Currently there are people with the 245-normal and 258-heroic versions of certain items about in the game and even some with 2x the same item. I have not found anyone with the rings or trinkets that we would use though to be able to say with confidence those ones will work together and I am not fully certain that we should assume this is intended or not - Blizzard have not shared that knowledge with us :P

My friend and I are having a (sorta pointless) debate:
[Moonshadow Armguards] vs [Bracers of the Autumn Willow]
(Assuming t9 4set and haste soft cap w/o Autumn Willow)

My elementary school math said 42 crit is ~0.46% increase to RJ and 11 spellpower is ~0.2% increase. RJ is ~60% of our effective healing, so I figured overall the crit is worth ~0.276% throughput, while the 11 spellpower affects all of our healing (so it stays the same?). Is this math accurate? If so, then could it be said that 3 crit rating is worth about 1 spellpower (when wearing t9 4set)?

At first I thought this would be a dumb question (spellpower rules all right!), but it is a bit more intricate. I think we need to have more discussion about what the value of crit is with 4pc T9. Honestly, I'm struggling a little bit with how to plan to use my EPGP for upcoming drops.

At what ratio is crit valuable to spellpower?

At what point do we feel its "okay" to break T8 4pc, specifically?

What amount of crit is worth falling under the soft haste cap with 4pc t9?

What ILVL of T9 is worth investing in? Will you be mixing all levels of it to make a 4pc?

There is a lot of crit on the new gear, and haste, at least for me, is getting tricky to manage... My original plan was to upgrade all my non-tier pieces first, but I know I will have to start making my t9 at some point, and I can't control what drops...

I have done a small bit of research in terms of what gear to get. One thing to keep in mind about myself, is I am stubborn with leather. I hate wearing cloth, and taking it from other casters. With that being said, I would choose 258 over 245 for two reasons, the overall spellpower you get from it is nice for Wild Growth, Swiftmend, Lifebloom, and the more frequently used Nourish, and the extra Stam/Int/Spirit. Faction Champions is a good fight to have that extra stats on .

The rate at which I will recieve my teir gear is DEAD last, since our 4pc t8 is so powerful. Trophies don't go to resto druids in our guild. Well we can get one to replace our "5th" piece. The 232 gear is such a small upgrade from 8.5, that I believe it should only be used to complete 4pc t9 with one piece of 232, being gloves or shoulders (lowest stat values per slot). Restoration druids have a lot of math they can use to determine "best in slot", but it comes down to personal preference in the end. It is all in how you heal, what your healing assignment is.

kirbie, if your guild is holding back trophies because they think T8.25 4pc is so uber, they are making a huge mistake. 3.2.2 cuts it in half, plus if you really take the time to do the math and figure out how much spell power you need to break even from losing your 4pc T8, as well as the other stat boosts that come with it, you are losing out big-time.

A couple pages back someone posted some numbers showing how much spell power it would take to break even when losing 4T8. I did some similar math using my healing numbers from a ToC10 raid recently and found that it would take as little as 113 Spell Power increase needed from losing my 4T8, but that was only for Rejuv to tics to make up for the bonus heal. It did not count all the other heals in my arsenal that I used that night, therefor I have come to the conclusion that I will be replacing my 219 T8 shoulders to the 232 T9, as well as my 219 gloves to the 239 Frozen Glade gloves which previously were a downgrade due to not having two pieces to swap in place of losing my 4t8 bonus.


I hope my rambling made sense.

It did make sense, and I understand where a lot of people are coming from. I am just going off by how much overhealing does with rejuve, and did you count that in your math? Look at the EHPS of the 4pc T8 and the EHPS of your 113 SP boosted Rejuve and its overhealing, and you would have to get this from 4 pieces of gear. Also, I am not talking 10 man's either, because healing rotation is completely different in 10 man raid enviroment. Typical fights like Twins, IC Hardmode, Firefighter (raid heavy damage) is where my guild utilizes my class most. 5xRejuve->WG melee 5xRejuve->WG melee. Thats my rotation, which allows up to and over 10k EHPS on these encounters (minus firefighter all the downtime).

