I just finished listening to the Resto Roundtable hosted by the Team Waffle Podcast. It was very interesting to listen to different high profile Druids talk from different perspectives about our spec and what’s in store for us in Mists of Pandaria. One of the things that really interested me was everyone’s view on Healing Mushrooms.
Since my last post on the subject, we’ve gotten a little more information about the spell. In the MoP talents it currently works the same way the Balance version does, meaning you drop 3 mushrooms and “bloom” them for a burst AoE heal effect. The Bloom effect is currently on a 10 second cooldown, has a 6 yard radius, and affects all targets.
From the Resto Roundtable it seemed that the spell got an overall negative reaction from the panel:
- Dropping 3 shrooms is 3 GCDs with no healing going out. In healer-time that’s an eternity.
- Shrooms aren’t mobile, so you have to hope no one moves out of range.
- Having to target-drop 3 different times is a clunky and inconvenient way to heal.
These are very valid points.
Some suggestions on creating a better spell:
- Have us limited to 1 shroom that does the same amount of healing as the original 3- This reduces us to 1 GCD for the spell.
- Increase the radius of the heal- 6 yards is pitiful. Increase the yard range to 20 for the 1 shroom.
- Reward us for dropping it and having it on standby- Give the shroom an aura. Either a +heal aura or even something like Healing Stream Totem.
- Tie in Efflorescence- Have our shroom create our AoE ground heal. Unbinding Swiftmend from Efflorescence allows Blizz to give us a shorter CD on Swiftmend, increasing our single target HPS which we lack compared to other healers.
Hey some nice thoughts there. I also listened to it and though I can understand that there are things to make it better, I also realise that it’s a totally new healing mechanic which in itself is pretty awesome. 6 yards is pitiful, and I thought maybe diminishing returns like you get with Eff would be better. However, the boomshrooms are also 6 yards, and to keep continuity they should be the same. The loss of global CD time, probably wouldn’t make much difference I would have thought, after all you could cast it in your spare off moment when you’re not casting something (since as Druids our hots are always ticking) – but I realise that I speak from a 10 man perspective when all targets seem to have hots going already (esp if you have 4 piece T13) so you do have a few 2 second breaks when you’re not doing something – which would be utilised in placing them. I guess because I think I’d be placing them like I do in arena, run run run, stick shrooms in a spot where the healer would be drinking/hiding and detonate at the appropriate time. I don’t think the spell should be too OP or it would be nerfed like our other awesome spell
OK, that reply is too long. Thanks for listening.
Hi Navimie
I have played both 10 and 25s and I can tell you first hand that there is a lot more stuff to do in 25s. Druids in 25s suffer from being GCD-capped. There’s only so many GCDs in 1 encounter and because most of our healing is instant cast, losing that 1 GCD hurts Druids more than say a Paladin or Priest or have more access to cast-time spells.
In reality dropping 1 shroom instead of 3 gives us only 2 extra GCDs. The spell’s output would still be throttled by the 10 second cd. The extra GCDs would mean 2 more Rejuvs we can throw out to raid members. In essence, shrooms was designed mainly for stacking up. If the raid is spread out (like on Ragnaros) we would probably lean more heavily on Rejuv as our primary heal.
The reason the 6 yd range would need to be changed is that it’s radius is just too small. In fact, it’s smaller than the radius of Efflorescence, and we all know it’s hard enough to get raiders to stand in a big green circle. Spells like Radiance have a 40 yd range and a very large radius with diminishing returns, so I don’t think 15-20 yds wouldn’t be asking for too much.
I think I might expound upon this topic in a blog post of my own, but I do really like the concept of unlinking SM and Efflo. The times I find myself most desperate as a resto druid are times like Elementium Bolt impacts on Madness. My guild 2-heals the fight with myself and a holy paladin, and I feel like when Tranq is on CD, I am contributing next to nothing to save the raid from Bolt. Even when Tranq is up, I have to start casting Tranq before impact in order to prevent people from dying. This is good play and I like being rewarded by good play, but without a raid damage reduction CD and without significant sustained burst healing like Chain Heal/CoH/Radiance, I feel incredibly powerless.
I was initially really resistant to the concept of Mushrooms as a burst AOE because it feels like CoH without the backup of a spell like PoH, or like Healing Rain without the backup of Chain Heal, or Holy Radiance without the backup of… um… more Holy Radiance. Now I can kind of see it as Mushrooms with the backup of WG+RJ, which makes it a little more palatable.
Having our burst AOE be ground-targeted isn’t a problem to me, because we already function decently in loose raid formation because of WG and RJ’s strengths. I’m just not 100% convinced that a burst AOE on a cooldown is what we need as compared to spammable burst AOE like Radiance/Chain/PoH.
Hey Rush!
