So I obtained that illusive beta code, and have been putzing around a bit on the beta. I haven’t done a lot, and I don’t know how much I’ll do until the pre-made 90s become available in the later stages of testing. I have this whole thing about not wanting to spoil the new content for myself before release, but it is conflicted with my desire to try and do my part to make sure that druids are in a good place at launch. Anyhow, in the time I’ve spent in the beta, I have decided that mushrooms have an even bigger problem than their clunky drop 3 and detonate mechanic.
Six Yards
If mushrooms are (unfortunately) supposed to be our magic “fix” for this expansion, we have a very serious problem. Have you ever wondered exactly how big six yards is? The runes in the picture above illustrate it pretty clearly. That is me standing in the middle of my mushrooms detonating them. That is also me starting to panic slightly.
Why? Well, six yards is an absolutely miniscule space. People will literally have to be in each other’s models to receive a heal from mushrooms. And there is no chance in hell that any encounter with a “spread out” mechanic is going to have a viable use for this ability. In my opinion, the range is now our number one concern with this terrible “new” spell. It’s worse than the placement and detonate problems (which are still awkward and cumbersome). It’s worse than the targeting problems (which are still clunky). The six yard range pretty much makes this ability next to worthless in most situations.
In all of my optimism, I just do not see a way that this is going to be practical or competitive when we look at what our counterparts on the healing team are going to be able to do. If the devs want mushrooms to be any sort of “fix” or expect them to provide any sort of “competitive” healing, this must change. There is no “but” or “what if” – if this is our fix to burst healing, it must do better than this.
Our “Fix”
I will admit that I’ve been growing increasingly disappointed as I’ve watched more and more news release surrounding the other healing classes and some of the new abilities and tweaks they are receiving, yet continue to see nothing “new” or “exciting” for druids. Not to mention that Monks at the moment look like they are going to be the healer to end all other healers – but that is a conversation for another day. As I see other healers start to flourish in the beta with their new toys, I can’t help but wonder “what about me?” as I watch druids continue to stagnate. I mean surely Blizzard can’t leave druids out in the cold for another expansion, can they? Surely they have some nifty new thing up their sleeve that they just haven’t released yet, right?
Please, Blizzard, I have faith in you. Do not disappoint me by telling me that all I get are these shitty mushrooms and “symbiosis”. Please don’t make me go through another expansion where I go from “undesirable” to “overpowered” back to “undesirable”. I’m tired of fighting to prove I’m just as viable and versatile as any other healer (hint: I’m not). I’m tired of working twice as hard to get the same results. Please do not leave us with this lackluster “fix” and call it a day.
If you are dead set on these mushrooms, please at least make them viable and competitive. They are going to need a lot of work, and some significant changes to get there. Let’s start with increasing the range to make them useful if your raid isn’t piled on top of each other in the tiny confines of six yards. Once we’ve fixed that, we can talk about ways to make them more desirable. But before we can get to that step, this must be resolved.
Falling Leaves and Wings 
Given the lv 90 Priest talents (the ones which reward people for not snuggling up) and how awesome the Monk currently is, six yards is definitely not going to cut it.
It seems as if Druids got the “fun” stuff, orca/stag glyphs etc but nothing with substance. Although I do think that most of the healers need a lot more work right now but when you compare say the Priest talent tree to the Druids…. Priests get to choose 1 of 3 new heals plus can take void shift as a new cooldown in addition to what they already have. Druids get some interesting stuff but it’s more utility based which is great if everything you already have works perfectly but since it doesn’t… you end up with gaps in the toolbox again.
Ugh, I don’t even want to get into our talent trees haha. I have to admit, priests are looking like a lot of fun in MoP!
Druids do need to be thrown a bone somewhere meaningful, I think. I’m going to be very sad if we go another expansion without something “new” 😦
My first character, and one true love was a resto druid. I loved here more than anything, I loved playing a druid, I loved healing as a druid, I loved pvping as a resto druid. I tried to stick it out through Cata, I really did. Slowly people turned away from me…my raid group wanted a different class, my rbg team refused to bring me – in spite of the output, druids just weren’t the preferred healers, and once that got nerfed it was over. Playing a resto druid just stopped being fun. I abandoned her to a Holy Pally. I geared her up and I do enjoy playing her, but I still miss my poor druid, languishing in the middle of Stormwind, only getting attention when I need to transmute some gems.
