A Discussion on Stat Weights
Stat weights as resto are subjective based off circumstances and healing style, and more complex than one might assume. I'll aim to explain these in a way that is easy to understand, yet concise here.
INTELLECT:
Obviously our primary stat. Not only significant throughput, also significant regen. When (if) we get to the point we have too much regen and its wasted, lose spirit. In this scenario Int will only lose value once you've eliminated all spirit and still have more regen than you need. I am doubting this will happen this expansion, but time will tell.
SPIRIT:
Disappointing regen return I thought. Divide the cost of one of your healing spells by 12, then double it. That's how much spirit it takes to cast 1 more of those. In the mana starved first tier, Spirit will probably be the secondary stat anyway as you need mana.
HASTE:
Haste is the most complicated stat for us, its value will depend very much on circumstances, healing style, your current haste level, and how many Haste cooldowns you have and how good you are at utilizing said cooldowns.
Haste effects healing in the following ways:
- Reduces cast times.
This increases throughput, but the more mana constrained, vs time constrained you are, the less it applys, because you'll stop casting or fill in with Nourish more. So conversely being mana constrained means hpm and regen is more important than hps. Also the vastly increased hp pools of Cata have reduced the value of this portion of haste because reducing one particular cast by fractions of seconds is much less likely to make a difference in saving someones life. If a really fast spot heal is needed, that's what SM and RG are for. They are fast enough.
- Reduces the GCD.
With RJ GCD capped from talents, this aspect is reduced in value as well, though still appreciated with LB/WG/etc.
- Adds extra hot ticks at specific breakpoints.
This is the primary way Haste adds hpm. Getting to the 5th RJ tick is a 25% boost in 40-60% of your total healing. 6th RJ is 20%. While a 9th WG tic is only 12.5% of 10-25%. And the RG hot is generally such a tiny amount of total healing as to be irrevelant. Here is the list of breakpoints, all rounded up, and assuming the 5% haste raid buff.
- 915 = RJ 5th tic
- 1220 = LB 12th
- 1415 = RG 4th
- 2004 = WG 9th
- 2440 = LB 13th
- 3659 = LB 14th
- 3744 = WG 10th
- 3964 = RJ 6th
- Lifebloom scales more linearly as time between hot ticks is reduced (since it will rarely be refreshed between the 2nd to last and last tic), exception is breakpoints come into play when using it for raid heals during TOL. Hardly worth gearing around, in my opinion, but it is a good reason to chain haste cd's while in TOL.
- Smart use of CD's can justify stacking more haste if you wish so more of your RJ's can have 6 ticks. 1777 haste gives you 2 extra WG tics and 1 extra RJ 25% of the time, via Nature's Grace, if you use it off cd. (A bit challenging since its basically a minute long internal cd. Some addon help is in order.)
If you can rely on having Dark Torrent you may choose to gear around having that as well.
- Increases Revitalize regen by a small amount. (Some math to get a good mp5 per point or percentage of haste would be appreciated, maybe assuming 1 stack LB and 3 RJ's?)
- Also minor boost to clear casts. While RJ might tic faster with more haste, since you will have the same number of tics total, you will have the same amount of chances for clearcasting, outside of breakpoints. However the extra Nourishes Haste can give you, and faster ticking LB's can add some procs.
So, to decide on what Haste is worth for yourself, you'll need to heal a few raid bosses and see:
How mana constrained vs time constrained you are. If you find yourself needing to stop casting or fill in with Nourish a fair amount of time, that greatly reduces the value of the cast time portion.
What your healing breakdown looks like. Figure out what % of your total healing is from cast spells, and what % from gcd's other than RJ.
Decide how actively you want to use and potentially gear around haste cd's. The more you have the more justified it can be.
My understanding is, scaling linearly and disregarding breakpoints for a moment, 1% haste would give you about 1% throughput, if 100% of your casts, and 100% of your gcd's benefited, and mana wasn't an issue. This isn't the case, so check the above and get an idea for how useful it is for you. Then add in the benefit from whatever breakpoints you can reach.
For instance, if you are mana constrained, and RJ is 50-75% of your gcd's, then linear scaling is pretty insignificant, just giving you potentially more (weak) Nourishes, and linearly increasing LB output. In which case, is it worth adding 1089 haste to go from 5th RJ (915) to 9th WG(2004)? That is, I believe adding about 8.5% haste for a 2.5% throughput gain from WG alone. Assuming WG is an average of 20% of your total healing. Add a percent or 2 for extra nourishes and the minor regen gains. Haste is looking hardput to compare with crit in this scenario. Now figure out your haste cd uptime and how well that's utilized. Lets say we do go all the way to 2004. And we manage to maintain a 25% uptime on Nature's grace. While it's up, we gain 20% to our RJ's, and 11.11% to our WG. If RJ is 50% of your healing, and WG is 20%, than you gain an additional 3% throughput from stacking haste to 2004 and using NG off cd. (All pretty rough I know, it could be slightly more since you can actually use WG twice in the 15 seconds its up, but likely less since circumstances aren't likely to permit NG being used strictly off cd.
MASTERY:
Often seems to be underrated, and underutilized. If 100% of your healing is effected by it, it increases throughput (and vitally important, also HPM) by 1.25%. This could be substantially more valuable than haste, but individual mileage may vary.
Regardless of the amount of mastery you have, even with only the base amount, be aware of it. 10% free bonus healing is free healing nonetheless.
If one were to completely ignore mastery and not change your style at all, it could range from effective 80%+ of the time tank healing, to sub 30% 25 man raid healing.
