I'm a big fan of passive INT as well, sure you get juicy innervates, but the rest of the time you are missing out on a lot of spellpower.

I'm thinking I'll be using SoW still since it has such a high item budget (almost 2k mp5 plus an extra Nature's Grace is hard to beat) and that Althor's Abacus wanna be trinket. (Sorry MMO is down and I don't know where else has firelands gear at the moment.)

Definitely don't just start dumping regen, but I was expecting the same as Hamlet. Going up a tiers worth of INT will be significant, and that along with the slight buff to mastery, and major buff to Crit, makes Spirit the last stat.

This of course, is assuming we are talking about extra stats adding to current gear, Haste to a breakpoint is the best secondary stat, and worst past, and its the same with spirit, doesn't matter how much mastery or crit you have buffing your Rejuv's if you oom and can't cast any. But if you are past the spirit breakpoint (consistently end the longest/hardest fights with mana to spare) then spirit is garbage. And this will happen with less spirit when we've moved up a tier of INT so be ready to pick up a couple more haste/mastery items, or reforge spirit off stuff instead of mastery like most of us have been doing.

Moonglow and our other regen talents account for a heck of a lot of mana, if you have mana to spare, drop furor, and then drop spirit. Don't drop other regen talents.

I'm not going to underestimate mana regen in firelands, I am decked in all 272 gear + SoW and on every fight i could always use more mana. Am I overhealing, trying to do too much? perhaps but it has worked so far and I trust my healing team.

I will try to get spirit on every slot at start(except belt, can't seem to find a spirit one with secondary stats) and if the need arises will reforge out the spirit for crit/mastery but i wont drop moonglow.

I doubt it is really worth using a personal damage mitigation cooldown in order to save a not really very substantial amount of mana.

On the 4.2 talent spec issue, can someone comment on our mana situation in PTR raids? Can Regrowth actually replace Healing Touch as our "go to" casted heal as was suspected by some in the old thread with the crit changes? Is that feasible in terms of our mana usage?

If it is, we could take points out of Naturalist in order to maximize Living Seed and Nature's Bounty. I don't see how it is possible otherwise. We need to free up 2-3 talent points from talents like Naturalist, Nature's Cure, Perseverance or Nature's Swiftness.

Druids with Tank healing responsibilities will not take points out of Naturalist ever I guess.

It looks like Blizzard has changed our Mastery at the last moment to make it a little more competitive with Crit, though my own math still shows it to be the inferior stat. Unless I'm doing this math thing completely wrong, our Mastery would have to give 1.65% bonus healing per point to compete with the improved throughput from crit.

First off, 3/3 NB, 1/3 LS is quite easy to get, just look at my current spec. A tank healer could drop furor/genesis/NC to max LS.

But the thought of not making those sacrifices, and dropping Naturalist instead intrigued me, so following is some math and my thoughts on the matter.

Regrowth:
Currently (unbuffed in org, near full BIS) I'm averaging 8379 non-crit RG's, 12568.5 crits, with 775 non-crit tics, 1162.5 crit. Keep in mind the NB crit bonus DOES apply to the hot portion.

At 81% crit(not unbuffed, I'm adding in the 5% in a raid) that's an average of 11772.5 and 4355.5 from the hot portion(4 ticks), for 16128 total. If you assume a 30% LS is always used its 14826.64 direct heal, 19182.14 total.

Raid buffed its a 1.2 cast, and costs (with 3/3 Moonglow and SoW) 5566 mana.

Healing Touch:
In contrast, HT averages 20176.8, 30265.2 crits. At 21% crit, that's an average of 22295.36, with a 2.2 cast, and 4718 mana cost. 24202.07 with 100% LS usage.


From this we clearly see that on live, RG is never worth the mana cost, however if its free, (OoC), it is higher hps. (You can cast both a RG and RJ in the same time as one HT.)

Most healers don't need to look at the LS numbers, the only way you can have anywhere near 100% usage, is if you ONLY cast it on active tanks (seems to be on next hit, not actual dmg sadly), and if you DON'T chain cast it, aka if you cast it ever 5-10 seconds and only on active tanks, then LS would get a high use. Use either RG or HT for raid spot heals, and LS won't usually proc.

Now lets see how much 4.2, changes this.
Regrowth:

Still assuming 8379 base, the crits are now 16758, and 1550 crit ticks. So 15166 average hit, 5611 from the hot portion, for 20777 average hit. Include LS, and now its 19238.2 direct, 24849.2 average.

Healing Touch:
HT crits for 40353 now, so an average of 24413.8, 26956.04 with LS.

So RG is a full second faster cast, 848 more mana, and only a bit more then 2K less then HT assuming LS, 4kish without. A lot closer then the 5 and 6kish difference they are currently.

Now I'm thinking a Raid healing druid (most of us) can actually get high use of LS, because we are mostly using our direct heals for the dual purpose of keeping LB and Harmony up, so they are cast on the active tank, and not chain cast, aka the best case scenario for LS.

Furthermore, since us raid healers don't use very many cast heals, most of these are in fact free via OoC, so the mana difference is further trivialized.

