Wild Growth Nerfed in 4.3 PTR

I sort of wonder if I should have gone to sleep last night.  The notes for the PTR for 4.3 were released early in the evening, and by this morning, MMO-Champion has datamined just a ton of stuff – including the Dungeon Journals for all of the new 5 man dungeons and the Dragon Soul raid.  Don’t head over to the website if you don’t want to spoil anything – consider yourself warned.

The only resto change up at the moment is a nerf to Wild Growth, both in the form of a flat out reduction to its healing and a change to the way its glyph functions:

• Wild Growth healing has been reduced by 20%.
• Glyph of Wild Growth now also increases the cooldown on Wild Growth by 2 seconds.

Wild Growth heals too much.  Fine.  Wild Growth is “set it and forget it” healing that requires basically no effort and no brainpower to use.  Fine.  It was buffed by 30% and given an 8 second cooldown in patch 4.0.6 because our raid heals were seen as too weak at the time, so this change is going effectively going to reverse that.  Fine.  I don’t understand the reasoning, since (prior to the Firelands nerfs) druids really weren’t spamming Rejuv and Wild Growth and forgetting all our other spells.  I felt like our toolkit was well-rounded and generally in a good place aside from (perhaps) not having to worry about mana management as much as we probably should.  But since Tranquility now has a 3 minute cooldown and Efflorescence has been redesigned to be much more effective in the time since 4.0 launched, I’m not too terribly worried that this is going to cripple our group healing.

The nerf to Wild Growth isn’t what irks me.  This post by Ghostcrawler is:

“We’re okay with Resto druids using Wild Growth frequently, but we think we allowed it to become too powerful given its ease of use. As I suggested above, this may or may not be sufficient to nerf Resto druid throughput overall. The change to the Glyph of Wild Growth has positive and negative elements. We heard from druids that they felt like they didn’t have as many major glyph choices as intended, since the Glyph of Wild Growth was such a no-brainer for raiding druids — it increased the number of Wild Growth targets with no downside. We want major glyphs to be a decision, which usually involves them having some kind of downside. With the AE heals, we thought the downside might be that the healers may not be using their AE heals necessarily, but having seen two raid tiers of content now, we’re confident that the glyphs did not have as much of a downside. (We changed the Glyphs of Circle of Healing and Light of Dawn for similar reasons).”

(source)

Major glyphs need to have a downside, so all the healing classes who didn’t already have downsides to their major glyphs got one.  I understand that, and I recognize that it wasn’t fair for shaman to be the only class who had a major healing glyph that had both negative and positive implications.  But let’s call this decision what it is:  a nerf.  Even with the change to Wild Growth, there will be no choice as to whether resto druids will take it – we WILL take it.  We have no other options.  Rebirth is standard, and that leaves Healing Touch, Innervate, and Wild Growth as the only other resto-centered glyphs we can choose from.  Innervate was nerfed to the ground patches ago, so no one takes it anymore because it’s worthless for us.  The idea that this change is going to give us a chance to make some kind of meaningful choice about our glyphs is just insincere.

Beyond this, the comment “this may or may not be sufficient to nerf Resto druid throughput overall” is extremely worrying.  The majority of the druid community warned, when we were given Tranquility as our 3 minute cooldown, that this would greatly inflate our healing numbers.  A 3 minute Tranquility was the “raid wide cooldown” we were promised that was supposed to be comparable to shaman getting Spirit Link Totem.  Because Blizzard, for whatever reasons, seems to be unwilling to give us a true damage-mitigation or absorption cooldown, we have become throughput monsters.  The only option a druid healer has in dealing with damage is to throw more healing at it.  I don’t care that we have to hear other healing classes who don’t necessarily understand our mechanics complaining that our HPS numbers are too high.  I DO care that the developers who created this problem seem to have developed short-term memory loss in regards to their involvement in it.  Druid throughput does not need to be nerfed because it is the thing that is keeping us competitive.

That’s enough ranting for me before I’ve even had my coffee this morning.  Jasyla and Hamlet also have some excellent responses to this change if you’re looking for additional reading on the subject.  Happy PTR day to you all, and cross your fingers that the Wild Growth nerf is the only one we see.