The new glyphs sound fun, but…I just don’t see the real problems with druid healing being addressed. I would LOVE to play my druid again, but so far, I’m not getting my hopes up.
I definitely agree that the problems we saw this expansion have not been addressed sufficiently. I hope that they get there by the end of the beta, because it’s going to be hard to go through another expansion with druid healing shaped the way Cataclysm has been. I am even more concerned with some of the things in our toolkit and how they will play out with the mana changes, but I haven’t had enough time to put my thoughts together and really flesh them out yet.
That new spell makes me cringe. It’s one of the reasons why I don’t like playing moonkins is because I *hate* spending three gcds to get three mushrooms. I’m pretty sure I won’t like it on my resto druid either. Why don’t Blizzard make it so that we can cast three in one click? Make it more like a field of little mushrooms that explode when you trigger it. This would make me a little happier with the spell. It isn’t even the size that bothers me, it’s having to place three mushrooms in three gcds that bugs me the most. This feels like a clunky and inefficient way of healing, so to speak.
I’m busy enough healing as it is, do they think I’m going to have time for placing those mushrooms on the ground? We’d be the only healing class that has to deal with this particular type of type and I’m pretty sure other classes would complain if they got the same thing. I really think this could have been done better!
I think three in one click, or having it be just one mushroom would definitely be a step in the right direction. We are already very GCD capped, and trying to add in a multi step process while maintaining everything else is just extremely clunky and cumbersome.
Thank you for taking the time to investigate the beta builds and provide a forum for feedback. As a very silent reader, I greatly appreciate your efforts to improve a game that I have devoted so many hours to. After reading your post, I had just a couple of thoughts I would like to share regarding what could be done with our magic mushrooms.
I would like to see the mushrooms become a slow version chainheal. What would be neat is if you set the first three down, when you detonate them, they then spawn another circle of mushrooms near the feet of the character with the second lowest health. After some short cooldown, the druid could then “explode” them, and again, the mushroom ring would travel to the person with the second lowest health (which could now be the original player that was targetted”.
The other idea would to make the mushrooms similar to the priests lightwell such that when a player runs over the mushroom it explodes creating an AOE heal located about that spot that would heal anyone then in the area. The best solution might be a combination of the two, such that you would have a traveling mushroom spawn that other players could trigger.
Once again, thank you for providing a forum to discuss the upcoming changes.
The chainheal mechanic is also riddled with problems (range being a big one of them), but it would be better than the mechanics of the spell now. I don’t know if I like the idea of someone else deciding when my mushroom heals. I think I want to remain in control of when those bursts are going out, so that I can time when my heals are going to land.
The funny thing about these healing mushrooms (or the offensive ones) is that in a different format of game, this type of ability is perfect, logical and strategic. That format is a turn-based, grid-based style game such as D&D 4.0, where you have time to carefully place your multiple “detonation points” for maximum effectiveness.
It’s great! They work fine…in THAT STYLE OF GAME. But in an active, frantic, everyone-moving-at-once-omg game like WoW? A 6 yard range is ridiculous. I mean, hell, Death & Decay is a huge range compared to 6 yards and I still sometimes miss or barely clip the boss because I’m busy mashing keys and moving and running out of fire, etc.
The one thing I’d like to see, Beru, is can you show us how close players can be standing to each other but not be within the range of the mushroom? I wonder if the heal range is bigger than it appears – or if it is really IS that small, seeing two players standing nearly side-by-side, but outside of the mushroom heal radius will be pretty telling.
Just for you, Rades!
I have seen very few druids that liked the idea of mushrooms as a heal mechanic. I personally know zero resto druids that are tackling hardmodes on a regular basis that want them. I’m terrified that our other heals are going to get nerfed into the ground to make us ‘want’ to use the Mushrooms just the way Chain Heal was destroyed so that shamans would use Healing Rain.
And I dread all the MoP encounters that are going to be designed around stacking mechanics 😦 Blizz apparently didn’t learn a darn thing from Dragon Soul (where Holy Paladins stacking tools were still superior). Or maybe they did but they are handing all the new tools to the monks. Efflorescence was fun but meh, I’d love to have a new tool for the first time in two expansions that makes me sit up and get excited.
