In a word: I’m frustrated.
I was trying to express this in vent last night, but I’m afraid I wasn’t very articulate about it. Borsk was pretty much like QQ more druid – which I suppose is fair, since the frustration that I felt last night is likely similar to what shaman have been feeling for the past two raiding tiers. So I’ll let him have it. But that does not change the fact that I was so frustrated and disheartened last night that by the halfway point in the raid, I didn’t even feel like being there. It is not fun to feel like you are giving it everything you’ve got and yet everything remains so insufficient.
I’ve had two druid experiences so far: a completely PuG LFR with Elentari and my Progression raid with Beru. In my PuG Elentari dominated – but I suspect that has more to do with me being a competent and skilled healer in a PuG setting than anything else. I also dominated on Mynn in the LFR I did with her, and she’s the healer I’m least comfortable with and least geared. So take that for what you will.
However, when I got into my progression setting with five other competent and very skilled healers I felt like I was busting my ass – and felt like that no matter how hard I tried I wasn’t going to catch up. Now, in looking over my logs this morning, I was far from perfect. My LB uptime was much too low on several fights and my harmony uptime needs to be picked up (but wasn’t terrible). So there is definitely room for improvement – but I have to think that everyone on my raid team was in the same boat as we looked at these fights for the first time. Let me see if I can articulate the problem without it simply sounding like a bunch of whining.
The Problem
The problem remains the same as it was when we saw 4.0 launch. Druids struggle to effectively deal with heavy burst damage. It is the sole reason that WG was buffed back at the start of T11 content. WG wasn’t effective enough to handle the AE damage that was being seen in raid content – and the only other tool that they had to deal with raid damage was Rejuv, which was sub-optimal because the cost of trying to blanket rejuv was prohibitive. So they stuck a bandaid onto WG by boosting the healing it was doing and shortening the CD and said “here, this will help”.
And it did.
Now, admittedly, WG at the end of it’s 4.2 iteration had gotten somewhat out of hand – and likely something should have been done about it. That being said, taking it all the way back to where it was when 4.0 released was heavy handed. And I held out hope that the nerf would be somehow lessened before 4.3 went live. When it wasn’t, I thought “well, if it didn’t get change, there must be a reason and it should be fine”.
It wasn’t.
As I went into our first progression raid last night, I found myself growing increasingly frustrated as I blew through my mana bar trying to keep up with our other healers. We ran the night with 2 priests, 1 shaman, 2 druids and a paladin for most of the raid. We one shot everything but Ultraxion and Spine (we didn’t attempt Madness). It was discouraging to look over and see our priests dominating, comfortably sitting with half of their mana – and I struggled to remain competitive pulling out every last ounce I had to give and ending every fight so out of mana that I was often literally waiting to have enough mana to cast another spell.
AE damage would hit, and despite my efforts to prep the raid for it with Rejuv rolling, WG ready and swiftmend queued, when the damage came the other healers laughed at my HoTs as they quickly (and efficiently) put the raid’s life back in order. All I was left with was a lot of overhealed HoTs and an empty blue bar. I’ve never felt more ineffective in my seven years of healing. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t keep up.
I sent off messages via RealID to see if it was just me. Was I the only one feeling impotent? Was I the only one struggling? Was I just having a bad night? And as the replies came back in, the answer was “no”. Many of my progression trees were expressing the same frustrations and facing the same problems I was. It wasn’t just me – nobody could keep up.
I think what makes even more frustrating is that Blizzard recognized our lack of being able to offer burst healing as a problem at the start of the expansion, stuck a bandaid on it and then ripped it off leaving us with no alternatives. I understand that they didn’t like a “fire and forget” spell being so powerful – but they didn’t give us an alternative to deal with the problem and they buffed other healers to better deal with the damage.
The “solution” I’ve been offered as compensation is “cast more Rejuv”. Which is frustrating in and of itself because you find yourself quickly out of mana for a heal that offers very little upfront healing and ends up largely being overheal. In looking through my numbers from last night Rejuv was frequently my top heal (sometimes more than 10% more than my other heals) and was often more than 70% overheal. WG tickled damaged raid members and my heavy rejuv use quickly throttled my mana bar. So where does that leave me? Right where I started the expansion – with very little burst healing and feeling like just about any other healer could do a better job, with greater ease, than me.
I was discouraged.
As the logs went up, Borsk said “you didn’t do as badly as you think”. But as I looked through them, I had to disagree. In the first four fights that showed up in WoL the orange bar wasn’t on the top once. And it wasn’t for a lack of trying. Believe me, I tried. So fucking hard.
Now, I’m not saying that the orange bar should live at the top. It shouldn’t – even if Blizzard has told us what we offer the raid is incredible throughput. I like it when the other healers on my team make me work. But I’m competitive. I want to win, I’m not afraid to admit that and I push myself to find my limits. And yet not one of those four encounters in the logs found me on top. I busted my ass. I tried so fucking hard. I used every last ounce of mana I had, and potted every fight. And I couldn’t keep up with the damage being tossed out to the raid. No matter what I did – someone else did it faster, better and more efficiently. I’m not being melodramtic, I’m trying not to be whiny, but god dammit I work hard I should at least feel like I have a chance at putting that orange bar at the top.
And right now, I don’t.