After looking at all this, I'm going to start Firelands with no points in naturalist, and go 3/3 LS, 3/3 NB, and see how badly if at all I miss Nourish/HT. Because of course without Naturalist neither of them are worth even being on your bar. HT is still a better emergency burst heal obviously, since you don't need to rely on the LS or hot, but thoughout the tier I've found RG as a better spot heal, because by the time a HT gets off the person is already healed. This experience may vary of course, based on the strength of your healing team. For me, speed and general throughput > size & burst. Now if your team relies on you more heavily for burst Spot heals (which they shouldn't in my opinion, since Rshamans and pallys... well really all healers are better at it) then you might need HT on occasion, and therefore need to keep Naturalist.

Its a rather major decision, because you are completely losing 2 direct heals as part of your toolbox if you elect not to pick up Naturalist. So put some thought into if for your own scenario.

I'm probably about to embarrass myself, but here goes!

Perhaps I've oversimplified things, however I don't see how Crit and Mastery would effect all of our spells differently as you listed. Frankly, I don't really even see how a higher Crit rate from spells would effect the importance of the Crit stat with regards to reforging or gemming. Have I misunderstood something? I'll show my work as you asked, and you can tell me how wrong I am. Could you explain what the scaling values represent? I'm unable to view them in OO.org, and can't seem to find documentation for those values anywhere. I understand Efflo's ticks don't crit, which reduces the value there a little bit (but not by much, Efflo only accounts for about 7% of heals in my 10 mans, and we're talking about a % change of that already small value...almost trivial). Likewise, Tranq doesn't appear to crit on every tick, though I'm unclear how this operates. Also, are those values in Treecalcs reflecting the new 1.25% per Mastery point, instead of 1% as was recently the case?

Here's the simplification I was talking about: over the course of a 4 hour raid, I'd assume the unreliability of a 25% Crit chance would roughly even out so that 25% of your spells/ticks had critically hit. Likewise, I assume 100% Harmony uptime, the same as the values you shared. Soo..

The intention of my "math" as I'll call it, until proven a fool, is only to determine if it's better to reforge/gem Crit or Mastery for higher HPS output. This means all I'm looking for is the difference between, for example, 100 points invested in Mastery rating or 100 points in Crit rating.

1 point of Mastery = 1.25% healing gain = 143.42 Mastery rating
(healing gain) / (rating cost) * 100 = % gained per 100 mastery rating
.0125 / 143.42 * 100 = 0.87% healing gain per 100 mastery rating

1% of Crit = 2.0% healing gain (assumes no Revitalizing meta) = 179.28 Crit rating
The 2% comes from a 1% chance of 200% healed = 2%.
.02 / 179.28 * 100 = 1.11% healing gain per 100 crit rating

With Revitalizing meta, it'd be 1.15% per 100 crit rating, using my "math."

Also, 916 rating for a 5th tick of Rejuv, and assuming 25% of raid healing comes from Rejuv results in:
(0.25 * 1.25) - 0.25) / 916 = 0.68% per 100 Haste rating, but is still a valuable breakpoint because if you're reforging below this point you probably won't be able to lose enough Haste to convert towards Mastery and justify the loss of the extra tick.

143.42 mastery rating gives 0.8 mastery, or 1% to your Harmony bonus (equivalently, 179.28 rating is 1.0 mastery, or 1.25% Harmony). Also, the Harmory bonus is weaker than it looks since it stacks additively with other bonuses that spells are already receiving. Finally, you're doubling the value of crit for some reason--1% crit will tend to add 1% to your total healing output.

I literally just realized this as I woke up from a nap. I attribute the error to sleep deprivation, thanks for pointing it out :P And I misunderstood some other things as well. So...I retract everything I've said, Mastery it is then!

Some small updates to OP for tomorrow. More haste points listed, slightly rearranged stats.

Also updates to TC--fixed Eye of Blazing Power, and Innervate now assumes that controllable Int effects (trinkets and Engineering) are fully active.

No Nourish bonus yet, keep that in mind if you're looking at the recent Naturalist discussion.

As an added little bonus, people can find my expected BIS list filled out in the sheet (but it's still not totally clear with Resto).

People playing with Crit or Regrowth builds may want to use [Revitalizing Shadowspirit Diamond]

Treecalcs110627 isn't handling that correctly. I believe the fix is to put

into cell AB20 of the "Gear Setup" tab.

Also change cell Z9 of the "Charsheetdata" tab to "54 Spirit, +3% Crit Healing". That won't change any numbers, but it does change the text displayed in cell D9 of the "Gear Setup" tab.

Absolutely, no one will have the mana to get high use from RG. Most of them will be covered by OoC's, otherwise only as needed for spot healz, or to keep up harmony.

This isn't to say it might not be a good meta, because unless I'm mistaken that 3% effects hot ticks as well. So I'll leave it to someone else to sim, but I would assume with our pretty low crit rate, and that we still can use more mana from the Ember, that we'll be staying with Ember this tier. Next tier I'm guessing we'll be past mana worries unless they nerf something hard, and have higher crit, so maybe we can use it then.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft will be what I rock, with the last point in genesis or furor, depending on my mana situation. Probably Genesis to start with since it is normal the first week anyway. But especially for Progression NS can conceivably save a raid, which is more then what you can say for any other optional talent.