Druid Heal!

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!

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!).

There aren’t many Idols that are viable for PvE. The pvp-ones all buff the end bloom of Lifebloom, which I do not see a tree in PvE actively using. There are three Idols I think are viable:
Rejuvenation
- Idol of Pure Thoughts: Increases the periodic healing of rejuvenation by 33 (can be bought with 30 Venture Coins in Grizzly Hills). Although the BC idol Harold’s Rejuvenating Broach might be better: Increases the spellpower of Rejuvenation by 86. (Have to test this).
- Idol of Awakening: Reduces the mana cost of Rejuvenation by 106 (random drop in Naxxramas 25 man). Mana shouldn’t be a problem with Rejuvenation because you will not cast it as much. The lifebloom idol will give you more!

Lifebloom
- Idol of Lush Mosh: Increases the periodic healing of Lifebloom by 106 (can be bought with 15 Emblems of Heroism).

This is the one you want, it buffs Lifebloom greatly (at approx 1700 +spellpower it means a ± 950 tick with a 3 stack Lifebloom).