I don’t think its quite in the game yet, but it looks good. According to others, it looks real good.
New Resto druid mastery: Increases the potency of your heals on targets upon which you have a hot.
It benefits both hots and direct heals equally while still supporting Resto being a healer that cares a lot about hots. It encourages layering different spells while disincentivizing Rejuv blanketing.
That right there just shot resto druids up to a level that should be close to (if not on par with) the other 3 healing classes.
Is this the part where I cry now and say no one’s going to want to bring a priest to raids? 😉
In the mean time, other than fighting off a nasty cold. Working on some posts for healers and guilds during the transition to Cataclysm.
- Importance of Spirit
- Stopcasting
- Changing guild policies for Cataclysm
At the moment, I’m in brain storm mode trying to figure out what questions GMs out there are going to ask themselves or their guilds.
I have a GM question for you. With the pending release of 4.x content patch, stale raiding, flaring tempers: Should raiding guilds suspend or at least cut back on raiding until the patch drops?
@David: Yeah, thats probably a good idea especially if people are getting pissed off and such. Its not unheard of to scale back operations. Just to give people a bit of time to rest and not burn themselves out. UNless you’re going for a heroic LK or Halion kill or something.
At first glance, I feel this Mastery will benefit us in terms of tank healing and maybe not so much with raid healing. Maybe I’m just not seeing it – so I’m remaining open to explanations or seeing how it will all fall into place.
But I keep thinking of how it is now. Someone takes damage and I place a Rejuvention on them. Normally, I would follow it up with an LB – but that may or may not be possible, depending on my role at the time (meaning I already have it on a tank). So then I get to follow the Rejuv up with a castable heal… that someone may already be beating me to and my heal gets clipped.
Eh – I just don’t see it being that fabulous… yet. It’s a great step, it’s a positive step. But the light bulb isn’t quite going off yet.
One thing we are having big discussions about in our guild, which I think others might have as well is about the size and number of raid groups to run come Cataclysm.
We have a core of really, really good raiders of about 17-20 people and lots more people that are varying degrees of skilled/regular raiders. Do we do 1 x 10 progression and 1 x 10 more casual, 2 x 10 progression and 1 x 10 casual, push towards 1 x 25 progression – tricksy one.
You’ll want to bring a priest for the raids for the more diverse toolsets (and damage reduction/absorptions) that will hold up in more situations than the resto druids really have tools for. The resto druid mastery is going to be of limited use in the WotLK-style “raid healing” role (where your goal is to heal the 23 people who aren’t tanks), because you have to heal the same person twice in order to get a benefit for that second heal (so WotLK-style rejuv blanketing doesn’t benefit at all from the Cata mastery). However, Cata may encourage us to return to the days of intelligent healing assignments (rather than the largely FFA raid healing role), then the resto druid mastery may work out well. In Cata, it may be dumb to let 3 healers stomp all over eachothers’ heals, and you may instead want to assign people to groups to focus on (and split out melee group from ranged group, etc).
The people who healed in Vanilla & BC may have to teach people how to do real healing assignments again to reduce the amount of overheal going on.
@David and Matticus – I don’t think stopping raiding now is really the best idea, unless you’ve got a concerted plan as guild leadership to continue to engage your membership. Fun legacy raid nights, or competitions, giveaways, guild pvp, world pvp – whatever it takes, just keep your members logging in. You want to give them reasons to keep logging in while slowing it down a bit to give them some rest prior to the leveling spree for Cataclysm.
@Jadissa: So long as the interest is there, its good to keep going. But I know guilds on my server are falling over left and right. people stopped showing up or they transferred off or something or other. Scaling back doesn’t necessarily mean stopping raiding. It just means identifying what raids are no longer worth the time and effort to do.
I would say the same as Jadissa said, don’t let your guildies get a reason to stop logging on. My guild has been going back and doing BC/Vanilla raids and even splitting up groups to rep farm and such. Keep them active. If your guild is a solid raiding guild that has heroic ICC almost or on farm detail, you could go back and get the drakes. Not sure if the drake is 310 but it gives most people some incentive to run it again. If you have enough you could set up 10man raids and set races. IE Be the first group to clear everything in Naxxramas or something.
Also for GM questions, I’m sure alot of people would like to know how they should be handling recruiting. This will probably be more for guilds that are a bit more open to recruiting now and not so much the guilds that have strict recruiting rules. IE Your guild is now level 25 and has most if not all of the current guild rewards. How would you determine if an applicant isn’t just wanting to join for the rewards instead of actually helping the guild? Basic things to keep an eye out for.
I know me and a couple other raid leaders and gms on my server have been talking about how we may have to change how we raid after 4.0. If it may possibly hamper some of our raids from performing well in heroic fights because of the large amounts of damage going out in them. As well as mulling over the 10 or 25man question. I know we may be converting to multiple 10 mans in our guild, we have an abundance of solid healers and tanks currently because they can’t make it to all our raid nights and it would help us to solve our scheduling concerns as we match peoples schedules up with different groups and provide more of our members with the chance to see all the bosses in a raid.
Matt,
Sorry your under the weather hope you get better soon.
Any chance we’ll see some sort of round table of healers to talk about the changes in a group setting. I would have liked to seen something like that on the wow forums or via some sort blizzard twitter chat with bloggers. For the most part the current forum discussions seem more focused on class a is better than class b and c vs how do the changes effect each classes role and where does the healing in general stand after the patch.
@Thordreen: Its a possibility. The thing is though that bottom line, we dont really know yet until we can check it out in a raid setting. We can come to some conclusions based on heroic or dungeon experiences. Right now its just a matter of fine tuning stuff.