Jeez I take a zoo day and Blizz puts up their Druid Q&A on the official forums! That’ll teach me to go to the zoo! When I came home and read the Q & A, I was exhausted from fighting the crowds at the Bronx Zoo and spending the day with 2 very sweet but very cranky 3 year olds. So I decided to take my somewhat befuddled dismay with a grain of salt and read over the Q & A in the morning when some sleep had restored my clarity. Unfortunately, although less befuddled, I still find myself somewhat dismayed.
First, a disproportionate amount of the Q&A was dedicated to ferals, so there were relatively fiew questions answered in regard to Resto druids. And what there was was… I guess disheartening is a good word for my reaction. Let’s go through the information, shall we?
Q: Can you describe for us what the intended identity and versatilities of the Tree of Life druids are supposed to be?
Ghostcrawler: This is a pretty philosophical answer here. If you only read one answer in this Q&A, you might want to check out this one.
The strength of the Resto druid is in heal-over-time spells. They can also do some decent single-target healing through Nourish or group healing through Wild Growth.
While I’d agree with this, as I’ve said recently on the blog, I do wish they’d reach a point where they are happy with Lifebloom and leave it alone. It’s a bit discouraging to see this HoT getting nerfed over and over again while Nourish gets a new buff every time you turn around. I don’t mean to be ungrateful for the buffs, but I know that I am not alone in wishing that they weren’t working so hard to make this direct heal strong at the expense of our “strength,” our HoTs.
The tree pretty much used to be a PvE mechanic since “rooting yourself” in PvP to benefit from ToL greatly limited the druid’s crowd control and escape abilities. We made enough changes to the talent to get trees into PvP in Lich King??? arguably too well.
What is this Pee-Vee-Pee of which you speak?
Druids overall have a strong niche. We are at a little bit of a crossroads with the Tree of Life however. We are currently wondering if druids sacrifice too much just to be as good as a healer as everyone else. What I mean is that if druids were good healers in caster form but great healers in Tree form, then there might be a decision there. However, we pretty much assume that healing druids are in Tree form nearly all of the time and balance around that. We don’t think it would be fair for them to be the best healers just for taking that talent.
It’s possible that druids have to sacrifice too much in TOL form to compete with other healers, in that we have to switch out to cast damage spells, then switch back to heal, wasting time and global cool downs. But how much does it affect you? I can think of a couple of Ulduar fights when I need to DPS. I help on Razorscale when he’s down. I help zing the heart on XT-002 because we’re working on killing it. I melee thump on General Vezax to proc clearcasting for when it’s time for me to heal to conserve mana (but I do this in tree form). I take a couple shots at Yogg’s brain. But generally speaking there is no need for me to be DPSing in the first place during raids. I don’t feel like I have to give up anything to be in TOL form. Similarly, although I now have dual spec, when I was just a resto druid out questing, it would have been ridiculous to me to take the time to switch into TOL to heal myself. I just healed up in caster form and kept on boring mobs to death. I suppose that the only situations where this question becomes relevant is in PVP, where players need to have access to a much fuller range of spells and abilities in one situation than is the case in PVE. I just do hope that if Blizz moves to make changes to TOL to balance or improve PVP that it doesn’t make PVE unwieldy or nerf our effectiveness or change our gameplay to the point that we do not enjoy it.
In addition to having to give up utility in order to heal as a Tree of Life, we have become less enamored with druids locking themselves into one form. In fact, you really never see the basic tauren or night elf druid form (you know, the one that actually shows off the awesome armor art) because all druids are in cat, bear, tree, or moonkin form nearly 100% of the time.
Ok, there is a point to be made here, but I’m not sure that the point is that we should be in forms less. Perhaps the point is that we should be able to see some changes in our forms based upon our armor. I know it’s not a new concept. I know that people have been asking for it for ages. Maybe Blizz has come to the conclusion that forcing people to switch into caster form more often is much easier for them to do than to put armor (or even weapons) on forms. I really hope that’s not where this comes from, though. Because, honestly, for me if it came down to not seeing my armor in TOL form or having the added complexity of having to jump in and out of TOL just to stay a viable healer, I would probably pick not seeing my armor (although I wouldn’t say this categorically, as I still don’t know exactly what they have in mind.)
