Patch 5.4 patch notes
Virtual Realms feature revealed
The Proving Grounds are coming
The latest patch 5.4 newsShifting Perspectives: Bear and resto druid changes ahead for patch 4.1
by Allison Robert 
Mar 8th 2011 at 5:00PM
Hail, druids. We've got another exciting patch coming up, and this week I wanted to take a look at the changes currently in store for both bear and tree druids (with a few notes that inevitably touch on cats as well, as some feral changes are pretty general).
And far be it from me to omit the most important change:
Zarhym
Prowl has a new icon.
Well, thank God for that.
I've collected all of the bear- and restoration-related 4.1 PTR changes here, and we'll go through them one by one.
Zarhym
Efflorescence has a new spell effect.
I have to redownload the PTR and hadn't seen this yet, but fortunately a few players nabbed video. I've embedded one at the top of the post and have to say the new effect looks really nice. Anything that distinguishes a helpful spell effect from its nastier boss AoE cousins in raids is always a good thing.
On the downside, resto players doing Naxxramas for nostalgia can no longer throw the raid into a blind panic with strategically-placed Efflorescences (is that even a word?) on Grobbulus.
Zarhym
Lifebloom now costs 7% of base mana, down from 11%.
Lifebloom's bloom effect has been reduced by 20%.
Lifebloom's bloom effect has been reduced by 20%.
The first one here is actually (if I recall correctly) a reverted change from an earlier PTR build; the latter is revamped from what was a blanket 20% nerf to Lifebloom's base healing. As with all things PTR, nothing that we know is written in stone, so portions of this article may well be obsolete within a few days.
For anyone new to the druid class as of Cataclysm, it's traditional for Blizzard to diddle endlessly with Lifebloom right around this point in an expansion. The component of the spell that developers decide to nerf/buff is the instructive point. If they go for the per-second tick, it's a PvE nerf; if they go for the bloom, it's a PvP nerf. What we have here is most assuredly the latter, but we'll see what happens as PTR testing continues. For the moment I think it's safe to assume that developers are trying to minimize any nerf's potential effect on tank healing.
Zarhym
Stampeding Roar's duration has been increased to 8 seconds, up from 6. The movement speed effect has been increased to 60%, up from 40%.
Since snow removal has constituted a good 75% of my waking existence from late December to the present, raid time has been pretty thin on the ground. I haven't had the opportunity to examine Stampeding Roar usage on a case-by-case basis during raid encounters as a result. Ashamed as I am to admit this, the ability was getting the most use from me while running back from wipes, as it was one of the few times it was guaranteed to do something for multiple people. I always figured there were encounters I just hadn't seen yet where it wound up helping players other than myself, but the 10-yard radius tended to eighty-six most of its usefulness while tanking. While slightly more helpful while healing (assuming I had the time to jump to cat/bear), it was still a crapshoot; any encounter requiring the raid to spread out (which seems to be most of them) by necessity meant that Stampeding Roar wasn't going to hit a lot of players. The high energy cost of the ability in cat form sure doesn't help either.
From the opinions I've canvassed, PvP players aren't hugely enthusiastic about the change either; Stampeding Roar is overwhelmingly seen as an ability that's potentially useful but undermined by a punishingly small area of effect. Neither of the proposed changes addresses this, so SR is probably doomed to stay banished to the Siberian section of many an action bar.
Zarhym
Swipe's (Bear) cooldown has been reduced to three seconds, down from 6.
Mmph.
While a good boost for "Hold threat on everything or the DPS dies" situations, this won't have much impact on bear tanks at level 85, because Thrash is by far the better AoE threat ability. It's going to be felt most below level 81 by leveling bears -- what few of them seem to exist -- who have Swipe and only Swipe for AoE threat. It's just unfortunate that the solution for the hassle of AoE tanking on a bear seems to be a return to Wrath's much-derided Swipe spam. Granted, a 3-second cooldown doesn't constitute spam, but ... still.
