Druid Heal!

As it is now on the PTR the talent Gift of the Earthmother is changing:

- Reduces the base global cooldown of your Rejuvenation, Lifebloom and Wild Growth spells by 20%; to
- Increases your total spell haste with 10% (at 5/5)

Although this is going to be a nerf for our HoTs our direct heals will benefit. Now a nerf isn’t anything we can do about, just live with it. What will be the new (soft) cap?

Total haste rating needed to get a gcd of 1 second is 1640. With the talent that is lowered to 1312,1. That is a lot of haste to gather! But no fear, we have some raid buffs up our sleeves:

- get a moonkin and add 3% haste and lower the cap to 1203
- get a shaman with the Wrath of Air totem and add 5% haste and lower the cap to 1132

If you are lucky enough to have both in your raid group, your haste cap is lowered to: 1018 which is still a lot of ground to cover!

There a few things you can do to get your haste up:

- use haste trinkets, but you will only have a 1 second gcd whenever the trinket procs or gets used;
- consider the use of another balance talent: Celestial Focus and increase your haste by yet another 3% (haste cap 1203 or 902 with raid buffs);
- put Nature’s Grace to use: all spell criticals have a 100% chance to grace you with a blessing of nature, increasing your spell casting speed by 20% for 3 sec.

Now you know the numbers for 3.3. Its on the PTR so remember this can change!!!

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!).

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!.

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!

Blizzard has put some of the druid changes for 3.1 on their forum:

1. Savage Defense – this is a new passive ability. When a druid in Dire Bear form deals a melee critical strike, the druid gains a damage shield equal to 25% of their attack power. The next hit completely removes the shield regardless of how much damage was done.
2. Survival of the Fittest has had its bonus armor reduced to compensate for the above increase in damage mitigation.
3. Faerie Fire (and similar debuffs) now reduces armor by 5%. See Sunder Armor in the warrior update below for additional details.
4. Thorns and Nature’s Grasp can be cast in Tree of Life form.
5. Survival Instincts now works in Moonkin form.
6. Replenish – to avoid confusion, this talent has been renamed “Revitalize.” It now also works with Wild Growth.
7. We are also looking at increasing the sustained (not burst) damage of feral druids in cat form.

It seems our feral friends are getting some nice buffs!

Changes notable for trees:
- Thorns and Nature’s Grasp castable in ToL, nice but not really needed in PvE.
- Replenish has been renamed, yep it did cause some confusion. Now it works with WG, still not taking the talent: it sucks (very low proc)!

That said, nothing to worry or to be excited about. Next blue post please!