Druid Heal!

Here are the changes notable for restoration druids in Patch 3.1 (remember NOT FINAL):

Glyphs

• Glyph of Rebirth – Players resurrected by Rebirth are returned to life with 100% health. (Old: Increases the amount of health on a character brought back to life via Rebirth by 100%.);
• Glyph of Wild Growth  – Wild Growth now affects up to 6 targets;
• Glyph of Nourish  – Your Nourish heals an additional 6% for each of your heal over time effects present on the target;
• Glyph of Barkskin – Reduces the chance you’ll be critically hit by melee attacks by 1 to 0% while Barkskin is active.

Skills

• Abolish Poison now ticks every 3 secs for 12 secs. (Previously ticked every 2 secs for 8 secs).

Talents

• Improved Mark of the Wild (Tier 1) now also increases all of your total attributes by 1/2%.
• Intensity (Tier 3) now allows 17/33/50% of mana regeneration to continue while casting. (Previously 10/20/30%)
• Improved Regrowth (Tier 6) renamed Nature’s Bounty. Increases the critical effect chance of your Regrowth and Nourish spells by 5/10/15/20/25%. (Previously increased just regrowth crit by 10/20/30/40/50%)
• Replenish (Tier 9) renamed Revitalize;
• New Talent* Improved Barkskin, Tier 10, 2 point talent – Increases the damage reduction granted by your Barkskin spell by 5/10%, and increases resistance to Dispel mechanics by 30/60% while under the effect of Barkskin.

The notable changes are the buffs to Nourish! The new Talent Nature’s Bounty Nourish becomes a very good heal although the same talent is nerfed for Regrowth (from 50% crit to 25% crit). But it should mean that nourish will crit for about the same values as regrowth only without the HoT, which gives us a cheaper spell then a full (glyphed) regrowth! So instead of renewing regrowths will most likely cast Nourish when Regrowth is up. Another buff is the Glyph of Nourish: +6% for every HoT present, which is Imba with the T7 4 set bonus + 5% per HoT, effectively making +11% per HoT! Which could mean a max of +44% to Nourish (Regrowth, Lifebloom, Rejuvenation and Wild Growth). More crit and more healing to Nourish, 3.1 is the Nourish Patch for us Druids…

The other changes were already known (revitalize, intensity) or aren’t notable (sorry people, this is a PvE blog). I will update this post when there’s more to tell!

Want to compare stats of your old gear with the gear in patch 3.1? Or do you want to know how the changes to mana regen will affect your druid? See my mana regen calculator / gear compare calculator!

Update: I have Raaff on the PTR (Raaffie on Brill test realm), and the calculators seems correct with my values of Spirit/Intellect and MP5!.

Want to compare some gear? Want to see what the new mana regen will be for your character after patch 3.1? Please see my mana regen compare calculator!

I would very much like your feed back, comments and bug reports!

Enjoy!

Update #1: PTR up, now to have my char show up! Let the testing commence!
Update #2: I have Raaff on the PTR (Raaffie on Brill test realm), and the calculators seems correct with my values of Spirit/Intellect and MP5!.

As announced the mana regeneration will change in 3.1. Ghostcrawler has written some specifics about the changes on the PTR forums. As was pointed out earlier the game developers feel that the mana regeneration while not casting is to high and that druids (and priests) can use the OOFSR (Out Of Five Second Rule) time to regen a lot of mana. This is the reason Blizzard has made some changes to the mana regen formula and the mana regen talents:

- the base mana regen constant is lowered by 40%, for level 80 it was approximately 0.005575 and will be 0.003345;
- the effect of the talent Intensity is increased and now have the values are 17/33/50%;
- these two changes should lower the mana regeneration while not casting (OOFSR) and approximately the same mana regeneration while casting.

These are the changes that Blizzard has implemented on the incoming PTR, and are subject to change because they need to be tested and aren’t for real untill they go live! But it would be nice to take a closer look on these changes.

Mana regeneration formula

What does this mean for the mana regen formula? The formula is:

Base Mana Regen_{Int, Spi, Level} = S * Base_Regen(Level) * √I * 5 + 0.001

The “Base_Regen(Level)” has been lowered by 40% and now has the value of 0.003345. What would this mean for your mana regen? Lets fill the formula again!

If I use this formula on Raaff with 990 spirit and 850 intellect the mana regen would be:

990*0.003345*sqrt(850)*5 + 0,001 = 483.74 (was: 804,57)

This would mean a decrease of 320.83 mana per 5 seconds while not casting or 39,8%. The mana regeneration while casting is:

483.74 * 0,5 = 241 (was: 241)

There are no changes to my mana regeneration while casting. It seems that these changes indeed mean no changes to mana regeneration while casting.

Value of Spirit and Intellect

But what does the change to the formula mean to regeneration from Spirit and Intellect and MP5? Lets take a look at my older post Let’s do the Math and follow the same route!

