The druid resto tree: she's not broken, she's just a baby

Though I've been trying to keep myself spoiler free when it comes to the story of Cataclysm, one thing I have not denied myself is news on the mechanics of the game and how those will be changing. New spells, changes to the professions, changes to the stats, etc--I have been keeping up with all of these changes, mostly because I want to be prepared when Cataclysm drops to make the best decisions and not spend my time undoing or regretting a bad decision I made due to lack of information. It was only through the reflection brought on by this news hunt that I decided that my inevitable Worgen alt would be a rogue (Before that choice, I had considered a mage, warrior, and hunter, but it was upon reviewing the talents and ability distributions, as well as the abilities themselves, and some personal reflection on why I enjoy playing my druid, that I decided on the rogue.)

But there is a darker side to that news hunt, and that darker side is that we see classes in the middle of the great balancing act that is game design. We grow attached to abilities or talents that never make it to the live servers, or we languish in worry as we see that our class just isn't doing well in the design process. That latter point is affecting us resto druids on the beta right now. The comments I've seen from druids on the beta trying out resto healing consistently say that it needs work, and now the math has shown that our mastery bonus is the worst thing since pre-nerf Oculus. It's fair to say that this isn't a good time for resto druids, and that has lead to a lot of worrying on the part of the druid community. Will it be fun to heal in Cataclysm? Will mastery, this new and exciting stat, be of any use to us? Will we all just roll/switch to shamans/priests/paladins when we find out that we can't really heal anymore?

I used to worry about these kinds of things, but I now realize that it's better to think of resto druids on the beta as a work in progress, rather than a broken class that Blizzard needs to fix. After all, we're going to go through quite a shift in game design when Cataclysm comes out, and with Blizzard actually trying to keep all of the classes balanced, it can't be easy designing us druids to fit that philosophy, so I'm happy to not cry foul until a week or two before the game ships.

Let me elaborate on that point about game balance. Back in the day (I'm a player who grew up during vanilla WoW but came of age in Burning Crusade), the game was much less balanced than it is now. Once upon a time, warriors were the class that could tank, and any class that could heal was expected to do so (they couldn't do much of anything else; the game just wasn't designed to support them doing so). To put it simply, Blizzard didn't really care all that much about the classes being on par with one another. This mentality allowed the classes to evolve in their own special way, since they Blizzard wasn't all that worried about balancing them, and each class gained a unique feel to it. However, as the expansions went on, Blizzard started to care more about class balance, to the point where Wrath of the Lich King has been the most successful class balance in WoW history.

Of course, by the time Wrath rolled around, the classes had all developed their own unique feel to how they play. We druids, for example, specialize in healing with HoTs (heal-over-time spells) and tanking by absorbing damage, rather than avoiding it (this was especially true in Burning Crusade). This worked fine in Wrath of the Lich King, where the rapid damage spikes of raid bosses and our HoTs somehow worked well to make us good healers without us being overpowered (to my knowledge). However, come Cataclysm, that damage model will change. When Cataclysm rolls around, damage will be much more consistent, and healing won't be a race to top off every player's health bar. Healing will be more about using the right spell at the right time than using your most powerful spell as quickly as possible. Because of this, players will spend more time with their health below the maximum.

In an environment like this, HoTs would have dominated. The biggest weakness of our HoTs right now is that players are likely to snipe our healing by healing a target to full health before our HoT has run its duration, leading to wasted mana (though that was never really an issue). In a world where players won't be healed to full health immediately after they take damage, this would not have been the case. Our HoTs would have been able to do much more healing than they can now simply because players will be at less-than-full health more often, giving our HoTs ridiculous mana efficiency. After all, their current mana costs are balanced around the idea of them not healing for the full amount because of other healers bringing our targets to full health almost immediately. If those mana costs stayed the same while HoTs were able to heal for much more, they would have been ridiculously mana-efficient.

