It appears to me that druids have all the tools they need to be a comparable healer to the other priests, but several recast timers that link their past-expansion versions of spells to the same recast limit their ability to use many of these tools. Specifically there are 3 spells I see this as an issue with: Revitalization - 0.5s cast time heal - 12s Recast - (Timer 15) Adrenaline Barrage - 1.8s cast time heal - 15s Recast - (Timer 2) Remote Moonflash/Sunblaze - 1.0s cast time Nuke + ToT Heal - 24s (16s) Recast - (Timer 11) To be clear, I believe their recast timers of 12seconds, 15 seconds and 24 (16) seconds respectively should stay. What I am suggesting is removing the Timer 15 / 2 / 11 from these lines of spells to allow us to dig into our spell book and pull out past era versions of these spells if we want to focus our spell casting style into these types of spells. 1. Revitalization: So the prevailing healing strategy for clerics centers around cycling between their remedy lines of heals. These are 0.5s cast time with 4.5s Recast. With the speed of mob attacks in recent expansions and the likelihood of damage spikes, its almost impossible to reactively heal using the old core Light/Vida/Mending line of priest heal spells with 3.8s base cast time. So they naturally favor the faster, though lower powered line of heals. It is good design that clerics have the option to go with several older lines of Remedy to achieve this goal of reactive healing. Druids however do not have this option due to the recast timer on our Revitalization line of spells linking all past spells in the line together. We have to rely on one cast of 0.5s Revitalization, one cast of 1.8s Adrenaline Barrage and then rely on 3.8s Curavida until the fast heals come up. If it were removed, we would be able to elect to go down this route of devoting several spell gems to older versions of the spell so that we may reactively heal damage spikes. I do recognize that this line of heals for druids has a higher base heal value than the remedy line for clerics, however I feel this is balanced out by the innate 12 second recast on each of these spells. Clerics can accomplish the goal of cycling quick heals with just 3 spell slots and 3 eras of spells. Druids would need to go devote 5 spell gems and go back 5 eras to a level 90 spell to have full coverage and always having a quick heal available. The average value of a quick heal cast between the 3 remedies is 9964 for Rank 3. (this ignores the bonus for <20% heals). The average value of the 5 druid revitalization spells would be 11206 for Rank 3. This difference is basically negated by the bonus heal amount from remedy landing on low HP players. Plus for a class like druids that often fills many offensive and defensive roles, devoting 5 spell slots out of 13 isn't feasible in many scenarios. Most druids would only load 2 or 3 of these and try to fill the gap with other heal spells. 2. Adrenaline Barrage: Basically, this is a similar argument to the above. This is our sort of fast cast (1.8s) large single heal. Based on the cleric Renewal line. It doesn't really make sense to have this tied across eras with a recast timer now a days. 3. Remote Moonflame/Sunblaze: Being the class split between priest / caster, this is what I see as a core purpose of the class. The ability to nuke and heal simultaneously. However with a 24 second recast, cut down to 16 seconds with AAs, you aren't able to build your play style around it. You can weave it in every once in awhile but that's it. If you were to remove the Timer 11 tied to our Remote line of spells we could focus our playstyle into more nuker focused while providing some healing support. The Paladin (Censure) and Cleric (Intervention/Contravention) lines of these spells are not tied together with a recast timer and it allows them the flexibility in their spell bar to determine how they want to play. Whether they want to load several of these, and focus on splitting their power to do DDs and Heals simultaneously, or just load the highest level one and using it sparingly. ------------------ In the end, I just want the flexibility to be able to choose my spell gems more carefully and have several different styles of play both offensively and defensively to play a class that is designed to have many different roles. These old recast timers however pigeon hole druids into a single play style which is boring.
