Infraction for thedrewster77: 2. All opinions should be stated as succinctly as possible.

• Aldriana · 10/23/09, 5:58 AM

Post: Resto (PvE) Healing Discussion
User: thedrewster77
Infraction: 2. All opinions should be stated as succinctly as possible.
Points: 1

Administrative Note:

Message to User:

I can't figure out for the life of me why you have a huge quote in the middle of this post.

Original Post:

I saw a very solid post on the Official Forums in the thread where GC talks about reverting the Rejuv nerf.

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> PTR Build 10571: more druid nerfs

No he wouldn't, he'd just need to gem for haste instead of SP. I've checked. You can either believe me or spend ten minutes on Wowhead to confirm. If this is going to turn into a Sono hate train again, you probably won't believe me, but I really do try to research things like this before I make a conclusion and post about them.

(This is almost certainly part of why I come off as annoying - I actually spent about half an hour on Wowhead looking at druid healing gear to make sure that they could softcap with 245 gear, and then I checked to see if they could do it with 4pcT9. The answer was yes in both cases. So, since I am absolutely certain that the softcap is reachable, every time someone posts that it isn't I am comfortable disagreeing with them - and since multiple people keep coming in and posting that it's not possible, I've been disagreeing with them fairly often.)

(In before someone says THATS NOT WHY YOU COME OFF AS ANNOYING YOU COME OFF AS ANNOYING BECAUSE YOU SUCK etc. etc.)

Assuming you swap out the head for Helm/Mask of Abundant Growth, here are the max values on ilvl 245 items:

Head: Abundant Growth, 74
Neck: Wail/Cry of the Val'kyr, 38
Shoulders: T9, 67
Back: Refreshing Winds, 50
Chest: T9, 0
Wrist: Autumn Willow, 50
Hands: T9 Gloves, 67
Belt: Pale Thorns, 59
Legs: T9, 82
Boots: Mourning Widow, 59
Finger1: Darkmender, 50
Finger2: Invoker, 50
MH/OH: Perdition, 128 (note that this is a significant loss of SP and regen compared to MH/OH combos)

That's 774 haste on a gearset that is fully optimized for haste and assumes the druid got seven specific drops from ToC25/ToC10H, a rather tall assumption. It is still 82 points short of the soft cap, meaning this (extremely lucky) druid would need to socket pure +haste gems in all yellow sockets as well as +haste/+SP orange gems in 3 red sockets, or else talent Celestial Focus.

Bear in mind that all this regearing and regemming is required to get us to exactly the same place we are now, with a 1-second GCD on HOTs -- while losing 66 SP from gems and 12% crit, which is worth about another ~270 SP in itself. So, with optimal gearing, we are looking at a loss of around 330 SP equivalent, or in the neighborhood of 8-10% throughput. And most druids will see a significantly greater reduction, because their gear will not be optimal.

Paladins gave up this much crit in 3.2, and since haste will be so much better than crit for druids in 3.3 I don't see why you wouldn't want to trade an only mildly useful stat for an incredibly useful stat. (Also I personally would say that losing crit from gear is trivial for a druid, but that's more of a value judgement and not worth arguing about.) You retain your unbuffed 36% crit on Nourish and 32% crit on Regrowth that comes purely from talents and Intellect (I assumed 1200, which is 7%), which is already more than most classes.

Couple things. First, how much crit you have has no bearing on what the value of crit is to you, because crit doesn't have diminishing marginal returns. Second, crit is actually valuable to druids; a point of crit is currently worth about 0.5 SP in throughput terms, when the T9 bonus is taken into account; in 3.2, crit is definitely more valuable than haste once the haste soft cap is reached. Third, haste is only becoming an "incredibly useful stat" because we are losing so much of it at the baseline! That's like removing one kidney and being happy that your other kidney is suddenly worth more. Finally, comparisons to other classes aren't particularly relevant, because there is no way to take all factors into account; druids aren't paladins. The 3.2 "nerf" actually ended up being an overall buff for paladin healing. There is no chance that the 3.3 nerf will end up being a boon to druids.

It really makes sense to me and looking at the gear list: I have a problem.

Edit rather than do a threaded reply which got me a warning....

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