Druid Heal!

With the new expansion coming up the boredom of Icecrown Citadel is hitting hard. I see a lot of people starting a new character (an alt, a twink). When you’ve got your main character decked out, you probably have some emblems lying around. You can buy gems for them or primordial saronite to sell for precious gold, but why not help yourself on your new character with some heirlooms?

A male druid with the Wildheart Raiment

Heirlooms are pieces of gear with stats that scale with your level until level 80. The heirloom is the equivalent of a (very good) blue item at your current level. When you buy heirlooms you get nice buffs useful while leveling like + 10 experience on a kill, completing quests or 2% life/mana restored on a kill. You can get these items in Dalaran (for Emblems of Heroism, you can buy lower level emblems with current emblems) and the Argent Tournament Grounds (for Champions Seals). If you rather level your character in pvp you can also buy pvp heirlooms. The pvp items can be bought in Wintergrasp (for Wintergrasp Mark of Honor). But which items to get? Here is a list of items to get per talent specialization:

Restoration/Balance
Restoration is a healing specialization and is not really good for leveling, unless you plan to use the dungeon system to level.

• Preened Ironfeather Shoulders – 10% experience bonus
• Preened Ironfeather Breastplate- 10% experience bonus
• Dignified Headmaster’s Charge – a weapon to get you going!

For other gear you should look at intellect, stamina, spirit, spell power & crit for restoration and for balance: intellect, stamina, spell power, and critical strike. When you get improved moonkin form, spirit becomes more useful.

Gear fo pvp, only shoulders and a weapon:

• Lasting Feralheart Shoulders
• Grand Staff of Jordan

Other gear: look for stamina, stamina and stamina on lower levels.

Feral

• Stained Shadowcraft Spaulders – 10% experience bonus
• Stained Shadowcraft Tunic – 10% experience bonus
• Repurposed Lava Dredger – a weapon to get you going!

For other gear look for agility, strength, stamina, attack power and crit.

Gear for pvp, only shoulders:

• Exceptional Stormshroud Shoulders

These items give you +20% experience per kill and completing quests!. Imagine the bonus when you level rested! Then there’s the case of the trinkets. These are not really useful for feral druids, but the 2% mana/health restore on a kill is quite useful when questing. Heirloom items do not have durability and thus don’t need repairing.

Trinkets

• Discerning Eye of the Beast
• Swift Hand of Justice
• For pvp: Inherited Insignia of the Horde or Inherited Insignia of the Alliance

There’s also a ring you can earn by wining the Kalu’ak Fishing Derby. The Dead Pirate Ring will give you an extra 5% bonus to experience earned from kills and quests.

Enchants

The gear can be enchanted. But since heirlooms are lvl 1 items, you can only enchant them with low level enchants. I listed the enchants after the break!

Riding Skills, mount up asap!

Remember that you can learn riding skill from level 20 and flying from level 60. Which will speed up your questing by quite a bit! I listed riding skills required levels and cost after the break!

Glyphs
You can utilise glyphs after you reach level 15. I listed the levels at which you get new slots.

• Level 15: 1 Major, 1 Minor
• Level 30: 2 Major, 1 Minor
• Level 50: 2 Major, 2 Minor
• Level 70: 2 Major, 3 Minor
• Level 80: 3 Major, 3 Minor

Talents
I did not list any talents for leveling because the amount of work that would go into it would be high and since Blizzard is changing them quite soon in Cataclysm (and probably a month before with patch 4.0) its no use. But luckily others already have! Remember that you can buy dual talent specialization at level 40 and utilize other builds as well.

• Restokin – Lissana’s leveling guide for Balance and Feral
• Wowwiki- Leveling as a druid
• the Druid Wiki – Feral leveling

Last tips

• Stick to questing, it is the fastest way to level
• Only play when rested, the rested bonus is 100% extra experience, use it!
• Try out the dungeon system, the easiest way to get those pesky dungeon quests out of the way. Re-live the old dungeons (man they were HUGE in vanilla Wow.
• Start your proffesions at higher levels, its much easier.

Have lots of fun leveling your new druid. After the break the promised info!

(more…)

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!

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.