I’m back to where I was at launch. Feeling like I lack the burst healing needed for many of the new encounters and despite my best efforts, struggling to deal with the damage the raid is taking. Last night, for the first time ever, I truly felt that I was a replaceable member of our raid. I’ve always been a pillar of “fuck you, I can make this work” when it came to druid healing – time after time feeling like I was proving that druids could be just as valuable as any other healer (Healing Heroic Halfus pre-nerf with three resto druids? Yea – I did that). But as I watched the raid damage flying around last night and watched our shaman finally able to play to his strengths and watched our priests just wipe the floor with me (and saw Divine Hymn far outperforming tranquility) – for the first time, I truly felt that another blue bar or white bar would be better in the raid than my orange one and it was really humbling and made me incredibly sad.
I’m worried about what heroic will bring. I’m worried if I’ll be a liability to my raid. I’m worried that I’ll be making things harder than is needed because we run two druids on our roster. I’m wondering what my “amazingly good throughput” is going to bring when every healer right now offers what I have to offer…and then more.
For the first time ever I’m making a post where I’m telling druids that the future outlook of our class is “gloomy”, rather than saying “it’s not so bad”. For the first time ever, I’m saying that I don’t know if our class can remain comfortably competitive as a result of the inherent problems of our class and the seeming direction of many of Blizzard’s raid mechanics, and I’m having a really hard time seeing an upside to being a druid on a progression raid team right now. I won’t say that the sky is falling, because it’s not. But you should expect some thunderstorms along the way.
Falling Leaves and Wings 
Hi Beru:
I can understand your frustrations. I’m also concerned for heroic modes too since my group runs with me and a priest (two healing raids). We managed to clear four bosses the first night but I always managed to be on the same page as the priest. But now I’m a page BEHIND.
I couldn’t believe seeing divine hymn heal for far more than my Tranquility did. She had more mana than I did, and I worked my ass off too. I still came up short on the healing meters which also leads me to believe that I’ll also be a liability in my raids.
It’s a terrible feeling. I brought this up with my other healers and explained changes to my class. The only solution we’ve come up with so far: if the incoming damage isn’t too OP, let my hits do the work- don’t top people off if there’s hots ticking or else I’m wasting my mana. Still, I shouldn’t have to do this. I don’t even feel like a raid healer anymore.
It’s a sad day for Druids.
/unglyphs WG in protest.
I don’t think I’d feel nearly as frustarted if I felt I could be competitive. But when I’m pumping out as much as I can just to stay in the ballpark of the other healers at the cost of all of my mana to a fraction of theirs, I just don’t know what to say. Do I have room to improve, time cooldowns better, be more comfortable with the flow of the fight? Absolutely. But so do they. And I just don’t see a way for this discrepancy to be resolved, and I’m worried that as we gain more gear, it’s only going to grow.
No, you’re right, it’s just not competitive if you’re using everything you have and coming up short. I don’t know what to say either, even my priest said she felt OP right now. I cast WG every cool down and could feel myself reaching for rejuves more so I could also swiftmend off cd as well for aoe heals. I hate that because rejuves offer so little in return going to overheals and are expensive to blanket the raid with. It’s not the healing numbers I care about, it’s about how inefficient I feel right now into being forced to use expensive hots to raid heal again. Druids mindlessly spamming HoTs in Wrath was what Blizzard was trying to avoid when they released Cataclysm, by imposing high spell costs for our HoTs. I think, if we’re being forced to use more HoTs for raid healing, Blizzard could look into maybe lowering the spell costs for hots if they are so adamant that WG is too overpowered and easy to use.
But then, we’d be back to where we were in Wrath. *sigh*.
It may get better with gear though…. hopefully!
Hi. I understand from where you are coming from. What can we do to make blizzard see their mistake? I mean there has to be something we can do you know. Maybe there is some way that we haven’t seen that we have heal as from now on. The same way we had to change the way we used to heal back at the beginning of cata. There just has to be a way to compensate this.
Well…I wrote this post 😛
Although I’m not big-headed enough to think anyone at Blizzard is going to read it. And even if they did, I’d be shocked if they said “By golly! Beru is frustrated, so we must fix it!”. My guess is that after a couple of weeks they will look at their internal data and make a decision on if they feel something needs to be done, and I’m not sure if there is anything to be done to change that in the interim.
Sorry your first raid night was so frustrating. I acutally found the nerfs affected me less than I thought they would. The flat WG nerf I can definitely live with, though I am finding the glyph change stings. Were you using the glyph for the raid? I ended up dropping it and my healing felt much better afterwards.
A Holy Priest’s Divine Hymn is pretty ridiculous now. Does almost 50% more healing than a Tranq…that’s a bit of a kick in the shins.
I really don’t think you should worry about your ability to do heroic modes though. I agree with Borsk that based on your logs, you didn’t do as badly as you think (though I know you hold yourself to a higher standard than most). Don’t despair!
I strongly suspect that our differences are likely related to a) raid make up, b) length of the encounters and c) the overall strength of my healing team as a whole. I’ll be happy to explore that more in depth with your privately if you want 🙂
Interesting your experience is quite different from Jasyla’s over here (http://www.cannotbetamed.com/2011/11/30/druids-post-nerf-in-dragon-soul/). I myself really didn’t have a good barometer because I wasn’t in a similar role as any of the other healers in my raid, but I also ran without the WG glyph (mostly because I’m in 10man). I wonder what your take on Jasyla’s post is, if you’ve read it.
