Sure the penalty is fair. If 120 spellpower has the same effect on throughput as 120 haste (hypothetically), you would take the spell power because of the free regen tagging along. It would be 120 SP = 120 Haste + x Mp5. Where x is maybe around 15. Now if you do not value Mp5 at all, meaning that you set your stat weights for mp5 to 0, then yes, you would be indifferent between 120 SP and 120 haste. (There is a small difference between the two. You would probably prefer SP in 10 mans, and haste in 25 due to the number of available targets) Therefore Haste takes a penalty that is proportional to how much you value regen.

If you really don't value regen, you would be gemmed straight spellpower/haste with the spell power meta gem. You would also be wearing as much haste/crit gear as you could (since crit > spirit > mp5 = 0), and Illustration of the Dragon Soul would be BiS trinket. You would avoid Mp5 as if it were hit.

If you respond to this with: I need the Mp5 I currently have, but why would I want any more? then I could respond the exact same way about spell power, or throughput in general. More regen allows you to cast spells you wouldn't be able to if you needed to manage your mana. More haste (if used) does lower regen, effectively taking away from your current Mp5.

EDIT: If Regrowth becomes the new heal of choice for raid healing, then mana will probably become more of an issue than it is now.

Resto T10 stats:
World of Warcraft Database - Sigrie

3 crit/spirit pieces, 2 haste/spirit pieces. Overall that's quite poor, given the complete lack of utility of crit. No idea why they finally relieved Moonkin of having Spirit on set gear, but left crit in for Resto. Oh well, hopefully ilvl bumps will let us hit the haste cap with 2 crit pieces on without too much trouble.

Oh, and the 2T10 is still terrible, which doesn't help make this stuff attractive.

2T10 isn't too hot - 3% increase to WG - but it's better than no bonus and you get it by using haste pieces so we'll probably end up having it, at least until the heroic gear starts flowing.
As for the crit, as I wrote this was obviously gonna happen, our gear was plagued with crit since WotLK launch. Nothing before 4.0 is gonna fix that. Hopefully every slot will have a haste piece, this isn't short ToC after all.
Maybe the total lack of spirit on DPS caster loot will finally stop them from taking spirit for Molten Armor or whatever other minuscule bonus it grants. Haven't seen any posts about them doing it before Cataclysm though.

All of our sets have been 3/5 crit and 2/5 haste if I remember correctly so there is little deviation here. Not to mention we have hardly been plagued with crit on our gear at all in this expansion but we have had almost no use for what has been on it fair enough.

This also excludes the ability to work around some of the frustrating crit items with the cloth versions that we have done in the past.

Not sure what you mean by "this". Should be plenty of leather and cloth gear with haste in a large raid as ICC.

With my current gear setup, I'm able to achieve 677 haste. As it's been mentioned 735 haste is cap with 3/3 Celestial Focus come 3.3. Do you think it's worth it to change 3 gems to 20 haste to get haste cap? One of the gems would be Luminous Ametrine (12sp/10int), so I'd lose 58 spellpower in order to gain 60 haste through gems to get capped.

Your thoughts?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that despite the theorycrafting you could reasonably choose to gem haste over spellpower up to the cap anyhow... I'm sure to disturb some here who prefer to "math it out" on all occasions and generally I'd agree with them if we were discussing dps or tanking. Healing isn't quite as one-sided however.

Basically I would describe it as a choice between "spread" and "focus", with haste being spread friendly and spellpower being focus friendly. Favoring haste allows you to heal slightly more different targets for slightly less - good for a raid healer, which is the role we typically assume already.

If the stats were farther apart in the theorycrafted values I would also disregard the "fuzzy logic" above, but the fact that haste is performing decently even in theory settles it for me. Simply because faster casts have such a strategic value for a healer, giving more choice and flexibility. If we find ourselves wanting to increase focus, i.e. heal fewer targets for more, we have and always have had the option of layering multiple hots and following up with direct heals.

Raid composition and healer teamwork in your particular group could also affect this question - if you usually have clear assignments (e.g. "Flowerdrude focus on groups 2-3") then haste may appeal less to you.

Haste performs comparably or slightly better than spellpower in terms of raw healing (will have to check spreadsheet).

I think you can make a good case for gemming haste, in that it enables to you choose between focused or spread healing by swapping Rapid Rejuv in or out. When you want to be spread, you won't use the Glyph, and haste is better than spellpower (both higher overall healing and better spreading). And when you want to be focused, just swap in the Glyph, and now the haste adds just as much HPS to your ticking Rejuvs as spellpower would.

