just my 2 cents