Unlike the other healers, Restoration druids will not be receiving any new spells. They have plenty to work with already, and our challenge instead is to make sure all of them have a well-defined niche. A druid should be able to tank-heal with stacks of Lifebloom, spot-heal a group with Nourish and Regrowth, and top off lightly wounded targets with Rejuvenation.

Really?  Come on Bliz…  I’ve been waiting all day for that.  After being wowed and amazed that priests would get something as cool as a life-grip (cooler than death-grip, saver of the stupid!) and that shaman would get an AOE hot that lasted 10 seconds and had a 10 second CD… after that, I find I’m getting… drumroll please… nothing.

All heal-over-time spells (HoTs) will benefit from crit and haste innately in Cataclysm. Hasted HoTs do not reduce their duration, but instead add additional HoT ticks. Haste will also benefit Energy generation while in cat form.

Yeah, okay this is a general change to mechanics (not just a druid change), but I admit it will favor us the most.  And yeah, it takes what we love about rapid rejuvenation, and gets rid of what we hate… I really have no complaints about that.  Actually I think it will be rather powerful.  Makes me even more smug about my hots.  Yes, I approve.

Tree of Life is changing from a passive talent to a cooldown-based talent, similar to Metamorphosis. Mechanically, it feels unfair for a druid to have to give up so much offense and utility in order to be just as good at healing as the other classes who are not asked to make that trade. We are exploring the exact benefit the druid gets from Tree of Life. It could strictly be better healing, or it could be that each heal behaves slightly different. You also will not be able to be banished in Tree of Life form (this will probably be true of Metamorphosis as well). Additionally, we would like to update the Tree of Life model so that it feels more exciting when you do decide to go into that form. Our feeling is that druids rarely actually get to show off their armor, so it would be nice to have at least one spec that looked like a night elf or tauren (and soon troll or worgen) for most of the time.

Tree of Life is ugly, and I don’t like it.  So the idea of being less hideous… thats seems good.  But does this mean we will no longer give a healing buff to the raid?  What about the armor buff we got with improved tree?  And the spirit to spell power boost?  So may questions, so little answers.

Restoration druids will have a new talent called Efflorescence, which causes a bed of healing flora to sprout beneath targets that are critically healed by Regrowth.

Um… K.  What do the pretty flowers do? Heal the target?  Heal everyone standing on them?  Increase my healing on people standing within them?  I mean… I’m okay with a “bed of healing flora” but I’d love more specifics.  Makes me wonder…

Barkskin will be innately undispellable.

I don’t really PvP enough to care… sorry.

Druids will lose Abolish Poison with the dispel mechanics change, but Restoration druids will gain Dispel Magic (on friendly targets) as a talent. All druids can still remove poisons with Cure Poison and remove curses with Remove Curse.

Yep… okay… dispelling magic on friendly targets… useful.  Though as far as poison was concerned abolish > cure so… oh well.

Restoration

• Healing
• Meditation
• HoT Scale Healing

HoT Scale Healing: HoTs will do increased healing on more wounded targets. The mechanic is similar to that of the Restoration shaman, but with HoTs instead of direct heals. In Cataclysm, we anticipate druids using a greater variety of their spells so there is a distinction between healing and HoT healing.

Well… okay.  Better HoTs on the dyeing… except HoTs don’t really thrive on saving the low in health do they.  I mean, we’re better at sustaining health high, then ninja-saving people with low health.  Ugh I just don’t know… I hope I’m wrong and these changes are more exciting that they seem at first glance.

New Dungeons and Raids

New Cross-Realm LFG system

Making a new Level 1 Druid, you won’t start with attack on your bar

Rebirth: The cooldown on this spell has been lowered from 20 minutes down to 10 minutes.

Tranquility: The cooldown on this spell has been reduced to 8 minutes, down from 10 minutes. 

Gift of the Earthmother: Redesigned. This talent now increases spell haste by 2/4/6/8/10% and reduces the base global cooldown of Lifebloom by 2/4/6/8/10% instead of its previous effects.

Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation: This glyph allows for the druid’s haste to reduce the time between the periodic healing effects of Rejuvenation.

Rejuvenation: Druids will no longer get a more powerful spell error message when attempting to overwrite a Rejuvenation they cast.

Top-level helm and shoulder faction-related enchants are now available as Bind-on-Account items that do not require any faction to use once purchased (they still require the appropriate faction level to purchase).

Read the full patch notes!

But if you don’t want to read all the notes, let me tell you what effects us trees most!!!  

* Innervate: Duration reduced to 10 seconds, and cooldown reduced to 3 minutes. This means each use of Innervate will give half as much mana as before, but it will be available twice as often. 

Half as much, twice as often?  Ok… I don’t think this is going to be a huge deal really.  I guess we’ll see in practice!

* Lifebloom: The final heal that occurs when this spell blooms has been reduced by 20% on the base and on the spell power coefficient. 

I miss the good old days when lifebloom kicked ass!  Another nerf here.  I use to use lifebloom for spot healing but now I lean more towards rejuvenation anyway.  I think I get the most use out of lifebloom as one of the HOTs I keep stacked on the tanks, and this being the case I never let it bloom.  I know it’s a nerf but I don’t think it’s as big of a deal as some people are making out.  

+ Empowered Touch: Now also increases the amount of bonus healing effects for Nourish by 10/20%. 

For you druids who spam nourish, this can only be a good thing right?

They also mention the changes in the level you can learn different travel forms, like I talked about in my post a couple of days ago.  

All and all nothing overly thrilling!  Besides, I think we are probably still several months from 3.2 and I’m sure there will be loads of adjustments made before then.