I think that HR was a bit too powerful, comparatively, and I think that was recognized by removing the HoT component from it in MoP (I could be wrong about that, but it’s my theory!). But I do agree that if Blizzard starts to design encounters around all of these “stack up” heals, we are going to have fairly un-dynamic encounters.
I, too, want something that makes me read the beta notes and go “HOT DAMN! I CANNOT WAIT FOR THAT!” – however, to date, I have continued to be disappointed in what I see coming down the pike for druids.
I don’t know what to do here other than add my voice to the chorus.
Symbiosis is no answer. Don’t make the mistake you’ve always done blizz, where you make druids doing one thing weak, because we have so much “choice”.
We really don’t. I feel like we’re the bastards. Lysanna is doing, but we should all sound off. About our piss poor lvl 90 talents, and the state of our toolbox.
Let’s march to eisengard.
I agree that our level 90 talents need some serious reconsideration. I think the biggest issue there is that they are trying to find talents for four specs in two environments (PvP/PvE), and so far none of them are really doing much. There are a few other talent trees that really make me cringe as well that I’d like to see tweaked. BUT! (always a but!) even if they did NOTHING ELSE to the talent trees, and fixed our burst AE healing I would be a relatively happy druid.
Yeah, i agree. Fun gimmics aside, what i play for is to raid. But to raid, you have to be able to perform.
Yeah, totally agree with the general consensus. I’ve been playing a resto druid since 05 and for the first time ever I am seriously considering a main change. The new Symbiosis is just a gimmick, the devs are running out of ideas and obviously not many (if any) actually play a resto druid.
Healing mushrooms?? Don’t even get me started.
Sad days for the trees…..
I think I’d have to agree that there seems to be a disconnect on where the devs feel druid healing is, and where active druids feel druid healing is. I don’t know if that’s because none of the devs are playing druids, or if there is another reason, but the disconnect is definitely there.
As I’ve continued to be underwhelmed, and grouse about what we are seeing for druids in MoP, Brade has (on several occasions) nudged me to consider swapping my main. The thing is: I don’t want to. I love my druid and want to continue playing her. She IS WoW for me in A LOT of ways.
That being said, I think Brade may be hanging up his druid claws as we move forward. He grows continually frustrated at the state of cat DPS, and the lack of scaling they have, at the end of each expansion.
How does brade feel about ferals now having extremely bad survivability compared to rogues now?
I suggest that you do te same as you did in your picture, but have either a Shaman cast a Healing Rain, or a Disc Priest Cast their AoE Shield (can’t remember the name), or a Holy Priest cast their AoE heal (again can’t remember name) over it just so you can show how freaking much bigger those spells are.(Not to mention all only taking only one GCD to cast).
I’ve never played a resto Druid, and not likely to play MoP, but you poor trees are getting some bad fertilizer.
I will have to track some of those players down to see if I can snap a screenshot. And I would agree! Definitely seeing some bad fertilizer 🙂
I too will just be adding my voice to the choir here. It’s ridiculous what they’re doing to us. I think if we MUST use mushrooms, it should be one shroom with a large range… kind of like an efflo that you can place wherever. That would be much better than their current triple place-n-poof mechanic.
I’m going to stick it out in MoP as a resto druid, but I’m not sure how fun it’s going to be.
I agree, if they are going to stick to mushrooms the need to get rid of the need to drop three of them.
I’m a bit torn on the healing mushroom topic to be truthful. They actually do a fair amount of burst healing ~30k from what I’ve seen, but that’s if you can get all three to bloom on a target. I think if they end up keeping them to how they are (2.5 gcds to plant three and bloom, 6 yard range), they’re going to be only useful for stack fights really or if you can designate an area to stack for a certain mechanic. On the other hand, they will be always useful if you can train your raid members to stack tightly. Melee are almost always behind the boss when attacking. If you can have them stack closely, they will be amazing for a mechanic like Morchok stomp.
That being said, I hate mushrooms. I hate them on my moonkin so much because of the placement system. My hope is that they extend the range to maybe 12 yards, I don’t think that would be too terrible. Also cutting down the mushrooms to two would be a good change as well. Healers have so very little gcds to waste making sure the little glyph icon is in the correct place.
The range has got to change if they intend for them to be any sort of remedy to the problems that we have now. I also agree that the placement mechanic needs to be adjust somehow to make it more conducive to healing in high damage, high stress, dynamic raid encounters.