I’m not saying we would just cut Tree of Life from the game.
O.O Bite your crabby tongue, GC!!!
It’s been around awhile and for better or worse, it’s part of World of Warcraft now. However, we could see taking the druid in a direction where shifting was much more common and easy to do. Maybe you only go into tree form for certain spells but leave for other spells — this didn’t work previously because of the high cost of shifting, but in the absence of power shifting, we’d love to get rid of the costs completely.
For me, the question is not just one of cost. It’s also one of the mechanics of running the class. We already have a much more complex spell rotation than, say, Paladins. We already have HoTs dropping off timers and cooldowns that need to be maintained. Having to also monitor when we should and should not be in form seems to be a pretty hefty burden to add, particularly in light of the fact that no other healing class has to juggle this mechanic just to be an effective healer. In addition, adding GCDs to our healing cycle just… sucks.
Another way to go would be to make Tree of Life form a cooldown, more like Metamorphosis. You shift into tree when you need a healing boost, but you don’t stay in it all the time.
This I just hate. =( See above and then add in having to juggle it as a cooldown. I don’t want this form to function like a trinket. sad sad tree.
Now, I am totally waving my arms here. This is not the kind of change you are going to see in the next patch. But it is something we’re thinking about long term, and the kind of thinking we’d love to have more feedback on from the community.
Note to other healers: this is why you are unlikely to see any kind of “Holy form” ever. Giving up healing to do damage works okay. Giving up everything to heal is lame.
In PVP maybe.
Community Team: Both Tranquility and Healing Touch are meant to be strong healing spells but are generally viewed as very ineffective due to their lack of flexibility.
Q: Do we have plans to improve Healing Touch or Tranquility?
Ghostcrawler: Tranquility is a fine spell. You can use it in situations where high amounts of damage are coming in on one group. Ultimately, we’d like to get away from the concept of groups within raids, but that’s not super high priority. Having a talent that promotes a situational spell on a long cooldown though is a problem (for any spell, not just Tranquility).
Yes, I agree completely about the talent supporting tranquility. Not so good.
Likewise, we think Healing Touch is fine. You use it at low levels and you use it with Nature’s Swiftness. Maybe you use it when healing a 5-player dungeon. Druids have a lot of heals and if we made Healing Touch more usable it would come at the expense of another heal like Nourish or Regrowth. The problem again is the talents. It doesn’t make sense to have so many talents support a situational spell.
Agree, again, about the talents that support Healing Touch. Lame.
But GC, you ask, if you know the talents are lackluster why haven’t you improved them? The answer is that Resto druids are in a really good spot now. If we changed the HT and Tranquility talents to boost other kinds of healing, then Resto druids might become too powerful.
Not if you made changes that asked druids to make creative choices between multiple viable, balanced options.
If we nerf Resto healing to compensate for these talents, then druids might have less flexibility in their talent builds. We would also suffer a lot of player backlash if we nerfed spells just to make talents (which you may not be able to afford anyway) any better. We’ll suffer player backlash when we think the change is important. I’m not sure this one is. We’ll definitely rejuggle the talent tree long-term though.
Community Team: The next set of questions are related to the itemization for druids which was the source for a wide variety of questions. For one, Restoration druids feels that critical strike rating is not very helpful for them yet it is often present on the leather casting gear.
Q: Do we have plans to improve the usefulness of critical strike rating for restoration druids?
Ghostcrawler: Yes. We’re fine if some stats are slightly more attractive than others. The problem comes when some stats are considered junk because they are valued so much less than other stats. We don’t have a ton of stats to work with when you consider that things like Int and Spell Power basically improve at a linear rate with item level. That means we need for say Haste and Crit to be attractive to all casters. This is a problem with several classes, not just druids, and was largely caused by having too many scaling talents that over-inflate the value of some stats relative to others.
