[...] A preview of our talents is up at MMO – no more speculating on leaks and rumours! Blizzard has sent select fansites this preview information. As always, this information is not final, but should give us a good insight into our talents for Cataclysm. For the full post, click here. I won’t repost the whole thing, but here are some Resto-relevant highlights/changes: Tree of Life (1 point) – Requires 5 points in Empowered Rejuvenation – Shapeshift into the tree of Life, increasing healing done by 15% and increasing your armor by 240%, but reducing your movement speed by 50%. In addition, some of your spells are temporarly enhanced while shapeshifted. Lasts 45 seconds. 5-minute cooldown. Enhanced spells: Lifebloom, Wild Growth, Regrowth, Entangling Roots, Thorns, Wrath Improved Tree of Life (3 points) – Requires 1 point in Tree of Life – Reduces the cooldown of your Tree of Life by 30/60/90 seconds, and increases your damage done while in Tree of Life by 5/10/15%. — Nature’s Bounty [NYI] (5 points) – Requires 3 points in Improved Rejuvenation – Increases the critical effect chance of your Regrowth spell by 10% on targets at or below 25% health, and you have a 20% chance when you critically heal with Healing Touch and Nourish to reduce the remaining cooldown of your Swiftmend spell by 0.5 seconds. Increases the critical effect chance of your Regrowth and Nourish spells by 10/15/20/25%. Swiftmend (1 point) – Requires 1 point in Nature’s Bounty [NYI] – Consumes a Rejuvenation or Regrowth effect on a friendly target to instantly heal the target for 5306. Keeva’s note: mostly unchanged, except that now it heals for a set amount rather than Xseconds. Will be affected by talents that boost Swiftmend by X%. Empowered Touch [NYI] (2 points) – Your Healing Touch heals for 5% more on targets at or below 25% health, and your Nourish spell has a 50% chance to refresh the duration of your Lifebloom on targets. Your Healing Touch spell gains an additional 32%, and your Nourish spell gains an additional 16% of your bonus healing effects. Keeva’s note: handy for tank healing – saving GCDs not having to refresh LBs. Although it may take some getting used to if your LB is refreshing itself (but only 50% of the time). Efflorescence [NYI] (3 points) – Requires 1 point in Living Seed – When you critically heal with your Regrowth spell you also sprout a bed of healing flora underneath the target, healing all nearby friendly targets within 15 yards who stand on them for 10/20/30% of the amount healed by your Regrowth every 1 seconds for 7 seconds. Increases your total spirit by 10/15/20/25%. Revitalize (3 points) – When your Regrowth or Lifebloom heal-over-time periodic damage critically hits, you instantly regenerate 1/2/3% of your total mana. This effect cannot occur more than once every 6 seconds. Gift of the Earthmother [NYI] (5 points) – Increases the healing done by your Tranquility on targets at or below 25% health by 4%, increases the healing done by the bloom effect of your Lifebloom by 2%, and your Rejuvenation spell also instantly heals for 3% of the total periodic effect. Increases your total spell haste by 4/6/8/10% and reduces the base cooldown of your Lifebloom spell by 4/6/8/10%. Wild Growth (1 point) – Requires 1 point in Tree of Life – Heals up to 5 friendly party or raid members within 15 yards of the target for 2905 over 6.99 seconds. The amount healed is applied quickly at first, and slows down as the Wild Growth reaches its full duration. — I don’t have much to comment on yet, I said most of it in my previous comments on the same leaked abilities. Still no word on the “enhancements” that TOL grants each of our abilities (although we’ve seen some leaked). And I really don’t like that 50% snare – ten bucks says that gets axed somewhere along the way. Because what I really want is to pop my “I need to do more healing because it’s crunch time” cooldown and then get stuck in fire that I am slow-mo running out of. Snares suck. Edit: for more analysis of the changes and what I think of them, refer to my earlier post (on the alpha leaks): http://treebarkjacket.com/2010/05/06/cataclysm-preliminary-talent-changes-unconfirmed/. [...]

I like the improvements to Rejuv, LB and such, I usually use a full range of heals, as I do mostly 10s, so all those are win!

I’m still not happy with the ToL changes. This also has a wacky CD (talented) that will not time well with most of the rest of the raids longer CDs. I also don’t think that the ImToL talent is worth taking if it is only a CD reduction… if that is ALL it does for healing. Unless fights are going to be really long in cata, I can’t see being able to use it more than once anyway.

I’m pondering the change to WG…. I can’t see it being nearly as useful if the healing it gives is cut in half… especially since it has such a limited cluster range… wonder if that might be changing… hmmm…or are they counting on the hasted hots to cram more heals into that 7 seconds to make up the difference. Has anyone actually figured out how much haste can boost HoTs (theoretically).

One: Blizzard Devs remarked on the idea of “DPSing to Heal” (I can’t find the post) and pretty much just said “interesting but hard to balance” and something not necessarily all healers would enjoy being forced to do. So the damage would have to be pretty weak/interfere too much with healing in order for it not to be mandatory of healers.
Two: Our mana is supposedly going to be much more strained in the expansion unless we are efficient with our spell casts. Right now in fights where the raid could actually use some extra DPS to beat enrage timers, I am usually crunching to heal & low on mana. That could change in Cata but I doubt it. And even with Fury of the Stormrage you have to cast heals that crit to get the procs, so even if you are casting Nourish to get a free wrath proc, you’re potentially wasting mana spamming to get that proc. Weaving heals/DPS sounds fun for PvP but in a raid it doesn’t seem practical to me…
Third: Right now if a raid needs extra DPS and too many healers they would replace a healer with a DPS or have a healer swap specs. I don’t see having a healer’s still gimped and inefficient DPS being practical over bringing in another DPS so that the fights ends sooner/less healing is required (i.e. Saurfang).

I do see potential for say the beginning of the fight popping ToL CD to do some initial damage before much healing is needed and so that the CD will be up by the time the healing is typically crunched towards the end of the fight. Again it probably wouldn’t be a significant amount of damage but it could make things more interesting for us.

Just my 2 cents! Overall, I am pleased with the changes, and the fact that we seem to be able to play with our talents a little more. There are mandatory talents, yes, but I see a lot of room for fun… it’s cool hearing people already talking about speccing Solar Beam, etc for utility.

Oh the possibilities!

I like my tree the way it is, but think about, if there where no changes then we would go 4 years (WOTLK + CAT) with essentially the same healing set up. That will get boring and we would likely lose tree healer’s to other healing classes with new spells to play with.

I’m in favour of almost all these changes, in whatever format they end up in … I just dont want to lose my base tree-form. Why you ask ?

Night Elf males look ridiculous when they cast spells. Seriously Blizz … a fist pump ?? At least there is a sex change option now

Blizz has shown boomkin a lot of love in the all the expansions. They had no CC that was useable indoors and they’ve never had a silence. Adn look at them now! Cyclone, Entangling Roots inside, Typhoon, Starfall, and the removal of that silly mana-for-melee mechanic.

Now they’ll have a pretty unique silence, Starsurge, and a spec specific Eclipse mechanic. Oh and that level 80 mushroom spell. Lucky owls…