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!

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!!!

This is part 2 of my new resto druid mega guide 3.0: Glyphs.  A druid can improve or change their spells through glyphs, enchants for your spells. Glyphs might change the way you use your spells. You will have three Major Glyph and three Minor Glyph spots at level 80. Restoration druids have access to the following major glyphs:

• Glyph of Swiftmend – Your Swiftmend ability no longer consumes a Rejuvenation or Regrowth effect from the target. This means you don’t have to consume a recently casted Regrowth or Rejuvenation on your target and leads to more healing over time and mana efficiency. A druid without this glyph is handicapped, it makes swiftmend a very valuable spell;
• Glyph of Regrowth – Increases the healing of your Regrowth spell by 20% if your Regrowth effect is still active on the target;
• Glyph of Lifebloom – It increases your Lifebloom with one second. In theory you could have a 9 second Lifebloom with the appropriate talent (Nature’s Splendor>) and this glyph;
• Glyph of Rejuvenation – While your rejuvenation targets are below 50% health, you will heal them for an additional 50% health. This glyph is a very good raid healer for encounters with a lot of raid damage like Hodir;
• Glyph of Healing Touch – Your cast time is reduced by 50%, mana cost 25% and healing by 50%. It converts your Healing Touch into a flash type heal like Nourish. In my experience a glyphed Healing Touch has higher heals then Nourish but is also costs more mana. Which one should you use? Do you want a fast panic button (which you already have with Nourish) or do you want to be able to cast 7-10K heals with a non glyphed Healing Touch when nessecary? It is all about preference.
• Glyph of Nourish – It will buff the bonus part of your nourish spell by 6% per HoT on the target. This glyph stacks with the T7 4 set bonus.  The glyph is supposed to replace the T7 4 set bonus after you have replaced your T7 with T8 gear;
• Glyph of Wild Growth – Heal 1 additional target with your Wild Growth, might become handy with the talent Revitalize, 1 more target, 1 more change to proc. Apart from the talent an additional target that get heals is always good especially since the raid has a lot of aoe damage in Ulduar.

Not glyphs for your healing spells but you might like these:

• Glyph of Innervate – With enough spirit on yourself you will not be needing this glyph, but if you cast it on someone else your regeneration of mana will be a 100% for 20 seconds;
• Glyph of Rebirth – Increases the amount of health on a character brought back to life via Rebirth by 100%. Nice but not really needed.

Which Glyph should you use? The plan at first was to provide you with a decision tree but while making it occured to me that some choices are hard to make. Nowadays I easily change my glyph between fights if I feel it is necessary. Some guidlines I use:

1. It depends on your healing style. It would be silly to glyph a spell which you hardly use.
2. What is your role in the raid? Are you raidhealing, tank healing or a bit of both (i.e. normal dungeons or heroics)? Some suggestions (not in this particular order):
   Raidhealing:  Glyph of Rejuvenation, Glyph of Wild Growth;
   Tankhealing: Glyph of Nourish, Glyph of Regrowth, Glyph of Healing Touch.
3. What gear do you have? More importantly which tier set bonuses do you have?

An example: if you have the tier 7 4 set bonus it gives you a 6% bonus to Nourish per HoT you have on the target. You could take  Glyph of Nourish to boost it even more or choose not to glyph Nourish because it heals good enough for your style and choose to glyph Glyph of Wild Growth to boost your raid healing.
Lastly I would like to point out that there are minor glyphs, there’s only one I would recommend:

• Glyph of Unburdened Rebirth – Your Rebirth spell no longer requires a reagent.

Next episode will be about talents!

This is part 1 of my Druid Resto Mega Guide 3.0! Since this guide is written for the beginner and the raider alike, we are starting quite basic! I am starting with spells, you need to know your tools before you go healing!