Raaff gets more spirit!
Lets assume I got a new piece of gear with + 10 spirit and the same amount of intellect, my mana regen would increase by:

(1000*0,003345*sqrt(850)*5+0,001) – 483,74 = 488,35 – 483,74 = 5,61  (was: 8,13)

My mana regen would increase by approximately 1 spirit = 0,56 (was: 0,81) mana regen while not casting and 1 spirit = 0,28 (was: 0,24) while casting.

Raaff gets more intellect!
Now I got a new piece of gear with +10 intellect and the same amount of spirit, my mana regen would increase by:

(990*0,003345*sqrt(860)*5+0,001) – 483,74 = 485,57 – 483,74 = 2,83 (was: 4,72)

With an increase of intellect and no increase of spirit my mana regen would increase by approximately 1 intellect = 0,28 (was: 0,47) mana regen while not casting and 1 intellect = 0,14 (was: 0,14) while casting.

Raaff is lucky and gets more spirit and intellect!
Now I got a new piece of gear with +10 spirit and + 10 intellect, my mana regen would increase by:

(1000*0,003345*sqrt(860)*5+0,001) – 483,74 = 491,21 – 483,74 = 8,47 (was: 12,89)

With an increase of both stats my mana regen would increase by approximately 1 intellect and spirit = 0,85 (was: 1,29 mana regen) and 0,42 (was: 0,39) mana regen while casting.

Conclusion:
- Mana regeneration while casting has increased slightly when you get more spirit, and is even when you get more intellect;
- Mana regeneration while not casting has been nerfed by approximately 40%;
- It seems the projected changes do what Blizzard intends to do.

I don’t mind these changes, it makes healing more interesting and less spammy. A bit of challenge doesn’t hurt! Now bring on Ulduar!

Things to consider:
- value of MP5, will it rise?
- what will the nerf to spirit mean to innervate?
- what will change to clearcasting talents?

Do you have any ideas? mail me or simply place a comment!

P.S. Placing a nice calculator on my website, keep an eye on this website!

I have been asked to tell you something more with haste and the haste cap. Haste increases the speed you cast your spells (lowers the casttime) with and lowers your global cooldown (gcd). The global cooldown cannot be lowered under 1 second. However the lowering of your casttime is not limited.  There is no such thing and a haste cap, you can have infinite haste untill your spell is instant, which is unreachable. Your haste stat can influenced by gear (including gems and enchants), talents or aura’s (buffs, elixirs, totems etc). The only talent that can lower your gcd or spellcast time through haste is Gift of the Earthmother. Another talent that lowers you casttime is Naturalist, but it only affects Healing Touch and not through haste.

Formula of haste

Haste_needed = Casttime/ (1+Casttime_wanted/100)

- haste_needed is the x% of cast speed increase
- casttime is the casttime of the spell
- 1% increased spell cast = 32,79 haste rating
- global cooldown is 1,5 seconds, which can be lowered to a minimum of 1 second.

Global Cooldown

The Global Cooldown (or gcd) is the time you have to wait in between spellcasts before you can cast another spell. Lowering the gcd would give you the ability to cast more spells and thus more healing. If you use the formula above to calculate how much haste you need to lower the gcd to 1,0 second, you will need 50% increased speed or 1640 haste. Which is unreachable (maybe it is reachable, but at a huge cost). With all possible raid buffs such as Moonkin Aura (3% haste) and Wrath of Air Totem (5% haste) you would need 1275 haste, which seems also unreachable. Is haste a stat a druid should look at? Yes, but only when you feel you have other stats like Spellpower, Spirit, Intellect and MP5 sorted.

You can get the gcd of your instant healing spells down to 1 second. How? Through Gift of the Earthmother and lots of haste, but not as high as the numbers noted before. To get a global cooldown of 1 second on  Lifebloom, Rejuvenation and Wild Growth you need a speed increase of your spell (in this case gcd) of 15,38% or 505 haste, remember that the 20% from Gift of the Earthmother is applied after** any haste you have on gear. This number looks more reachable doesn’t it?

The question one could ask is: In what kind of setting do you actually want a gcd of 1 second? Mostly in a raid setting, a lower gcd means more spells that can be cast and results in more healing output. In a raid there are buffs like the Moonkin Aura (3% haste) and the Wrath of Air Totem (5% haste). How much haste does a druid need with or without these buffs?

Gift of the Earthmother – 15,38% or 505 haste (655)
Gift of the Earthmother/Moonkin Aura – 12% or 295 haste (541)
Gift of the Earthmother/Wrath of Air – 9,9% or 325 haste (469)
Gift of the Earthmother/Both – 6,9% or 225 haste (365)

This will give you a gcd of 1 second on Lifebloom, Rejuvenation and Wild Growth.

As you can see there is a kind of “soft” cap for haste in raids. Depending whether you talented Gift of the Earthmother and the available raidbuffs you need between 225 and 505 haste to reach a gcd of 1 second. In most raids you will find both buffs there, so thats why you will find the number of 225 haste around on other blogs and guides as a soft cap. Because above that number (assuming both buffs and a full talented Gift of the Earthmother) haste will still increase you spellcasting on non-instant spells.

