Recent statement

Few days ago, Ghostcrawler posted this about "we use more than 2 spells" :

We just don't think the data bear that out. I'm looking at a random parse for a heroic Icecrown 25 druid who healed 80% of his or her damage with Rejuv, 17.5% with Wild Growth and 2.3% with Swiftmend. That is literally 99% of healing, though I suppose you could be charitable and assume the Swiftmends did something with Regrowth. This result is very typical. Presumably this healer is no slouch, since he or she is handling the most challenging content in the game. You could argue I suppose that he or she would have been an even better healer with more buttons, but the fact is, the raid cleared the instance. This healer is not doing anything wrong. This healer figured out that ignoring those other buttons didn't really slow the group down much. We think that is a design flaw. If we saw, say the two-button druid healing Vault of Archavon and Marrowgar and the five-button druid healing heroic Sindragosa and Lich King, then it probably wouldn't be the kind of thing we were so aggro about.

We think druids are too effective when they only use a couple of spells. Several players called me on that saying they used all of their tools and only "bad druids" used two spells. I called them on that, saying that these so called "bad druids" were clearing every boss in the game, on heroic mode, using only two spells. So if they are truly the bad druids, there isn't enough separation between good and bad. More than likely, I think there aren't many bad druids beating LK 25 heroic, and that some druids are giving too much credit to the size of their toolbox when only a few tools are doing all the work.

Needless to say that I do disagree with most of what he said here. Maybe he just forgot that the so called content is not challenging at all and he is partially true because of that point not because of the design of the class.

When you take a look at parses, you can caricature :

- 90% of druids are just playing with Rejuv and Wild Growth and you can easily pull insane number with this "playstyle" because this is the most throughput oriented way to play. Then you feel like you are doing well, because you are healing a lot. Watching at logs you'll see roughly what GC said : +-3% of their healing with everything else.

- 9% of druids are using a bit more their spells. Rejuv and WG are still healing a lot and it's hard to see exactly where is the frontier. If you take a close look at logs you'll see some Swiftmend casted, some Lifebloom and probably some Regrowth and Nourish, for a total amount of 6-8% of their healing. Indeed the line is very thin.

- Then you have the rest, that push deeper into Lifebloom, Nourish, Regrowth, Swiftmend. But afterall it won't go far more than 15% of their healing. Nonetheless,  it's always about number of Swiftmend, number of Nourish, Lifebloom uptime, overhealing on these spells and all of that compared to effective healing. Overhealing really depends on the boss you fight, then on number of healers in the raid and finally on reactivity. Again the frontier with the last category isn't clear.

This explanation is only for few bosses like Sindragosa Halion and Festergut where tank and raid healing is important. On other bosses many druids will find themselves using more than only Rejuvenation and Wild Growth but that two spells will still be a large amount of their heal. In fact other bosses can be done by many manners. I don't say all ways are successful but you can't heal on Saurfang with only Rejuvenation and Wild Growth as soon as you want to be a bit efficient.

On Sindragosa, Halion and Festergut, many druids will only use Rejuvenation and Wild Growth. Yet, these bosses aren't really hard and that's probably why you can still succeed doing only that. But after all, you would do a far better job using more spells and, to be more precise, assisting a lot more on tanks.

The main issue is that logs won't tell much. We all agree that the content isn't really challenging and that's why this is hard to determine in what kind of category a druid is. You would have a far better view of it if you would do ICC with 4 healers only because this is currently too easy to heal.

Then why bothering yourself casting anything else than our 5x1 rotation? Probably because you should never be enough of the minimum.

Having seen and experienced the changes in Cataclyslm, I hope what GC said will be true. But in a certain manner I feel like we won't be as good as we can be now : being able to do such a good tank+raid healing at the same time.