See my response above to Jasyla for why I think we had different experiences.
Our druids didn’t do so hot in the front half of DS either, but towards the end you get some Druid-friendly fights. Multi-hotting is great for handling the debuff on Spine (though that won’t show on the meters) and these are our logs for our Madness kill:
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-9xxvgb9l4n9zdo3t/sum/healingDone/?s=433&e=1265
This is mostly because you spend the entire fight under an AE damage aura that fluctuates between ‘that tickles’ and ‘okay I guess I have to put effort into healing this,’ ascending to ‘SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT AAAAASD;FLK;LFJDGFD’ in the finale.
I would probably say that Druids are decent to good in situations where healing is a thing you have to put actual thought and effort into and decent to ‘meh’ in situations where damage just exists to give us something to do while more interesting mechanics are going on.
I would agree there. But right now, based on what you are saying, there are really only two fights of eight for druids to “shine” (at least on normal) Ultraxion and Madness (which I’ve not seen yet). And even then, I really had to work on Ultraxion to stay ahead – and still felt the same mana/burst frustrations that I had the rest of the night.
For spine, we started with a “disc/druid” approach to handling the debuff – and I was out of mana before we even got the second plate free’d. Granted it was our very first look at the fight, and we ultimately went with a “group assignment” strategy for dealing with the buff, with other healers helping when they could, and I had one hell of a time getting my group cleared. Maybe I’m just not being as effective as I could on that fight, I don’t know. But I will say, that of all of the fights we looked at last night, that was the first one where I felt as if I was having “fun” – and I think that’s more due to the nature of a brand new fight and having some extremely close wipes than anything else. I still spent a lot of the fight frustrated at my mana pool, and struggling to keep up with my assignment 😦
Beru, can I see your WOL report for those bosses? I don’t see a link in the post.
There wasn’t a link posted. Here you go:
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/b9c2y9251vkdoc1n/
I hate to say it but I agree with Borsk. but then I raided at the start of this expansion as a Shaman. I was dropped so fast my head spun.
I don’t mean to imply that we are nearly as bad as shaman have been. I was more commenting that I understood how they feel. And oddly – there was a blue bar at the top on at least one of those fights last night. I’m happy shaman are getting to see some results of their hard work finally. They deserve it, to be sure. But that doesn’t make my frustrations with the resto changes any less valid.
I can’t offer any suggestions, as I’m not raiding anymore, but I can offer sympathy. I remember the beginning of the expansion . . . when I turned off Recount and wondered if I should sit myself. (But couldn’t, because I was leading the healers and had to be in the encounters to learn how they worked . . .) It was an excellent opportunity to stop worrying about my showing on the meters and worry more about the teamwork of the raid . . . or so I told myself, clinging to the idea while fighting tears of discouragement . . .
Hopefully things will work out as the tier moves along. They usually do, even if not quite as well as we wish. Good luck!
I feel your pain Beru. We are only a ten man raid team. We run Disc priest, Holy pally and Resto druid (me). And I struggled constantly all night.
I was frustrated. I felt like my heals just couldn’t keep up with the incoming damage. The Priest dominated the meters and he’s not the best we have, so that really made me feel even worse. I kept being told to blanket rejuv, WG on CD, Swiftmend on CD. Well shit that just doesn’t work for my blue bar. I was constantly willing my innervate cd to hurry the hell up as I needed to use it again asap. I watched as our Pally’s blue bar was on fumes but there’s the priest with not a care in the world, sitting at half a bar or better.
It feels like we got more than just a WG nerf. While yes it maybe a little too good for Firelands, but to nerf it going into Dragon Soul I think that was a bad idea. I’m going to be reglyphing my WG too, the new CD is just too painful to keep it for that one extra hit.
If you’re doing 10 man then I think it’s highly advisable to go without the glyph. The likelihood that the 6th application of the HoT goes wasted or to a pet is much higher and not that optimal.
I would agree with Jar here, that I believe for 10 man raiding you may get more value from unglyphing Wild Growth – but you may want to check the math on that before deciding. That being said, glyph or no glyph, you will like still feel many of the same frustrations.
I think you’ve lost a bit of perspective regarding where your first night of raiding in 4.3 should fit within your semi-recent raiding activities. You and your group just came out of a ~2month? long face->wall grind on heroic rag where everyone in the raid was on pins and needles for the whole raid. I imaging that experience was probably something like an Olympic team of marathon runners preparing for the summer games together. Everyone in your raid sits in the top ~3-4% of everyone who raids. Every one of you is probably in the best “shape” you can get in right now. Then you all went and entered your group into the local 2mile community “Fun Run”
You cleared 7/8 bosses in a brand new tier on your first night and said that you 1-shot 5 of them? As a researcher and an analyst, I can tell you that that sounds like a horrible data point to base any kind of real conclusions off of. You more or less pointed out the same principle when you described your LFR experiences. Taking your raid through normal DS is sort of like taking a jet fighter down the block to the corner store and then trying to evaluate what your fuel efficiency costs were like for the trip.
One of the characteristics druid healers have always had is that when you have too many (skilled) healers in the raid and not enough damage going around to keep everyone from being bored, then druid are going to lose on “modern” healing meters that don’t factor in overhealing.