Lovely. Making stats that appear on most of our gear better? Win.
Q: Do we plans to alter how the GCD works for form changing so that shifting into a form is as easy as shifting out of one?
Ghostcrawler: As I mentioned, long-term we’d love to get druids shifting more often, which means shifting has to be less painful. I don’t know for sure that changing the GCD needs to be a part of that, but it could be.
If Blizzard does, indeed, make changes that force us to be shifting in and out of Tree of Life form (which I am SO doubtful about and hope very much that they don’t go too far down this path unless they come up with some really amazing perks that I currently can’t imagine), I would hope to high heaven that they would not be adding additional global cooldowns for us to deal with in our rotation on top of it. =(
Overall, the Q & A left me fairly apprehensive. I agree that druids have a nice niche right now and are doing pretty well overall as healers. There’s nothing that I really think is “broke” and in need of fixing. But the whole idea of wanting us to shift more just doesn’t sit easy with me. It’s lovely that I have access to numerous forms. I can swim or run more quickly when I need to. I can sport my new gear as I browse the shops around town or while I’m eating fish feasts between pulls. But when it comes to healing, I am a tree. The forms we inhabit the most are the ones we identify most closely with. They are not a burden to us. They are our natural skin. The whole idea of forcing us to break out of our skin to be viable (and, by the way, there was no similar discussion for making cats claw with their nightelf fingernails or Bears roaring out a taunt in a tauren like “moo”) just bums me out.
What do you all think?
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There are 12 Comments to "Questioning Druid Q & A"
I know I’m probably totally alone in this – but I don’t think that the concept of making encounters as a healer druid more dynamic by involving more shifting is necessarily a bad one. I think it could be really cool, actually.
After all, what we’re really talking about is just a concept here – there is no indication given by Ghostcrawler of any of the mechanics behind it except to say *maybe* like Metamorphosis and then quickly backtrack to say he was just “waving his arms”.
While I am loath to leave the tree form behind, I think the idea of making druids more versatile as healers in a variety of situations has merit. Besides, I highly doubt that Blizzard would abandon tree form entirely or make it something that only showed up for 5 seconds during a fight – if they were proposing that I would not be very happy. I really liked Keeva’s discussion of it over on Tree Bark Jacket as well, as she brought up the “what do we really gain from tree form” issue as well.
I love being a druid. I love shapeshifting. It’s basically the reason I rolled the class in the first place. But it sounds like Blizzard recognizes that shapeshifting is THE most important bit of being a druid and is trying to find a way to better one aspect of it.
Whether they will succeed or not is, of course, the big question. But I, for one, am very curious to see their proposed mechanics.
Taz´s last blog ..When Is A Tree Not A Tree?
Taz, you bring up some very reasonable points here. I always feel guilty when I get all worked up over a Blizzard announcement, because time has shown me that it is usually not going to be as bad as we fear and they really do know what they are doing. That being said, I believe that any change that they make that makes shifting a regular part of what we are doing is going to start a domino effect that will require lots of other changes, maybe big, maybe small, to compensate for the change. If they do go down this road, I certainly hope that the changes are balanced, viable, and interesting enough to make all the work involved worthwhile.
The antagonist in me wants to Photoshop a tiny collar onto that dog, with a tag that says “GC”
But that would be naughty and childish.
Keeva´s last blog ..Blizzard’s Q&A and the future of trees
lol Keeva, I thought the dog’s name went without saying…
It implies stuff! With dogs! And what they do to trees! And we’re the trees! Because we’re trees!
I get jokes.
Keeva´s last blog ..Blizzard’s Q&A and the future of trees
See now I have the giggles at work.