This is part 3 of my rewritten Resto Druid Guide. This episode is about talents. Play styles can make you decide whether not to take a talent or to take a talent. Remember that there a more roads that lead to Rome and that a talent might work for you. I have not commented to all talents because its not needed because it speaks for itself or you just must have it!

Talents from the restoration tree, the first tier:

- Improved Mark of the Wild (2/2), must have.
- Nature’s Focus (3/3), must have.

You have no use with Furor as a restoration druid. Next up tier 2:

- Subtlety (3/3) : lower your threat, in most builds you see a maximum of two points in this talent (they are needed to get to 10 points). Threat is not much of a problem for a restoration druid (mainly raiding druids).
- Naturalist (5/5) : This talent will lower your Healing Touch spellcast from 3 to 2,5 seconds. If you do not intend to use the glyphed healing touch, don’t use this talent. Spent your points in the shapeshifters talents.
- Natural Shapeshifter (3/3) : the goodies come from the next talent : Master Shapshifter.

Tier 3:
- Master Shapshifter (2/2) : get 4% extra healing while in tree form!
- Intensity (3/3) : Must have period, a druid without a decent amount of mana regen while casting can’t do his job properly!
- Omen of Clarity (1/1) : gives you a mana free spell every once in a while.

Tier 4:
- Improved Rejuvenation (3/3), must have.
- Tranquil Spirit (5/5): If you are going to use Healing Touch (a must for the glyphed Healing Touch users) and Nourish a lot this talent is a good one since it will lower your mana cost of the spells by 10%.  If you have no mana problems, you might consider spending some points in other talents.

Tier 5:
- Nature’s Swiftness (1/1) : If you have glyphed your Healing Touch chances are you won’t be using this spell much. If you don’t glyph you healing touch, get it. In combination with a Healing Touch it is a very powerful tool.
- Gift of Nature (5/5) : Must have, period.

Tier 6:
- Empowered Touch (2/2): Since this talent buffs Healing Touch and Nourish this talent is a must have. If you don’t use these spells a lot, skip it.
- Nature’s Bounty (5/5): improves your crit and thus higher heals, with mana regen in mind higher heals (25% crit is a lot!) are welcome.

Tier 7:
- Swiftmend (1/1), must have.
- Living Spirit (3/3): must have period! (Spirit also buffs your Spellpower in Tree form!)
- Natural Perfection: A few % extra crit for the people that need it. If you look at Nourish it seems to benefit a lot from crit, this talent is worth spending points on when you got some to spare.

Tier 8:
- Empowered Rejuvenation (5/5), must have;
- Living Seed: This is mainly a Main Tank heal, opinions differ about it. I have raided with and without it and I can’t say I missed it.

Tier 9:
- Tree of Life (1/1);
- Improved Tree of Life (3/3);
- Revitalize (3/3) : With patch 3.1 it procs from Wild Growth too making a chance for a proc higher.

Tier 10:
- Gift of the Earthmother (5/5): It will lower your Global Cooldown with 20% for your instant healing spells, which means you can cast more of these spells in the same time;
- Improved Barkskin: this is a pvp talent, not needed for pve.

Tier 11:
- Wild Growth (1/1), needed for raids.

Talents from the balance tree:

- Genesis (5/5): It buffs your healing over time and damage over time spells with 5%;
- Moonglow (3/3): It will reduce the manacost of Moonfire, Starfire, Starfall, Wrath, Healing Touch, Regrowth, Nourish and Rejuvenation spells by 9%. Less mana, more heals;
- Nature’s Majesty (2/2): You need to take this talent to get Nature’s Splendor, crit is not as important on lower levels of raid content but crit is becoming more important as we progress to t9/t10 level content.
- Nature’s Splendor (1/1): This is the real talent you want from the balance tree, an 8 second Lifebloom, 15 second Rejuvenation, 27 second Regrowth. Need I say more? This would mean more rolls on your raid/party and the time to cast other spells like Abolish Poison or Remove Curse.
- Nature’s Grace (3/3): It will grant you with 20% off your cast time and is worth thinking about a lower cast time could mean life or death.

The most common raiding build is  14/0/57 see wowwiki for more builds.

Next episode will be about attributes.

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!.