Why Nourish? It seems like a pretty well thought out spell. It has a decent cast time, heals a mild amount of damage, and the healing power of it is increased by having your HoTs on the target (and more still with glyphs and armor bonuses). Why is it so concerning?
Well, if you look at the WWS reports of my guild's last raid (which are indicative of a trend; every raid's WWS reports have looked similar), you might notice the problem. Names blacked out for privacy's sake, first letters left because I need something to reference them by.
These are the boss healing numbers for successful boss kills of Flame Leviathan (which doesn't factor into the WWS), Razorscale, Ignis, Deconstructor, and Iron Council, with the inclusion of one wipe on Iron Council and two wipes on Kologarn. There was also a Paladin healer, but I didn't include him as it was unnecessary information.
You can see on the chart that myself and Druid T are rather close in numbers. However, there is a huge gap between myself and Druid S, a gap of roughly 1.5 million effective healing and 2% overheal (or 10% in the case of Druid T).
These are my healing spells (same fights, ignoring Potions):
Druid T's:
Druid S's:
Druid S used Nourish 59% of the time, had more effective healing, less overheal, and almost the same focus as Druid T. This focus was large, indicating a great amount of raid healing. With the majority of raid healing being Wild Growth, and Wild Growth being used only for 24% of the other healing, over half the time Nourish was not being used in conjunction with other HoTs. With Druid S's gear and raid buffs, there were no mana issues and no mana potions taken.
This is not an isolated incident. I have spoken with others in different raiding guilds, and their Druid healers who top the charts use Nourish just as much. This seems to be along the same lines as when Wild Growth was in its heyday. It's not mana troubling, it heals a decent amount without needing the modifiers, is quick to cast (especially with enough haste), and it makes a pretty FWOOSH sound. All indicators that Blizz devs are soon going to be looking at it and seriously considering changes, if they aren't already.
This may be paranoia on my part, but no tree who has watched the trends of change to our class and spec of late can say it doesn't bear the signs.
EDIT: Just to clarify, since one of my friends already asked me, no, I am not losing sleep over this or freaking out or anything. I'm not really worried; it's just a title.
22 comments:
Hmmm... I think I'll spam Nourish tomorrow night and see what happens. Normally, I do Rejuv/WG/Lifebloom, spitting out a Nourish to the tanks for a seed proc.
Have to see what that'll do. ^_^
That is very interesting. I have also noticed in Old Kingdom, when Herald Voraj (sp) has you fight doubles of your party, the druid healer spams Nourish over and over again (I don't think she uses anything but Nourish) and everyone complains about how hard she is to kill.
I'd have to ask what the Gear of this Druid S looks like. 4pc T7? Nourish Glyph? Both? My numbers never look like that. Though my raid is full of AOE healers...
I used to use Nourish liberally, almost as if I were a holy paladin, but after 3.1 I switched to a different playstyle that revolved around Rejuving as many people as I could between WG cooldowns (using it every time it was up). It's caused my numbers to shoot way up. I typically only use Nourish on tanks, as I have all my HoTs on them and will get the full benefit of the bonus healing to Nourish. To quickly heal the raid, I'll pop swiftmend since I roll it on the entire raid.
I have one spec for tank healing built around nourish. Like Corgii said - I call it my "I wanna be a paladin" spec. I only use it when I'm not assigned to raid heal... and most of the time I'm raid healing. If Blizz knows how powerful it is, I don't think most of the rest of WoW has. I hope that will delay any nerf.
This druid does have 4 pc. t7 and nourish glyph; however, those do nothing since he's not stacking HoTs and just using Nourish. Also, he's raid healing the majority of the time, not tank healing. His raid healing is 50-60% nourish, 20-25% wild growth, 5% living seed, and 20% everything else. The bonuses from the glyph and armor don't help him much at all. This is almost completely straight Nourish.
My numbers look a lot like S's.
I tend to tank heal using the t7 4pc and the glyph; since my guild is usually making our pally's tank, and it works amazingly well to keep 3/4 hots up and spam nourish on my tank. I'm not sure how S is putting out that sort of numbers using it without hots though; when i catch myself using nourish as a raid heal i notice what I am doing because my total healing is low.
