Druid Heal!

I know, I know, I have been slacking shamelessly on posting some nice tidbits for you to read. There is so much to share I have not had the time to aggregate it for you and post it here. But fear not! I am working on a complete rewrite of my druid guide with all the 3.1 changes incorporated.

So what to do in the meanwhile? Maybe visit Keeva on her site Tree Bark Jacket, she made an excellent write up on healbott (grid incoming). Or if you are not bothered with addons maybe compare some gear for the upcoming patch in my mana regen calculator.

Any other requests, comments are welcome!

T8 set bonusses from the new PTR build!

T8 2 set bonus — Increases the healing done by your Swiftmend spell by 10%.
T8 4 set bonus — Your Rejuvenation spell also instantly heals your target for its periodic healing amount.

Nice! Rejuvenation is going to rock the house!

Nature’s Grace re-designed: All spell criticals have a 33/66/100% chance to grace you with a blessing of nature, increasing your spell casting speed by 20% for 3 seconds.

Bah! no more 0,5 sec of your regrowth’s (they critted a lot), which effectively means another tiny nerf to regrowth. The bonus is now 0,4 seconds (20% of 2 seconds).
Bonusses on other healing spells:
Healing touch : 3 seconds – 0,6 sec
Healing touch with naturalist: 2,5 seconds – 0,5 sec
Healing touch glyphed with naturalist: 1,5 seconds – 0,3 sec
Nourish: 1,5 seconds – 0,3 sec.

It will be very hard to get your casttime below 1 second for Nourish and Healing Touch or bring a lot of haste (more then 448 to be exact). Now lets hope the 20% casttime bonus doesn’t scale with your effective casttime or you will have to bring even more haste!

There’s a lot of QQ around on forums and blogs all over the internet because of the lifebloom changes. I will wait and see to form an opinion, the changes aren’t even on the PTR yet! But that doesn’t mean we can’t do the math. Warning calculations! I have thought long and hard about the lifebloom changes and I thought lets calculate some stuff to make it more clear for me and maybe you!

First a few things

Disclaimer: this is just an investigation into how this would work for us druids IF these changes are applied. The mana cost of lifebloom is increased by 100% but it could also be a lower value. I hope I didn’t make any errors, if you find one tell me!

- when you let the lifebloom bloom you will get your base mana per application back, so I assumed this would be the base mana before talents and bonusses;
- the base mana for a lifebloom is 14% * 3496 = 489 mana;
- the mana cost for a lifebloom with the T7 2 set bonus and Tree of Life is 489 * (1 – 0,05 – 0,20) = 367 mana, which would mean 734 with the proposed changes;
- calculations are made with Nature’s Splendor and the Glyph of Lifebloom resulting in a 10 second HoT;
- the healing from a lifebloom at 1911 spellpower is 329 and a 2.763 bloom (including all talents etc etc, doesn’t matter much for the calculations because these numbers are the same for both situations), Regrowth costs 720 mana and heals for 6.190 initial and 548 per tick, Rejuvenation costs 447 and heals for 1547 per tick and Nourish (with 3 HoTs and T7 4 set bonus) costs 547 mana and heals for approximately 6.829;
- I took the base numbers: I did not take into account crit because it would make the calculation complicated and its not needed for comparing the differences, assuming a crit now will be the same as after applying the changes.

Lets get cracking!

Assume the following spells are cast on a MT pre patch 3.1 untill the lifebloom needs to be refreshed (yes I use Nourish, quite happy with it):

Lifebloom (0) > Lifebloom (1,5) > Lifebloom (3,0) > Rejuvenation (4,5) > Regrowth (6,0) > Nourish (8,0) > Nourish (9,5) > Nourish (11,0) > Lifebloom (13,0) healing for 42.163 hp.

This will cost you 1101 mana to stack lifebloom and 367 to refresh, 447 mana for the rejuvenation, 720 for the regrowth and 1641  mana for the Nourish. Total cost: 4.276 mana.

