Cascading Vim

Thade

DINOSAUR THADE
Druids are one of the two healers with group healing capabilities. Their current highest level group heal is from level 63, Circle of Vitality. It’s healing has not kept up with current hp pools. My druid with buffs has about 11000 hit points. Without daytime healing bonus, My druids circle of vitality heals for ~3750. Without a successful crit, I need to cast two of these to get my group out of danger from large aoes. A cleric group heal non-crit heals for over 6k. They only have to cast one group heal to get out of danger if it doesn’t crit, and a crit will fully heal the group from almost nothing. The druid group heal is also much slower than the cleric group heal; so on top of being far less mana efficient, it also takes considerably longer to heal a group.

Currently, the druid first runic spell has very limited uses. It does have a few niche applications where its quite useful (especially while duoing with something with a lot of hit points, like an enchanter pet which allows you to dump almost the entire heal into the pet), it is not something that is frequently cast. It suffers from being awkward to use, and requiring a particular set of conditions to be effective, and clashes with druids already incredibly full spell bar.

The spell was originally a new group heal, with a heal over time attached to it. It had too slow of a cast, and cost far too much mana for the amount of healing it did. However, at this point in time, I feel going back to its original intent, with a some changes and a slight twist, would suit the spell far better.

My suggestion:

Runic: Cascading Vim
Mana Cost: 825
Cast Speed: 4.5 Seconds
Range: 100
AE Radius: 100
Slot 1: Increase Hit Points by 1780
Slot 2: Reverse Splurt Heal Per tick: 950, 475, 237, 118
Cast on You: You are surrounded by blue revitalizing light

The thought process here is giving druids a group heal that is in flavor with what they are already about (heal over time spells), and allows them to have a large enough efficient group heal without stepping on clerics “huge burst healing” schtick. The first ticks are larger, that way in the event you need to cast multiple group heals due to constant AOE, you get more upfront healing.The heal over time is intentionally in slot two so it doesn’t stack with Relic: Sihala’s Empathy. If you have to spam the spell, you should get one hot tick between casts. This gives you a group heal that’s weaker than a clerics (when taking into account archaic/vessel of althuna) if you have to spam it, but equal if you can let it tick twice, and more efficient/total healing if all four ticks are effective healing.
 
As interesting of a suggestion this is, although I think I would prefer to keep vim even with it's too small radius and huge mana cost. Reason I say this is because changing Vim to this spell would make end game fights like Curator impossible for a druid to solo heal. If your issue with our group healing abilities is that our normal heal is too small and too slow I get you...even with druid group hot ticking it is not enough to full heal a group without a crit and even with crit sometimes still not enough depending on toons in the group.

Better fix would be to just add into the game a actual lvl 65 group heal for druids that is either faster cast time and or bigger heal. I can give it some thought to actually post a suggestion of the spell a little later but that is my input at this time
 
I will weigh in, this is not the team's official position or anything, just mine.

I'm resistant to the idea of replacing Vim, as I do think it's a useful tool for some situations (and completely hopeless for others). As with any class issues, the problem is always encroaching on cleric territory. I think the suggestion does a reasonably good job steering away from that by still making this a HOT and thus making heal crits apply per tick, making the healing game a bit more interesting and less...known. So that's cool. But replacing Vim? I'm not sold.

Instead, I'd almost be interested in having this become a quested/dropped spell or something alongside Vim. I have no idea whether this is something that would be considered, but it would have my support. Dropped class-specific rare spells do have a precedent in the game.

So yeah, cool spell, but I'd suggest it become an addition, rather than a replacement.
 
Also, in a nod to Woldaff, the cast message would have to be "Blue light emanates from your every pore."
 
I have no problem with it being available somewhere else. Only other current replacement would be refuge spell, otherwise it needs to go somewhere new, which is fine but no clue where to put it.
 
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There is a certain "big..." druid who may cry if you get rid of vim. that said, I recall many deaths at the hand of his vim casting... :)
 
if vim was to be changed or as a alternate spell one of the top things on my list for it would be add a guaranteed group heal then have its effects cascade to the other groups. because other groups frequently have another healer anyways and you might be the only healer for your group it sucks to do a vim and watch one of your group mates die because they needed a heal and vim didn't choose them.

here is a version I came up with if was going to be a rare spell. has same healing potential as vim but kinda more reliable hence the higher mana cost since it hits everyone in range, but less healing total in single group situations also heals those that may not need it. figure this would take same slot as circle of soothing. won't overwrite other hots and other hots for same slot will always overwrite it. that way you don't overwrite a hot that is better for circumstances like the spell reduction on paladin hots and so it can be overwritten by another hot when it cascades down to being weaker than other hots. The upfront healing is to buy a little time for the first hot tick to land.

Cascading Soothing
Mana Cost: 900
Cast Speed: 3.5 Seconds
Range: 100
AE Radius: 100
for group(2963 total group healing)(Circle of soothing is 2520 for comparison)
Slot 1: Increase Hit Points by 600
Slot 2: Reverse Splurt Heal Per tick: 1200,600,300,150,75,38
for raid(excluding own group) (1037 total group healing per group)
Slot 1: Increase Hit Points by 210
Slot 2: Reverse Splurt Heal Per tick: 420, 210,105,53,26,13
Cast on You: You are surrounded by blue revitalizing light
 
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