The Spirit Realm

*** Spells ***

- A new resurrection spell has been added for Druids and Shaman. Wanderer Astobin and Mystic Abomin in the Plane of Knowledge library have the scroll for sale. The spell returns 90% of a player's lost experience and can only be used while out of combat.

Something we have been after for some time, im glad we got it and I'm also glad it kept paladins ahead of us in rezzing capabilites by adding the OoC regulation (not sarcastic here).

EDIT:

I just looked at the data from alla, and apparently the cast time is 20 and it costs 700 mana. The cast time is pretty crappy, but I guess 90% rez with 20 sec cast time is better than nothing... It is attainable at level 59 also.

/em hugs his neares (female) parent class!

Always nice to be given pity abilities only because in 2 weeks an NPC people can hire would be better than our class in a group.

Yeah, well, you still port and snare better than they do. And you look much better in hotpants too!

Druid atk debuffs are much more powerful than you give them credit for AND you make no allowance for the Surge heal druids get that shm have no parallel to. Also, did you notice in your perusal of spdats that the shm "equal burst heal" costs *30%* more, thereby not just "taking into account" canni ability, but flat requiring that a shm with similar healing demands spend a fourth of his time casting something other than a heal? Heal amount over the five seconds of a single cast+recast might be the same, but healing output over the course of even a couple fights isn't.

Seriously, the "vastly superior" thing with regards to slow vs atk debuffing is just off the wall. The abilities are roughly equal in tier 2 SoF content, aside from casting time, and from there out atk debuffs are favored in effectiveness, to the point where even just the one best atk debuff is more powerful than Turgur's Swarm in Crystallos. As well consider that Beastlords, Enchanters, and Bards all have functional slows, but no other class reduces the differential of adding a druid to group for debuffing.

Solteris? You mean raid geared? That's not "appropriate", that's "overgeared". Crystallos difficulty was appropriate to raid tanks when it was prenerf Ashengate/Frostcrypt being appropriate for Demi/DK tanks, not a year and a half later for Solteris tanks. I know all about Solteris level gear, that's what twinks in my guild wear, for the most part. My own warrior twink is about half raid geared (8/20 slots Solteris/SoFtier2, all the rest is group stuff). I DUO Crystallos with that warrior. That's not in any way appropriate! It's outlandish and silly! Appropriate for Crystallos is 500 to 800 ac less than Solteris, and sketchier mods. I've done that, too, and it's ... "exciting" Survival actually depended on the healers and debuffers using all the tools available to them. When you were trying out CoA/demi (raid stuff still? hmm) tanks yourself, did you ever have the puller kite for a second so you could drop the full debuffs (Gelid Frost, Hand of Ro, Fixation of Ro circa 2008 here) on each mob, and only have the tank engage after casting Reptile? If not, why not? The extra tools aren't there just to turn "easy" into "cakewalk", they're supposed to turn "undoable" into "doable".

And btw, I don't quote devs on data. Devs aren't good sources for numbers. The right thing to do is go past the devs to the players they got the data from, or just plain generate it yourself. AC isn't as easy to check out as slow, but it's entirely doable.

The thing with attack debuffs vs slow comes down to druids needing to cast 2-4 spells to gain the same effectiveness as 1 slow spell. Further, I have seen it stated by a dev that druids are NOT supposed to be able to fully debuff a group mob.

Also, while I would not say solteris gear is required, the benefit from attack debuffs come into the same category of getting a better geared tank. To survive being 1 rounded in the upper zones, a tank needs solid ac. The more ac the tank has, the less benefit you gain from attack debuffs. There are a few other classes that can debuff attack, but I agree with you, it is not like the parity between shaman/chanter/beastlord slow spells. This is what makes it so hard to parse attack debuffs because any tank you use that would show significant gains from an attack debuff is more than likely too weak to survive the mob and can be 1 rounded or killed faster than either a druid OR shaman would be able to heal to save them.

If you want to look at the 30% increase in cost of shaman heals over druid heals, then you need to also take into consideration the mana regen of the classes. I bet if you were to test it out, shaman would come out WAY WAY more than 30% more than druids. I do not have the time atm to pull all the numbers though.

Burst heal spell with max spell haste from items and a cleric buff brings the cast time down to 2.3 seconds. The cast time of the adrenaline surge line is 1.8 seconds. That 0.5 seconds is not likely to make a HUGE difference. Also, the adrenaline line has a LONG recast timer to make up for its short cast time and HIGH mana cost. It is in the same line as a cleric's Desperate Renewal spell line.

Also, it would be unfair to compare druid/shaman healing and include Adrenaline line without considering the HoT spells that shaman gain which BY FAR are more efficient (but take time by their nature). Add to that the parity in Union of Spirits to Convergence of Spirits even though druid one costs MORE aa to get same effect. Then the shaman epic heals the group which will NEVER decay while the druid epic is all but obsolete with the next expansion.

The rez spell is helpful for when I am soloing and don't care for me whether I get a 90% or a 96% rez. However, in my experience over the past week, in a group without a cleric, people do not want a 90% rez and will wait til later to summon and get a cleric to cast a 96% rez on them.

