Roon

I'm considering whether spell hit would be worthy for cyclone and roots, but I would like some exact numbers.

I've searched far and wide to no avail for specifics on heartbeat resists and how spell hit affects them. Is there a check for resist every 1 second, 2 seconds, 3 seconds? How often?

Assuming it can be mitigated by spell hit, I'm looking at this scenario:

Assume check for resist every 1 second and other players have a 4% chance to resist my CC, during the duration of Cyclone there's a 4% chance to resist the initial, and for there to be a resist every second afterwards, that's a 96% chance of success over 6 tries, .96^6 = 78% to not break early

with +1% spell hit, for a total of 97%, that's .97^6=83% to not break early

at +2% spell hit, 88% to not break early

at +3% spell hit, 94%

Of course, I have no idea whether my assumptions are true or not, and I would greatly appreciate any sort of information on this topic.

 

panny

Actually I was suggesting War/Druid/Pal which we fought a few times (was quite tough!)

 

oldmandennis

I've never noticed cyclone breaking on a heartbeat. I feel that spell hit is nice for reducing the initial resists though, you can cap it with the glyph of power, the glove enchant, and a couple of dawnstones. However, I'm not very good, so take it for what its worth.

 

Duncan

One of the really good things of a 34 balance 27 resto build is capped spell hit with just talents. Everytime i swap back to 11 11 39 i really feel the difference of missing spell hit. However, i never felt like going for spell hit on enchants, though. Mostly due to me changing my spec fairly often.

What i really got used to is 20 spell penetration on my cloak. It helps to cut through a MotW buff, to hit that cc on a felhunter and so on.

 

Bäverdräparn

I'm running 2v2 with a warrior, we havent got the best gear atm so we'r only doing 10 games a week.
We've run into this problem against mage/spriest which was the only team we lost to this week, our tactic is going after the priest while I try and stop the mage from CC:ing the warrior. What happends is that the priest goes after me while the mage stops my warrior from reaching the priest, as soon as I try and root the priest he dispells it.

Any suggestions what to improve on or what to do different?

 

Duncan

You can try to "protect" your roots with faerie fire and rank1 MF. Besides of that try going for the mage, while you Cyclone the priest. Feral charge him when he's trying to sheep your warrior, that will also root him down.

You shouldn't concentrate to much on one target. If the priest is going to be imun to cyclone and the mage is most likely going to chain CC your warrior just cyclone him and switch to the priest.

 

Zure

What's everyone's gemming strategy for 2.4?

For the first time, I think I'll be picking up all of the socket bonuses available to us:

Poweful Earthstorm Diamond (stun resist) requires 3 blue gems, as I believe MSD is being changed
3 Great Lionseyes (10 spell hit)
1 Vivid Chrysophase (5 spell hit, 6 stam)

Giving me 4 yellows for the 4 yellow sockets on resto gear (helm, neck, shoulders, chest), 1 blue for the meta, and a total of 2.89% hit.

Then 2 Blessed Tanzanite (11 healing, 6 stam) in the chest to activate the metagem

and 2 Durable Fire Opals (11 healing, 4 resil)... my optimal gem.

For a total of 422 resilience (which seems more favorable now that it mitigates mana drains). Thoughts? What are you planning on doing?

 

Duncan

I'll stick with an Insightful Earthstorm Diamond as my meta gem.

 

Roon

I'm not certain it does really, but I've noticed it break early many times even when no diminishing returns had set in, so I assumed it did break on heartbeat. This is of course after the person I had cycloned had used their trinket already, so I'm certain it didn't break early due to trinket either.

My question still stands however... How long is a heartbeat? 1 sec?

 

Pater

Is this the consensus? I'm wondering whether to save for 2.4 cloak and neck or just go ahead and buy Kharmaa's and S3.

 

Herrera

Unless it gets nerfed for some reason, this is my definite choice of meta with the current available gems.

 

Vayeate

I was reading about this new 6 seconds to achieve mana from drinking "nerf" and the more I read it the more it seems like a slight nerf, but a huge buff to shadowmeld. In 2s at least your partner should easily be able to take 6-12 seconds with no heals by los and pillar humping if needed.