The first hit of 4pc T8 is hardly every Overhealing. 90% EH according to my WMO's. How much would the 4th and 5th tick of rejuve be overhealing? It all depends on your raid comp too. If I was solo raid healing IC Hardmode, I would certainly go for that extra 113 spellpower and more, because chances are the 4th and 5th ticks of rejuve won't be overhealing. I mentioned that it has a lot to do with playstyle, and now I am adding raid composition. If your playstyle and raidcomp allows you to use different gear outside of 4pc t8, then more 232 gear would be viable.

(I apologize for typo's or mispelling, I didn't sleep last nite )

EDIT: PS. The trinkets from Heroic and regular stack. Blizzard counts "Heroic" (the green text) in the item name.

I haven't done all of the math on T9 4 pc (I think it's going to take real world application to really bear out the value anyway) but pre-nerf T8 4 pc adds 10-12% total real, measured, effective throughput in current content that scales upward with spell power. Given that there are druids still wearing 4 pc T8 and sporting more than 2500 sp -- I'm going to go with not 100, not even 200 sp would have made up this difference pre-nerf. Post-nerf, it bears further inspection but I'm still leaning toward 4-pc iLVL 258 before breaking T8.

EDIT: Some quick inspection shows me I'm on the right track here:

Average per-piece upgrade in spell power from iLVL 226 to iLVL 245 is about 21 sp. Times 4 pieces = 84 sp

Average per-piece upgrade in spell power from iLVL 226 to iLVL 258 is about 39 sp. Times 4 pieces = 156 sp

Source:

Conqueror's Nightsong Regalia - Item Set - World of Warcraft
Triumphant Malfurion's Garb - Item Set - World of Warcraft
Totally Triumphant Malfurion's Garb - Item Set - World of Warcraft

Even factoring in 50% nerf, I don't see the additional 78 sp of 4 pieces of iLVL 245 on it's own making up for the throughput of T8 4pc. Not sure what the realistic additional throughput will be from 4-pc T9 crit bonus. Maybe we get close to equal throughput of 4 pieces of T8 226 gear using 245 4 pc spell power increase PLUS 4 pc crit bonus working in conjunction. I really still think it's going to take the extra 156 sp AND 4 pc crit bonus of iLVL 258 to net us a throughput increase.

This is definitely very quick napkin math though so I'm very interested in hearing more back-and-forth on this discussion. It'll be interesting to see some parses of 4 pc T9 bonus value in current content. Don't know if this is a 1% or 5% or insert % here throughput gain -- that's the real unknown wild card in these calculations and it could make even 4 pc 245 a contender to break 4 pc 226.

My only issue with this is the 10-12% throughput increase is dependent on some level of blanket hotting a raid who is taking some kind of damage. The only fight in TOC that provides a scenario where your initial application HOT of the 4set would be 90% non-overhealing is Hardmode Twins. The rest of the fights do not really have any kind of raid heavy AOE damage for hots to chew through and as such I feel the 2set bonus, crit on Nourish, is a very useful set bonus in conjunction with the 2set t8, 10% on Swiftmend.

Personally I'm very close to having my 4set t9, which I cannot wait for, and I have been working on getting as much crit gear as I can. My goal is as close to 30% crit raidbuffed as I can get, and I should be able to do that. I gave up the 4pc t8 except for on certain encounters and haven't noticed any substantial throughput loss other then on fights like Twins, where I feel critting rejuvs will give me that back.

I hadn't really revisited 4 pc T8 bonus value since validating the 10-12% number across many Ulduar and Ulduar hard mode parses. That said, your statement gave me some incentive to look at the past couple weeks of ToTC 25. My parses aren't agreeing with your assertion of lowered value of T8 4 pc bonus even on Normal mode. Weds of this week on 25 man Normal and Northrend Beasts Heroic mode progression pulls, 4 pc T8 netted me this per fight:

NRB 25 Normal: 12.9% effective throughput (sadly had my duck equipped from a hard mode Vezax pull prior night. Switched in throughput idol on all future encounters on this night though)
LJ 25 Normal: 20.5% (yeah, that one is shocking to me, even)
FC 25 Normal: 20.7% (again shocking but true)
Twins 25 Normal: 12.7%
Anub 25 Normal: 12.2%

NRB 25 Heroic best attempt: 11.3%
No further heroic attempts yet.

