If SM is becoming much larger, then clearly it won't be equivalent to Nourish which is the slow, mana efficient and low throughput spell.
The point was that if SM heal size remained equivalent to Nourish heal size but was instant cast & front loaded then that has clear merit to me.
You are happy with SM being tank-only and later on say we need a raid burst healing spell. Well, why not rework SM to be more usable as such?
Because the only way to do it would be to remove the 'consume a HoT' component to Swiftmend or allow RJ blanketing. I simply cannot see the Devs implementing either of those solutions.
I didn't say we need a raid burst healing spell, I simply observed that we do not currently have one. There's a difference there which indicates to me that our niche may be changing to be more directed towards tank healing/support with a strong stabilising effect on raid healing as opposed to the raid healing powerhouse we are right now.
As for tank healing comparison, the interesting one would be to disc which is back as the tank heal spec. Lacking inspiration hurts more than a tank CD I'd say since these are easy to apply from another healer. Inspiration is not applicable on demand and requires a lot of casts, certainly with the lower crit rates.
If Druids end up more towards the tank healing end of the spectrum, I definitely agree that we suffer somewhat in comparison with Disc & Paladins. However, some of that is due merely to number crunching throughput & regen which can obviously be tweaked at will. Comparing toolkit, we are definitely more mobile than Paladins but it's difficult to see how we compare to Disc since so much will depend on how many cast time heals everyone needs to throw.
I personally think that we need an Inspiration type effect on a HoT tick - probably RJ which is shaping up to be unable to be blanketed and should generally be thrown at tanks.
I personally think that we need an Inspiration type effect on a HoT tick - probably RJ which is shaping up to be unable to be blanketed and should generally be thrown at tanks.
If we did get an Inspiration effect (which would be nice) then it would be better tied to LB which should only be cast on the MT anyway (and it regulates it so that while it is reliable it is not able to be overused). I hope that Lifebloom benefits greatly from glyphs in order to keep it strong in PvE without being overly so in PvP. Having two glyphs (medium/major) where one adds Inspiration, and the other chops off the Bloom in favor of stronger HoT ticks should go nicely towards making it solid for PvE if invested in.
Just throwing a few beta numbers: CoH with level 80 priest and ~3000 spell power (before inner fire) heals for about 3000 on each target and WG for druid with same spell power heals for about 6648 (8 ticks). Prayer of mending heals for about 6000. At least druid numbers don't seem to scale that much on the way to 85 (gear will help somewhat, of course).
--
Druid specifics (quick math): come level 85, you are probably aiming to get about 16% haste from gear (which with 5% haste buff will earn you +2 ticks to WG, +1 tick to rejuvenation and +1 tick to regrowth). When nature's grace is up this will lend you 10th tick to WG and 6th tick to rejuvenation (bloodlust is 11/6 and lust+NG 13/7). If you aim for this setup you are probably doing it because you want to chain RG+WG/RJ bursts (or because crit/mastery are pretty bad stats).
An alternative haste count from gear is around 7% which adds +1 tick to WG and rejuvenation both. This setup will still let you get additional +1 WG and +1 RG ticks with nature's grace.
Above calculations are based on extra ticks being earned on tick count being rounded to closest integer (so you don't need 25% haste to get 5th rejuvenation tick, you just need 12.5%).
I'm 99% sure that by the time they are done with number balancing, we will come out as strong tank healers. The number balancing part is what is hard at this point, since numbers are all over the place and there are still a lot of bugs (like Nourish refreshing lifebloom reducing how much lifebloom is healing for). I'm pretty sure that HOTs combined with our direct heals will weave together into a very solid tank healing toolset in the end.
At this point, that's about the only thing I can say without sounding like "the sky is falling".
There isn't too much data to suggest that druids will be good tank healers, especially when solo healing a tank in 10m raid. The numbers on LB are as bad as they are in WotLK, and with health pools doubling or more, it went from mediocre to bad. Yes, numbers can be tweaked, but considering the rather sorry state of this spell for the entire expansion, some amount of skepticism is in order.
LS is a good tank healing talent but the spell that can proc it the most, RG, is the most expensive single target healing spell in the game and not really appropriate for spamming.
Both of the main, slow heals have no way to speed up besides unreliable NG procs. This is unlike every other healing spec. Even from a quality of play PoV, the rotation is boring and monotone.
