Balanced Undergrowth

Cataclysm Tree of Life Changes, and Why I Mostly Like Them.

Posted on June 25, 2010 by . Spells and Talents

For anyone that may not know, here’s what Blizzard had to say about Tree of Life form in their Cataclysm Class Previews.

Source

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.

From what I’ve read around the web, most people don’t like the change to Tree of Life form. Personally, I like it…and I like it quite a bit at that. The one word that comes to mind to describe why I like it, is utility. As an example: just last night in heroic Icecrown Citadel, while fighting Lady Deathwhisper, I was told to cyclone any of the mind controlled targets that I saw running around. This isn’t a problem for me, and I’m more than capable of doing it with the current Tree of Life setup. However, I noticed that once I cycloned someone (and was shifted out of Tree of Life form) I was left with a rather critical choice, one that other healers wouldn’t have to make. Either I spend a GCD right away on a heal to save someone (and stay out of Tree of Life form), or spend a GCD to shift back into Tree of Life form and hope I can still save that person.

While this situation may not be as extreme as I make it sound, it’s still something I dislike doing. As no surprise, I’m also one of those people that enjoys some lol-wrath spam on boring farm content or 5-mans. You could argue that to heal those things I don’t need the extra boost from Tree of Life, and you’d be completely right. Though if you look at the Druid talents for Cataclysm (as they stand now), there seems to be some interesting DPS type things sprinkled in. This makes me think we will see more fights where you’re ported into some room and you need to kill some add, or you die. Not to mention, more than once in my WoW career I’ve been told to DPS as much as I can during the end of a boss fight, where we’re fighting to beat the enrage timer.

On the less important side of things I like, I’ll finally be able to show off my awesome armor! This is more of a vain thing than actually useful for game play. As much as I like the Tree of Life model (along with its dance) I just don’t feel quite as awesome fighting a boss next to people with spikes and skulls and glowing stuff coming out of everywhere.

There are some things I don’t like about the new Tree of Life form, the biggest one is the cool down, and the talent that reduces the cool down. The standard cool down (as they have it in the talents now) is 5 minutes. This means that with -most- boss fights, I’ll probably only get one use out of it. Unless of course I use it right at the start, and then I might be able to use it again at the end…but that doesn’t really fit its intended use. With the Improved Tree of Life talent, you can get the cool down to 3.5 minutes. This may be enough to get a couple solid uses out of it on most boss fights, however, while I was going through talents I found that I had better areas to spend those points on. I guess only time and the final draft of talents will tell what I do with that, but right now it’s definitely going to be a one time thing on a boss fight to get through a tough healing moment.

Finally, the other thing I’m not too happy about is the 50% slow while in Tree of Life. I understand Blizzard’s reason for it (sort of). If you don’t know they’re reason, they more or less want us to have something to weigh against when deciding to use Tree of Life (other than needing a healing boost or not, I guess). The fight that comes to mind now is Algalon (I’m sorry if you’re not familiar with this fight). The slow movement speed might hurt your ability to get into the Black Holes in time, so that would be a moment where you’d have to weigh that run speed decrease against the mechanics of the fight to decide if you really want to pop your Tree of Life cool down to save the tank at that precise moment. That’s kind of a long winded explanation, and of course you’d make the decision in a split second, but I think that’s what Blizzard is getting at with the movement speed decrease. Really my only gripe with it is something like that isn’t a thing other classes need to necessarilyworry about with similar cool downs.

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