I understand the reason you probably want to do this is for multi-binding. Which I understand but have never been a fan of; not that I am judging others for using it. Honestly, I would of liked for them to have given us a real bonus for our heals. Originally clerics got the strongest heals, Shaman got the HoTs, and druids got regen! LOL The healing rain spell was originally designed by a druid for the druid class and then given to shaman for no reason, that should of been our bonus something. Then they also gave a different one to clerics as well. Druids are the only class without a healing rain. The devs obviously do not see the link between the druid class and the concept of a healing rain spell. Its simply to much of a stretch for their imagination. The big shaman bonus in addition to the HoTs was their very cool group recourse heal, they could of given that to us as our something class specific, but they didn't and in the case of the recourse heals, its kind of needed in shaman raid groups due to the mechanics of the game. I don't envy them as raid healers at all. So then they designed the remotes and twinheal nukes, and I thought okay this makes sense make the druid able to DPS while healing. Finally we have found our niche! But they gave the same spells to clerics and shaman too. So that's not it. And if you change it for druids, its just going to get changed on the cleric and shaman versions too. What I did find interesting was how the TBM dicho spells worked, clerics got a really cool group intervention/combo direct heal. Shaman got a powerful super HOT that also combod with their panther/lynx melee proc spell. Druids got an extra remote, seemingly an afterthought. Idk what you want to draw from all this history, except the fact that many ideas and proposals have been given to the devs over the years. When one of the ideas turned out to be a good one, it was promptly handed to another class. In Summation: The devs either, do not want druids to have a special function as healers OR they haven't been offered an idea crappy enough that they are willing to allow druids to have, OR, just perhaps, the only way we get a druid only healing ability is; IF AND ONLY IF, clerics or shaman design it for their class and they then give it to druids instead. Because that's just what they do!
I'd be tempted to put on my galoshes and tinfoil hat about now, sadly though this does seem to be the way things turn out. Just because we are paranoid doesn't mean somebody isn't really out to get us.
Clerics have a lot of nice heal lines and they aren't tied together. Here is my cleric's DPS (not burning): Combat Dummy Taza in 340s, 5259k @15468 Here is my cleric burning (ITC -> Channeling the Divine, 1st Spire, Battle Frenzy, Divine Avatar, Intensity): Combat Dummy Taza in 205s, 8197k @39985 Alone, only buffs were ENC haste and self buffed, in the guild hall. The dummy resisted me a lot which doesn't help. I feel like a jerk for posting about bad cleric DPS here in a thread that's meant to help druids, but really, every class has a tradeoff. Those Intervention/Contravention spells don't get clerics very far. I'm not against druids having some spell lockout shenanigans solved, if it is really bad, I don't play one. But I don't think the argument should come from a comparison of other classes spells. Maybe more like, druids cannot heal for X seconds after casting Y spells because they are all tied together, giving them an average healing output of Z over 60 seconds, while clerics can do ___, and shamans can do ___. I'd be interested to hear why it isn't sufficient, along with what else druids bring to the table. Personally I find the priest Alliance spells outrageously OP; shaman rain, splash - the AE heals are really on another planet compared to most spells.
Clerics have Mitigation, HoTs, Intervention, and Direct heals all going on at the same time, and auras. Not debating any of that they have multiple niches in the healing aspect going on. And they should. Shaman have HoTs, Recourse Heals and Direct Heals all going on at the same time. Druids have Direct heals. Darchon wants the remote niche given back to druids. Which they can't really do unless they take them away from clerics and shaman. That will never happen. Its not much of a niche as you may not be aware you even have the spells on your cleric and shaman. I just expanded on the dismal history of druids trying to expand their healing ability. Every single time we have designed a niche it has been taken from us and given to another class by the devs. So I guess my point is why bother?