Personally I’m OK with the concept of a ground-targeted AoE heal as long as it’s worth using. The biggest concern the Druid community will have for the spell will be making sure using shrooms is worth using over our current healing tools such as Rejuv spam.
I honestly don’t want a copy of Radiance or Prayer of Healing. I want something unique. Let the pallies and the priests get the cast-time spells. Druid healing has been unique in the sense that we have always relied on instant cast spells for the majority of our healing (except for Rank 4 Healing Touch spam back in Vanilla).
I think Healing Shrooms will be a successful tool added to our arsenal. It just needs to be ironed out a bit. I’m sure Lissanna will be all over it.
1 gcd instead of 3 and 20 yards instead of 6 is quite ridiculous. Moonkins have a hard time dealing with this kind of spell. If they were make the healing shrooms this easy and strong then why not the other one too? What I always see as an answer if someone complains about 3 gcd is too much is this: don’t use 3 if you don’t have that much time. I have to agree with it. You are not supposed to be OP just by using one, if you have 1 free gcd then use 1. Healing the same amount as the boomshroom does would already good. Imagine blooming it for 6x 10k heal. Isn’t that awesome for 1 instant spell? Placeing 3 doesn’t mean you are waseting those gcd-s. Every one of them will increase the detonation heal by a big chunk. Also having more than 1 enables to heal at different places at the same time. You can keep 1 under a melee group and 1 under the caster group in the case the boss fight requires separated team movements.
Hey Gami, thanks for stopping by!
It’s not really as ridiculous as you would think. The spell is still limited to a 10 second cd and the output could be balanced as the same with 3 shrooms up. It’s GCDs that we would be saving. And considering spells like Holy Radiance have a 40 yd range, I don’t think 20 yds is asking a whole lot.
Biggest problem with Resto Druids (especially in 25s) is that we are GCD-capped. We can’t afford to spare GCDs anymore than we have to. This is due to our ramp-up time that it takes for our healing to become just as effective as other healers. If we start losing GCDs our healing diminishes by a large margin, especially if there’s not immediate healing benefit. This is also true for other healers, but Druids suffer the worst because most of our healing spells are instant cast, aside from our 3 direct heals.
One thing I must stress is that just because something works for a DPS spec doesn’t mean it’s viable for a healing spec. Balance and Resto are 2 completely different playstyles, not to mention their roles, so it’s really important to keep that in mind. I’ve played as Balance and quite frankly I hate having to plant mushrooms. It’s just extremely clunky to use, even as a DPS. No other DPS caster has to work as hard as Balance Druids for AoE.
My main is a balance druid. I know how hard is to handle shrooms. I hate when stupid people pull the pack out of my preplaced bomb in an instance (sometimes they do on purpose, they fight for top1 on damage meters afterall…yeah even tanks do that), but I don’t hate the mechanism itself at all. It’s one of my favourite actually. I usually play PVP and participate a very little in PVE so I look at things from this sight. Right now the MoP talent calculator shows the healings shrooms as the same spell but heal instead (about the same numbers). Our damage is reduced by resilience in PVP but not the healing done. If I would be able to deal the same damage with shrooms as I’m capable of in a PVE environment it would be totally insane. 60k+ instant damage with a lucky 3x pack solar detonation / target. However bloomshrooms are not reduced by resi. Even if you have to use 3 gcd-s. If you preplace it while hugging a column for example its a very very powerful tool. Can even be detonated while not in line of sight of them but in range. If they would reduce it to 1 shroom with a 20 yard instead of 6 they need to reduce its healing capacity too. I know its healing not damage. But it is already very hard to deal with even a noob healer who spams 1-2 healing buttons and do no cc. At least it is with a moonkin :/ If they get the same tool but 5 times stronger, I can’t imagine how do I kill one.
Circle with 6 yard radius: 6^2*pi = ~113,1 yard^2
3*6 yard radius shrooms = 113,1*3 = 339,29 yard^2 = ~10,4 yard radius circle.
Circle with 20 yard radius: 20^2*pi = ~1256,64 yard^2
One 20 yard shroom would be 3,7 times larger area than 3*6 yard ones and 3 times faster thanks to the 1 gcd instead of 3! (also 3 times cheaper) So one 10-11 yard shroom might be fine. That at least covers the same area and not a ridiculously large one.
Sorry for the math, I just wanted to show why do I think its too much.
Anyway, we will get an updated MoP talent calculator within a week or so. I can’t wait to see updated tooltips!
No leaving versatility by allowing 3 shrooms is fine. The thing is to make sure 2 GCDs for 1 shroom and explode is worth it.
By having 3 it allows for more configurations and placement and therefor usability.
[...] us). The solution implemented was to make our moonkin’s damage shrooms into healing shrooms. This is a really controversial spell, however, and some of the resto druid community would like to see healing shrooms thrown out and [...]