Your “raw healing” across all boss attempts: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/b9c2y9251vkdoc1n/analyze/hd/source/?enc=bosses
You’re at the top of the meters with 22million healing and 3,000 healing per second ahead of the next closest healer.
Even without factoring in overhealing: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/b9c2y9251vkdoc1n/sum/healingDone/?enc=bosses
You’re at the top with 10million more healing and 2,000 HPS(e) above the next closest healer.
It’s obvious to me, looking through your logs, that you were busting your ass and an important part of the success of your raid. Our 10man cleared 7/8 in ~3hours last night and as we were chatting afterward, it was agreed that we could have pretty easily dropped to 2 healers if we had wanted to, I can’t imagine 25man normal wouldn’t have posed a similar lack of challenge for your group. Because it was a new raid tier though and we didn’t know for sure what to expect, I kept us at 3 healers just to play it safe and had my healers complaining (good naturedly) that they were bored for most of the evening.
As always , I think your awesome ❤
You cannot look at “raw healing” for the night as any kind of parameter, as it is colored by the fact that I got a red buff on Ultraxion which skews all of the raw healing data. Not to mention that I continued to bust my ass healing the trash, and actually stopped and chided the priests for being slack asses (“I know that you guys are wiping my face in it on boss fights, why am I owning you on the trash”). You would have to take all of the Ultraxion healing out to get a better picture of overall healing done. Once you take that out – I am not on the top of overall healing done.
I don’t think I’ve lost perspective. I think I’m a competitive healer who is used to being pushed and staying competitive who is now frustrated that I no longer feel as comptetitive. One night of raiding or ten nights isn’t likely to change the constraints that I feel on mangaing burst healing or the pinch trying to remain competitive put on my mana.
I will have no problems coming back in a week or two and saying “guys, I was wrong and jumped the gun”, and if that does in fact happen, I’ll be the first to admit it. But it does not change how I felt last night.
The numbers I posted had already factored out all of the trash data (boss attempts/kills only)
If we also subtract out the Ultraxion numbers (during which Borsk and Hugs recieved a 28% and 23% boost to their own numbers from their buffs)
Then you are still 18million healing ahead in raw healing done (which includes overhealing since resto druids don’t really have any direct control over whether or not a heal you cast ends up being overheal or not) I didn’t work out the HPS numbers exactly, but because your actually less ahead on that fight than your overall numbers across all of the bosses, your overall lead in HPS(e) should actually go up if you remove Ultraxion from the calculation. Your lead in “effective healing” drops from 10million to 7million if you remove the Ultraxion numbers, and the same argument suggests that your lead in HPS(e) would have increased after removing the Ultraxion attemps.
The perspective I was talking about is simply regarding the shift between how easy these normal modes are in comparison to the content your group has been working on for the last 3-4 months. I think that if you had taken your “main” raid team into post nerf normal mode BWD/BoT last week (before the patch changes) and had run with the same number of healers that you used last night in DS (6?), that you would have felt just as frustrated with your inability to keep up on most fights. A lack of *serious* raid damage, and a couple of “extra” healers and resto druids have never been able to keep up with some of the other classes as well in *most* fights if you factor out overhealing (and back then WWS and the like didn’t automatically factor them out)
As I know you know already <3, it is just a dangerous thing to try and look at healing meters competitively. If you truly wanted to top the meters, you should enlist 5-6 raid members to try and intentionally dodge into whatever mechanic is available to keep their health between ~40-80% as often as possible without getting themselves killed and then *forbid* any of the other healers from healing them at all. Your healing group only gets to heal the amount of damage that your raid takes, and you only get small "chunks" or "windows of opportunity" that you're even allowed to heal in most fights. If your raid can't learn how to keep their health levels down in the range that best facilitates your class' healing strengths and if you haven't trained your fellow healers to stop causing your HoTs to overheal, then trying to get your orange bar back on top is going to be difficult and/or impossible… for individual boss fights that is. Overall, across your whole raid, not including trash, whether you ignore Ultraxion or not, and whether you factor in over healing or not, you were still sitting at the "top of the meters"
Just wanted to clarify that the last bit in there about training your raid to stand in the bad and your healing team to not heal them was meant to be sarcastic 😉
I think one of the biggest reasons that druids are showing up higher in a couple of the fights is because those are the only couple of fights that were presenting an actual challenge. I predict that moving into hard modes (which will hopefully be as challenging as they were last tier) next week will produce different results that what a lot of people were feeling this week of everyone being forced back into normal modes.
But you just illustrated the problem (and my frustrations) so well with this last comment.
There actually is a decent amount of damage being taken by the raid – that can be shown by the raw HPS of the raid team. The root of the problem is that it’s very bursty damage – and we have no really strong tools to deal with that (again), where everyone else does. It’s been an issue since 4.0. One that Blizzard recognized, and slapped a bandaid on.
Additionally, there is nothing wrong with wanting to be competitive. I get really frustrated at people who feel that wanting to be competitive is a nagative, or like it’s a fallacy to want to be competitive member of your raid team. It’s not. In fact – the reason that druids are in the position that we are in right now is because everyone else felt they should have the same throughput as a druid and didn’t feel competitive.