Based on the surprisingly high values of some of these, I looked at last week to double-check and see if these numbers were exceptions and found:

NBR 25N: 14.2%
LJ 25N: 20.1%
FC 25N: 21.2%
Twins 25N: 12.3%
Anub 25N: 13.4%

Similar values are also showing in prior weeks for the bosses that were available those weeks. If TotC follows Ulduar, I would expect Heroic/Hard Modes of these fights to show as much or more value.

In 10-man, I have a bit more success in heroic TotC encounters and have the following values by comparison (I fully realize 10 man content is not an indicator of 25-man performance but these values might be of interest for those that run 10s primarily):

NRB 10N: 12.8%
LJ 10N: 12.0%
FC 10N: 9.6%
Twins 10N: 12.2%
Anub 10N: No values. Haven't attended for this yet.

NRB 10H: 9.8%
LJ 10H: 16.7%
FC 10H best attempt: 12.9%
Twins 10H: no attempts yet
Anub 10H: no attempts yet


I know I might not believe me either if I saw someone post 20+% numbers so all values can be verified at my World of Logs page if you are so inclined:

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

I'd be very interested to see if my numbers are way out of whack compared to what you or others are seeing but based on this, I'm seeing an increased value of T8 4 pc bonus in TotC, not a decreased value. All good conversation at any rate.

You still ignore the application of 4T8 which makes you use Rejuvenation reactively though which inflates the numbers of not just the bonus itself but the healing done by Rejuvenation as you use the spell more frequently (I do not believe any amount of SP will account for this). The "snipe" mentality is really what causes the bonus to look so good and it's very similar to how CoH was back during Hyjal/BT when it got buffed up and got abused as soon as any tiny amount of damage was delt.

Without 4T8 you will (eventually) use Regrowth and Nourish slightly more often and obviously you will cast Rejuvenation less as a result. You may very well end up initially seeing your healing done decrease overall as you mentally adjust to the change (where you will see someone take a spot of damage, cast RJ on them and it will get overhealed before the first tick where before you had 2k healed at that point) and your 4T9 may end up not actually increasing the amount of healing done by your RJ in comparison to when you had 4T8 (ignoring the bonus heal). A further result of you using different spells will be your mana consumption going up but that may end up being counterbalanced by the hefty increase in mana you gain from the 226/239->245/258 level gear.

I think that if you attempt to compare 4T8 to 4T9 healing you will be disappointed at first as your healing goes down and when it starts to go back up your mana consumption follows suit giving the illusion of it being a nerf.
As I have said before 4T8 has been a really unfortunate bonus for us and perhaps the conjunction with the general mana nerf did not help things either. The sad part is that the attempt to test how critical strike on HoTs will work for us via 4T9 will end up being poorly tested and influenced by the loss of 4T8, resulting in there being poor data for Blizzard to utilize (granted it might end up making them "overbuff" any attempt to make critical strike useful for us which few if any of us will complain about - until they nerf it).


All that said it will be interesting to see real world data when people finally start getting it and to find out if my general assumptions are correct about its affects on our playstyle.

I do agree we use Rejuvenation differently based on the instant-heal and that definitely impacts the numbers. I am guilty of refreshing a Rejuv early to get the instant heal component. I obviously would not do that in the future with the 4 pc T8 bonus broken. That said, especially as the 4 pc T9 bonus is still Rejuv based, I really don't see RJ blanketing going away and I fully expect RJ to be top spell even post-T8.

Rejuvs are such a good/cheap heal that I cast them anytime there isn't another heal needed. I agree that rejuv blanketing isn't going away, its effectiveness my be diminished a bit, but we will still do it. I have found myself casting Nourish and regrowth a lot more-which is a good thing. IMO the T9 bonus actually encourages you to cast more rejuvs. Without the instant heal it is almost more important to have that hot running on people. Part of the problem is that our one decent/quick casted heal is tied to having a hot on the target already. I don't know if Blizz wants us to be rejuv bots or not, but they really haven't done anything to change that with T9. I remember before T8 the one complaint with rejuv was it took sooo long to get a heal out of it-3 seconds is like an eternity in this game sometimes.