Your data that Tanks-who-don't-need-help don't... need... help? Shocker. Groundbreaking, really. Astonishing. Mind boggling, I suppose, if ones mind is subject to boggling.

I think people don't ask about atk debuffing because they don't value it, not because it's not valuable.

People are used to healing badly and not working with the tools they have. It's a historical conditioning dating from the beginning, when the only good way to deal with damage was to CHeal a dude every half minute. Nothing else was even in the ballpark for effectiveness or efficiency. That is so very different than all the other actual healing abilities in the game. No matter what damage had been taken or how fast, as long as it wasn't death from full hp in under 12sec, the tank was just *poof* filled. Minor, Lesser, Healing, Greater, Superior, Remedy, all the way up to Light/Gemmi's/Puravida... all heal "some" hp, and how much you need to cast (dps vs hps), how much you can cast (efficiency) matters.

Everquest players don't have it in their blood yet to actually pay attention to dps. Sure, slowing a mob is visible, it puts more time in between swings for healer's bombs to land like old cheals. But healing someone to full hp using modern heals is being inefficient. If the tank doesn't end up somewhere below full, healers are truncating the efficiency of their heals. The scramble to get the next full heal off is insidious because it doesn't encourage a hps vs dps view. It doesn't encourage looking at dps at all.

A very parallel gap between actual interactions and what players look for existed in tanking for a very long time and until quite recently. See the paladin forums on this site for a mention of a tank being asked for the first time just a month or two ago while lfg "what's your ac?" instead of "what's your hp?". That's a big deal. HUGE in the context of this discussion, because raising tank ac and lowering mob atk is the same thing.

I did not make the claim that shaman burst heal spells cost 30% more mana than druids. I responded to that claim saying it was balanced by the superior mana regen abilities of shaman compared to druids.

Kumudil's point, and mine, was that those aren't forces in opposition. The mana cost of healing requires canni, which reduces the effective healing because it takes up fighting time. Consider an analogy? The fuel a Hummer SUV consumes to get across the county isn't "balanced" by a larger gas tank, it requires the larger gas tank, and the gas to fill it costs the owner much more than the gas for my Toyota Camry. Both automobiles are going the same distance, but the guzzler has to stop 3/4ths of the way to gas up again.

Using the gas tank analogy, a druid and a shaman have the same size gas tank (mana pool). The druid is more efficient at spending the fuel but the shaman is more efficient at generating (adding) more fuel to the tank during the trip. The amount of fuel that the shaman can generate more than compensates for the less efficient use of the fuel thereby having the net gain of being able to go for a longer time before needing to completely stop to fill up.

That's right, but it's not without cost. The hp cost hasn't been relevant for a long time, of course, but the time it takes in the middle of fighting still very much is. That we can go for a very long time when the pace of damage isn't critical seems not so important to shaman when shit hits the fan. When an encounter's success depends on how fast you can pour out how many hp from your mana bar into people taking damage, druids have been and remain ahead of shaman by a good margin, contributed to by the efficiency advantage of Granvida and also the fast casting and highly efficient Promised heal line and the continuing Adrenaline heals.

Shaman definitely have a stamina advantage in the long run, that's totally right. The same advantage does not scale down into healing output in a single fight, that's where I disagree with you. Shaman and Druid healing isn't the same now, despite the similar base healed amount of our respective 3.8sec direct heals.

I've found that most clerics don't even memorize their promised renewal spell. 18 seconds is just way to far down the line to count on. It's too long to count accurately, so most of the time the heal ends up hitting right before or right after a normal heal, and is therefore wasted. Clerics think it's a waste of a spell slot, and druids are generally a lot more stingy with our spell slots especially without a combo debuff. This new gate AA isn't going to help either, not too many of us keep that spell memmed, I know I don't.

Every good cleric I know uses Promised heals a ton. I've found that how much it's utilized is nearly a litmus test for skill in that class now. I expect to feel the same way about druids a month down the line. The spell casts in 0.25sec, costs 500 mana and lands for over 11k. It lands slowly, but easily fits twice in the time scale of a typical fight, three times on a named. An extra 30k+ healing so cheap and fast casting as to be almost free on both counts.

I am shocked at the concept of clerics not using their promised lines ........... seems like a waste not to, especially in groups. I would be doubly shocked if druids don't use their new promise heal in raids or groups, it is more beneficial for us to use this than it is to ignore it. And the whole I don't have a slot for it is ridiculous, configure your spell set for pure healing, debuffing, pure dps, heal/dps, whatever. We are now able to save spell sets and I'm sure as a druid you don't have one spell set ALL the time. Adjust yourself.

People are creatures of habit.

This expansion offers 3 new spells for druids that have long recast timers and therefore would really need to be up at almost all times. To obtain 3 new spell slots, I personally will be trading in a 2nd burst heal spell I usually have memmed for the Promised heal. I am losing my 1 floating spot to load buffs (thorns, regen, skin, preincarnation, etc) and will have to find another slot that can accomodate that need. And for the 3rd spot, I have to give up a debuff or reptile. Some would argue that reptile is useless, but that is not the point I am trying to make here.