The lack of inspiration was done to death. Druids aren't paladins and don't have the ability to power through it. It's one of those glaring problems that hopefully will be fixed until the first real raid is released.
The druid mastery doesn't support tank healing (and is in general quite bad), probably moreso than any other spec. Holy priest is a close second but tank healing is not that spec's strength anyway.
Two factors that are positive and support druid tank healing:
Hots being affected by crit and haste - it's hard to know how significant this is since there isn't enough gear available yet, most importantly the raid entry level gear - heroic dungeons. It could be a strong point for tank healing, especially since haste seems to stat to stack right now for throughput.
The passive healing bonuses, closely tied to the strength / efficiency of nourish. Druids and holy priests get +25% healing from selecting their trees, shamans and paladins only 10% while disc priests get 15% int. This is not getting enough attention and could be the tipping point making nourish, coupled with strong support talents and +20% from hots, outshine the other bread & butter heals. Will a 2.5s efficient heal be enough? I have my doubts, but it's something.
Above calculations are based on extra ticks being earned on tick count being rounded to closest integer (so you don't need 25% haste to get 5th rejuvenation tick, you just need 12.5%).
Efflorescence cannot benefit directly from haste or crit.
Mastery
Additional healing from mastery is determined when the spell aura is applied. If you apply a HoT when the target has 100% health, you will gain no bonus on any subsequent ticks. Therefore, it is most efficient to apply your HoT at the lowest possible HP.
%Health_Deficit*Mastery% = Additional Healing
For instance, If your Rejuvenation ticks for 3000 hp, you have 40% mastery bonus, and you apply it at 20% target health:
Mastery
Additional healing from mastery is determined when the spell aura is applied. If you apply a HoT when the target has 100% health, you will gain no bonus on any subsequent ticks. Therefore, it is most efficient to apply your HoT at the lowest possible HP.
%Health_Deficit*Mastery% = Additional Healing
For instance, If your Rejuvenation ticks for 3000 hp, you have 40% mastery bonus, and you apply it at 20% target health:
Thanks for the useful numbers. Regrowth having 3 ticks is quite nice.
Is there a minimum threshold for the mastery? That is, will you get an extra 10%*mastery if the target is at 90%?
Anyway, the behavior of the mastery taking the value at the application is hopefully a bug. Precasting an LB on a naked tank to gain a significant boost is tiresome.
I've not found an upper threshold for mastery to apply, even at as close to 100% as I could manage. In fact, HoT ticks seem to be 1% higher than they should be at full health. So far, I've attributed this to mastery, as nothing else seems to explain it.
Even if mastery is intended to resolve at casting time it's still not working properly
It's not working for either the direct or heal-over-time portion of regrowth (wording indicates it should work on both), it's not working on wild growth. Unsurprisingly it's not working for lifebloom final heal (and probably isn't meant to).
I noticed the T11 set bonuses were just released. Thoughts? This in combination with the new Empowered Touch that has a 100% chance on nourish casts to refresh our lifebloom stack suggests they really wants us to build a LB stack and keep nourishing the target.
# Item - Druid T11 Restoration 2P Bonus - Increases the critical strike chance of the periodic portion of your Lifebloom spell by 5%. / Instant
# Item - Druid T11 Restoration 4P Bonus - Whenever you have Lifebloom stacked to its maximum of 3 applications on its target, you gain 540 Spirit. / Instant
2t11 is very weak.
4t11 is mana. Something we'll probably need in the first tier. Its hard to tell if that is a lot or just a little bit.
Change to NG makes timing much more predictable. Before if you were currently casting HT, and you were considering Rg + No as your next two casts, you might not be sure if No would land in time to refresh Lifebloom. Now you will know (except for unknown lag or pushback events).
Some glyph changes:
Lifebloom (Prime): +10% crit chance on LB
Rejuv (Prime): +10% RJ healing
Swiftmend (Prime): no change
Regrowth (Prime): "Your Regrowth HoT will automatically refresh its duration on targets at or below 25% health."
Healing Touch (Major): "When you Healing Touch, the cooldown on your Nature's Swiftness is reduced by 5 sec."
Innervate (Major): "When Innervate is cast on a friendly target other than the caster, the caster will gain 50% of Innervate's effect."
Wild Growth (Major): no change
Thorns (Major): -20s cooldown (so 4/5th uptime hmm)
Entangling Roots (Major): makes it instant cast (wasn't that ToL's effect?)