So now we go back to waiting 3 seconds for a heal from rejuv with a casted heal that is based on a hot already being on the target. In addition we are being encouraged to actually take all the haste above 359 off our gear and stack crit. So that casted heal which was taking 1.2-1.3 seconds is going up another tenth or two. Maybe it is just me, but this all just doesn't seem to flow for me. I will of course upgrade to T9, but I will surely pick up most other pieces first. At the rate spell power is going up, by the time all non tier pieces are upgraded that 50% nerf to T8 bonus will probably actually work out to be a 25% nerf. compared to pre-coliseum numbers.

That's the funny thing though because it's not.
There are two spells we have which Blizzard have thought out poorly on a psychological level which still plague us today - these being Nourish and Swiftmend.

Swiftmend heals less if you use it on a target which has RG on them which makes you feel like it is bad to cast the spell unless the target has RJ on them instead. This makes you then dislike using RG as much because it will give you an inferior Swiftmend when needed. I have a slight gripe that Swiftmend tends to be ignored on all except one set bonus per expansion and this is a prime example of an aspect that needs updating. The most ideal way to amend it would be to have it changed to be a fixed value heal and only require RJ or RG on the target to be consumed and heal the same amount regardless.

Nourish always feels inferior (or wrong) to cast unless the target has a HoT on them for the extra 20% healing and despite all the buffs it has received this perception remains and Blizzard are being.. silly in thinking it just needs more buffs to get it used more. From what I was aware during the beta the intention was for that bonus to be able to make it a good spell for also healing tanks with while being a typical flash heal normally. I posted about this back then in beta that the bonus should be additional critical strike because that retains the general higher healing on tanks and also links with Living Seed well while keeping the normal functionality of the spell as a flash heal to be thrown around without much issues.
Please note I wasn't implying it should have the 20% bonus healing done baked into the spell and they decided to have the additional crit on Nature's Bounty instead which felt slightly awkward to be honest.

The importance of how people perceive things is often shrugged off but it is a very powerful aspect to most things that we don't even notice. Just look at how meters influence how people play/heal because the general belief is that if you are low on healing meters you did a bad job

@ Ganuard: I have to use the logs I have which are predominantly normal. I understand this may not be ideal. That said, the most extensive / successful pull or Northrend Beasts Heroic still had T8 bonus coming in at 11.3% (right smack dab in the middle of the 10-12% average we are seeing in Ulduar Hard Modes). I'm not saying these are the ideal fights to look at -- they are simply what I have. I'll start looking at WoL parses of other guild's attempts on heroic to get a larger sample size but I fully expect to see similar 10-12% effective bonus on this T9 content as well as T8.

From those parses, I think it shows truly the opposite of how good the set bonus is. As others have said, the set bonus accounts for so much healing because you use it a lot, not necessarily because it's good. I could just as easily have worn 4pT7 and shown how much more % healing nourish does than everything else, but that doesn't mean the set bonus is good, it just means you probably used nourish more than everything else. Just look at your overheal numbers; 90% overheal on rejuv? Is the 2k heal so good that spamming a spell that's going to overheal 90% is worth it? Just by seeing that the set bonus is only 13% behind a heal that heals 6x more and cast just as many times indicates that most of the time you're not getting more than 2-3k healing or so per cast.

Honestly the worth of 4pT8 is blown way out of proportion. Yes it's good. However, I think most of it is psychologically rooted. People forget that we spam rejuv because the content supports it, not our gear nor that that strategy is good for all situations. Ulduar was full of high volume, high spread, gradual delivery damage, which conveniently matches the healing profile of rejuv. The set bonus was a 12% increase on the best healing style, so it was good, though I would argue that its worth lies more in the volume side of healing and not so much as a reactive heal. Now, new content is, for the most part, moving away from the Ulduar damage model, and instead of changing most are trying the rejuv spam method, which is understandable since playstyle shifts take a little time to take effect. Now that content is more bursty, the random hot delivery on rejuv is going more to overheal than before (90% for example), but since we can control where the initial set bonus heals we can ensure it doesn't overheal as much (50% for example). This then inflates the set bonus's % healing value artificially. This makes it look good, but it's not. People forget; we spam rejuv because of rejuv and how it fits the content, not because of the set bonus.