Why would you want to remove the glyph for spread? I would think that you would want it just as much for spread as you would for focus. Maybe I'm not understanding the mechanics here.

The glyph speeds up the ticks of the rejuvenation, lowering the total duration of the rejuvenation since the number of ticks remains constant. Instead of lasting say 17 seconds, it would last something like 13 seconds. That means if you are hotting on CD every second, you can only have 13 rejuvenations up instead of 17 which means you're covering less the raid.

Most people agree that the hasted hot is not optimal for raid healing where the majority of our hots are overhealing. You want as many rejuvs up as possible for when the raid damage does hit.

Where I'm seeing the difference it focus v. spread is in raid comp. If I'm the only druid raid healing and blanketing rejuvs on as many as possible, I'd opt out of the glyph. With other druids, have a smaller focus of groups for each, and use the glyph.

Although, I guess I'm looking at the reverse of Thorngrip, and thinking of haste for focus, and sp for spread.

At any rate, my expectation (untested at this point, as haven't had 25-man experience on the ptr, only 10 - and obviously 10 is focused already), is to meet the cap and switch out the glyph.. thus will have to be gemming a bit of pure haste up-front with my current gear.

If you are healing with another druid than the glyph will be useful nearly all the time. Even for blanketing, it allows you to take 2 groups each and provide more even healing on these groups. whereas without it there is some overlap.
Even as one druid it might be better for these, depending on the amount of aoe damage per tick - which, gasp, will probably be higher than what we've seen. Melee don't require that much healing anyway and you're better off focusing on 3 groups via 5-1 rotation.

Even in 10 man it is somewhat annoying using the glyph unless you are assigned to cover a Felmyst-esk aura (and need the glyph in order to manage it) as it really hinders your ability to blanket the raid and then play reactively especially if you only use 2 healers as standard. Meter padding is wonderful I know but if you don't actually need the healing it provides then it (to me) becomes more of a hindrance than anything else.

If you take the route of having tight assignments (3 healers in 10, and 1-2 groups on 25) then it will become more useful but if that is not the case and you also don't need the increased healing it provides specifically then the people who just take the glyph for the sake of it upon 3.3 will no doubt find themselves worse off more often than not.

Ahh true, I hadn't thought of that. My concern had been the inability to get to the haste cap in a 10-man environment (without an optimal group), but even with only ~740 haste, I was a reduced to a 13 sec or so Rejuv in a 10-man, which would be nice.

When I first saw the glyph I was thinking it would be great for 10 man healing, as our group runs with a resto druid and disc. priest only, priest focused on the tank while the druid (myself or another) raid heals and keeps HoTs on the tank/s.

The big question will be, how do the new bosses hurt your raid? If it's Mimi napalm type attacks, the faster casting regrowth + old rejuv covers that. If it's a steady raid wide Twins aura that does more than a normal rejuv can handle, hasted rejuvs will allow you to spam cast and then focus on other things, rather than weaving LB and RJ. In 10 man stuff WG doesn't hit 6 as often anyway, and if you don't need the mana you're likely to have a glyph spot to play around.

On 25 person content it can still be handy, depending on group positioning and raid damage. Do bosses target a few folks with a volley of DoTs which can be dealt with using RJ, or will everyone take Twins type aura damage where max coverage wins the day?

The only fights I can see myself not using the hasted rejuve glyph are aura fights. Right now we have 3 of them. Twins, Iron Council (HM), and Sapphiron. I wouldn't use it on General Vezax, but we out gear the encounter now that it doesn't matter anymore.

o Frost Aura — Deals 4,500 Frost damage to all nearby enemies every 3 seconds.

-Sindragosa.

4 Aura fights, 4 fights I would replace Rapid Rejuvenation with another glyph. Until you came to the point where you out geared the encounter again. Our healers are out gearing the Twin's encounter already, so I wouldn't even switch for this fight (unless it posed a problem).

Your running a tight 5Rejuve->WG on most of these encounters. Unless you have aoe healing strong in your guild, frost resist is going to be a big factor as well. When I read this fight, giving its nature, I think frost resist is going to help out a lot here. I have started to gather mats for the rings (for the raid, not just my own).

[Titanium Frostguard Ring]
[Arcanum of the Frosty Soul]

As the "primary" healer to this fight, I wouldn't go much over the ring and enchant. Losing out on all that spellpower might hurt us overall. This may even be "too far". Until we can see the intensity of this damage on normal 25, it is going to be hard to tell. However, this is a lot more frost damage going around than just this aura.