So let me be clear. I in no way want other classes to have abilities changed or removed. I'm only looking for Druid spells to be modified slightly so that we can use older versions of spells in conjunction with our newer versions to accomplish several different play styles. So right now if I'm having to heal a tank, or worse, multiple tanks I'll have 4 heal spells up aimed at healing the tank (group heal is more for everyone else in the group). Curavida, Adrenaline Barrage, Revitalization and Survival. Survival is on a 90second recast and is essentially comparable to Cleric DArb and 2.0 click as an emergency heal. Theirs balances and heals a bit, ours heals low HP members a lot and higher HP members minimally. Basically it accomplishes the niche of "Emergency group healing" in different ways. Outside of having to use that every 15 seconds I'll be afforded 1 Adrenaline cast 1 Revitalization cast and then I'll have to make do with Curavida for the other 3-4 casts. Those bread and butter spell lines all priests used to rely on (Light / Vida / Mending) are simply too slow to be relied on for current content, especially if you have more than one target you're trying to heal. Shamans can get around having to rely on their Mending spell with their unlinked Reckless Line of heals (1s cast time) and relying on powerful heal over time spells with different varieties (HoT in slot 1, Counterbias in slot 2, Recourse delayed heal). So they can rely on either several expansions worth of Reckless heals or several stacks of HoT/Delayed heals in conjunction with just the nearest Reckless heal. Clerics can get around this with unlinked Remedies, unlinked Remedies on top of HoTs, unlinked ToT Nuke/Heals with two different lines, and to a lesser extent unlinked Renewal big heal/Cure line. Which does have a 3s cast time but that hastes down to 1.8s which is identical to our Adrenaline line. Basically those classes have the flexibility to choose a playstyle. Druids get pigeonholed into theirs because they cannot focus into one spell type. Regarding Cleric DPS I have no doubt it's on the lower end. But as Druid DPS got axed quite handily last patch on the basis of "Druids are primarily healers" I think it's reasonable to view the state of Druid heals. Right now the raw healing value on them puts Druids as the second most powerful priest but in reality they are the weakest because they aren't able to heal as quickly as often. Also those dummy examples only use one line of your ToT heals. You could cycle between your top Contravention and Intervention by assisting between tank and the mob. Also they *should* patch those Nukes to be chromatic instead of physical Resist check here soon. I have no doubt those will help Cleric DPS. Not to Druid levels I'm sure. But these changes won't bring Druids to Cleric levels of healing either as we would still have gaps in time we can't use 0.5s heals or we would have to devote huge chunks of our spell bar to some of these spells and lose all our DPS or Utility functionality. Druids long talked about stances. White/Black wolf were seen as Druid stances for a bit but I would argue allowing us to flood our spell bar with a certain focus of spell whether it be very fast heals or ToT Nuke/Heals, etc. would be the best thing for Druids as it makes us do a cost/benefit assement of sacrificing certain abiltities by selecting which spells we keep up and which we don't.
I do think that druids could use some help with single target healing, but unlinking the timers isn't the way to go. While the shaman reckless line is unlinked, they don't provide near the benefit that your remote/adreneline line do. In fact, they nuke us for a non-insignificant amount each time we cast them leading to me healing myself for just as much as the MTO on some events. Fully maxed out from our focus AA, the 110/105 are a 7s recast with a 1s cast with the 100 being a 1s cast but 13s recast. I think the way to go with druid healing would be to either reduce the base cast time of the xx-vida line to something like 2.5-3s or to reduce the recast time slightly of the revitalization line. Allowing multiple generations of the adreneline line would mean that the benefit of the recourse rune would be greatly amplified. Same idea with unlinking the heal+nuke lines.
Reducing Vida to 2.5s would be a nerf because spell haste stops working below 3s and the raid hasted cast time on Vida is 2.3s. Dropping it to 3s would be an improvement but not one I think they want to go for on a main heal line that has existed since PoP for all 3 priest classes basically. Dropping revitalization's base recast down would help as well. Adrenaline recourse runes would not stack. Future procs would simply not take hold if the former one is still on. Shamans have 4 single target heal spells. (2 Direct - Reckless / Mending, 2 HoT - Counterbias / Halycon) Clerics have 8 single target heal spells. (4 Direct - Renewal / Light / 16th Hour / Remedy, 1 HoT - Elixir, 2 ToT Nuke/Heal - Contravention+Intervention, and 1 Delayed- Promised) Druids have 5 single target heal spells. (3 Direct - Adrenaline / Revitilization / Curavida, 1 ToT Nuke/Heal, and 1 Delayed - Promised) Yet out of all these ways to single target heal... Shamans have 0 of their 4 linked Clerics have 2 of their 8 linked (11th hour line which is useless due to the poor implementation of the cast limiter... the remedy line does what this line should've in the first place with a lower heal at high health and a bigger heal at low health, instead you simply cannot cast it over 45%. And their Promised line which being linked is irrelevant due to how delayed heals work) Druids have 4 of their 5 linked (Promised being linked is irrelevant) But still. It seems extremely odd Druids get stuck casting their base slow heal while their other spells are on cooldown while the other priests can opt to either cast that slow heal like a Druid... or load up past versions of these spells to fire off heals faster. I think it's telling that these priests opt to do the later rather than spamming their core slow heal (Light / Mending) in many scenarios. Sometimes the later may even be preferable, but those classes have the choice. Druids aren't afforded that choice in their spell selection.