Nourish changed to a Starsurge glyph and Rapid Rejuv is gone (obviously)
Does anyone else replicate Thorns on beta (warlock imp maybe)? It's a pretty beefy aoe threat tool now.
Imp doesn't have Fire Shield anymore. A level 80 Paladin's Ret Aura with 2500 spellpower and +60% damage only hits for 250. Level 83 with 3000 spellpower made Thorns hit for 1700... New scaling + new Glyph seems like too much.
We think it has more of a purpose with more damage packed into a smaller window than weak damage available 100% of the time. In the latter case you'd never think twice about attacking someone with Thorns because it's never not there. It also asks a little more of the druid to use Thorns at the right time rather than just whenever the buff drops off. Thorns isn't a raid buff on the scale of something like Fortitude or Bloodlust so we see no reason to consolidate it.
I am not sure what in my post lead you to believe I wasn't aware of how Thorns worked in beta.
Re: imp and retribution aura: perhaps this iteration of thorns coupled with the nerfing of tank aoe threat gives caster druids (boomkins and resto) another raid utility. It has been Blizzard's theme to rework useless spells (soothe, thorns, resto healing toolkit) to make them more useful. This leads me to believe thorn buffs will probably stay. Imps have other ways to be useful, and retribution paladins run their aura for other reasons. We had no real reasons to cast thorns except as a miniscule damage contribution. Now it can help tanks with aoe threat, and has obvious pvp applications on focus targets.
So I'd been noticeably absent from this thread for a while--I was away for a while, and people have probably also seen me focusing on Moonkin stuff a lot recently. I do want to get some Resto theorycraft work underway though, so they're both ready for live (especially since, in all likelihood, I'm still going to be actually playing Resto in raids). The Moonkin sheet is almost ready for live already, but before I really get into looking at Resto, I wanted to ask a bit about what we want out of a theorycraft tool.
Healing obviously is less focused on raw spreadsheet output than DPS is, but there's still a lot of basic info you want to know. Most importantly, what's the raw HPS/HPM of each of my spells? There are few situations where you're more or less playing like a DPSer and trying to optimize a rotation for HPS (such as spam healing on one tank). Finally, you want to see the quantitative effect of various stats/talents/set bonuses on your most-used spells. I think TreeCalcs did all of these things pretty well, and it generally got good feedback. It didn't really do much else and was a very simple sheet (none of the complex rotation stuff that the Moonkin sheet needs).
For Cataclysm though--some new mechanics make it hard to do any serious computation (I'm thinking mostly of Deep Healing here). I think I can still put together a basic spell chart so we can compare HPS/HPM of everything and get a sense of the various stats/talents (although again, not sure what I'd do with the Mastery stat). But I was wondering what other ideas people have for information we might want, to help inform good play.
Along the same lines of ordering HPS/HPM, we may also want to sort out the value of the mana conservation/regeneration talents Moonglow (-9% mana cost), Heart of the Wild (+6% int), Revitalize (3% total mana return proc), and even Furor (+15% mana). Especially since we can't get half of them without making throughput choices which would also have to be determined by healing priorities and rotations based on their HPS/HPM and the various new mechanics.
And although druids have been known more as raid healers and EJ has been primarily concerned with 25 man raiding, the inevitable rise in popularity of 10 mans may be reason to include an equal focus on tank healing data.
It might be good to let people have one or two rotations where they enter their custom spell mix (by number of casts)
Sample:
Average target health 80% (for Deep healing):
WG: 1 (@4.5 targets), HT 1, Nourish 3, Rejuv 1.5, Regrowth 2 (euphoria ticks average 1.5 targets), Lb3 rolling (maintained by Nourish)
Once I've entered those numbers, treat it like a first-class rotation.
If I select it as my "current" rotation, I'd then want to see numbers that help choose between Genesis/Moonglow/Furor, as well as stat weights.
Efflorescence cannot benefit directly from haste or crit.
Mastery
Additional healing from mastery is determined when the spell aura is applied. If you apply a HoT when the target has 100% health, you will gain no bonus on any subsequent ticks. Therefore, it is most efficient to apply your HoT at the lowest possible HP.
%Health_Deficit*Mastery% = Additional Healing
For instance, If your Rejuvenation ticks for 3000 hp, you have 40% mastery bonus, and you apply it at 20% target health:
Can you explain your formula for the haste ranges for ticks?