Now assume the following spells are cast on a MT after the changes in patch 3.1 untill the lifebloom blooms:

Lifebloom (0) > Lifebloom (1,5) > Lifebloom (3,0) > Rejuvenation (4,5) > Regrowth (6,0) > Nourish (8,0) > Nourish (9,5) > Nourish (11,0) > Bloom (13,0) healing for 49.465 hp.

As you see the only difference is that I let the Lifebloom  bloom instead of refreshing. This will cost you 2202 mana to stack lifebloom and 1467 return from the bloom, 447 mana for the rejuvenation, 720 for the regrowth and 1.641 mana for the Nourish. Total cost: 3.543 mana. Now it seems you are better of, you heal more (the lifebloom blooms and blooms times 3) and you spend less mana. But the catch is you need to reapply the lifebloom stack where in the old situation you can continue casting nourish (regrowth and rejuvanation still running):

Old situation at refresh:

Lifebloom (0) > Lifebloom (1,5) > Lifebloom (3,0) > Rejuvenation (4,5) > Regrowth (6,0) > Nourish (8,0) > Nourish (9,5) > Nourish (11,0) > Lifebloom (13,0) > Nourish (14,5) > Nourish (16,0) healing for (42.163 + 14,645) 56.808 hp. The mana cost is 4.276 (see above) plus 1.094 is a total of 5.370 mana.

New situation after bloom:

Lifebloom (0) > Lifebloom (1,5) > Lifebloom (3,0) > Rejuvenation (4,5) > Regrowth (6,0) > Nourish (8,0) > Nourish (9,5) > Nourish (11,0) > Bloom (13,0)/Lifebloom (13,0) > Lifebloom (14,5) > Lifebloom (16,0) healing for (49.465 + 2.961) 52.426 hp. The mana cost is 3.543 (see above) plus a 3 stack Lifebloom minus the refund (assuming you let it bloom again) is 735 mana for a total of 4.287 mana.

Now lets look at some differences:

old : HPM = 10,58   HPS =  56.808/17,5 = 3.246
new : HPM = 12,23  HPS = 52.426/17,5 = 2.985

So it seems the healing per mana increases and the healing per second is down. So we will be more efficient, but we have lower output over time. But this does not take into account the possible overhealing involved. You cannot time the damage a tank gets in 10 seconds (on some encounters you can like Loatheb and Maexxna) so the bloom on a lifebloom could all be overhealing. This could make you decide to refresh the lifebloom, but at a cost: you don’t get the mana return from your applications. This will result in a total mana cost of 5.370 (old mana cost) plus 4 times 367 (the mana cost was doubled so add 4 times the old mana cost of lifebloom) makes a total of 6.838 mana.

new: HPM = 56.808/6.838 = 8,3 HPS= 3.246

If we can time our blooms at the right time we have a new powerfull tool at our hands. However most of the times this will not be the case. Our main heal has just been made more expensive and we will have to choose who to roll it on. No more rolling on multiple targets, more use of other spells.

Got something to share drop me a note or leave a comment!

Edit: I recalculated and found some errors, updated post. The outcome remains the same.

I don’t have a lot of time, but I felt I should post something about it: the Lifebloom changes. Ghostcrawler explains.

There are changes incoming to the lifebloom spell according to the patchnotes:

Lifebloom: Mana cost of all ranks doubled. When Lifebloom blooms or is dispelled, it now refunds half the base mana cost of the spell per application of Lifebloom, and the heal effect is multiplied by the number of applications.

So what does this mean? It means our lifebloom spell is going to be used differently because:

1. it becomes more expensive to cast and roll a 3 stack (1 Lifebloom costs 366* mana this will become 732 mana, a 3 stack cost will go from 1098 to 2196 mana);
2. but if you let it bloom/ it gets dispelled the mana cost will remain the same because you get 50% base mana (= 230 mana) back;
3. you get a higher bloom (e.g. 1 stack 3000 hp, 2 stacks 6000 hp, 3 stacks 9000 hp).

(*A lifebloom costs 366 with the 2 set T7 bonus in Tree Form).

I am not sure what to think about these changes, I am a bit confused. Healing with Lifebloom is going to change/change a bit/not going to change? I’ll post my thoughts when I got ‘m straight!

Now for some spring-like sunshine! (Its here!).