Assuming you time the meld right and dots aren't an issue, wouldn't this be a massive buff to night elves?

 

Whitemane

I agree, it's quite a buff to nelfs. Which is kinda stupid, because shadowmeld in the 2v2 bracket really didn't to be stronger. I liked the idea about 20 waters though, although it'd be a fucking pain having to restock after every fight in case of a prolonged fight.

 

Anticor

How are you drinking in arenas? Before I'd never need to because games would be over too fast ( go go lower brackets!) but last night I was in a fight that was long enough where drinking would have been awesome. I got out of combat but when I went to use my water / underspore pods it kept saying I couldn't use those items. Is there something I'm missing / doing wrong?

 

Kaber

Honestly, I'm not a fan of drinking in arenas. Or eating, or bandaging, or healing trinkets. It really is not all that far off from using health/mana potions and requires a much larger investment (both money and honor) from certain classes than others. Mana drains are quite powerful, though the most dangerous one is the Priest's since he can basically machine gun someone's mana down if left alone. If something was done about that we could stop these 30 minute drinkfests, because I really do not find them to be all that fun, even though my class is basically required to do it. As much as I hate to recommend nerfs, I think the priest mana burn needs a cooldown, and both the warlock and hunter mana drains need a reduction in mana drained (or nerf scorpids so Viper sting is easier to cleanse in the first place). It is a difficult recommendation to make since I also play a Hunter, but if you could not drink, you could really do a lot of balancing in arenas around mana efficiency. Of course this runs the risk of overpowering classes that do not use mana at all because you would just have to outlast the other team's mana.

Maybe a more realistic approach to drinking would have been to create health/mana potions similar to the BG ones that can be used in arenas. The stack sizes are already limited, so if you could only enter the arena with 10 of each and you were still limited to one per 2 minute cooldown, things might be a little different. You wouldn't get to drink spam your way back to full, nor would certain races have a clear advantage. What it would give you is an extra 2k mana or health every 2 minutes, and the current trinkets would not be necessary.

 

Kaber

Either mage water or the water you can buy from the honor merchants (where you normally get PvP potions). Star's Tears are 2 honor and 25silver if I recall correctly, and are the same strength as the best water you can buy. For some reason standard water is not usable in arenas.

 

panny

I'd just prefer drinking to break Shadowmeld to be honest. Having the water limit doesn't change the imbalance, only how long it can be used for.

 

Vayeate

I like my shadowmeld don't get me wrong, and when I was feral it was most certainly a poor comparison to warstomp, but now it's very nice for drinking even though it still only buys me an extra second or two. Unless the teams are really terrible and just ignore me.

Don't nerf shadowmeld for that, just change the drinking. I'm saying nerfing it this way is just making it insane when it doesn't need to be.

 

Chucifer

I've been thinking about the new spellhaste lowering gcd and the new 4p set bonus and with that I'd like to test/model a 2.4 resto concept that rotates around haste, nature's grace, and regrowth.

Imp regrowth crits alot and with the 4 piece set bonus and ~160 spell haste rating (through the new gems, new battlemaster trinket, new ring, new neck, and new cloak), regrowth gets down to around a 1.63 second cast time at the expense of around 160 healing and 32 resilience (by giving up healing/resilience gems, season 2 ring and the healing battlemaster trinket, assuming you gem healing gems into red slots and resilience gems in yellow slots. More stats are lost if you have epic gems). However, Lunar Guidance can help with the lost +healing to some degree.

Here's the build that I was envisioning: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Your GCD goes down to around 1.36sec and cyclone with Gladiator Gloves goes down to a 1.26 cast.

I'm not too sure about the game play, but the idea would be to use a (downranked?) regrowth often to proc nature's grace. Since the NG buff is 15 seconds, you can cast a few hots after the regrowth before you have to use the NG buff for cyclone (0.76 second cast), roots (0.86 second cast) or even a bigger regrowth (1.13sec cast)

Mana will definitely be an issue, but with Idol of the Crescent Goddess (Hydross), regrowth costs 65 mana less. Alternatively, the Vengeful Idol means your lifeblooms are blooming stronger as you will likely not rolling LB as much. If mana is more of an issue than anything else, Moonglow could be specced over points natural perfection.