All of that being said, I’ve been very closely watching other druid’s parses for the first eight bosses in DS – and pretty uniforimily druids are struggling to keep up with their peers, and that in and of itself is somewhat frustrating when all we have to offer the raid is “big healing”. We’ve been told our strength is our ability to put out a lot of healing, but in truth, everyone in the raid now has the uniform ability to equal a druids throughput with more ease, and has more to offer the raid than just sheer throughput.
I think I probably should have clarified that I agree, in principle, with everything you posted. I was just trying to point out that based on the logs, I don’t think that it is as bleak as you claimed. You were still the top healer for your overall raid, even if you weren’t on top for any individual boss. I think that fact showcases the druid’s strengths (which we both agree is *not* small bursty bits of damage here and there in the raid.)
I think that druid’s got the short end of the stick and I think that priests most likely got a bigger bump than they probably should have.
I also couldn’t agree more that competition is usually a healthy thing and *completely* understand it as a center piece for enjoying raiding on an individual level. I was just trying to offer a friendly reminder that there were probably more factors at play than you seemed to be considering for this week of normal mode facerolling. Of course, there is no way to tell if I’m right though until we get to start looking at the logs from next week’s heroic attempts/kills.
As always, I love getting to read your blog each week, thanks for providing such good topics for conversation to the rest of us ❤
“For the first time ever I’m making a post where I’m telling druids that the future outlook of our class is “gloomy””
Silver lining:
The MoP changes for Druids look absolutely fantastic. Healing shrooms, some damage reduction, symbiosis. The immediate future is bleak for Resto Druids in progression content, but the not too distant future looks pretty bright to me.
Oddly, I pretty much disagree with your outlook on MoP. Everything I’ve seen regarding druids has me feeling pretty “meh” about druids in the future.
I think healing musrooms are a terrible idea if they retain the application of wild mushrooms that we currently have – needing 3 (shorter) gcds to line up one stationary heal is…lack luster at best. I’ve never felt healing mushrooms were a good idea, and was dismayed to see them implemented into our arsenal going forward.
In addition to that, I’m pretty unhappy with the direction it seems Blizzard is pushing druids. I don’t want to turn into a cat and DPS – I want to heal. I don’t want to lose my functionality as a healer to utilize 1/3 of the new “talents” that have been introduced. I could just have a case of the Mondays regarding MoP – but I’m fairly unsatisfied with everything I’ve seen rolled out so far. Which, admittedly, has colored my current situation somewhat.
I see healing shrooms as more of a situational spell, which lessens the impact of the GCD issue for me.
I’m extremely pumped for Ironbark. We finally get the pony we were promised in regards to a damage reduction CD, which mitigates some of the problem with the WG nerf going forward.
Symbiosis is very much up in the air, but it has the potentially to be just awesome. It COULD be a dud, but the possibilities are endless right now should they approach it right. Imagine the utility a Resto Druid would be bringing to a raid in that regard? There are two ways it could go, one realistic, the other less so. Realistically speaking, you could very well effectively end up doubling up on spells. Imagine we could pull Lay on Hands or PW: Shield and basically double up the ability of the raid to use those abilities (Effectively halving the cooldowns on each in a sense)? I doubt we’ll end up that OP on it, but there’s distinct probable advantages to bringing a Druid to a raid for that one spell.
Additionally, I may be reading too much into this, but there’s no distinction in the wording of the spell that it has to be a party member. Probably wishful thinking considering the chaos that it could cause, but what if you could snag a spell from some random player wandering around SW/Org and bring it to a raid? Now I highly doubt that’ll be possible considering that would make us extremely OP, but right now it’s fun to speculate.
Then there’s all the little things like Efflorescence being built into Swiftmend, Glyph of Regrowth baked in.
All told, I’m pretty pumped to see what’s going to happen in MoP for Druids, a lot moreso than I was going into Cataclysm when basically all we got was Efflo and massive nerfs to Regrowth and Rejuv.
Odd. I honestly didn’t feel any pinch aside the mana constraints (10man) that the other healers (holy priest, shaman, pally) were feeling, too… I just took that as a challenge. I think I asked for an external (feral) innervate once over the night. My tactics, however, don’t include rejuv blanketing in most cases, and my raids are quite well-trained to stand in the green (and blue, and click light wells). I was never concurrent in the raid with the holy paladin, curious if that impacted my perception. From what I gather, holy pally AoE healing was buffed, and disc priests have an easier time with mana than their holy counterparts.
RE: WG glyph for 10mans: the first thing I did when I logged in after the patch was grab a dust of disappearance and reglyph out of WG. I put innervate in there, but it’s unlikely to be used on anyone other than myself, so I’m considering barkskin or thorns. /sigh
(Well, I say I avoid rejuv blanketing, but to be fair, it’s my second-highest healing done, just behind unglyphed WG.)
Parse of my first night in there, in case analysis may be helpful: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/hjchh37cqnja5wwu/ I was rotated out for Zonozz initially, but they were wiping with 2-heals so they yanked me back in for a 3-heal setup. Ultraxion was not included in the parse, but I took the green buff in that one and was pretty competitive.
