I would love to go with that spec! However my guild runs 10man raids exclusively so we don't have access to that higher tier. After playing around in Rawr for a bit it seems counterproductive to crit stacking for me to take 1 point out of GotEM. We don't reliably have a ret pally and the only moonkin we have is my offspec so we can only count on Wrath of Air Totem. That means I'd need 656 haste rating with 4/5 GotEM. My question is if I need 5/5 GotEM where would I scrounge that talent point out of? I'm thinking Nature's Bounty, Living Spirit or Revitalize but I'm not really too sure D:

First of all if you cast RJ on 10-15 targets, you are not left with much time to actually use your NG. All it would gain you is more talent points to take out of gotem for a slower build up of RJ haste. Definetly far from unbalanced.

I just don't think NG is a good healing talent that could ever get unbalanced. Damage spikes usually don't require a nourish spam. The spikes are usually short, in which case you may cast a heal, but first of all it has to crit and then you need to follow it up with another heal that benefits of haste. Or the damage incoming is high over the long term in which case the extra rejuv is worth more than the nourish.
The same way crit is not a great healing stat. 50% unreliable bonus, in the case of swiftmend and NS+HT very rare and on regrowth with such a weak gain, it can only be called a good stat for Nourish (and RJ on the set bonus). Now maybe im just healing wrong, but even in on the edge pure tank healing situations my Nourish maybe reaches 40% of my total healing done. Those situations are rare as other classes have just as good or better tools for this kind of healing.
In my opinion haste has a better gain as you increase the frequency and through that the output of heals on alot more healing tools. Obviously the gain is less on aoe damage encounters where you blanket heal with hots, but crit can only shine through the set bonus there, direct heals are nothing you spam on those.

Maybe its close to a moot point for crit and haste if you are at the haste soft cap and have the 4T9, having two equally weak secondary stats still doesnt fix the current itemization problem that lets spellpower win against all other by a mile. Mana seems to be a non issue with the new 5min encounter plan from blizzard, int is unavoidable and sp gain from spirit is low. I started to use the 25sp+2%int meta now and use every item with max spellpower i can get. That seems to get me the best results, but obviously depending on playstyle, guild healing setup and encounter your guild is wiping on currently YMMV.

I tend to agree that NG is a rather weak healing talent. It is not actually in the healing tree, so that makes some sense. It does a good job when you're either spamming nourish on a tank (rare) or chain regrowthing the raid (very rare).
With 4T9, I'm not sure how you can compare crit and haste (assuming you're over the softcap). Rejuv and SM favors crit, regrowth favors haste, nourish is somewhat in the middle if you aren't spamming (or don't have NG).
The main problem is that even if all our hots were allowed to crit, we'd still be missing the secondary effects - inspiration, mana regain - that other healers gain from critting. Granted, changing hots to crittable will also surely include a revision of related talents like NG and Living Seed.

Ok, RJ on 4-5 targets + 25-30% crit rate = constantly proc'd NG = imbalanced. However you want to position it, 3-6% effective healing uplift plus near 100% uptime proc of 20% haste would be a bit broken for a set bonus. It's kind of moot I guess as it's not happening but I don't see how anyone would think this is balanced.


The outcome of your math is much different than the outcome of my math. My experience also tells me that at my current haste of 372 plus raid buffs, my NG-proc'd Nourishes are at least 1.1 seconds (per Quartz bar -- see screen shot below with NG, WoA, Moonkin Aura and 1.1 sec channel on Quartz).



Not a lot has been written that I could find on haste value for 1-second Nourish post NG proc so, when I did my research to determine how much haste I wanted to shoot for, I went the route of finding material on haste required for moving Wrath down from 1.5 to 1.0 post NG proc and then backed out Celestial Focus.

So, less Celestial Focus: (1.5/(1.03*1.05*1.2)=1.155802 = 15.58% haste needed to get to 1.0 seconds X 32.79 haste per 1% reduction = 511 haste required. I bumped it up to 541 since 511 put me so close to dropping a point out of GotEM that I might as well do so. I'm not sure how you're getting 1.04 sec post-NG Nourishes with 359 haste. It's not impossible I'm missing something but I don't think I am. If I am, I'll put my tail between my legs and go sit in the penalty box with a dunce cap.

