Sunday 22 August 2010

Tree of Life raidwide aura

I was thinking about the Tree of Life raidwide aura (+6% healing received to party and raid members) and suddenly thought... I think this is disappearing in Cataclysm. I'm fairly certain it's disappearing, as I haven't seen it noted in talents on the beta. I imagine it's gone along with the permanent tree form, though I think it's a shame if it does disappear.

It correlates with the Moonkin +haste and spell crit auras and Leader of the Pack aura. The Moonkin +haste is, so far, still in beta (I don't believe spell crit is) as is Leader of the Pack. It would be great for the ToL aura to remain as well. I could see two possibilities for this: The first option I see is the increased healing received is only up during the ToL cooldown. While less useful overall, it would emphasize the ToL cooldown situational use and perhaps buff that up a little bit more. The second option would be for the +healing received aura to be attained once specced into Tree of Life, but the aura will remain up 24/7 (while in Caster form as well as ToL form). This would correlate with the changes to Master Shapeshifter (which now provides +4% to healing in Caster and ToL forms).

I may be wrong about the aura disappearing, since I'm not in the beta to test it. Hopefully it's still there already, but in case it isn't, I think this would be a good idea to put it back in. I made a post on the Cata forums about it (here), though it looks like it may be swamped out pretty quickly (or lost amongst the millions of OMG SAVE ToL FORM posts), but hopefully it'll be spotted!

2 comments:

Simon said...

the new ToL form will increase 'our' healing for 45secs but from what I know that current ToL aura is gone (could be wrong tho i'm a bit unsure)

the reason behind the removal of the current ToL was one: resto's didn't have enough 'freedom' in groups because the shift would lock our abilities and the second reason is because ToL doesn't add enough 'shwung' to stay in cata.

so we lose 6% raidwide +healing aura and 20% mana off all our heals...

what would be nice is that when we pick the new ToL talent we gain the aura in caster form and gain the cooldown (a passive aura + ability) but that might sound a bit to powerful for one talent point

I have no idea where it went but I might've missed the blue post :)

Feral Tree said...

"what would be nice is that when we pick the new ToL talent we gain the aura in caster form and gain the cooldown (a passive aura + ability) but that might sound a bit to powerful for one talent point"

Yep, this is exactly what I'd hope for with the current Cata build of the talent tree and ToL. I'm not sure it would really be overpowered, as it would still be pretty equivalent to the Moonkin and Leader of the Pack talent points down the Balance and Feral trees... both of those provide bonuses for the druid (and moonkin form now increasing the druid's damage with the recent beta build buff) as well as give a raid-wide aura.

I don't know how much they increased our overall healing to match us up with other classes (as apparently they wanted to do that, instead of the Wrath model of ToL form bringing us to par with other healers), in which case maybe an aura like this would end up a bit overpowered. I'd think that could be sorted with some number balancing though... hm.

We shall see!