At this point I am almost hoping for a nerf of nourish since it makes the 4 piece set bonus on t7 too valuable, and I'm still using my naxx 10 tier helm instead of th non-set helm from naxx 25 and the 7.5 chest instead of one from ulduar 10, because losing the set bonus seems worse than the stats i gain
I love the FWOOSH that Nourish gives off!
To improve the strength of your healing team as a whole, I'd suggest rather than copying this guy you complement him by spamming hots. That means RJ+WG before/during AOE, RG/RJ the rest of the time.
RJ is usually 50%+ of my healing now. This was even true on our IC hardmode attempts where I used what I consider to be an abnormal amount of Nourish; Nou still only made 11% of my healing done.
With three druids there's certainly space for one to take the "life-saver" role, but if you all go that route you'll find your HPS too low for later bosses and mosdef hard modes. Basically those bosses are the first third of Ulduar, it does get harder :)
Even so as a "life-saver" I would rely on NG RG, the hot and swiftmendability are serious business.
(context: yes I have 4xT8 but I only just got it, RJ is nerf-worthy without it. Late TBC I rolled LB, early LK I spammed RG - I'm not pushing RJ+WG out of any personal attachment, if anything I find it a little dull)
@Ixsli - I won't be emulating him, and I'm not trying to; even with my lower total heal and HPS, I do my job and end up having the largest percent of all the healers on the main tank, a good showing on the off tanks, and generally the least on the raid. Whereas this Druid heals the raid most often, and has a very strong showing there.
Since Blizz has practically shoved nourish down our throats, I would be surprised if they nerfed it. Then again, they've done that kind of bait and switch with paladins on more than one occasion.
Like Ixsli, I too feel that I have become a little bit of a rejuv bot. And yes, it is a little bit dull, I would agree. I am primarily raid healing right now and my healing break down looks kinda like this: rejuv is making up about 40% of my heals, the 4T8 set bonus about 12% of my heals, WG 20%...the other 28% are a mesh of my other heals.
Previously, LB would top my spells, but it wasn't so far ahead of my other spells the way Rejuv currently is, that I felt I was almost neglecting some of my other spells.
Maybe it is just because there are so many fights in Ulduar that make rejuv such a strong heal at them moment? I don't know.
As for Nourish...I really only use it on a tank with full HoTs up, or situationally where I can time it with my HoTs (think gravity bomb). I will say that I do tend to use it more in my 10 man raids then my 25 man raids, but not in such a great amount that it completely alters the way I heal.
I really do think that Druid S' nourish numbers are probably more the exception than the rule right now. Maybe the rest of us are all doing it wrong =) But I wouldn't think that it is going to see a nerf anytime soon.
I´ll drop my two cents here. I´m awful at healing since I´m usually DPSing, but we have 2 or 3 resto druids in my raids. One consistently destroys the healing meters using what he calls his "paladin healing spec". He doesn´t really use Nourish, he pretty much just spams Regrowth and rolls it on a bunch of people.
He doesn´t seem to really have mana problems, and doesn´t call out for innervate like my priest healers do.
I´m a pretty nub healer myself though, when I do swap over. I just spam Lifebloom on everyone that looks like they need health, lawl.
Macbook
My reply got mixed into my blog post for today. I was going to complain about how I don't use regrowth as much, but went off on a tangent about half way through talking about how we probably use lifebloom too much, and how we'll switch to rejuv-spam once we're sporting the T8 bonus. The nourish trend is really a short-lived T7 thing.
Besides, when they nerf one thing, we just drop it from our rotations and switch to something else...
I don't raid much yet, so most of what I'm saying is from a brand-new baby tree. :)
I found that nourish (While not healing for much without hots on) was a great "Oh crap they're going to die!" button. I have a 1.34-1.39 cast time, and it certainly helps keep someone standing till I can hot them and nourish again. Regrowth seems to heal for less initially with a longer cast-time, and while the HoT is useful, the target can die in the meantime. :/
Otherwise, rejuv and WG, with regrowths on the tank. Don't really use lifeblooms at all, even on the tank, though I'm starting too for that extra breathing room.
I am not concerned. For one thing, you don't have to spam nourish to be a good Druid healer. There is still not "set" way to heal as our class. It's also heavily dependent on your role as a healer and what boss you're fighting.
One of the main reasons I am not terribly concerned is that we are not paladins. Unlike paladins, we cannot endlessly spam nourish. It just doesn't work that way.