Assuming I'm right, when I talk about getting to 511/541, I'm not talking about Nourish spam in general to up my overall throughput. I'm talking about specific situations where the utility of 1.0 second Nourish spam would be very useful / necessary. The particular situations that come to mind (based on my limited 5/5 heroic 10 and 2/5 heroic 25 experience) are:

1) 2-healing Anub'arak 10 heroic and needing to keep 2 penetrating cold targets upright while Paladin partner takes care of MT/OT with beacon.

2) Dealing with Incinerate Flesh in 25s heroic when Paladin healers have been kissed and effectively silenced.

3) There may be other situations which I haven't come across due to not seeing 5/5 heroic 25. Those two alone are enough for me atm to cause the shift in my spec and thinking.

In those occasions, I want as fast a Nourish cast as possible and that's why I'm pushing for 1 second post NG Nourishes. Maybe it's because it's progression for us, maybe our heal team is currently lacking execution but we have absolutely had scenarios where a tenth of a second on Nourish is the difference between success and a wipe within heroic ToC. Throughout Ulduar, I was perfectly happy with 359 haste and a 11/0/60 spec. ToC has changed things up for me which is why I'm considering haste values and the spec I posted.

Hm, thought I grabbed a correct one. I'll see if I have another with everything up. Either way, I'm near positive I've not seen anything below 1.1 NG proc'd Nourish with Moonkin Aura / WoA / NG. I'll do a test with tooltip hover as you have suggested to verify. The second decimal would be handy.

If you are right, then throw everything I've said out the window. If I am right, then there could be some debate about whether trading ~152 crit for ~152 haste is a worthwhile endeavor.

NG is simple multiplicative haste. With WoA, Imp. Moonkin Aura, and NG up, the haste required to hit a 1s Nourish cast time is 511 haste.

In the odd situation where you need to spec out for heavy Nourish use, definitely grab haste up to that point. Basically, if you're doing 10-man tank healing or Penetrating Cold--anything which uses Nourish enough that you're picking up NG in the first place. In normal usage though, you use Nourish little enough (at least I do) that any haste which affects only Nourish is pretty worthless.

This is almost moot anyway, since our top gear has so much haste on it that you'll be over the Rejuv cap in ToC gear. There are very few llvl 258 spellpower/crit/spirit pieces to aim for.

Aye, the use cases I've found so far in heroic ToC have been Penetrating Cold duty and Incinerate Flesh coverage when Paladin(s) are taken out by Maiden Kiss. In both of those scenarios, I've seen 1/10ths of a second absolutely matter. I use Quartz latency to key the next Nourish based on the latency indicator and not after full channel of spell to shave 1/10ths there, spec'd NG to grab 10ths there, and am looking to grab haste to 511 to shave the last 1/10th.

Prior to ToC, I'm with you -- I would cast Nourish but it was about once every 3 months or so that I felt a need to cast it back to back so I didn't even spec NG let alone worry about 511 haste. It's these particular situations in ToC that have caused me to devote some attention to the matter.

Absolutely crit will buy me more overall effective throughput post 359-haste. I'm not arguing that . . . though, from the parses I've looked at, the crit vs haste we're talking about is a fraction of a percentage of total effective throughput. What I'm really talking about here is weighing that fraction of a percentage of effective throughput vs. expanding my toolkit to deal with difficult success/failure-determining situations.