The way I was thinking was that to acquire the minimum haste needed for an extra tick would work like this -
5 Rejuv ticks. 12 second base cast duration. 12 / 5 = 2.4 seconds between each tick. For that hot duration, you'd need (3/2.4 = 1.25), or 25% haste.
That isn't correct. It appears you only need half of that haste. So once you reach a threshold of reducing the total hot duration by half of a single hot tick, then you gain an extra tick? It looks like they allow the hot to go past its normal duration? Ie at 13% haste my rejuv looks like it lasts 13 seconds in game.
Instead of giving a partial tick in some way, it rounds up to the nearest additional tick. At 12.4% you are closer to no additional tick, at 12.5% it rounds up giving the bonus 5th tick.
Yes, they're saying it rounds to the nearest integral number of ticks, whether up or down. So you can get more than the default duration at some haste values.
To put it succinctly, if a HoT has k ticks by default, then haste breakpoints (addition of an extra tick) will come at haste values of (2n+1)/2k, for integers n.
In TreeCacls for Deep Healing, I think we need an additional table for each spell (with steps of 20%), to view the gain of HPS by the life of the target.
It would be interesting to see also different with or without the transformation into a tree.
For the talent "Efflorescence", should be able to inform the number of people impacted.
In addition to the extra-ticks, it should also have the time interval between each tick.
To put it succinctly, if a HoT has k ticks by default, then haste breakpoints (addition of an extra tick) will come at haste values of (2n+1)/2k, for integers n.
Thanks, Hamlet, that is the formula I was looking for.
I found these numbers by observing the time difference between the previous and theoretical next tick for varying haste values, and it worked out to be the [Hot Duration]+.5[Additional Tick Duration]/(1+.01*Haste), which I was able to verify pretty meticulously with the Thaumaturge. For instance, Rejuvenation would gain an extra tick at (12+1.5)/12=1.125 or 12.5% haste and (12+3+1.5)/12=1.375 or 37.5% haste.
For each HoT (and DoT in Moonkin sheet): The additional haste rating needed to gain another tick or to lose another tick. This would be useful information to know in regards to reforging.
A reforge buffer for all reforgeable stats. You fill in the normal stat fields for what you currently have on your gear as usual and leave them alone. Next to those stats are boxes for +/- reforge reallocation. In addition, there is a box for providing your +/- reforge state budget to aid us in maintaining a zero balance. When you enter a positive/negative value in a reforge box for a stat, not only does it increase/decrease the stat value used in the normal calculations, but it also scales that stat to be subtracted/added into the reforge budget value. This would allow us to easily mess around with reforge options with seeing their impacts w/o having to keep reentering our current stats, making sure in our head that we are correctly converting each stat, and making sure in our heads that we are ending with a 0 reforge balance. (This feature would be useful in the Moonkin sheet too.) Of course, since the sheet does not know what gear the character is wearing and how the stats are allocated on them, it would not be able to limit how much of each stat can be possibly reforged. The user will still have to do some work on their own, but this will definitely help with the reforging trade-offs.
For each HoT (and DoT in Moonkin sheet): The additional haste rating needed to gain another tick or to lose another tick. This would be useful information to know in regards to reforging.
A reforge buffer for all reforgeable stats. You fill in the normal stat fields for what you currently have on your gear as usual and leave them alone. Next to those stats are boxes for +/- reforge reallocation. In addition, there is a box for providing your +/- reforge state budget to aid us in maintaining a zero balance. When you enter a positive/negative value in a reforge box for a stat, not only does it increase/decrease the stat value used in the normal calculations, but it also scales that stat to be subtracted/added into the reforge budget value. This would allow us to easily mess around with reforge options with seeing their impacts w/o having to keep reentering our current stats, making sure in our head that we are correctly converting each stat, and making sure in our heads that we are ending with a 0 reforge balance. (This feature would be useful in the Moonkin sheet too.) Of course, since the sheet does not know what gear the character is wearing and how the stats are allocated on them, it would not be able to limit how much of each stat can be possibly reforged. The user will still have to do some work on their own, but this will definitely help with the reforging trade-offs.
First part is actually already in the Moonkin sheet, will be in next upload.
Second part is largely the function of the marginal stat values that are already there--unless you're in a zone of heavy nonlinearity, I would think that those make reforging choices pretty obvious (especially since reforging currently happens at a 1:1 ratio).
09/06/10, 7:00 PM
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