Obviously, rejuv spam isn't completely defunct right now, but I don't think it's quite as king as it used to be, thus making the set bonus not as king as it was either. Other healing styles are possible right now, perhaps better, even. I don't think people should be skipping entire tiers of gear because of a 2k heal that somehow makes rejuv a reactive spell. I don't think you need 200+ more SP from upgrades to make up for 4pt8. Maybe I don't understand how good it is because I've never had it, but I don't see how orgasmic it is when you're overhealing 90% on rejuv.

Overheal is high because damage is lower on Normal mode content. You will not see this amount of overheal on a hard mode parse. The parses are not ideal for displaying the bonus -- they were simply the only ones I had for TotC which was the temporary discussion at hand -- i.e. does the bonus display as much value in TotC as in Ulduar.

If I wanted to show a parse with less overheal and the same effective throughput value, I'd show something like this:

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

11.8% of total effective throughput on the bonus, overheal specifically on the bonus is 38% range (largely from the ticks that get wasted on pre-hotting) -- total overheal below 50% range for hard mode Ulduar parses

I suspect we will see a similar profile on TotC but, again, I need to widen the sample size by looking at other guild's parses of heroic mode pulls of this content. I used what was immediately available to me which I will admit is not ideal.

There are of course more than one way to heal. As I said-it is in my opinion. I am not really sure which point you were making it seems lost in there to me. The one thing I am sure about is on free GCDs I will probably be throwing rejuvs on people it only makes sense and I have the mana so why not. Now whether doing that is better with T8 or T9 I don't really know. I am guessing for now that upgrading non-tier pieces and keeping my current bonus is most beneficial to my raid. The instant 2k heal from the T8 bonus is a pretty handy thing to have around and can be counted on and controlled. The T9 bonus not so much.

Nourish and Regrowth are starting to make up about 20%+ of my heals and I am happy to add that diversity to it. Nourish is inferior to cast on somebody that doesn't have a hot on them-20% inferior at least. Now that doesn't mean it is bad, but that doesn't really matter anyway because you aren't really gonna have much other choice. At least with the T8 you could decide if the 2k instant would keep them up for one more GCD and then decide what to do from there. With T9 somebody sitting there without a hot and low health doesn't leave you as many options. At least if they have hots running on them you have another choice-not to mention 20% stronger heal.

The truth of a statement that the spells I think are the best and use the most will make up the highest % of my output is hard to argue with.

However, it's not like I'm some numbnut out on an island who has decided that Regrowth was the bestest spell ever. I and 99% of other druids progressing through hard mode content began to use Rejuv alot because it was effective. My premise from my limited experience in TotC was that I had not seen anything in that content that would change rejuv blanketing continuing to be equally effective and thus the T8 bonus should likely continue to be relevant there (i.e make up at least 10-12% of effective healing in TotC).

My mistake was I used the parses immediately available to me which did not include heroic mode. Apologies for that but I was extrapolating from the data I had. But this is nothing a little research couldn't cure. I submit to you WoL parses from guilds that are clearing heroic mode encounters in ToC:

NRB Heroic: You'll find a slew of parses at World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis that look like this: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis over 10% effective healing from T8 bonus.

Lord Jaraxxus Heroic: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis 18.2% from bonus.

Faction Champions Heroic: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis 18.7%

Twin Valkyr Heroic: Quite frankly most of the parses I found with druids on this fight were crazy skewed by Val'anyr which was responsible for like 80+% of all their healing (jeebus): World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis. However, the one I could find without Val'anyr looked like this: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis 10.3%

Anub'arak Heroic: can't find a parse atm.

Anyway, from the above, looks like the bonus is alive and well in TotC, which was my entire point. Which means it is still a relevant calculation when considering the move to T9. Maybe Rejuv blanketing was a strategy some folks were hoping to see go away with TotC-- but early data does not seem to indicate this. More to come I suppose.

If you look at the proportion of healing done by rejuvenation and the 4pT8 bonus in the first 3 encounters you'll see that rejuvenation itself does just over twice the healing of the instant heal. This means on average barely more than one tick of rejuvenation occurs before the target is at full health, which again means that all the bonus really does here (in general terms) is transfer healing from either the rejuvenation ticks or other healers.

