Faust

A while back I was having some friends heal me. They were trying to get record crits and so I volenteered to be the guinipig since fel armor buffs heals by 20%. Eventually after an hour or so we decided we should get a tree druid so I would have the buff and be healed for more. The same four people had been healing me for a while. A khara/ssc level epic healing shaman. A blues and heroic/khara epics druid, and a mostly solid blue pally. By that time we pretty well understood around what they crit for. And generally the highest would be somewhere between 11-12k with trinkets and luck. But this was pretty rare and everyone wasn't going that high. The pally only crit for over 10k twice. Now inviting having the druid in the group should have instantly been a huge buff to their healing. 25% more healing should have been noticable but almost immediatelly we realized that they didn't stack. We kind of decided, meh, sucks that they don't but blizzard is blizzard and they kept healing me. But after more and more heals without any of them beating their records and usually average out to the same average crit heals (around the 9-10k). As this continued I started having a much more annoying suspician. That not only does fel armor not stack with tree aura but the fel armors 20% buff, is the one applied not the 25% from tree.

I did this a few weeks ago but the suspician kept batting around in my head and coming to the fore every time I saw a moonkin druid. Now I don't see this being that huge of a concern in five man content. But for min-maxing in a raid environment it is very annoying. The obvious buff for almost all encounters is fel armor for the 100 spell damage, yet the fact that it negates the tree aura, not game breaking but just an ugly mechanic. I feel they should stack but if they don't the larger buff should definitelly apply imo. I don't have hard and fast math and crit records because I was kind of just doing this for fun, so if people want to they can check it. The fact that they don't stack should be easy to attain, the 20% vs 25% slightly harder to crack, but I believe it is true.

Basically I am posting this both because I believe it needs attention but also to get the opinions of people farther in the raid progression. Is this a bigger concern later on? I doubt anyone will ditch fel armor because of it in raid situations but does it need to be changed? Is it a bug that they don't stack? Is that working as intended but the higher percent should take precedence? Is there some buff preference order I don't know about like the one that decides which DoTs to kick off? Is this entire thing working as intended and it just functions like so many of the hidden mechanics in diablo 2? Are they just skimming a bit from an equation in the hopes we wouldn't notice. If someone checks the math and finds that the 25% is actually applied (something I do not believe but do not have proof atm), is whether or not they should stack still a worthy discussion?

 

Antoine

You gain 25% of the Tree's spirit, probably no more than 200 onto the base heal (pre-crit or whatever). This is very different from 25% increased incoming heals.

 

nachrichter

Also, may want to go back and replace "moonkin" with "treeform" all over the post, for clarity. Moonkin would help you crit your heals more often, but wouldn't otherwise influence the size of the heals. Tree druid would add 150-200 +heal to each of the people healing you, as the above poster said.

 

Faust

Okay. I probably got this wrong then. Was from observation whether than math so I'll try and recreate it and get hard data. It just seems wierd that they didn't break their record crits with the aura even after an extended period.