Of course, in a world where mana is supposed to matter and where Blizzard wants us using most of our spells, this just couldn't be. They would need to balance us around the ridiculous efficiency of our HoT's, making our direct heals much less appealing and effectively gimping us when we needed to use them to add extra healing to our style, like when we are the only healers in a five-man or when we are tank healing and our HoTs aren't doing enough. We would have been stuck in a style reminiscent of Tree of Life healing circa early Burning Crusade, when Tree of Life limited us to casting heal over time spells, meaning we could never use our only pure direct heal at the time, Healing Touch. It was this limitation that lead to the creation of the Dreamstate build, which forewent Tree of Life in favor of buffing Healing Touch. This was a viable build in heroics, where our HoTs might not have been enough to heal everyone there, but it petered out in raiding once the efficiency of Tree of Life HoT healing was revealed.

But I digress. We have been a HoT-centric class ever since Burning Crusade, and that needs to change in Cataclysm for us to remain balanced with the four other healers. In order to do that, Blizzard needs to effectively rebuild the druid class from scratch, taking our old abilities and reworking them to fill new niches, allowing us to retain some of what makes us unique (our HoTs) while still allowing us to fit into their new philosophy of healing design without being overpowered. Blizzard really had to overhaul our class to make us fit into this new game design, so it doesn't surprise me that they haven't perfected us yet. And considering everything else they have to do on the beta, I'm going to be patient as I wait to see what they do to make us good again.

In other words, the druid's resto tree and resto playstyle as they stand in beta aren't a failure, or a disappointment, or a sign that Blizzard isn't giving the same level of attention to us as they are to the other classes; they're just an indication of just how much work Blizzard has to put into designing it. While all of the other trees started mature and didn't need to change too much, Blizzard had less to work with when it came to designing the resto tree, so our tree is, if you will, younger than the rest. It isn't broken; it's just a baby.

The inherent risk of replenishment

Replenishment is an interesting little buff. It has been added to a variety of talent trees over the course of Wrath of the Lich King, from the most overpowered to the ones in greatest need of a buff. The first three trees it was added to (Survival (Hunter), Shadow (Priest), and Retribution (Paladin)) were all less than popular during the Burning Crusade, and I suppose part of Replenishment's raison detre was to increase interest in these trees. Replenishment was later added to the Destruction tree and the Frost tree (Warlocks and Mages, respectively), and though I can't speak about the state of Warlock balance when Replenishment was added to Destruction without risking saying something horribly incorrect, I know that Frost has been falling behind the other Mage trees in terms of DPS and is only now coming to the forefront on the PTR. It seems to me that Replenishment was just a band-aid to make Frost seem more raid-viable while Blizzard worked on an actual fix to Frost's DPS, just like how Replenishment was likely added to it's original three sources in case Blizzard wasn't able to make them viable by the time Wrath of the Lich King came out.

There is a risk in using Replenishment in such a way, though. That risk is that replenishment may let Blizzard off the hook when it comes to fixing specs. We saw that risk manifested in Frost Mages, who are still falling behind on the PTR, though not as much as previously. Though I can't say for certain that Survival wasn't as attractive as Marksmanship when Wrath began, I do know there were few talents in the tree that actually boosted ranged damage, and I know that Black Arrow was originally slated to be included in Burning Crusade, but was scrapped because it was too powerful. The fact that Blizzard added a spell to the Survival tree that they once considered too powerful says a lot about how Survival was matching up against the other specs.

Far be it from me to criticize Blizzard's balancing efforts, for they have a lot of things to consider when tweaking the numbers behind class balance. That said, Replenishment seems to me to act as no more than a consolation until Blizzard can come around to fixing a spec. After all, most raids already had a source of Replenishment in the form of a Retribution Paladin, considering their massive popularity during most of Wrath, and considering the prevalence of Replenishment when it was added to Improved Water Elemental (now Enduring Winter), most 25-man raids (the only place where Replenishment was considered a necessity, rather than a bonus) had some source of it already. Point is, giving Replenishment to Frost Mages didn't really mean much in the grand scheme of things; it was little more than a symbolic affirmation that Blizzard recognized that Frost Mages were falling behind and wanted to improve them.