On this I do think there may be some discrepency in having to heal 10 vs 25 people. Maybe not though, since there are a few 10 man raiders who posted above that stated they felt equally frustrated. But for me, part of the heavy Rejuv use is that I have WG on fairly healthy CD that only heals roughly 1/5 of my raid (compared to it hitting 1/2 of my raid) and was in the raid with two very beefy holy priests, a very skilled shaman and a strong paladin. All of who can offer a lot of fast, efficient and effective burst healing. Things were quite honestly healed before HoTs even had a hope of working on a lot of encounters (which I think is evidenced by the extremely high overheal seen, I mean I’m used to a lot of overheal – but damn).
It was just so damn frustrating to be sitting OOM, and to look over and see other healers not only out performing me but laughing at me with their mana bars.
Unsure what the usual requirements are on number of healers for a 25, but did it feel like perhaps there were too many healers, if the job was getting done before your HoTs could tick? Even if it’s just on one boss or another?
Well, we ran 6 on everything. We pobably could have very easily run 5 up to Ultraxion.
That being said, I’ve been scouring parses today from some of the top guilds (for those that left them public) and from other guilds on par with mine, and what I’ve been seeing from everyone’s logs are pretty much on par for what I saw last night as far as druids are concerned from a pure numbers stand point (with the difference being some of them had some really beastly paladins dominating instead of priests). Of course, I can’t speak for their mana frustrations, but I would assume they were equivilent to mine. Most ran five to six healers for most of the night as well. However, I’ve yet to see a log where a druid dominated on anything outside of Ultraxion – and even then I saw a good many Ultraxion logs where druids weren’t on top. In a lot of cases, it would seem that I fared better that some of the other druids I looked at today.
Just from talking to people, and looking at some of the other first numbers coming out, I don’t think I’m alone with my frustrations 😦
The WG thing is basically only a significant issue in 25’s. I haven’t actually run any raids since 4.3 dropped, but for fun (No, not really, I just forgot to take care of it), I ran the new five mans with WG still glyphed and it made them a massive pain. Upon removing it, it’s business as usual.
I can see where this is going to massively sting for the hardcore progression set, but the vast majority of the population (I.E., relative casuals like myself) is not getting destroyed by this like we did at the beginning of Cata.
Honestly, though, I wouldn’t be surprised if something was done mid-patch to kind of bandaid it again, maybe roll back the change on the glyph or at least alter a current glyph to give us a viable alternative.
So far I’ve only raided for 2 hours on normal and 2 on LFR this patch, so I think it’s a little early to lose all hope. I understand where you’re coming from though. It feels like a punishment to be nerfed while every other healing spec is buffed when we weren’t that far ahead last tier.
In LFR, a decent pally just clobbered me on the meters for almost every boss. In my normal 10 man, I just broke even with our very competent shammy, but I used innervate twice and a concentration potion and was nearly out of mana on and off while he didn’t even need mana tide or a potion at all.
Nowhere did I say all hope was lost =P
I did however indicate that I was frustrated and that I didn’t see those frustrations being alleviated in my near future.
I actually whispered Glow (one of the stand-out druids on our server, http://www.glowbie.net/blog/), last night when we were both raiding, to say I wasn’t feeling the nerf, as I was wondering if it actually happened! It is maybe hurting the srs bzns druids more than us ordinary casual raiding folk? (We were thrilled to down a single boss on the first night.)
I had to swap back to pots of conc rather than mythical mana on our Yor’sahj attempts, much like at the release of BWD, but I figure that will sort itself out with better gear.
I was having massive fun rejuv spamming, with Velocity from my shiny new Seal of the Seven Signs up for almost 20% of the time, but WoL shows I have 40% overhealing on rejuv, and terribad Harmony uptime. So I have work to do to improve, and I’m a bit worried about what will happen if I try 10s.
Meantime, 4.3 is interesting, LFR is wonderful, and if there’s sometimes a shaman above me on the meters, I’ll be happy for them.
“if there’s sometimes a shaman above me on the meters, I’ll be happy for them.”
Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled for them. But I wasn’t “sometimes” not above people on the meters – I was always below them. Which is frustrating. I really do think the stronger and more competitive your overall healing team is, the more you will feel the changes. Which is why I was far less frustrated in the LFR that I did with my mini-me, and completely dominated with her. However, as a counterpoint to that, we did a LFR last night with our progression team, and our priest did roughly double my healing on 3 of the 4 encounters. And I was running myself OOM trying to keep up, but just didn’t have the burst to counter how quickly the other healers handled the incoming damage.
Quick post as I must go to bed:
Yes I share your frustrations, Beru, and I’m sure pretty much every single tree does too! I really hope they revert some of the nerfs we recieved this patch, for as we still haven’t received the tools necessary to cope with taking off the uber-WG band-aid, we unfortunately need it to remain until MoP. Most of the encounters aren’t suited to our toolkit, flash back to 4.0, which just makes the nerfs even worse. And then triply so with everyone else being buffed so damn much – Holy Priests need to be reined in a bit right now, for sure.
Keep hope, keep slogging, and as someone who has tried Madness tonight (7% best try), I actually found it fairly suited to trees. There’s lots of aoe damage, even phases of smaller, constantly ticking damage – perfect! Make good use of your cooldowns – you WILL need them so very much. I just hope Heroic turns out good for us too.