They do perform a decent amount of healing currently, I agree. However, unless they can fix the GCD/placement issues, they are going to remain problematic in their implementation.
For shrooms, the targeting reticule isn’t the same size as the effect from the heal. The 6 yard radius for the heal is only slightly smaller than the swiftmend/efflorescence graphic. They really just need to fix the graphic to better reflect how large the heal actually is (ie. rather than having like a 1 to 2 yard radius circle, make the targeting circle bigger).
The mechanic could use some tweaks, but they aren’t so bad in practice.
I am going to have to respectfully disagree that they “aren’t so bad in practice”. It is already a struggle to manage lifebloom and harmony in a 10 second window, while continuing to utilize other heals. Adding in a heal that is going to take ~2.5 GCDs to execute is going to make it even more complicated to manage everything that we need to do in order to remain effective healers.
Any way you slice it, or try and sugar coat it, for mushrooms to be effective in any meaningful way the range needs to be increased.
Did any of you listen to the Blizzcon discussion about Shrooms.
THEY ARE NOT MANDATORY, they are to patch, help with specific AoE Burst healing phases like Chimeron and other similar fights. Otherwise the Devs thought that Resto Druids were fine.
The other fix you are all getting is the ability to move life bloom so be happy about that as well. The real developers to get bitchy at are the encounter designers because no matter what GC and the class developers do, the encounter ones will still screw up the paradigm.
Is this the part where I have Brade ride in on his silvery steed and respond to you? Oh, wait, that’s not going to happen! Mostly because he feels that I’m a strong, intellegent and articluate person who can manage to handle my own debates.
So maybe this is the part where I go to your blog and tell you (and all of your commenters) that they don’t listen, and despite having plenty of first hand experience healing with the current druid model, that they are wrong about what they have been struggling with for almost the entirety of an expansion. Hrm, I don’t think that is going to happen.
If you sersiouly think that we are supposed to be content with a quality of life fix (done via a glyph, no less), and a gimmicky mechanic that 95% of the community is unhappy with, and are supposed to idly sit by while it happens without trying to effectuate change, you obviously do not know me very well.
I really never liked the mechanic of the damage mushrooms and the healing mushrooms seem even more problematic.
The range is definitely a problem. A 6 yard range is almost a 45% smaller area than Efflorescence has. The range should be easy enough to tweak though.
For me, the targeting circle and the fact that you need 3 GCDs to place the mushrooms is the biggest problem. It’s awkward and is too much time to spend setting up a spell.
I can think of some very specific examples of when the mushrooms could be useful (a period of low damage where you have the spare GCDs to set up the mushrooms, followed everyone grouping up in one predictable spot and taking large raid damage), but really, how often does that happen? Especially in hard modes. I’m hoping fights in Mists are more dynamic than that.
I agree, there are times in current content where Mushrooms could be powerful – but as you said encounters where you always group up aren’t going to be dynamic, interesting or particularly fun. The targetting is a problem, the number of times you have to drop a mushroom is a problem, and the range is a problem. Can these things be adjusted to make them a “fun” heal? I don’t know. I just know that as they are right now, they are not going to transition smoothly into our current (and seemingly future) toolkit.
I guess im one of the few who likes the healing mushrooms and always liked the boomshrooms as an owl too.
I do agree with the sice of the AoE however, 6 yds just isn’t enough.
Yes, the small range of the spell needs to be increased for them to be a meaningful heal in most raid environments.
So I think I have thought of a change that may improve range with this and maybe even the cluncky mechanic. Though healing shrooms still may never be fixable. What if the healing area for the shrooms was in an area between all 3 shrooms where they could not be placed more than 10yds apart. So that they could be pre placed where other players know where to go to get the healing when the time comes. Also this gives the opportunity for placing all mushrooms at the same time, one after the other where you dont have to click on the placing button each time. Almost like a click and drag.
That’s not a bad idea! If the heal was split between all three mushrooms within a 10 yard range of each other, you can gain a lot of real estate for the heal. I still have an issue with having to actually place 3, and a second issue with knowing exactly how far that 10 yards is, but it would definitely be an improvement over the current iteration.