Haste and casttime

Haste increases the speed of your spellcast. A nice stack of haste gives your druid more spells to cast in the same amount of time. Which means more healing output. If you look at the formula you will see that the longer the casttime the easier it is to lower your casttime. This is because haste is based on a percentage and not on a absolute value. As you can imagine 5% of a 3 second Healing Touch cast is higher the 5% of the 1,5 second Nourish cast. This also means you need more haste to get the same absolute amount of your spellcast (0,1 sec of healing touch 3 sec cast means 114 haste, on the 1,5 nourish cast it means 234 haste). Though a lower casttime is nice, if you stack too much haste you will lose some of the other stats that I think are better: Spellpower, Spirit, Intellect and MP5. Blizzard has said that it feels that haste and spell critical strike are inferior stats….

** At the time of writing this post, patch 3.0.8 has been applied. Phaelia at Resto4life claims that Gift of the Earthmother is now applied before your haste rating, this would mean a rise in needed haste. I haven’t tested it yet, but if that is correct the numbers concering gcd above are subject to change! I have put the numbers between brackets, for those wondering what the effect will be.

Another blue post, with more about the mana regen changes:

As we have suggested, we have become concerned that mana regeneration is currently too powerful, especially for healers. We want players to have to keep an eye on mana. We don’t want you to go out of mana every fight, but running out of mana should be a very real risk for sloppy playing or attempting content that you aren’t yet ready for. When mana regeneration is trivial then certain parts of the game break down – classes that offer Replenishment are devalued, stats that offer mana regeneration are devalued, and spells that are efficient are neglected in preference to spells with high throughput.
Here are a list of changes you are likely to see in 3.1. They will be available to try out on the PTR. Mana regeneration is somewhat technical, so please bear with us.
Regeneration while not casting (outside of the “five second rule”) will be decreased. We think that (1) the ability to cast heal over time spells and then sit back and (2) benefitting from a clearcasting proc that also gets you out of the five second rule both provide too much mana regeneration, even over short time periods.

This might be true, but I am not that much outside the FSR. Question is how much will they decrease it? Right now I have more then 1000 mp5 raid buffed, I think I could do it with 850 MP5 too.

To make this change, we are reducing mana regeneration granted by Spirit across the board. However we are also boosting the effects of talents such as Meditation that increase regeneration while casting. The net result should be that your regeneration while casting will stay about the same, but your not-casting regeneration will be reduced. This change will have little impact on dps casters, since they are basically always casting.
The specific talents and abilities being boosted are: Arcane Meditation, Improved Spirit Tap, Intensity, Mage Armor, Meditation, Pyromaniac and Spirit Tap. Yes this makes these “mandatory” talents even more mandatory, if such a thing is possible.

Boosting the effect such as Meditation, the Priest equivalent of the Druid’s Intensity, would mean druids would spend even less time outside of the FSR. Which would make point 1 have less impact. Spirit based regen is reduced, which would make MP5 a more valuable stat!

Since paladins rely less on Spirit as a mana-regeneration stat, we have to address them in other ways. We don’t want to change Illumination or Replenishment. However, we are going to increase the healing penalty on Divine Plea from 20% to 50%. Divine Plea was originally intended to help Protection and Retribution paladins stay full on mana. It should be a decision for Holy paladins, not something that is automatically used every cooldown.
In addition, we are also changing the way Spiritual Attunement works. In situations with a large amount of outgoing raid damage, as well as in PvP, this passive ability was responsible for more mana regeneration than we would like. We want to keep the necessary benefit it grants to tanking Protection paladins, while making it less powerful for Holy paladins in PvP or raid encounters with a lot of group damage.

This is not a pally blog!

We are also taking a close look at clearcasting procs themselves. One likely outcome is to change them to an Innervate-like surge of mana so that the net benefit is the same, but healers won’t shift to out-of-casting regeneration so often.
I am not sure what is meant by this, they are going to change it to mana returns it seems. Curious how this will unfold.

We balance around the assumption that even 10-player groups have someone offering Replenishment. To make this even easier on players we are likely to offer this ability to additional classes, as well as make sure that existing sources of Replenishment are more equitable.

As I read on some blog, if replenishment is mandatory why don’t you just delete it?

These changes are ultimately being done to bring the different healing classes more in line with each other as well as to give the encounter team more leeway when designing encounters, who can balance with these new mana regeneration numbers in mind. In a world with infinite healer mana, the only way to challenge healers is with increasingly insane amount of raid damage, so that global cooldowns become the limiting factor since mana fails to be. An example is the Eredar Twins in late Sunwell. We weren’t necessarily happy with that model, and this change hopefully allows us to move towards giving healing a more deliberate and thoughtful pace rather than frenetic spam.

This is something I like, more smart healing then spamming heals. The thing I don’t like is that they are making the healing more alike to make nicer boss fights. Its nice to have different types of healing, if its all the same…

I do agree something has to be done with mana regeneration because its silly right now. Even before Naxx it was hard to go out of mana as a druid. But I don’t know if the changes stated above will change this. We get less regen outside the FSR, but more inside the FSR. The value of spirit will go down, mp5 value will go up. I can’t wait to see it in action on the PTR and do some tests!