What you have to realize is that the same group of clowns that were busy hating on druid/shaman dots as too much dps for a "healer" are going to flip right around with their skewed logic. Now they will scream about how Druids shouldn't be able to heal better. They were "ALWAYS" intended to be a dps class, not really an effective option as a main healer. As a result instead of gaining any improvement for druid healing, what is all too likely to occur is that they revisit shaman healing and decide that they need to link the timers on their spell lines or something equally stupid. {Baby gets spanked with an axe} It always frustrates me when people tell me I am supposed to be able to main heal as well as a cleric/shaman when I don't have the same toybox to play with. My heals are slow so I have to start earlier and hope I don't get caught between stools when the music stops. At least now if I am focused on healing short of eating a mana drain I wont go OOM as it takes so long to cycle through everything. Compare my performance against another druid apples to apples so I can see what I need to do to improve. Comparing my parse to that of a shaman or cleric is worthless as we will always come out behind against any fairly well skilled player that knows how to play their class. Sure we can outheal the shammy that is too busy nuking or the cleric that thinks they are a tank insisting on melee. But then a zerker with really top notch bind wounds could almost do that if they decided to be goofy.
It's not a matter of the runes stacking, it's a matter of having the chance to increase rune uptime to more than they've tuned based on the rune absorption values currently. Once your level 110 fades, you cast your 105, then your 100, then your 95, and by then your 110 would be back up potentially chaining the runes back to back. Bit of an odd comparison here. Shaman have two single target instant heal lines. Druids have 3 single target instant heal lines. One of each is unlinked due to the recast being 0. The shaman unlinked line nukes us each time we cast, so we take more damage to ourself the more healing we put out to others. The level 110 nukes us for 11.4k base each cast. The linked druid lines both have pretty good benefits in addition to the healing. Your quick heal casts half as fast as ours. And your other line has a decent chance to proc a rune. Compared to cleric, unlinking your quick heal would put it above their remedy line in terms of heal. Your 110 version heals for 4k base health more. That'd have to be reduced to match their tune intentions. The most they'd probably do would be reduce the recast slightly down to 8-10s. They won't unlink the remote/adrenaline line as there's the rune proc. To take a step back, here's my interpretation of the intended healing roles of the 3 priests from a raid perspective... Cleric: Focus on single target healing of the MTO or the add tanks in their groups. Shaman: Focus on keeping their melee group alive, and splashing to heal the entire raid from AOEs. Melee will take more damage from adds/rampage having to stand close. Throw dots when able(7 casts every 1-2m). Druid: Focus on keeping their group of casters alive using primarily group heals with the occasional quick heal for the oddball damage spike. Cast dots+nukes between needed heals on the mob(few dots+chain nukes). I don't think druids should be spamming the MTO except on rare occasions. In a raid setting, healing is all about heal cast volume. Spamming the faster heals will always be preferable to slow ones. And it's also proactive instead of reactionary for the most part. I heal at 100 and if mine doesn't land, the person that started their cast .5s after me will land theirs. And if not then, then next person that started .5s after them.
Druids and shaman were easily topping parses over pure DPS classes. That was broken and I'm glad they fixed it. We were doing too much for non pure dps class, not too much for a "healer".
Shamans naturally heal themselves through their other methods of healing, group HoTs and group heals with decays to offset the self Nuke. I'm also assuming Spell shielding cuts it down and it doesn't modify upwards in any way. Cleric Remedy is indeed less healing power. 4K base 1k if target is very low. This is balanced out by the fact that their recast is 4.5 seconds. Letting them cycle with just 3 spell gems. Druids is 12 seconds which would require 5 spell gems going down into a level 90 spell if you wanted to spam, a spell with only a 6k base heal amount. So basically Druids would still have gaps. Plus the Druid heal costs 80% more mana. Your interpretation of raid healing is certainly correct. But group healing is equally important. And in groups mobs put out very spikey DPS in modern content and regular 3.8s base cast heals are too slow for a lot of content. Druids are relegated to using those for 60-70% of the time because their only fast cast options are on cooldown and they're all linked with past variants.
