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!

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 like to know how you feel about crit vs. haste. Haste makes us cast faster and spend more mana. Crit makes us heal more and spend less mana. Which to choose?

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OH and do tell my why via a comment please!

Attributes

Your druid will want to have a lot of the following attributes on gear:

1. Spellpower: it will strengthen your healing spells. How much it will strengthen your healing spells differs from spell to spell;
2. Spirit: Spirit increases your mana regeneration and your health regen, plus gives your +15% of your spirit to healing in Tree of Life form;
3. Intellect: Intellect increases your mana pool (15 manapoints per 1 intellect), mana regeneration and spell critical hit;
4. MP5: Mana regeneration is the mana you regenerate in 5 seconds while not casting or while casting;
5. Stamina: Stamina increases your health points.

Other stats that are interesting to Trees are:
- haste : reducing your global cooldown (1,5 seconds before you can cast another spell it is an inverse spell cast time, you will only notice it on instant spells) or spellcast duration
- spell crit :  it gives you a chance on a ± 50% higher heal.
Which stat should you go for? Choose one until it is satisfactory for you, then focus on the other.  But it will be very hard to profit from both.

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Now we have progressed to a gear level that has enough of our base stats spellpower, spirit and intellect other stats like haste and critical strike chance become more important. I already wrote about Haste, you can read it here, but how does crit work? It is becoming more important, especially now we have the new Tier 9 set bonuses that are all about crit:

- 2 set: + 5% critical strike bonus to Nourish;
- 4 set: Your Rejuvenation ability now has a chance for its healing to be critical strikes.

Critical Strike

Every time you cast a spell you have a chance of getting a bonus on the result. The bonus is 50 – 100% when it is a damage spell (depending on talents) and 50% on a healing spell. The chance to get a critical strike depends on your critical strike chance and of course more critical strike chance means more probability of a critical strike. The formula for calculating your critical strike percentage is:

Critical strike percentage = ((Intellect/166.6667) + 1,85) + (Critical Strike Rating/45,91)

The formula tells us that you get more critical strike by accumulating either Intellect (166,67 intellect = 1% crit) or Critical Strike Rating (45,91 rating = 1%). The easiest way to boost your critical strike chance is getting critical strike rating found on gear. If you are not yet raiding you will get critical strike mostly by accumulating Intellect, critical strike rating is hard to get on pre raid gear. Having said that, critical strike is not important until you become fully raid geared and it starts to make a real difference. It is important to remember that your HoTs can not crit, only direct heals can crit: Healing Touch, Nourish, Regrowth and the Lifebloom bloom.

Next to gear you can boost you critical strike rating by choosing the right talents. The following talents improve your critical strike chance:

1. Nature’s Bounty : 25% extra on Regrowth and Nourish;
2. Natural Perfection: 3% extra on all spells;
3. Nature’s Majesty (Balance tree): 4% extra on Healing Touch and Nourish.

Or summed up by spell:

1. Nourish +29% or + 32%;
2. Regrowth  + 25% or + 28%;
3. Healing Touch +4% or +7%.

An example:

A certain druid has a 1029 intellect and 438 critical strike rating that means he has a critical strike chance of 17,57% on all his spells. The above mentioned spells have a bonus through talents (between brackets with Natural Perfection):

• Nourish : 17,57 + 29 = 46,57% (49,57%);
• Regrowth:17,57 + 25 = 43,57% (46,57%);
• Healing Touch: 17,57 + 4 = 21,57% (24,57%).

As you can see Nourish and Regrowth benefit the most from crit and if you use these spells a lot it is good to pick up a few pieces of gear with critical strike rating.

Tier 9 Set Bonus

Nourish has the potential of getting a bonus to critical strike chance of 34/37% with the 5% of the set bonus, which is a lot! If you use Nourish a lot this is a set bonus for you.

I am not so sure about the 4 set bonus. I assume it will take your normal crit chance into account. The success of this set bonus depends on how much critical strike chance your druid has and how much you actually use Rejuvenation. Since nobody has had the chance to test this set bonus I am sceptical of this bonus. The 4 set bonus of T8 (your Rejuvenation spell also provides an instant heal for your target) is a lot better where you are sure of an extra instant base tick (not benefitting from Genesis, Improved Rejuvenation, or Gift of Nature. It is benefitting from Empowered Rejuvenation, Master Shapeshifter, and Tree of Life).

Next post is all about the Druid guide again, Part 4: attributes.