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The resto druid buffs that Ghostcrawler hinted at a few days ago have finally hit the 5.3 PTR – and the changes should make for some happy trees out there.
First, Swiftmend sees it’s AOE healing increased from 8 yards to 10 yards. With so many fights being “/range 8” this tier, it means that druids could possibly hit 2 people. It will also help those druids healing lazy stackers where “stack on the same pixel” is really subjective!
Swiftmend area-of-effect component now heals injured allies within 10 yards, up from 8 yards.
Next, the tank CD Ironbark has seen it’s cooldown reduced from 2 minutes to 1 minute. This is a good change, and hopefully we will see more druids using this regularly to help out their tank healers. It seems to be a very underused spell by druids, particularly for those in guilds who aren’t doing cutting edge progression, so druids should feel free to use it a lot more liberally with the reduced CD.
Ironbark now has a cooldown of 60 seconds, down from 2 minutes.
Wild Mushroom: Bloom has also received significant upgrades. This is also underused by resto druids but it can be extremely powerful when used correctly. First, it has been buffed by 100%, which will double the output from this spell. Then the increase to 10 yards from 8 yards will be great and require less precision in placement by the druid. And lastly, Rejuvenation overhealing will now also contribute to Wild Mushrooms. Hopefully these changes will help this vastly underused spell get some more play.
Wild Mushroom: Bloom now heals all allies within 10 yards (up from 8 yards) for 100% more, and includes bonus healing from Rejuvenation overhealing.
Ghostcrawler also tweeted a bit of clarification on the Wild Mushroom changes…
Our Mushroom patch note is confusing people. It now heals for double (+100%) what it does on live, which includes Rejuv overhealing.
And of course, there was the Druid-wide change to Tranquility.
Druids have been pretty weak this tier, especially when raiding in groups heavy on the shields (discs and holy pallies) although if they are in a non-shield raid group (or perhaps with only one shield class), their heals can really shine. These 5.3 PTR changes, while not live, should make some resto druids pretty happy.