Types of spells

Lets get to know your druid a bit better. Which healing spells does a druid have and what do they do? The most important spell-types for a druid are Healing over Time (HoT) spells. A druid has 5 types of HoT spells:

1. Lifebloom, an instant 7 second healing over time spell with a bloom (direct heal) at the end, if refreshed before the end the duration it will not bloom but stack up to three times multiplying the heal per second by 3. The lifebloom spell was introduced with the introduction of The Burning Crusade and was the number one druid spell. It was mostly used on (multiple) tanks to “cushion” high spikes of healing. When Wrath of the Lich King went live, the HoT part of lifebloom was nerfed slighty to make druids aware of other spells. While lifebloom remains a tank healing spell other spells are needed to keep your targets alive. I have used lifebloom more often on raid healing where the raid takes sustained damage.
   In patch 3.1 Blizzard is changed this spell a bit. The mana cost of the spell is doubled, when you let it bloom you get 50% of the base mana back. Also the bloom is multiplied by the number of stacks. This means it becomes more expensive to keep the a lifebloom stack on a tank (same healing, more mana) and it is rewarding to let it bloom to get the mana return. Lifebloom will remain one of the most important spells for a druid, you just can’t keep it stacked on multiple tanks anymore due to the higher mana cost. But single casting it on the raid is rewarding (not refreshing it) it gives you a good and cheap spell! The Bloom can crit, and it does often.
2. Regrowth, a direct heal with a 21 second healing over time spell (2 second cast, 7 ticks, 1 per 3 seconds). The regrowth spell is a very powerful spell because it instantly heals your target plus it gives you 7 ticks of healing. It is quite mana efficient and used with the Glyph of Regrowth it is even better.
3. Rejuvenation, an instant 15 second healing over time spell (5 ticks, 1 per 3 seconds, first tick after 3 seconds), this heal is a raid heal. It is perfect to spam around on your raid and of course have one up on the tank(s).
4. Wild Growth, an instant 7 second healing over time spell healing 5 targets with 15 yards of the target it cast on. So you can cast it on a Boss and heal 5 melee’s chopping away at that boss, it will not heal the boss. Since patch 3.1 we see more and more raid damage so a decent aoe heal is very welcome. You can spam it every 6 seconds. It is a smart heal which means it will heal the players with the lowest health within 15 yards of the target it is cast on.
5. Tranquility, an instant 8 second heal for party members (4 ticks), druid needs to channel. This heal is a panic button and is only used in certain situations like saving your party in heroics, but be wary it can generate a huge amount of threat.

Next to these spells a druid has three direct heals:

1. Swiftmend, instantly consumes an active regrowth or rejuvenation spell and instantly heals the target instead of over time. This is a save button for any target you have your HoTs on, it heals for a very decent amount. The Glyph of Swiftmend is mandatory. A swiftmend can crit for quite a good amount of healing, so be sure to put it in sight!
2. Healing Touch, heals the target for a large amount (3 second cast), the biggest heal a druid has. Most druids only use it in conjunction with Nature’s Swiftness to turn it into a big save heal. But it can be turned into a flash type heal with the Glyph of Healing Touch and become a 1 second cast heal;
3. Nourish, heals the target and healing is increased by 20% if you have one or more HoT’s on the target (1,5 second cast). Nourish becomes even more powerful with the T7 4 set bonus and/or the Glyph of Nourish (these two stack!), it will buff the bonus of 20% by respectively 5% or 6% per HoT present on the target. In patch 3.2 Nourish will get more +healing from the talent Empowered Touch (+20%), which will make Nourish a more favourable spell then a glyphed Healing Touch because its healing amount will surpass Healing Touch.

A druid has a nice set of healing spells to choose from, healing with a druid means you heal over time mostly and use your direct heals like Regrowth, Nourish, Swiftmend and Healing Touch to counter higher or spikes in damage.

Next time I will talk about Glyphs! But if you want to read on now, you can always try my old Druid guide!

NB: There is no “one” way to heal, and my healing strategies might not align with yours. Thats ok though, otherwise it would become a dull world of warcraft!

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.