I agree that Holy Priests are a bit off the reservation right now, and pretty dismayed that DH is performing roughly 40% better than tranquility. Even our holy priests feel that they are a little too over powered right now. That being said, my frustration, more than anything else is that I feel so ineffective – and that I have to work twice has hard just to remain effective and relevant.
I hope you were able to finish off Madness 🙂 I ended up third on the encounter just behind one of our holy priests and our resto shaman. Apparently the fight is made well from them too ^.^
who are you fighting in this game? a world-threatening dragon or your team-mates?
you work with the tools you get given. if those tools put you “behind” your teammates on some artifical and tangentially relevant measure of performance, when your team is able to meet its objective, what does it really matter?
I’ve said it sevearl times, but I’ll say it again: there is nothing wrong with wanting to be competitive.
Sure, we are killing internet pixels. Sure, we are working cooperatively as a team to do that. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t want to be competitive and feel competitive at the same time. Competition pushes people. And I think it’s healthy. To not want to do better, and push yourself as hard as you can against your team is a mindset that I don’t understand. I think it breeds stronger, better, more driven players. And I’m Ok with that. To some people “meeting the objective” is enough, and you are satisfied. For me, I prefer the individual performance challenges as well as the macro challenge of conquering new content. It’s why I’m rarely AFK during trash, and why I always push myself to my limits and review my performance on a nightly basis scouring for new ways to improve. While that style of play isn’t for everyone, it doesn’t mean that it’s bad for those of us that are driven by it.
My point isn’t that you shouldn’t push yourself tbe competitive. It’s just that there is a cap that blizz puts on each class as far as HPS/meters goes. Pre-4.3 Shamans had a lowesr cap than druids. Was there any point in you pushing yourself to be “competitive” against shaman (as measured by HPS) pre-4.3? You were going to win. every. single. time. (specific fight mechanics excepted). Where’s the competition in that? Looks like some of the same thing is happening with druids now. Your cap has been lowered below priests/pallies. They might “win” the HPS competition now whereas they didn’t previously. That’s not because they’re playing any better than they used to, it’s just that their cap got changed.
The competition is to perform at your peak. If you do that and your numbers are lower than others then the number’s aren’t the right measure. If you want other measuremens, try comparing to your previous personal best (or the personal best of other people of the same class in the same fight). Don’t try to compare the outcome of different classes with different caps that are determined by a force you can’t control.
I think you missed one of the big points. All druids have ever had to offer is big healing. As it stands right now, everyone else has the potential to do just as much healing (and honestly, more healing with more efficiency) as we do, and brings more to the raid than we do. So if we aren’t as competitive with the only thing that we bring to the raid, and in many cases are far worse at it than others, exactly what is it that we have to offer? What is it that makes us unique? Why bring a druid over a paladin, priest or shaman? My shiny disposition? This is what has druids (including myself) frustrated.
I wasn’t feeling the pinch as severely as you’re describing, but I tend to revert to a triple rejuv/nourish routine when I start feeling low-ish. However, I did feel the urge to flog myself continually throughout the night as I was *not* used to having myself mid to bottom in our 3-man team. Even though I’m a bit rusty after a month or so of booming, I was frustrated at my seeming lack of ability to do anything but overheal most of the night. Like many others in 10-mans have suggested, I definitely suggest dropping the WG glyph.
That being said, I also reminded myself that I raid with an exceptional healing team, and having my healing lower than normal was not worth kicking myself over. I was disappointed because Jasyla had reported doing so well, and I was doing so sucky. I *am* also aggravated that our greatest strength (throughput) has been knocked back down without anything to shore up that loss.
I definitely feel your pain. Thank you for posting this, as I was feeling a bit like the kid on the short bus ^^
You are definitely not alone! It has continued to be frustrating through the few fights as well. You are not riding the short bus 🙂
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I’ve felt for a long time that Blizzard’s pre-release testing isn’t very good. There always seem to be imbalances or poorly-planned changes and the cycle seems to be:
Release -> Feedback -> Denial (Blizzard have a problem with this) or “we are looking at it” -> quietly fix it.
On the basis of my experience to date, I’m not too bothered at the moment as I expect a “4.3.x” with some revisions in the next few weeks.
Take heart!
I really hope Blizzard throws up some kind of bone. That being said, I fear that if I hold my breath, I’ll pass out from waiting ^.^
Forgive me beru but looking at your logs I don’t see what your complaining about sure you only topped the meters on one fight but apart from gunship 2.0 you were top 2nd/3rd on every other fight. Reading your post it reads like you are rock bottom of the meters and worried about being a liability for your team which doesn’t seem to be the case?
I am really sorry but I have to agree upon that.
Morchok 2
Warlord 2
Yorsahj 3
Hagara 2
Ulraxion 1
Blackhorn 5
Spine of D 1
and I cannot see whrere you are at the bottom of the meters all the time. To me this looks fine. I think druids are a little spoiled from there firelands over the top experience (I play one too so no flames here please 🙂 ) Maybe you should just give it some time. And btw yay for resto shaman who had to raid under worse conditions and for whom such an evening would have been incredible in FL. I see your point, but it really is not as bad as you feel about it at the moment.