As an aside, my TankWatch™ project continues. I don't have sufficient data to go live with an article on it just yet, but this is the tank representation I've seen in 5-man dungeons from levels 15-42 so far:
- Paladin: 66%
- Warrior: 25%
- Druid: 9%
Zarhym
Feral Swiftness now also causes Dash and Stampeding Roar to have a 50/100% chance to instantly remove all movement impairing effects from the affected targets when used.
True story: When the change to shapeshifting's no longer removing root effects in patch 4.0.6 was first announced, we got a peevish question from a feral reader over the team line wanting to know how cats were going to PvP with the change. Within a second of each other, both Sacco and I replied: "Poorly," and Chase opined that the change needed to be reverted because "Right now, feral druids are the only ones that have a shot of wrecking our frost mage overlords." As Diziet observed on Arena Junkies, the change turned the feral from one of the most to least mobile specs in arena overnight, and the removal of Fear immunity from Berserk also meant that the PvP trinket basically had to be used for a Fear or root removal, but not both.
I don't technically cover cats anymore in the Tuesday column (you've got the extraordinary Chase Hasbrouck, a.k.a. Alaron of The Fluid Druid, for now), but the loss of functional root immunity bled through to the bear, and this still irritates me. I saw it as one of the few truly unique things about a tank that's borrowed so heavily from warriors.
Regardless, this will provide ferals and more specifically cats with two Get Out of Snare Free cards before we go back to getting destroyed by Ice Lance. Also interesting is that the Stampeding Roar version should theoretically affect more players than just yourself (or it would if the 10-yard radius were anything other than the exact point of contention among PvP players).
Either way, this is not the last we're going to see of the developers' efforts to tinker with cats in battlegrounds and arena, although I hope it's the last time that bears are going to be collateral damage in that process.
Zarhym
Gift of Nature (passive) also reduces Tranquility's cooldown by 2.5/5 minutes.
The wording on this one is a little odd; Gift of Nature is one of the passive bonuses you get for speccing into the restoration tree, and it doesn't have ranks. So either Blizzard's referring to an as-yet-unknown talent here that accidentally got the Gift of Nature label, or speccing into the resto tree automatically buys you a 5-minute bonus on your Tranquility cooldown.
The change is arguably most interesting for what it's not, because we've been waiting to see what the developers cook up for a damage-reduction cooldown. Shaman have gotten a new totem, but the Tranquility change is definitely not the same deal. Stay tuned, folks.
Zarhym
Efflorescence has been redesigned. It creates a healing zone at the feet of a Swiftmend target, but this healing zone now restores health equal to 4/8/12% of the amount healed by Swiftmend to the three most injured targets within 8 yards, every one second for 7 seconds. This periodic effect now also benefits from spell haste, but the individual ticks cannot be critical effects.
This is something that merits its own post, to be frank -- but as Keeva at Tree Bark Jacket observes, it's a good thing -- or at least we think it is. The haste scaling is the most compelling improvement here, but I'll see how the new version of the spell performs on the PTR and report back.
What race should you choose for your druid? What happened to Tree of Life? How can you get started as a bear or cat in Cataclysm? Shifting Perspectives has the answers!
Filed under: Druid, Analysis / Opinion, (Druid) Shifting Perspectives
Reader Comments (Page 3 of 3)
alpha5099 Mar 9th 2011 1:03AM
For what it's worth, I'm part of that 9% of leveling bears. So far I've been enjoying it quite a bit, though it definitely feels like my tools are pretty limited at this point (just hit 30 tonight). A proper AoE ability will be quite nice, but getting FFF and glyphed Maul have significantly improved tanking packs.
The biggest problem right now is the rather glaring lack of defensive cooldown. Been a long time since I leveled my prot warrior, and I've never gotten a pally past level 20, but it'd be nice to have something to do when I'm taking lots of damage. Went into SM Library right after I dinged 29 tonight, and the fact that most of the mobs were in their mid 30s made a lot of pulls dicier than I would've liked. Aside from drinking a potion, all I could really do was sit there and say "Gee, I hope the healer can keep me up."