Blizzard could have accomplished the same thing with an actual buff, however; something like adding Glyph of Eternal Water earlier. Now, I don't know the logistics of how Blizzard goes about buffing and nerfing classes, but it seems to me like giving a minor buff to a class would be a better option than adding Replenishment. It would allow Blizzard to dip their feet, so to speak, in the buffing pool and get an idea of how much buffing the class needs to be even with everyone else, it would actually improve the class in a tangible way, and it would give the same affirmation that adding Replenishment to a class gives.

Of course, Blizzard probably would have buffed Frost Mages if they thought they really needed to be buffed. Perhaps Frost Mages weren't falling behind at that point in time, or perhaps Blizzard didn't see keeping them competitive as a necessity, considering their survivability and thus viability as a solo-ing and PvP spec. (Perhaps one of the commenters could enlighten me on the state of Frost Mages around the time when patch 3.1 was released.)

Regardless, the fact that Frost Mages fell so far behind shows that adding Replenishment or a similar effect to a spec isn't enough to make that spec worthwhile. Many people think Rogues should get an effect similar to Bloodlust/Heroism in order to make them more popular, but considering how many shamans there are in the world, how much would that really help? After all, like Replenishment, the Rogue version of Bloodlust would need to be subject to the same cooldown as the Shaman's Bloodlust, meaning if there were already a shaman in the raid, the Rogue's Bloodlust would be a pointless addition. The key to making classes and specs attractive is not adding homogeneous buffs, but to either bring the class up to speed with everyone else or add something that makes the class unique (or both). Adding a carbon-copy of another class's buff to an underpowered class is nothing more than pointless consolation, an easy way out for Blizzard.

The case for solo raid instances

Back when I started playing WoW and began to understand what raiding was, I came to grips with the fact that I would never be able raid seriously. I just don't have the time to dedicate to it, and as much as I would love to be able to see the new content that Blizzard puts so much time into making, I probably never will. It's a shame, because the vast majority of Blizzard's development time for patches is spent developing raid content, and yet so many players like me will never be able to see it. Then the idea hit me: what if each raid dungeon had a version where all of the trash and bosses were non-elite, regular level 80-something enemies? That way, players who don't have the time to raid with others could still experience the same content and do so on their own time.

I know many people's knee-jerk reaction to that suggestion will be that it is a bad idea, but maybe the details of my idea will placate them a bit. Let me start by explaining the lore behind my idea. The gnomes and goblins are known for their engineering marvels, so they would make virtual reality machines to match the raid experience, though toned down to make it accessible to single adventurers. Their practical reason for doing so would be to allow the adventurers of the world to be more prepared when they enter a raid instance. However, because these engineers would need to gather information from people who actually enter the raid in order to make their simulations accurate, each solo raid would not become available until some time after the actual raid has been implemented. Perhaps they would have weekly quests that would ask players to finish the actual raid itself and report back with their findings. When enough people have completed these weekly quests, the solo raid would be unlocked.

Because these solo raids would be virtual reality, they would not award any money, gear, or tangible rewards of any kind. Let me reiterate that, since I feel it is one of my most important points: there would be no real reward for running these raids, so people would still be motivated to run actual raids. The solo raids would probably not cause any durability damage to gear either, since the player won't be taking any actual damage. The trash enemies would range from level 79 to 82, depending on how tough they are in the actual raid. The bosses themselves would range from level 81 to 83, with earlier bosses being 81 and later ones being 83, in order to make them suitably challenging for players. Obviously, some boss fights would loose much of their challenge due to the fact that the player is alone, but perhaps the engineers running the simulation would chime in with quips about how being in a raid would affect the boss fight.

I'm sure one of the first objections people will have against this idea is that it would remove one motivating factor that keeps people raiding: seeing the content. If solo raids were implemented in the way I am suggesting then players will still definitely want to run regular raids, for if a player didn't go into actual raids, he'd be forced to see the content later than everyone else (I think a one to two month delay is sufficient), he wouldn't get any gear to show for his efforts, and his only reward would be seeing the lore behind these instances, meaning people probably wouldn't take advantage of them more than once. If players need even more motivation to run actual raids in lieu of running these replications, we could add durability damage to them, meaning the player would actually lose money by running them. Still, I don't think we need to revert to such drastic measures.