I’m sorry, but if you don’t see why there’s a problem when one healer is busting her butt and OOMing herself to be middle; while the others are cozily coasting with no mana worries and topping charts, then I think you’re letting your baises cloud you. This isn’t a resto druid whining about not being on top anymore. This is a healer giving it her all only to be “meh” at best, no matter how hard she tries. All the oomph she’s putting into her healing isn’t translating through her tools. That’s not right no matter what class you are. A player putting in so much effort (and mana) should always outperform one who is putting in less effort (and mana), given equal skill and gear.
Hey Beru-
Sorry you’re suffering from this. 😦
In a ten man normal co-healing with a holydin and sometimes a resto-shaman (we prefer to two-heal,) I did find that my numbers were NOT what I expected them to be. But I also didn’t have my powerauras up to date, so I probably did quite poorly on mastery uptime. I also forgot to unglyph WG, which is pretty much completely useless for me as a ten man raider, so maybe that will help too.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s really feeling a noticeable difference. I’m trying to figure out how to compensate, all I’m seeing is ‘push rejuv harder’. So… I guess I’ll work on my mastery uptime and optimal CD useage. I’m also working on trying to make Efflor as effective as possible; it was my top heal on Ultraxion, which was absolutely mind-boggling to me.
If it’s any help I’m with you! I play a DK, tank, and had to see my class nerfed to the ground and get gimped multiple times as Blizzard made us guinea pigs for the new kind of tanking they want. 4.0 through 4.2 has been pure hell and 4.3 did give us some buffs than I think are still insufficient. I hope they realize their mistake with druids and fix you guys fast. Nothing sucks more than investing yourself in you favorite class only to see it nerfed.
Hello Beru,
I follow your blog frequently and although I never posted anything, I felt the need to do it today.
When the changes were anounced I was afraid.I came to your blog and saw you with tones of confidence saying, “we can do this!”, and I believed so as well. After experiencing Dragon Soul I can fully subscrive all you said above, and even feel more frustrated than I ever did. I also have other healer characters (Priest, Shaman and Hpala), and all I can say is, it’s not a matter of skill, it’s really a matter of ‘nerf’, ‘class problems’ or whatever they may want to call it. Roughly saying, all resto druids were good at was raid healing. Ofc we could also perform other parts, but we could never consider ourselves tank healers, nor help the raid with mitigation. Today I see all the other classes shine at our former role, some outperforming us, and Druids left behind with low numbers and low utility.
I could as well handle the nerf, but I just cant take the ‘major glyphs are utilities or boosts with a downside’, when I see other classes with major glyphs with no downside and strugle to find utility on the remaining options we have, beside WG glyph.
I love my druid and I wont abandon it, even though I feel like it. But like in real life, it just felt good to know Im not the only one feeling terrible.
🙂
Quite simply, I think it’s high time druids got a “burst” aoe heal. Make it work something like a multi-target Regrowth: a decent heal with a cast time and a small hot component at the end.
It’s really just needed.
Hello Beru,
I actually just found your blog today. I raid on the maelstrom server and have enjoyed being a resto druid for just over a year now. I started healing summer 2010, and almost quit my druid (and the game) during the cataclysm. But I stuck it out, and again became a good healer. Currently, I can either top the charts with over 22k+ heals (avg ilvl 374) or sit around 8-10k. It’s sort of hit or miss. If there’s a shammy or pally in the group, my skada numbers go down. I am struggling with mana, but maybe i just haven’t learned a new cadence yet. In fact, I know I haven’t. Sometimes I do too many rejuvs, sometimes too little.
However, I am, in a word, like you, frustrated. I went from being a really effective healer to being…well, flip a coin effective. I’m out of mana sooner, not doing as much healing. I’m still learning the fights, so I’m not as effective as I could be. I don’t need to be #1 all the time, but I’m competitive with my healing….raid comes first, of course, but as I think about it, the only thing we druids bring to the table that was uniquely ours, was massive healing potential. We don’t have any “skill” except the use of our spells to generate volumes of healing. We have no tank cooldowns, we aren’t the only brezzer’s anymore (tho probably still the better ones), we don’t bring a unique buff (there’s more pally’s than you can shake a stick at), and now we simply cannot keep up.
I’m not ready to give up. I put a lot of time and effort and treecalc’s time trying to optimize my druid. But I don’t know if it’s all in vain, when any of my spells is simply going to get swamped by any of the other classes that can direct heal the aoe damage. It’s definitely my ego operating here, but I simply don’t want to be a 10k healer. I like when my druid hits 20k+ heals for the fight. It’s all I have as a tree.
I don’t know what the future will hold, but I guess that’s why I’m leveling a priest. I want to do the best that I can for the raid (and we need priests), but I don’t want to give up on my druid either. We will see what Blizz does, I guess.
“I’ve felt for a long time that Blizzard’s pre-release testing isn’t very good. There always seem to be imbalances or poorly-planned changes and the cycle seems to be:
Release -> Feedback -> Denial (Blizzard have a problem with this) or “we are looking at it” -> quietly fix it.
On the basis of my experience to date, I’m not too bothered at the moment as I expect a “4.3.x” with some revisions in the next few weeks.
Take heart!” – December 2, 2011 at 2:12 am
Well, I certainly spoke too soon! I’ve gone from being top healer in the guild to bottom and am now benched from raids. Patch 4.3.2 is released today and there’s no change for Resto Druids, so it seems that Blizzard don’t think there is a problem. Maybe I’ll change spec to Boomkin, I don’t know. I’m pretty fed up though.