Druid Heal!

My fellow druids, I wish you a very good and productive new year!

2010 will bring us the Fall of the Lich King and probably a new expansion which will keep us restoration druids happy

Some tidbits from 2009:

- Druidheal was visited 240.000 times this year with an average of about 660 visitors per day (and climbing);
- The busiest day on druidheal was the 8th of september with 1.205 visitors;
- Most read page was the Resto Druid Guide with 83.000 visitors, this month was the best month with 10.000 visitors;

I know they are just numbers, but to me it is a incentive to keep updating my Druid healing guide because I seem to write sensible stuff for a change . Thank you for your continued support!

Druid Resto Mega Guide updated and overhauled.

Maybe you have noticed it already, but the druid resto guide has been updated with all new stuff. Enjoy!

With the nerf to Gift of the Earthmother in patch 3.3 the haste landscape has changed a bit. This post covers the changes to haste needed to achieve your much loved 1.0 second global cooldown again!

How does haste scale with your cast time?

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 and Celestial Focus. Another talent that lowers you casttime is Naturalist, but it only affects Healing Touch and not through haste.
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 are sorted.

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 in the same amount of time 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. It might be reachable, but at a huge cost of other attributes which are more important.

You can get the gcd of your instant healing spells down to 1 second. How? Through Gift of the Earthmother, Celestial Focus, possible raid buffs such as Moonkin Aura/Swift Retribution Aura (3% haste) and Wrath of Air Totem (5% haste) and haste from gear. How much haste does a druid need with or without these talents and buffs? These haste numbers will give you a gcd of 1 second on Rejuvenation and Wild Growth:

As you might have noticed Gift of the Earthmother treats Lifebloom differently. For Lifebloom it gets 10% from total haste and 10% extra haste (so 20% total). This means you need less haste to get a gcd of 1 second for Lifebloom.

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).

Now tell me, you voted yes or no for Celestial Focus in the last poll, still sticking with your choice? I am curious!

Our last poll was about preferencing attributes, most of you agreed with spellpower, haste, spirit, crit. In my opinion its all about the current state of your gear. #1 is definately spellpower, but a druid with no spirit isn’t a real tree. Haste and crit is for the people out there with t8/9/10 gear. I’d say go for haste unless you have the t9 set bonusses!

Now for the new poll:

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Raaff as a feral druid, what a change. In my 4,5 years of playing a druid I was always healing. In vanilla World of Warcraft it was mandatory to heal as a druid in raids (go look at the tier set bonuses). That changed a bit in The Burning Crusade: cat, bear and mookin became viable specs. The creation of Tree of Life and Lifebloom made healing very interesting and quite cool. Still no interest from Raaff into other specializations.

For leveling in Wrath of the Lich King I used moonkin to level, since my healing gear was quite nice for it. It was not optimal, but it was way better then questing in restoration spec. While dual-talents are made for druids most people agree that it makes playing so much more fun and finding pugs easier. It made me delve into a spec I never would have tried before: Feral Combat, cat.

Cat specialization is one of the hardest things to master in my opinion. But when you do your likely to churn out some nice dps. Although I have much to learn. Being in melee range took some getting used too, mind you I have been ranged for most of my playing time. I seem to loose a lot of dps not doing any dps while I search for placement and survival. Other raid members seem to cope fine with it, but to me its entirely new world. Eventually I will get the hang of it, as I did with cat spell priorities.

Most fun of being a cat is the theorycraft part, agility or armor penetration, stacking hit or not? I see some posts for the future!

Any pointers are welcome, I am still learning….

PS: druiddps.com

#1 was crit vs. haste, you chose haste. But how about this one?

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And do leave comments!