Taking the healing component out of the equation (don’t shoot me yet healers) there’s still the glaring issue that in order for this mechanic to be optimally used the player must hit a hot key three times, mouse click three times and then press an additional hot key one more time. Regardless of the fact that placing mushrooms has a shorter GCD than normal the current iteration of this ability is asking for an absurd level of reaction speed from players in order to maximize healing. In theory it’s possible to drop all three mushrooms in a single GCD, but when you factor in targeting, placement and human reaction time it’s going to be closer to two to three lost GCDs in order to get all three placed on the ground.
If mushrooms are a mechanic that is here to stay then I think the healing needs to be built around a single mushroom. That’s still asking for three actions from the player to cast, place and detonate the mushroom. “Stack up on the mushroom!” can become the new “Click the lightwell!” It’ll even have the same issue when you can’t see it because a fat ass tauren is standing on it. After that it’s just a matter of Blizzard finding a healing number and cooldown they’re comfortable with the players having.
Note: This is my opinion only and I fully expect Beruthiel will yell at me for presuming I know a damned thing about healing.
Or for undermining my snark, omg! ^.^
I really don’t like when they add the “click the ability, then aim at the ground to drop it” mechanics… it really messes with my control dynamic while I’m playing. Especially during a raid situation where I have to move. It feels like a clunky mechanic and it wastes time trying to be precise in placement.
I almost think it would be better if you could give a player a “fungal infection” with your mushrooms… give them a nice big mushroom-cap head so they stand out… have the rest of the raid stack on that person and *BOOM* AoE heals…
At least it would be amusing, and you could mouseover/keybind to put it on a player significantly faster than trying to place it on the ground.
That being said, the range could probably still use a lot of work… 6yd is a woefully short range. I mean, I think I understand why they want to keep it really close… to keep it as a utility spell that’s only useful in situations where you have the raid tightly stacked for AoE healing out of necessity. The problem is that they’ve pigeonholed the spell so it’s effectively worthless outside that scenario.
What if they gave it a range-decay mechanic instead? Where it heals for X amount within 6 yd, and then less and less healing as it radiates outward, down to 0 at 15yd or so… that would give it /some/ use if people are outside the 6yd radius.
Even with a range decay mechanic it would need to exceed 6 yards to be beneficial, I think. I don’t know what I think about a fungal infection – it could work and is very similar to my “flourish” idea 🙂
Did some experimenting with our new magic mushrooms tonight. The mechanic is actually bigger than the graphic. I have screenshots if you would like me to send em to you, but basically the effect is almost exactly the size of our efflorescence. I was in party with my pallie, and I centered the shroom on him and inched forward and back to find the range watching my combat log. (I also cast a diff spell in between to demarcate blooms.) Once I found the outermost spot, I cast swiftmend on him. Lo and behold, I was standing just inside the inner green line on swiftmend. The outer line seems to be too far.
So, looking at mana costs, my current spellpower etc, my analysis is…
magic shrooms
More or less the size of swiftmend.
heals for 26k/35k/44k/52kish depending on crits and bloom size (based on 8819 as a non crit bloom)
cost 6180 for 3 shrooms
4 gcds (more or less)
rejuve
targeted
heals for 33516 total (5586*6 ticks)
cost 3380
1 gcd
I’d say I have to hit 4 or more people for the spell to be worth casting at all. And I’d need to be sure that they were all low on health… which 4gcds after a hit I’m not sure will be the case. The spell will have some situational usage, I think, but it doesn’t thrill me. Clunky is the word. It is a balancing act… I’m not sure that a somewhat spammable spell this powerful would make it into game. 4 gcds seems a bit long though.
There is a picture of Brade and I doing the positioning test a few comments up (in reply to Rades) 🙂
I think that it’s actually healing outside of 6 yards currently, because I did the exact same thing and put Effloressence down (which is 8 yards), and had Brade creep in until he could be hit with the mushrooms. He probably had to move in about one yard before the trigger hit him. Either way, that’s still and awefully small area 😦
Right now I’m not overly worried about the numbers. I don’t really think they can be effectively tested until 90, and I fully expect them to be tweaked a bit between now and then.
I was a bit happier when I realized that the actual effect is the inner line of efflorescence. I’ve managed to bully the raid into always standing in the healing rain puddle. It’s a lot bigger, but it does mean that I should be able to train them into a smaller space in a pinch. 😉 DS, though, is the king of grouping up. What will raid instances hold for us in the future?
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