However being mindful of it and healing smart can lead to it being easily effective 60-80%+ of the time. Making it better than crit, and depending on all of the above, possibly better than haste. The fact that every bit of it is a straight boost to HPM, like crit greatly increases its value in the first tier as well.
Again, to determine the weight you want to attach to mastery, pay attention to how you heal, and then check your healing breakdowns.
Rejuvenation:
RJ people with WG or LB first, if hp levels make it worthwhile. In Cata I doubt you can sustain more then 4-7 RJ's per 10 seconds anyway, so it's really quite easy to have RJ effected 80-even 100% of the time. Also a full duration RJ and WG together will probably be only around 25% of someones life, which makes it much easier to heal without overhealing with hots. Guess at what percentage of the RJ's you cast you are able to have benefit from mastery. 70-95+% is possible. Then pay attention to the percentage of total healing from RJ. Probably 20-40% tank healing (depending on how intense it is as you will likely still use WG and SM for eff nearly off cd damage permitting, and toss out the odd raid RJ when the tank is topped. 40-60+% raid healing(depending on your regen and length of fight)
Lifebloom:
If you keep RJ up on whoever you have LB on (refreshing this one after the WG hots fade if practical, since we can clip hots, and have an insta gotem tick, we have around 4 seconds leeway), LB can easily benefit 80-95% of the time. Whether its worth keeping RJ on the tanks will depend on the incoming damage and the other healers. If other healers realize you are keeping 2 hots on the tank and a HT/Nourish every 6-9 seconds regardless of what they are doing, and don't top him up uselessly it won't excessively overheal. If a Pally is spamming tanks with their infernally op mastery damage would have to be extremely high to justify keeping RJ on your LB tanks.
Wild Growth/Tranquility:
Smart heals go where they want, this is the only factor that really scales the benefit of mastery up in smaller groups. I'd say from my wotlk experience it will still get 10-20% benefit. Its more then you think since the damage is rarely strictly evenly spread out, which boosts the chances of the smart heals hopping to someone with a hot already. However with the cd raised on WG you won't likely see it as more than 30% of your total healing, probably closer to 20% or less. Tranquility is OP and I've seen it up to 20% of total healing (in our sub 2 minute icc boss fights), in Cata I'm guessing it can be 5-10% more likely.
Cast heals:
In most cases these will be limited to tanks, and thus all effected by mastery. There are a couple raid mechanics where you might need a spot heal with RG, but that's the exception not the norm. Its too expensive to use on the raid unless absolutely necessary, or if you have an omen proc, tank is topped off and you just refreshed LB. If you mix LB's and RG's to burn clearcasts during TOL it will increase the amount on the raid. Also sometimes there maybe such intense raid damage, or some mechanic requiring burst healing, where you will want to spam RG/HT on the raid. Even in either case, you can use WG and prioritize the lowest hp people WG so kindly targets for you.
Swiftmend/Effloresence:
Obviously Swiftmend is always benefited by Mastery, and hence so is Eff.
So looking at your average healing breakdowns, come up with a number that you guesstimate as the percentage of the time, from your total healing, that mastery benefits you. Then realize it's 1.25% per point. With smart healing I am expecting to benefit from Mastery 50-70% of the time 25 man Raid healing (always LB's on a tank, RJ if justified), and the smaller your group, or the more focus you put on tanks, the more benefit you gain. Up to over 80%, or a point where each point of of mastery is a percentage of throughput and hpm. In which case it is certainly better than crit, probably better than haste.
CRIT:
Each crit increases the critical heal by 50%. And since everything is effected by crit now, 1% crit will equal pretty damn close to 0.5% throughput (and hpm). If you only used healing casts, and every living seed was used, than it would be 0.8%, but that is obviously far from the case, living seeds effectiveness vary's widely, but even tank healing in wotlk with infinite mana, even spamming RG which was Crit capped, Living seed has never been more than 5-10% of healing, unless there is such a stupid amount of overhealing going on that its the only thing that can heal.
Without heavy RG use, even tank healing we'll be lucky if its more than 1-3%. Efflorescence double dips from crit, meaning if the Swiftmend crits, each EFF tic will be 50% larger, but each individual tic can also crit. However in its nerfed form, even in an ideal fight it isn't likely to be more than 7-10% of your healing, in the average fight less to much less.
I would say each 1% of Crit = 0.53-0.57% throughput. However Crit rating converts poorly, without the bonus crit multiplier dps get, it will be hard to imagine a scenario where crit isn't our worst stat.
TO SUMMARIZE:
Our Resto Druid stat weights can seem very complicated, for most of us I would recommend just paying attention to how you heal, and glance at your healing breakdown after each boss fight. Then simply keeping these points in mind you should be able to guesstimate with some basic in your head kinda math what your stat weights will be.
If that's too much trouble, here's what I'll be doing!
Int>Spirit>915 Haste>Mastery>more haste>Crit
Using this formula should make deciding on the proper gems and enchants a cinch. You may end up playing with haste amounts to match with haste cd's and the various breakpoints as you swap out gear, so to simplify matters, probably a good call to use Reckless gems if you decide a yellow bonus is worth picking up, instead of Artful. Can always reforge more haste into mastery if you like. Obviously will be using a majority of Brilliants, and possibly a Purified or 2.
Also since we will aim for the 6th RJ tick when its obtainable, we'll need to watch the bis lists and see when we need to start only taking upgrades with haste. However for the first tier or 2, I believe mastery will flirt around with haste, often being better, sometimes not far behind
12/01/10, 1:20 AM
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