Some may also say that they would rather Blizzard spend their time balancing the actual raid content than spend any of it balancing some bootleg solo content, but how long would it really take to balance the solo content? Even if, in their first iteration, the raids were too difficult or just unbalanced, the fact that players are going in on their own means that problems with the fights would become apparent very quickly and fixes could be implemented just as quickly. Because players will be fighting alone, Blizzard will know that any problems players have will not be due to lack of raid synergy or raids not bringing the right combination of classes. If 1v1 arenas were possible, it would bring the state of PvP class balance into sharp focus. Why? Because so few people are involved. Thus, if you only have one person involved in a situation, any balancing issues with the solo raids should be clear as day and easy to fix, thus won't take up much of the developers' time.

Considering how much time Blizzard spends on developing raid content and how much they have been catering to the casuals recently, I find it surprising that they haven't mentioned any ideas like this yet. I hope they do implement something like this, for I am just as eager to see the end of the Lich King storyline when patch 3.3 comes out as everyone else is. If you have any other objections to my idea that I haven't brought up, leave them in the comment section and I'll give you my response.

What I think Wrath of the Lich King did right

Judging by my previous philosophy posts (this one and this one), you can probably guess that I feel that Wrath of the Lich King is a fairly flawed expansion pack. That said, there are very few dark clouds with no silver linings (just as there are very few silver clouds with no dark linings... work with me people), so I want to talk about what I think Wrath did correctly and talk about all of the good things it did for WoW, and believe me, there are many.

Although I do believe that Burning Crusade was not as bad for class balance as people say it was (see my second post that I linked above), it was far from perfect, as any feral DPS who tried to move beyond tier 4 content will tell you. When Wrath was released, all of the classes found themselves on more or less equal footing. Sure, its still not perfect, and death knights were pretty overpowered when they first came out, but any veteran player will readily tell you that class balance is a hell of a lot better than it used to be. In fact, in the class Q&A's, Blizzard flat-out admitted that class balance was not a concern of theirs in vanilla WoW. Luckily for all of us, that has changed.

I also think that championing was a good addition to the game. It allows for much more flexibility in how one gets to exalted with a faction, and it forces Blizzard to make dungeons interesting, rather than requiring players to run certain difficult or boring dungeons in order to get rep with a certain faction. (Steamvaults, I am looking at you.) It also allows players to choose to run dungeons based on gear, and though that could be seen as a way to force players to run a certain dungeon, at least there is more flexibility in gear than there is when it comes to factions. You can't really make the comparison between gear and factions, since you can eventually replace your gear from heroics, but certain reputation items like head enchantments remain necessary no matter how good your gear gets. As such, getting reputation with factions is less negotiable than getting good gear, so making the factions easier to get exalted with is a good change in my book.

An even bigger change, however, was the switch to make all raid dungeons either 10- or 25-man. This allowed players to run raids the way they want to, and allows more casual players to see the content. Like I implied above, it's a really good idea for Blizzard to try to make content for as many players as possible, and having two versions of each dungeon prevents players from needing to overcome the raiding hump encountered in Burning Crusade, where many guilds couldn't make the jump from 10-man Karazhan to 25-man Gruul's Lair. Thanks to Wrath of the Lich King, they don't need to make such a jump.

Another good thing I think Wrath brought to WoW was the addition of hard modes, which I already covered in this post. To give you the TLDR version, the presence of hard modes allows more players to see content without taking away the challenge that hard-core raiders look for in their raids. As I said in the first post mentioned in the first paragraph, many of the changes in Wrath seem to have been aimed at getting players in raids sooner, and the idea of making raids challenging but not difficult while allowing hard-core players to still have their difficult content definitely fits in with this idea. It allows more players to see the content that Blizzard put so much effort into making, which makes sense from a business standpoint; after all, why spend so much time on something so few players will see?