Rank 6 Regrowth crit heals for around 1500, with another 1000 or so as a HOT, which is around what a 2 stacked lifebloom will tick for as a HOT before it blooms, for less than a 2 stack LB. Rank 7 Regrowth with the Hydross idol would likely hit for more for the same ~440mana

Thoughts?

 

Scurn

One thing I hadn't seen mentioned is they are lowering the swing timer on all the feral weapons to 2.0 seconds. This is pretty huge for the dreamstate resto build, almost doubling the mana you can get from swinging on pets in moonkin form. Just using the S3 staff as a reference point, enchanted with savagery, a moonkin has 1202 (staff) + 70 (savagery) + 105 (moonkin form ap bonus) = 1377 ap plus any other random buffs like bshout and base stats swinging at a 2.0 speed. You regenerate 30% of your ap on a fairly high number of swings so that's 413 mana back per proc. Lets say it has a 50% chance to proc, a lowball estimate from my experience, and you have a resto druid getting a nice 515mp5. Seems a little crazy to me.

 

Mex

@ Kaber. I don't agree with replacing drinking with pots. You'd still get the same effective situation where people would be required to go into an arena and pop them on cooldown to min/max their effectiveness, same as the current situation where you simply take 20 stacks of water and grab one or two ticks every 10-20 seconds. I don't like drinking in 2s, but by the same token you're right in that it's sorta necessary to effect a proper balance between non-mana based clases and casters. Drinking in arenas doesn't have an easy or quick fix I don't think, it's something that would require a fairly huge overhaul of game mechanics to balance, at least what I'd consider balanced. Still, I find it's a lot less of an issue in 5s (although I don't have much experience in high-end drain / 3 healer teams, maybe I'm wrong). I'd be happy to let 2s continue in its current miasma of drink spamming if it meant that drinking could be sensibly implemented in 5s games. Oh, and as I understand it, standard water isn't usable cause that'd make standard (and therefore buff) food usable, which would be yet another consumable we'd all be required to farm.

@ Chucifer. I can't see regrowth spam ever becoming viable. With half of an already highly inefficient spell's healing tied up into a 20 second hot, you're going to go oom by spamming it, even downranked. Not to mention that it's very vulnerable to dispel. In 2s and 3s mobility is king, so you want to be relying on instant casts as much as you possibly can, otherwise you'll just turn yourself into a leather-wearing paladin with no shield or bubble. In 5s you'd need to really spam the hell out of it to get the full effect, and in that case you'd be out of mana pretty damn fast. You're already sacrificing a lot of stats for haste, purely for the ability to spam a highly inefficient spell faster. I don't see it working.

@ Scurn. Yeah, putting pets on restokin druids is already dangerous. 2 speed feral staff is incredible though! Pity it costs so much for what's just a spare / situational weapon. Are any of the PvE feral staves being changed? As I recall they're all 3 speed.

 

Kaber

Part of my reasoning for potions is that some classes and combinations can get out of combat and drink much easier than others (Druid/Hunter for example). The current drinking system penalizes some classes and benefits others.

 

Mex

Ahh fair enough, I thought you were continuing the line of thinking regarding balancing mana based classes vs non-mana based ones. The entire thing gives me a headache just thinking about it. More and more I'm finding myself wishing for a separate ruleset for arena.

 

Pater

@Mex, with your comments about the regrowth haste build, do you have any comments about the benefit of spellhaste for a typical 8/11/42 build? I found only 1 or 2 posts in this thread discussing it, and those few seemed to say that even the GCD reduction is not worth it.

 

Mex

To be honest I can't say I have any experience with spell haste as resto. I havent played my druid in about a month now, and I had no spell haste at all when I did play. I was merely pointing out that the ability to stack bonuses and talents to spam regrowths super fast isn't necessarily a good thing, because it's so horribly mana inefficient, especially when you're overwriting the HoT.

But personally I'd say no, I wouldn't expect haste to b