Well, Wild Growth has the nerf bat coming anyway. Phaelia over at Resto4Life had post the other day about that. It seems Wild Growth has been working too well (along with CoH) and has become a bit of a one spell wonder. I do feel like in many cases I can do nothing but spam WG and be just fine!

With the recent changes and the addition of the HT glyph, HT is actually a very useful spell for a quick top-up which can be done without allowing the HoTs to drop.

Maybe a bit off-topic, but any opinions on Wild Growth? I’ve been trying to avoid using it too much in current content, since it’s making runs pretty boring for me. It’s handy enough for mopping up AoE spike damage, but it seems in many fights that I could just keep popping a WG to take care of melee and then carry on with rolling lifeblooms on the tank. Looking at healing meters, many priests and druids are making heavy use of their AoE heals these days.

I have to express love for the healing touch changes more than anything for 3.0. It took me a while to get used to the idea that HT isn’t evil anymore, because it definitely was a crutch in 2.4. Swiftmend has always been my friend, but now we can NS-HT without dropping tree, and that’s awesome. I took Nature’s Splendor over Wild Growth, and those extra three seconds have meant the world in being able to get off even a non-NS healing touch while the HoTs tick away. The mana whore in me refuses to get a glyph that gives me 50% of the healing power for 75% of the mana.

Of course, the expansion will come out before long, and we’ll all have Nature’s Splendor AND Wild Growth AND Nourish, and it’ll be like learning to heal all over again.

Once I get a good feel of how things have changed for Trees, I will certainly address it here. Right now it’s tough to tell between the nerfs and overall buffs to classes across the board. Things are just a little too easy!

@Matt and Bethany

I do use HOTCandy and Grid, along with Clique. This pretty much does what lifebloomer does, but with a tad more flexibility IMO. Still, Lifebloomer is a very nice mod.

@Everyone else

Thanks for the kind words, and thanks for reading! I think the KEY thing I wanted to hit in this article is that “zone.” I really think Druid healers understand this concept very well!

I personally loved that part where you refer’d to the “zone”. There’s times when I’m healing in a raid where I feel like I’m Mozart strumming my fingers across a piano. Lifebloom, Lifebloom, Rejuvenation, Swiftmend, Lifebloom, Rejuvenation.

Love playing the Resto Druid!

@David: From the raiding I’ve done since the patch, even though Lifebloom heals for a significant amount less, with the 30% reduced GCD on most of the healing spells and with Wild Growth as our new AOE, I felt that if it wasn’t for mana issues I could have solo healed the kara we were running.

Lifebloomer!

http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/lifebloomer.aspx

I don’t know whether this mod has been updated for 3.0, but I cannot recommend it highly enough. It allows you to set up any number of frames you like for the tanks you will have HoTs on, and it uses bars of different colors and sizes to show you how long you have left on each HoT on each tank. It also shows your GCD on each frame, making it very easy to get into the flow of healing while being able to hop out of your rotation for a quick heal elsewhere and then get back in with minimal disruption.

1) Gift of the Earthmother (reducing GCD to 1.2 secs on hots)

2) Nature’s Splendor (longer running hots)

3) Nerfs to lifebloom

Seeing as lifebloom lasts longer and has a faster GCDif specced right, is mana becoming the limit of the number of hots that can be up in one fight, rather than ‘feeling’ out the GCD?

David’s last blog post..On the trainable form and mounts of 3.0.3