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Icecrown: Trauma Most likely a 45 second ICD, but looks awesome for raid healing. Depending on the ICD, or if it is just a proc chance, it may be worth dropping haste on our weapons for, since critical becomes ugly again. Mag'hari Chieftain's Staff - Items - Sigrie is also a viable option, providing a lot of haste. Althor's Abacus This trinket looks strong as well, for a possible raid healing. Similar to the Shaman's Ancestral Awakening - Spell - World of Warcraft .

Once we pick up the new Icecrown trinkets with more SP, we are going to lose all the mp5 from Solace's. If your guild has been killing Jaraxxus for over a month now, then chances are you will have both solace's when Icecrown comes out. 144+128=272 mp5 we will be losing. This is a lot, and going to be really hard to give up (for me at least).

Trauma's effect has a 1(-2)% proc chance so a very high internal cooldown would be detrimental as then it would have a much higher proc chance.

If you look at previous trinkets which had such a low proc chance such as [Soul Preserver] or [Eye of Gruul] you will remember that they had no ICD (at least not that I recall or could quickly find information on) and you will no doubt remember how well the Eye of Gruul worked with CoH granting a rough 10%~ chance on cast to trigger it which was amazing at the time.

The wording of the equip also makes it seem to favor hots and especially AoE ones like WG which synergize with it extremely well so I would not be shocked if there was a short 10~20 second ICD to mitigate the raw strength of the proc chance for us.


More data is naturally needed before any precise conclusions can be made but I would be surprised if they hadn't put in a counter-measure for us to stop it being vastly superior above and beyond what it is for anyone else if the way it is worded is correct.

Looking at Trauma some more, I think it will be a chance on heal, with most likely no ICD. Until they change the proc chance that is.

Fountain of Light: (Normal mode Trauma)
It can heal in 2 different ways that I can find out. One that I am reading and thinking is going to happen is it will heal all targets within 10 yards for 217 every second. The other is it will work like the Fountain of Light in ToC 5; where it will heal 1 target within 10 yards for 217 every second (not always the same target). If the first idea holds true, this mace is going to rock hard. Our Twins setup has 19 people within 10 yards of each other, not to mention ~8 pets (six soakers). Maybe it is supposed to be that good for the loss of other stats. I need to stop thinking about it because I'll be extremely disappointed when it comes to loot day and I get it and it is basically a garbage proc ICD/Effect etc.

Firstly "Apply Area Aura" should be very easy to understand.
Secondly the ToC version of the spell summons an NPC using the wording "Creates a Fountain of Light that heals nearby friendly units for 45 sec or until it is destroyed." and when compared to "heal themselves and friends within 10 yards for 217 each sec for 6 sec." it should be quickly dismissed as being anything similar.

The loss of stats which is roughly 59 crit, 14sta, 14 int, 59 spirit is not an amazing one as at a meaningful level of being Icecrown geared you should need no more haste which results in both crit and haste being somewhat a useless stat and then the loss of 59 spirit and 14 int/sta is really not a big deal provided it compensates for the 22~ SP loss from the spirit.

If at release there is still no more known information about it you can always pass the first one which drops to save being disappointed until you find out exactly how it works...

I'd say this is especially true considering my solaces are now proccing six times per wild growth cast (one for each member effected) on the ptr, suggesting that solace may also now be counting as six spells with many similarly worded and programmed effects. If it procced on ticks of WG, */napkin math* you're basically looking at 36 chances to proc a 2%, or 74% chance that any given wg will proc it. Sounds beefy. 6*5*217 leaves you with 6150 healing done, having a 22% chance to proc every second assuming haste cap and rejuv/wg on cooldown. This gives you 22% chance per second of proccing 6150 total healing. With all hots rolling, it's ~1353 HPS increase assuming nothing overheals, overwrites, and no ICD.
I'm drooling already.
What happens if it can proc off of itself? If it hits six people, you have a 60% chance that it will proc itself again. If it doesn't overwrite itself, the numbers get silly. If it hits 10 people, it will mathematically proc itself and never stop proccing until it stops hitting 10 people. This assumes that it doesn't overwrite itself, which, come to think of it, would cause it to stack up indefinitely once you had it ticking on more than 10 people. Say, if 11 people, or 19 such as posted in the twin valks strat above were to be hit with it, it would begin to multiply and stack up to two stacks per person within the first 5ish seconds, and would basically start running rampant from there. My money is on a hefty ICD on this sucker, if there isn't, you'd better believe I'll have one.

The wording suggests the secondary heal isn't attributed to you ".. cause the target of your heal to heal themselves and friends within 10 yards for..." to prevent a chain proc I assume but again until more data available from actual testing it is hard to say beyond what the tooltip and spell data implies - we all know how reliable tooltips are though so.