Castion

As mentioned before the new HOT mechanic sounds interesting, would love to see one more thing added to them: If there is healing left even after the group check perhaps make it a temporary ward for remainder of the spells duration. Perhaps this is to OP, but without a shaman you are screwed.

It's the damage prevention and large damage spikes that seem to be the biggest issue. The Myth clicky and totoise shell are only defense against hits that are larger then the tank's health.

I would love the stun from tortoise shell removed and boost the range to maybe 10m to make it more useful.

I would love to see our elemental ward beefed up as well.

agree with all the other suggestions for more buffs on par with the other healers.

Lastly either remove or fix the cures from our AA tree - anyone actually use them?

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Ariel

Of course I have cures and at 200 AA I've put points into them because I didnt have anything else to do with those points - but can't say I see any correlation between the two.

And to be fair, we do have a nice self buff that is a good representation of a defensive druid. Trouble is, it doesn't do the raid any good from the sidelines where you are sitting in favor of another class that buffs better.

Ninamien

Stun off the Hierophants Province spell id like to see!!!

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NUDE HOT GIRLS CLICK HERE!!

Tessian

Is this coming in Feb? Or sooner.

Ariel

Allegedly Feb with the next expansion - most likely nothing good till then (if it even happens).

parmenion

The issues around 1 shotting and reactive versus proactive heals for druids versus shammies/clerics might be better served by one or both of 2 options.

Either raising the HP that druids can buff, as their heals do nothing to buff the effective HP of their targets, let the buffs achieve that.

Or adding a new type of effect to druid heals, perhaps a short term damage mitigation effect, that reduces the target's incoming damage by a percentage, while the heal is ticking away. this would let a new effect of druid heals co-exist with reactive and wards, and not always be last in line.

thedeuce

so, like the cure line.. except for mitigation? what would u do for focus damage? not shooting it down.. just curious.

parmenion

Well a possibility for a new complimentary to wards & reactives effect could be something like this... I'll pick figures out of the air just for example, they'd need fine-tuning bearing in mind overall heal balance and raid & group encounters etc.


The single target (photosynthesis & the fury one) & group (healstorm & the fury equivalent) regens get a new short term buff component that lasts say 10 and 15 seconds, reducing incoming damage by 8% and 12% respectively.

The new damage reducer components should not stack from multiple druid casters, just have a new arriving damage reducer component reset the 10 or 15 second duration, in effect it shouldn't stack beyond 1 single reducer and 1 group reducer on any 1 character. Additionally points in Wild Regeneration AA should not reduce the duration of the new damage reducer component, but increase it's duration maybe by 2 seconds per AA aslonside the AA's normal heal increases and decreased regen duration to speed up ticks.

This would let multiple instances of the buff stack from different druids for duration but never amounting to more than 1 photosynthesis damage reducer for 12% plus 1 healstorm damage reducer for 8%, giving 20% reduction to anyone with both buffs on.


In terms of the maths I'd expect it might operate so that incoming damage -> normal mitigation calculations -> damage figure reduced by new druid damage reducer amount (i.e. 8% reduction, or 12% reduction or 20% reduction) -> then wards absorb damage -> then reactives soak up left overs -> then the normal druid & others healing is applied to any damage into the health pool.

It lets multiple druids refresh the short term damage reducer components on a single person, and apply regen/healing as usual, but it never creates more than a 20% reduction per person even from multiple druids for example.

Something along those lines allows druid healing to effectively reduce some of the incoming figures before wards & reactives are applied, and would be one way of moving druids out of the, always last in line healing position, and make druid healing work far better in combination with shammy & cleric heals, that reducer would chop a chunk off the damage attributable as druid heals also having the net effect of making shammy/cleric healing upto 20% more effective.

The figures probably need work, and overall heal balance has to be considered, but that 8% (or whatever figure) reduction to incoming if a healstorm has been recently casted to group could help a lot with the 1 shotting issue, & getting a further 12% damage reducer component on your more fragile members in advance too.

Any druid heal changes have to be combined with a decent buff overhaul, including much better HP buffs, amongst more utility/stats/desireable effects overall. It also would keep druid heals in a different category to make them discrete from just ending up as wards or regens, and lets the druid healing be partially proactive, not entirely reactive. It also gives druid heals their own & different dynamic, responding partially to the size of the incoming burst, not just a fixed figure output, and keeping some difference between the heal classes seems a good goal.


I expect you'd probably want to display some damage reduction of X points spam in the healing figures channel, so it get's into the parses, and people can see it working etc.

patrck17

But think how much this would hurt the pride of those other healers who seem to want a healparse posted everytime their group takes more damage than anyone elses.

I've actually seen some healers claim that it is mostly druids who say the heal parse doesn't mean anything just cause we are the ones usually at the bottom of it. So we are just saying that as an excuse, which is why they still post it and brag when they are on the top of it.

I expect the healers who actually beleive that will be sad when a serious amount of heals are actually being parsed to druids.

Anyways this idea is too original and makes too much sense for SOE to implement. But if they do implement something like this I agree they should have it logged so it can be parsed and compared. This should also be done to the procs in the game that reduce damage such as reflexive skin and the gynok belt. I am not sure if it does or doesn't already as I havn't looked for it on the parse, but it would be nice to see just how much these items are doing to prevent damage.

Ariel

Pat, good post...ty

side note: that makes me crazy too - a Defiler in the MT group carrying on about how uber they are...then thinks I 'cheated' somehow if I (healing the mage group on an AoE fight) parses first.
/shakes head in amazement.

Or worse, another Warden (cause I thought we were smarter than most.. ) calls bullshit if they didn't parse first on a particular fight where they were trying to get their heals in first but didn't.

Just dumb.