It doesn't get modified up, and does get cut down by shielding. It does mean that geomantra clicks on us are useless for AOEs since we kill it in a few casts ourselvses anyway. Point being that there's a downside that's not present on any of the druid heals. It'd be pretty rare to get more than 3-4 deep in a heal multibind I'd imagine, even if they were all unlinked. At some point the 6k base heal although faster casting is going to be worse than the 22k base adreneline or 16k base vida line. In my 3-reckless multibind I use on raids, my 2nd spell is normally about 85% cast amount for the first, and the third drops to ~40%. That's because I've got other things to do than spam a single target heal on a tank. [/quote] In group situations, I drop down to just 2 single target heals on my bar(both reckless, so I sometimes have downtime with none up). I use other ways of healing such as HoTs, group heals, rains, etc. Druids should be able to do the same with their other healing options like ToT nuke heals, promised, survival/group heals, etc. I don't spam the MT in group situations.
Geomantra has always been useless in current content. The best version is 15.5k. Trash mobs in the first zone of the expansion like savertooths Nuke for 100k. Yes I grant you they have downsides but what I'm saying is those downsides are extremely minimal and are naturally offset by you just playing your class. Whether that be from your group HoT ticking, your Recourse line pulsing the extra casts, or just regular old Obulus procs or Hand of Holy Vengeance Recourse procs to offset the self damage. So it really isn't that much of a downside. If you had to choose between it having no downside but having the timers linked up I think we can both agree you would prefer eating that 8k damage or whatever it mitigates to for the option to have 3 on hand for emergency heals on a raid. It likely would be rare to reach into multibind 4 and 5, however in the event you need to spam heal you are having to devote 4th and 5th spell slots to this. Even if those are an adrenaline line or curavida, you would have to devote 4-5 spell slots to single heals. On top of Survival and normal group heal that's a huge number of spell slots devoted to healing when there are quite a few other roles you want to fill as a Druid. On a raid as you said, a Druid likely wouldn't find the need to do this but in a group as a main Healer you very well may want to. In groups sometimes tanks just fold in the 5 second gaps of Curavida spam while your 15s Adrenaline, 12s revitalization and 16s Remote are all cooling off, thus why I'm making this suggestion. Druids are the only priest forced to fall back onto their slow heal now a days. That should change. The speed at which you must play a priest has increased over recent years and the old 3.8s base cast time heals are incomparable with many scenarios you are put in in the group game.
Of course I'd choose the way that shaman have it over druid. And I agree that druid probably struggle in single target healing in end-game content with the way that they're set up. But I also think you have to be realistic about what's possible and what's probably not. There's no chance IMO that they're doing anything with the rune proc line. I'd say that it's probably a good idea to have the spammable no-recast one dropped down to a focused ~1.5-2s cast. For your current fast heal, they can either increase cast time and unlink similar to shaman reckless (1s cast) while also keeping the mana/heal ratio the same or slightly less to account for no self-nuke. Or they can keep it unlinked, and reduce the recast down with AA similar to how we have our reckless line. I don't think that they're going to do anything other than that.
I don't expect them to unlink all of them. But I think looking at what Druids bring to the table and the tools they have access to compared to what Shamans and Clerics bring to the table and their tools, it should be clear that Druids shouldn't be so limited in the spell selections they can make when trying to maximize their single target healing potential. I really don't see the adrenaline line as powerful as you do. The value of the heal when criticalling makes the Mitigation part a very small fraction. But this is the heal I'd prefer to see get some AAs for reducing cast time down from 1.8 to maybe 1.5 or 1.0, and reducing recast down from 15 to around 10-12 sounds like a decent boost for the spell line. The only reason I bring up the recast on that one is it's basically analogous to the shaman Reckless and Cleric renewal lines. Big value with higher recast, neither of theirs are linked. The rejuvenation spell line I could deal with a slight reduction in heal value if the recast timer is pulled entirely. Again I think it's 12s recast balances it compared to Remedies 4.5s recast, and it doesn't even need that reduction IMO but if it removes the recast timer fine. The remote thing is just what I viewed the Druid class should've been all along. The dichotomic for Druids reinforces that thought. But having them linked just means it's a uncommon spell we can use instead of relying on it in many scenarios as our bread and butter as we should. Like Paladins would rely on stuns or crushes as their bread and butter aggro, Druids should have unlinked remotes for heal/damage potential. It blows my mind the Cleric ones aren't linked and that they have two different lines available to them for chain casting while the class who is generally pushed towards nuking and healing has theirs linked. It just seems like some of these timer links just were thrown on originally and forgotten about.