As for achievements, while I don't see them as a particularly outstanding addition, I do feel they added something positive to the game. If nothing else, they give players something to do, and reward them for doing things in the game. Thanks to the achievements, raiding and PvP are no longer the only ways to gain titles. (I wear my chef title with pride.) They also make it easier to look back on your past accomplishments and feel proud of them, since you have a tangible manifestation and record of said accomplishments that you can peruse with ease. Besides, if nothing else, that ding makes everything feel a bit more satisfying.

So there you go. I have opened up and shown that my opinions are not as one-sided as my previous posts seem to suggest. That said, I am looking forward to Cataclysm because many of the features being added will change many things I perceive as flaws with Wrath of the Lich King, like Path of the Titans, which will give solo-players a way to make their characters more powerful, and Reforging, which will give the armor-making professions some use again. Yep, it's going to be a good time.

Why Burning Crusade wasn't that bad for class balance

A lot of people liked to complain back in the day about how the not-pure-DPS classes still fell behind their counterparts in DPS. Feral and balance druids, ret paladins, and others were denied slots in raids because their damage, and thus their perceived contribution to the group, was low. Damage meters were a big part of this accusation, but they missed the bigger picture. DPS classes who couldn't do high DPS brought something even more valuable to their groups; group buffs.

Let's take, for example, Leader of the Pack, a feral druid talent. Back in the day before raid-wide buffs, it increased the melee and ranged critical strike chance of all group members by 5%. This was a pretty big deal, and it made feral druids a good addition to any melee-DPS group within a raid. However, because cats didn't perform well on the damage meters, they were generally not viewed as valuable group members beyond tier 5 content.

Like I said before, damage meters miss the point when it comes to measuring a DPS class's contribution to a raid, and I'll explain why. Let's say you put that cat druid in a group with four other melee DPS, none of which are cats. Not only is that cat contributing his own damage to the raid, but also the increase in damage that LotP is giving his group members. Let's assume that the four other group members all do 1000 DPS without the cat in their group. Now let's say you add that cat to the group and all their DPS goes up to 1050. That cat could be doing 800 DPS on his own, but because he is responsible for an increase of 50 DPS for his four other group members, he is contributing to the raid just as much as they are.

Paladins were really unappreciated in this manor. The could increase everyone's critical strike chance against the target by 3% with Improved Judgement of the Crusader (now Heart of the Crusader) and could increase everyone's damage by 2% with Improved Sanctity Aura (now simply Sanctified Retribution). They also allowed holy paladins to actually use their judgments, since they could use Crusader Strike to refresh the duration of judgements other than their own. This meant they had endless raid utility, but because their own damage was so low, they were overlooked.

I actually find the Burning Crusade system to be more fair than the current system of "bring the player, not the class" where everyone does the same amount of DPS and each group buff has multiple sources and now affects the whole raid. In the olden days, hybrid classes couldn't do as much damage as the pure-DPS classes, but their could fall back on their healing and/or tanking abilities to help them while solo-ing. This gave them more solo-ablity, while the pure-DPS classes (rogues, hunters, mages, warlocks) needed to rely on their high damage output to kill the mob before it could kill them. Hunters and warlocks could use their pets, but they still had no way to heal themselves reliably or take a lot of damage. Thus it was only fair that they should be able to do more damage than the hybrid classes.

Now all the classes can do the same amount of damage while they are out on their own, but the pure-DPS classes have no defensive or healing abilities to fall back on when things get desperate. As a druid who can fall back on both defensive and healing abilities, I feel bad for classes who can't get themselves out of a jam as well as us hybrids. We druids, as well as paladins, shaman, and priests, can heal ourselves when things get out of control, and while death knights and warriors can't heal themselves that well, they can still use their tanking abilities to get themselves out of a jam. The pure-DPS classes have no skills of that nature, and when things get out of control, their only options are to rely on their pet or flee.

So, should we go back to the old system? I think that the new system of everyone doing equal damage is too ingrained in the player psyche for Blizzard to change it without the hybrid classes feeling cheated. I do miss the days where every class brought something unique to the raid, but those days are long gone. BTPNTC is here to stay. I suppose this can only be expected; balancing the different group buffs around one another was probably just too difficult for Blizzard.