Is it a great raid heal? Undoubtedly. Is it a great tank heal? Absolutely. But, I wouldn't say it's flat out *better* than any other heals that we really have right now (I'm referring to rejuv, regrowth, lifebloom or wild growth).
Ultimately, I think it's dependent on the druid's playstyle. I think there is a lot of variety in the way a druid can be played, and I don't think there are a *ton* of druids just spamming nourish, to be honest.
If he WG 25% of the time and Nourishes 50% of the time and Rejuv/LBs 15% and Seeds 10% of his heals.
Nourish cast time is 1.4 seconds lets say. WG procs on 6 people for 7 seconds. Rejuv for what 18sec? Assuming the Nourish Glyph and 4pT7, he gets 11% buff when something has a hot on. So...
Lets say he is healing the nearest 6 people to him. The following are seconds..
0: WG hits 6 people.
1: Nourish person 1.
2.4: Nourish person 2.
4.8: Nourish person 3.
5.8: Rejuv
6.8: WG hits 6 people.
7.8: Nourish person 4.
9.2: Nourish person 5.
10.6: Nourish person 6.
11.6: LB/Rejuv
...
You can get ~3 nourishes in for every WG and still get the bonus from nourishing someone with a hot, assuming they have WG/RJ on them...which is reasonable assuming he's healing a cluster of melee or a grouping of ranged.
My style of healing is the destro warlock style: Immolate, Conflag, and fill with Incinerate. Spam rejuv, swiftmend whenever you can on the target with the lowest hit points that has rejuv on them, fill with nourish.
I primarily raid heal, so I keep Rejuv and Regrowth hots ticking on all tanks. I'll throw LB 1,2, or 3 stack and forget if there is downtime on the tanks.
Blanketing the raid in rejuvs seems incredibly handy for almost all Ulduar fights. The t8 2piece and 4piece set bonuses seem to encourage this style of play.
t74p bonus is only useful if you are doing a ton of nourishes, but you lose out pretty quickly to IL219 and 226 gear for stats.
Plus, glyphed HT >> vanilla Nourish and more mana efficient. Nourish only beats it when you start to consider Nourish+Hots+Glyph. Which is a much more entertaining tank healing "mini-game" then RG spam was.
I think the bigger picture here is not how awesome Nourish is but how bad Lifebloom is as a raid healing spell. We can't see who Druid S was healing but since all the fights listed (with maybe the exception of Razorscale) were raid AoE fights I am assuming he was raid healing with Nourish while the other Druids (including yourself) were using Lifebloom (both in combination with WG).
The result? Single Lifeblooms on the raid do not produce nearly the amount of HPS that Nourish does and WWS shows it.
This week when you attempt those bosses try:
1. Using WG when its not on cooldown or right after a known boss AoE.
2. Roll Rejuvenations on 10-15 people instead of Lifebloom (get that awesome Idol of Awakening from badges).
3. Only use Lifeblooms on the tank(s) in conjunction with Rejuv/Regrowth (whose ticks also produce a lot of healing over time).
There are a few more tricks but try something like that out and see what kind of results you get.
Good Luck!
Rejuvenation and WG give better results than straight Nourish spam on intensive healing fights, but Nourish is good for spot healing on easy modes. Don't get pigeonholed into thinking Nourish spam will get you through fights like Steelbreaker last etc.
I'm a believer and user of Nourish after being so hardcore for Regrowth. But honestly I've seen straight up Rejuv healers (60% of the Fight) or Glyphed Growth healers (50% of a fight) and honestly as a druid their seems to be so many playstyles and choices. (Meaning, thats the healing spell of preference and topped the meters.)
This however puts my faith back that Nourish it workable and I just need more gear to scale it well! :)
But I don't understand why people still use lifebloom anymore, rejuv is cheaper, ticks for a longer duration with 1-2k heals per tick and even just 1 tick while waiting for swiftmend your target will not die at the point in end-game.
@ Orbitz:
Try finding out how it feels after a triple-stacked lifebloom crits for 19k THEN tell me that it's useless.
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/qG4FefqEtDinllS6/sum/healingDone/?s=12375&e=12997
Our hardmode XT kill shows the power of lifebloom and rejuvenation. Almost double the next healer. Also shows the power of ret paladin.
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