I'm a huge proponent of modifying druid heal spells because I do think we currently struggle in that area. There was no point trying to argue for healing changes before our DPS nerfs, but now that we have been nerfed, I think it more than reasonable to be asking for these changes. So as far as our single target heals go: Revitalization: I would prefer to keep the cast time on this line, so I'm not in favor of these spells having their timers unlinked. The only change regarding this line that I would be a proponent of would be a reduction in the recast timer - to something higher than the recast on the cleric remedy of 4.5s but faster than the 12s recast it currently has. Adrenaline Barrage (because who is using Thornspike Rush): I don't really see them changing anything with this line, and that's perfectly fine. Curavida: I would really like to see the cast time lowered on this line. It is currently 3.8s (2.3 focused), and I think it should be closer to 3s (1.8 focused) cast time. That's the biggest change I would like to see as far as our single target heals go. Promised: I don't really see them changing anything with this line, and that's perfectly fine. I do realize that single target healing is important, but group heals are just as vital in both the group game and raid game. I raid twice a week on a druid on two different servers, and the rest of my time is spent in the group game. I use my group heals in both settings more than any other healing spell, and it's safe to say that druids really need some serious help in that area. Even on raids with all the splashing and alliances, druids still struggle on some events with their current group heals. As far as our group heals go: Lunasalve: This is really where I'd love to see some changes regarding druid healing. This heal almost never leaves my spell bar. It is currently a 4.5s (2.7 focused) cast time with a 6s recast timer, and I would really love the cast time on this spell to be lowered. Having the recast timer be shortened would be a second option, but I'm more in favor of the cast time being reduced. Survival: Like adrenaline barrage: I don't really see them changing anything with this line, and that's perfectly fine, but it is a group heal so I listed it. Finally, druids have their two remote lines: Remote Moonflash (ice) and Remote Sunblaze (fire). Since these two lines are on the same timer, I normally use Remote Sunblaze (although there are some fights that the ice line is more appropriate). I can certainly understand the argument behind unlinking these timers, especially between the two lines. I think that these spells are definitely a "druid ability," and unlinking these lines allows us to maximize our heal/damage potential without going too far in either direction. Doing this would actually be a reduction in our overall DPS (which I know some people would be happy about), and I am definitely behind unlinking these timers in some capacity. I would almost prefer being able to use both the ice and fire line (and having the timers stay the same within each line). I could see how that would be a downside on certain events, but it would also be an easier/more realistic change to make than unlinking all of our remotes since they are all on the same timer (not that I would be against that). With all of that said, I'm not naive enough to think that all of these changes (if any) will actually happen. My main priority is definitely our Lunasalve line, for both raiding and grouping. There are definite adjustments that need to be made to this line. In a perfect world, I would also like to see a change to either our remotes or just one single target heal on top of the group heal changes (preferably to our Curavida line). I think that slightly modifying our group heal along with one single target heal or nuke heal in a way that isn't going make us overpowered or better than any other priest is a perfectly reasonable request.
We asked for this and they gave it to all classes, given the devs history with us I only forsee them nerfing us again in some way. Honestly we were lucky we got the remotes at all. Like so many things that were designed by us, for us, to round out the class; but then given away. It's often a struggle now, do you really want to risk making it worse?
I disagree because I take some pride in casting the right spell at the right time rather than wearing out part of my keyboard with multicasting. I think that clerics should retain their status as The Best Healer, but I think we should: - Reduce the cast time on vida by 0.5s. - Reduce the recast time on the fastest two single target heals by 1.5s. - Reduce the recast time on the two group heals by 1.0s. - Reduce the base recast time on the remote nukes by 1.0s. - Increase the mana bear's hp value by 25% to survive modern raid AEs. - Not related to this conversation but since we're talking about how screwed up druids are right now, our DoT mana cost is still too high for the newly adjusted damage output...the wasp dot is 3x the mana cost of the largest nuke. I used to use DoTs in every fight because they were fast casting, low aggro, low mana cost, and did respectable damage. Now I can't even afford to cast one modern DoT in every fight.