Minos Mar 9th 2011 2:31AM
You're in the Twin Cities, right? This season is gonna kill my snowblower yet. That, or my back. Possibly both.
Blooderfly Mar 9th 2011 4:04AM
I have a two of each tank, one horde and one alliance. I love tankin'. Leveling my horde bear in Wrath was super fun, though admittedly Wrath was veeery 'lolaoe' and swipe spam made bears quite easy (but still fun!).
I didnt get around to my alliance bear till Cata, and to my shame, gave up fairly quickly. In all honesty, as it is right now I really don't think bear tanking has to be as hard as it is, but in my experience, impatient, aoe-happy dps simply wont let you do what you need to do. You charge, and they unleash all they got at the same second...then get all huffy when they pull aggro.
I tried again when I got swipe, but... @-@
Considering how unbelievably easy pally tanking is at low levels, and even warrior tanking, whyyyyy is it so hard for them to come up with a solution for li'l bears? :
hshaft Mar 9th 2011 8:00AM
The Bear pve changes are minimal (and disappointing) and I suggest the the Swipe cd reduction was aimed at giving the low level Bears more to do in dungeons. While we will probably use it on cooldown at 85 for trash packs in heroics, I'm not convinced it will be all that big an improvement to our AoE tanking, as Swipe really only does a very moderate amount of threat. Even so, if we now incorporate another Swipe into the "rotation", don't we just end up with a macro like "/castsequence Thrash;Swipe(Bear);Mangle(Bear);Swipe(Bear)" bound to a key that we just spam (and occasionally tab to move the Mangle around)?
However, what Blizz really needs to do (and I'd hope perhaps you'll champion the cause) is address Thrash. Thrash is supposed to be a bleed, yet both the impact hit and the dot are mitigated by armor. It's the only bleed I know of in the game that works this way. There have been many posts on the forums about this, yet there have been a total of ZERO responses from Blizz. Not a "we'll look into it"; not a "we are aware and will address in an upcoming patch"; not even a "working as intended".
shiftbull Mar 9th 2011 8:04AM
LifeBloom explosion is (was...) not only usefull at PVP. Im healing new instances in PTR and can say that LB explosion could be very usefull on low geared tanks. The problem is, that Blizzard changed Regrowth after Cata launch, making impossible to leave LB to explode on high damage situations (Reg, Nourish and HT, all refresh LB stack). The good new is they changed Nature's Bounty, making Nourish %30 faster, but, why I cant leave my LB to explode? Blizzard need to fix that, i dont have problems at raids, can leave LBx3 on Nef tank and move away knowing that the explosion will make the job, but when im solo healing heavy damage on ungered tanks on the new instances sometimes I really wish LB stack to explode, but i cant.
Izzy Mar 9th 2011 10:18AM
I've not been able to bring myself to tank heroics. I've been a bear tank since end of vanilla/ BC launch. I've never had as much trouble with AOE threat, and I just taking a pounding on multiple mob pulls. Sure I could CC everything, but I really should have to considering my DK tank can literally AOE tank herorics in DPS gear, but my druid just absolutely gets walloped. I feel like SD doesn't proc nearly enough, and AOE threat is just abysmal. I've gone pretty much cat only now and I'm fairly happy with it; I just wish I didn't already feel like bear was so damn inferior. Single target is fine, I've saved plenty of groups by just switching to bear after the tank eats it (which is why I keep those bear talents in there).
Bikhai Mar 9th 2011 1:48PM
Not sure about the Efflorescence change. It's a definite numbers increase per tick (from ~700 to ~1500 as it stands for me). Really helps out in 5-mans because there aren't many more than 3 people who are ever going to be taking heavy damage. But in 10 or, more importantly, in 25 mans, this is going to be really underwhelming. Healing 3 people at a time for less than 2000 per tick just isn't enough to offset anything. It's like a souped up, short CD version of the priest Divine Hymn -- that is to say, both are useless when you need them the most.
I guess as a "hit it and forget it" ability it could be worse, but it certainly seems like it's going to hurt raid healing for guilds that having been using healing circles effectively to this point.