That situation with the other healers being kissed is exactly what jammed us a couple of nights ago on progression Jaraxxus 25. I had already used NS on a numbnut that couldn't move earlier so it was down. I had RJ on the target so I Swiftmend and Nourish spammed. The final Nourish that would've cleared it was at 1.0 / 1.1 when the target went boom. 38% Jaraxxus with everyone up went from possible first progression kill to wipe. I had a similar situation while two-healing Anub'arak PC in 10s. PC was on both I and the Paladin healer. It was final PC and I had let us get a little low when it first hit (was relying mostly on passive healing of JoL, HST, and WGs to keep raid up). Anyway, I quickly started in with Swiftmend, Nourish spam across both of us while he kept tanks up but I lost him to a 1/10th and then me right after. Fortunately we were around 3-4% on Anub when it happened and he still went down. Those two situations really got me on this path. How rare they are -- hard to say -- again maybe it's because it's progression and we are riding such a fine line that the tweaks I'm talking about are of interest. I guess the way I see it is I'm not really giving up much in return to gain the additional capability so it makes sense to me.

I'm not sure I understand your final point. When I'm looking at gear/spec, I'm very much looking at CURRENT content, not some future content. I need to optimize for the challenges progression is putting in front of me now, not some unknown future state. I guess in your case where you have completed / perhaps even trivialized current content, you begin to look toward the future. In my guild's case, I'm very much focused on milking every last ounce of capability I can from my raid spot so that we can clear current content.

We're just starting real attempts on Anub-25-HC, and certainly this fight behaves differently than most others. I don't see why you'd nourish spam PC - A (glyphed) rejuv matches the debuff quite nicely. I can only see nourish as useful to prevent the first tick death.

Haven't done this on 25s yet but I have done it on 10s and the 6k PC tick every 3 seconds plus a 30% leeching damage every 1 second will not be covered by Rejuv (glyphed or otherwise). Let's say normal rejuv is hitting for 3kish every 3 -- make that 4.5k every 3 with Rejuv glyphed and you are 1.5k behind every 3 seconds without even factoring in 30% Leeching. Granted there is some amount of resist usually on each tick of PC so it's less than 6k flat but 30% Leeching every 1 sec adds up considering you are trying to keep the target at greater than 9k to avoid a back-to-back or near-simultaneous ticks of PC / Leeching killing them. I didn't add in passive healing sources like JoL as it is hard to quantify but my experience in 10s definitely suggests you need more than glyphed RJ.

EDIT: the initial kill parses I viewed on Anub'arak 25H actually had a bunch of druids using glyphed HT to solve this problem. That's another interesting angle/strategy and apparently a successful one at that. I suppose glyphing HT could solve some of the other issues I'm discussing as well and it is 100% reliably 1 sec chains (due to GCD not cast time) whereas NG-proc'd 1 sec Nourishes aren't 100% reliable. That said, if you can keep it proc'd, 1 sec glyphed Nourish spam is better throughput than 1 sec glyphed HT spam.

Watch me as I go off the deep end . . . . wheeee. This really does beg the question what if I threw the efficiency conversation and other theories out the window regarding Nourish versus glyphed HT and really just focused on reliable timeliness of heal -- could I solve the problems I'm talking about by keeping myself around 359ish haste, jamming crit into my itemization, glyphing HT and spec'ing like this:

Glyphed HT / Heroic ToC Spec

I've got money to spare on respecs and easy access to glyphs -- I may mess around with this a bit to see what the glyphed HTs are hitting for versus the Nourish supported by one RJ is hitting for. Of course, at that point, this conversation really moves out of itemization and into another thread.

EDIT: On the face of it, I give up Nourish glyph 6% uplift per hot for the situational capability to get a reliable, no pre-HoT required ~.8 sec heal down on someone and a reliable chained 1 sec burst heal when necessary as well. No unreliable proc or haste requirement to support this outside of 359 I already have been gearing for which allows me to go after crit itemization earlier. In terms of spec, I'm not really giving up much . . only 11 points required in Balance and, even after using up 5/5 in Naturalist, still a good bit of flexibility in Resto tree to get the things I want. If I have time to lay burst down, I can roll Nourish at ~1.3. If I need something reliably faster, I have NS, Swiftmend, and then glyphed HT behind those to deal with when they are on cooldown. It's interesting. I'll be messing with this tonight in 25s and tomorrow in 10s.