>:(
Keeva´s last blog ..Blizzard’s Q&A and the future of trees
I was pretty unexcited when I first read about their ideas for possible changes to Tree form. After thinking about it for a bit though, an interesting concept arose from my oft-malfunctioning brain.
Tanks have their OHCRAP abilities; shield wall, last stand, etc. How about healers with ohcraps? Well, Pallies kind of have an ohcrap or two, and Priest get a couple sort of ohcraps also. We do have the venerable (and for me, often dusty keys associated with…) NS+HT.
Notice the lower case ohcrap. What if we had an OHCRAP ability?
What if Tree Form was our OHCRAP ability? When we shift in to Tree Form, our healing output could be increased by a pretty large amount for a set time. Just throwing out some numbers, but 10x for the next 3 hours sounds good to me. Seriously though, maybe double healing output for 15 seconds, on a fairly long cooldown, maybe 5 minutes or more.
In our regular caster form, we would heal for the exact amounts we currently do, assuming talents etc.
Tank: Shield Wall on cooldown!
Druid: Tree Form used. YOU LIVE!!!!
Could be cool.
This would be more interesting to PVP (ick) centric resto druids, I believe, though whether they’ll want to be shifting all the time and sacrificing the tree form armor bonus is another thing entirely.
Personally, I love the tree form, and I think it’s very unlikely to go.
It matches my Teldrassil Sproutling!
Apparently it does something nice to healing too, but meh, what would I know!?!
Niadyth´s last blog ..Shutting up saves lives!!
“Perhaps the point is that we should be able to see some changes in our forms based upon our armor.”
Not after seeing your posts on the t9 armor. We take any request for changes to our appearance back.
I kind of like the idea that treeform as an “ohcrap” ability. Roots you in place for 15 seconds, doubles all healing, allows access to one or two other spells you can’t usually cast.
Yes, balancing in PVP would be terrible. As with most stuff, trying to balance PVP and PVE sucks.
I don’t believe that seeing out armor is worth messing around with Tree of Life. They should just leave something that isn’t broken alone. Go fix Frost mage raid viability or something.
Regarding the whole post about them wanting us to shift more, I already do a lot of that in PvP. Shifting is an important skill druids need to master if we want to excel in it. In PvE, it’s a whole different story. Why would I need to shift in the first place? Maybe to cast a few spells in caster form and that’s it. I’m not going to shift into Dire Bear form to help tank if a tank dies.
How about they just stick an option where we can turn on or off our forms, similar to what we have with helmets and cloaks. That way both camps of the whole ToL change argument are happy.
“How about they just stick an option where we can turn on or off our forms, similar to what we have with helmets and cloaks.”
I like it. It’d be cool to see us crawling around like cats or bears but in regular caster form
I agree that in pvp shifting is a necessary survival tactic. You have to be able to go from tree to bear to cheetah, then when you’re safe prowl back quietly and be ready to pop that crucial heal at the right time.
I think you’re right that in pve this is usually not necessary. You pick a role in a group and you stick with it. When I was leveling, though, I tried a 0/30/31 spec that I actually liked a lot. I was usually grouping w/ a priest, pally, sham, and hunter from my guild. Priest or sham took main heals, hunter’s pet and pally took main tanking duties, and so my role was shifty. I would usually start in cat to take down the most important or the easiest mob, then shift to bear to off-tank adds heading for the healer and bring them back to the front of the fight. If the priest died or ended up running around feared, sheeped, or silenced. I could rebirth him or cover healing as long as needed, then back to cat to finish the fight. If that’s the kind of shifting GC wants to see, that can be a lot of fun I think. I think this is, or can be, one of the key strengths of playing a druid, or any hybrid class really. However as they say, “jack of all trades, master of none.”
Of course, any druid interested in shifting roles constantly within a single battle can still spec hybrid and gear accordingly, but in the days of dual-spec does anyone actually do that? I know I have a full-feral and a full-resto spec now, for example. How often do you see “LF utility druid”? Never, right? It’s always “LF tank”, “LF heals”, or “LF dps”.