Having now seen the T2 raids, druids need some healing help. Listen, if you are going to design a raid where there is a DoT that takes half a person's life every tick and half my life when I cure it, I am gonna need you to either give me another fast single target heal, or a faster (way faster) group heal, or to speed up the cast times of cures and heals. Right now, if two people get hit with that DoT, one is going to die for sure. I would even take adjusting survival so that it is a bit more effective at around 50% health.
I haven't seen the T2 raids yet, but I haven't had any complaints about druid healing through all the TBL T1 raids. I am usually assigned to a caster/ranged DPS group, where I can do lots of damage and perform 80%+ of my healing with group/AE heals. I back it up with Revitalization and Curavida, and I don't even waste a spell slot on Adrenaline unless I'm healing a tank. On raid trash, I can usually keep tanks up using remotes (i.e., while doing DPS) and using direct heals as backup. Don't forget to add Blessing of Ro into your DPS spam for its remote heal. I tend to believe that clerics are better suited for healing tanks, but would be wasted on healing casters/dps. Shamans really seem to work well with melee, who require more healing attention due to their proximity to mobs and higher likelihood of running around and being scattered. But druids, in my experience, have no problem keeping caster/ranged DPS alive - so long as the casters stay with their healer. My biggest healing problem, usually, is from group mates who stray out of group heal range. Hello, rangers! I agree with @FawnTemplar regarding Survival spells: they could really use a boost above 50%. I'm glad they are quick to cast, but often for the wrong reason: I'm usually concerned with being able to cast a more effective heal to clean up after using Survival. I love Survival when a groupmate is way low. But I hate that, in practice, I almost always have to cast another heal (or multiple) immediately after casting Survival.
Survival would benefit from a heal over time effect tacked on. It already has a very lengthy cooldown and hp state conditions that greatly hinder use. Ultimately, the lack of HoTs in druid lineup is why i think they lag so far behind cleric and shaman in TBL.
No kidding! I was nosing around yesterday, and noticed clerics get an AA which extends their HoTs by 4 ticks. I was curious how long the HoTs were and looked them up. The 110 cleric >group< HoT does 9000+ heal for 4 ticks (so 8 ticks with the AA). That's so far ahead of what druids can do, it's just silly.
You're greatly overstating the usefulness of cleric HoT. A 25-40k crit heal every 6 seconds is not that great. Most clerics I know never really use HoT except for some rare cases where there are a lot of AE going on because mana spent for the hp healed isn't great. Now, with the new log messages, you can see how terrible HoT are.
Ridiculous. Try NOT having that option, and long-cast time heals. That HoT would be a huge boon for Druids. If clerics don't need it, given all their other tools, then give it to us!
Agree. That is pretty ridiculous, at least from my perspective in grp TBL where hp pools only 2-3 dot ticks from death.
The thing about HoTs and recourse heals, is that they keep healing even if something subdues the cleric, shaman, or paladin. You may not be aware of this, as all three classes have super fast cast times, compared to the druids much longer ones; there is and has been a bug for at least a decade with any stuns and FD that screw up casters. If you get stunned or FDd during the casting, it will lock out your ability to cast any spell for what seems an eternity, and only seems to effect spells with over a 1.5 second cast time. Look at the cliffs mission, it has both stuns and FDs, while also pulverizing the entire group with pretty devastating AEs. Getting the locked out stun-fd bug during that mission is a very short ride to failing it for any healer, but since many of the cleric and shaman heals have a less than 1 second cast time, its not an obstacle at all.
I would never mem or cast a group HoT like that, they're only useful against trivial damage, or at very exact thresholds. HoTs are best as a value add to burst heals or other spells that you're already casting. But actually using a full spell cast time on something that isn't bringing someone to full hp is not useful.
However, with it lasting 8 ticks, you can cast it when things are slow, knowing it will hit for the next 8 ticks. And forget the "group" part, I was just pointing out how much healing that is. For the single target, it's faster casting than our big heal. So, yeah, I'd use it all the time. Druids have 2 fast casting heals, and then we're stuck with the slow one while those are on CD. With the HoT running in the background, we'd probably only need the 2 fast heals.