What I'm getting at is that in all those logs I can just about guarantee that the instant heal from the set bonus made no overall difference on healing.

On the twins you can see rejuvenation doing 5 times or more the healing of the bonus which means that the extra throughput could very well be much needed and this is where you would want to consider how much extra spellpower (and accompanying stat increases) you want before you break up the bonus for this particular style of fight.

As Paininabox said the 4pT8 bonus was excellent in Ulduar for two reasons; it was on close to the best gear and many of the hard fights were as made for raid wide hots and actually devoured most that healing making the extra throughput a big benefit. Now you have to look at the new fights (and gear) and see whether it really does anything for you before you automatically hang on to it.

T8 content didn't need the T8 4set upfront heal because most raid damage was spread over time. In very few situations the 4set bonus will have made the difference between a player dieing or staying alive. When someone died in T8 content it was due to a fairly long gap in healing. We considered the 4set bonus good because it effected our most suitable heal (RJ) to counter progressive damage intake. I will admit the bonus certainly made for some entertaining big HPS numbers but I don't consider it to have been a defining factor in our strength..

T9 content has much more 'bursty' raid damage where healing needs to land within the first few seconds or the raid member can quickly die. In these situations I struggle to resort to heavy Nourish use because I begin thinking another class should be brought instead, who can do this Flash Healing and provide other utility which I cannot. Landing a RJ with a small upfront heal, followed by its rather strong ticks that can help cover any future damage, seems to be a good strategy, and a mana efficient one too.

If we do not use RJ + T8 4set Bonus to allow for some reactive use of the spell then we have two options: To increase Nourish use or blanket RJ in the hope those players are the ones who take damage a few seconds later. I don't particularly enjoy blanket healing with RJ as the only skill is to click an almost random raid frame every 1.0s and results in a strategy which is too repetative to want to do on a regular basis. Nourish is still just an ugly spell that admits to a reduction in potential HPS and MPH and is a heal type that is better build into any other healing classes.

Despite my concerns about HPS and MPH I am a practical healer in that I am more than happy to drop out of a Rejuvx5 WGx1 rotation in order to use a more appropriate heal for the current situation, which usually means applying RG because it seems more in keeping with our role of keeping constant healing up rather than short bursts. I still try to keep Nourish use to a minimum and use it only when players are extremely low, or likely to take more damage very soon.

I'm sure the greater SP on the T9 gear will outweigh the T8 4set eventually but I don't think I will commit to the transition until I get all four T9.25 items in one week/raid, until then I am quite happy for our other raiders to make use of Tier tokens. The T9 4set bonus I am less enthusiastic about because it goes against the idea that our healing is steady and consistent, we cannot plan for the 4th or 5th tick to crit! and save the day and looking at T9 damage patterns, our 4th or 5th tick are likely to be late anyway. I enjoy the T8 4set because we do have control over it.

With 30% crit, critting ticks become a bit more predictable. Also, for raid healing, the averaged out HPS is more meaningful than on single target healing. That is, when you're healing a tank, having a bad string of no-crits, especially with big heals like Holy Light, can easily lead to the tank dying. Raid healing is often cross-healed and also dominated by smart heals. Your rejuv crits will cover parts of the raid and the stray CH/WG/CoH will handle the ones that weren't lucky to get the crit.

I think what's missing from this otherwise very good T8.5 versus T9 discussion is the fact that T9 also gives you an increase in other stats besides SP/crit. Your stamina (and thus survivability) is higher, your intellect (mana pool) is higher and your spirit (SP/regen) is also higher.

From everything I've seen i just don't see the T8.5 4 peice bonus (especially post-nerf) make up for the cumulative benefits of T9. I've only got 2 T9 peices atm but I plan to get 4 ASAP. That said, i mostly heal 10 mans and i do have to heal tanks in those so I probably use nourish a lot more than people focusing on pure raid healing in a 25 man. For me, the two peice T9 bonus, coupled with the much higher crit with T9 gear and talented nature's grace are quite useful. When I get 4 peices I can't wait for rejuv crits rolling on tanks/raid members. The uptime on nature's grace from this should be extremely high which would make up for less haste on the T9 gear.