I'm sorry but if you have to put it in terms "it could still end up being quite good" then I think you just said yourself that this is not what you'd expect from a legendary healing weapon for a resto druid. Personally, I'm completely disappointed in this and unless it happens that this is just one of the choices of stats, it seems pretty obvious that this will scale way better for the other 3 classes than for resto druids. Just because "it could end up being quite good" doesn't mean we'll actually benefit from it as much as someone else does. IMO the amount of haste and crit rating on it definitely means a lot of that will be quite wasted stat.

I'd like to also note that this is a legendary weapon in second content installment of this expansion. We still have at least two raid content patches to go just in Northend that have been at least hinted at. Putting a legendary with the item level that it has in this patch simply means that by the time we hit Icecrown, people may be putting it aside in favor of some Icecrown epic from a 10-man normal. Procs are great but raw spellpower will trump them anytime for healers - I don't want to be healing a tank or anyone else crossing my fingers and praying that I get a proc otherwise that guy dies.

My made up stat is just as made up as anyone else's theories on this mace. It doesn't even exist yet and people have already decided who it is best for. Seriously, is it going to make or break an encounter to have this mace on a druid? No. And if it does than your guild has more problems to worry about than who got a mace. I think you and many others are taking this way too seriously. It isn't a slap in the face to give a healing mace to a healer. It is a slap in the face to completely shut the door on one type of healer because of assumptions based on a limited facts however. The people who get this mace should be seen as someone their guild would like to thank or show some appreciation for, not for their class color.

Is it going to make or break the encounter? No, that would be silly. I guess this is more of an exercise of the hypothetical, since this is a board for discussing how to min/max. In case of a situation where all the healers are equal, in every facet, it would seem kinda silly to have a roll off for it. Without knowing more info about the proc, such as an internal CD, would help in determining who it truly is best suited for. I'm resigned to judge the item based upon its stats, and making a huge assumption that it might be on a standard 45 sec. internal CD until GC says otherwise. Thus, I profess my opinion that it is probably worst suited for a druid.

Obviously, it should go to the guild's best healer, and if the druid is the best healer then grats to him.

My issue with this situation is that I can't see how a ligitament min / max discussion can be had on this mace seeing as how we know so little about it. We know it has stats, we know it has a proc. We also know that Blizzard loves to change things. That's it. We don't know if or if not there are different versions for different classes like there were for Atiesh, Atiesh, Greatstaff of the Guardian - WoWWiki - Your guide to the World of Warcraft.

The shards are dropping now, yet people are determining who they should go to based on opinions, assumptions, and limited data. I feel sorry for any Druids that have been passed over already due to this. And that is really all I wanted to get across; that in the end it should be your best player not the class that gets this item because no one outside Blizzard headquarters knows enough to make any valid call on this.

Of course that's kinda beside the point of this thread, but how are you going to even decide whether a druid is better than a priest or a shaman or a paladin?

Can't look at the meters for that because obviously resto druid's EHPS simply scales linearly up with how many people he's throwing the hots on (up to around 15). Of course can't look at raw HPS either for the same reason and because for that matter you don't even see raw HPS of hots - with rejuv on 15 people that would be pretty astronomical anyway.

Can't really compare it based on how well you keep the tank up because obviously a pally will have better raw HPS than a druid on a single target anytime day or night. And disc priests here have a category completely of their own since their bubbles actually extend effecting HP of the tank rather then just healing it up.

So, unless someone is just plain bad, you can't really evaluate that - you're comparing apples to oranges. In the end, healers don't have to be stellar, they have to be good enough to keep their raid alive - it's like driving a car in a traffic jam - you're only going to go as fast as everyone else.

My guild decided on a popular vote. I happen to agree with the outcome but not with the method.

We have a few dedicated healers with several hundreds of raiding hours in the guild under their belt. From my experience at least, generally raid healing for that long means putting up with a lot of completely unfounded accusations. It's also sticking for a very long time with a fairly ungratifying job where even if you do it perfectly, people are dying to their own stupidity, and blame you for it. DPS has it's great satisfaction of the "damage done" meters - there is no such thing in healing because your EHPS will never exceed "damage taken" (tanking is even more veiled in that respect). So IMO give it simply to the healer that you've been raiding the longest and save yourself a lot of drama. If you have more than one, let them roll on it or see if any of them has preference for other weapon (say one takes the legendary mace but the other gets the first Guiding Star) - there are ways of recompensing other healers for not taking that.

This was my whole point, the shards are in fact dropping right now, and unfortunately we have to make an educated guess, and it may or may not end up screwing some people over until more info is discovered. The shard has to be given to someone.

As far as I can tell, the only way this is going to be BiS for us is if:

1) The proc has no ICD. (possible)
2) The proc works on hots. (unlikely)
3) The proc shield stacks with itself. (super unlikely)

I'm pretty confident that items like [Staff of Endless Winter] will be better for us. Or at least close enough that it doesn't really make sense giving it to us from a game-mechanic point of view.

Well, I just can't see how it couldn't be BiS; Blizzard isn't going to make it so mediocre that an epic of the same ilevel is better. First, GC directly said that the proc will be good "...even for druids..." which leads me to believe that they have made the proc good across all healing classes despite mechanic differences. It's highly unlikely that the thing won't favor some classes at least a little bit, but the fact that he said this supports the conclusion that they are aware of the possibility of the weapon proc being worse on some classes. That suggests that they have at least taken steps to make sure that it isn't crappy on anyone other than a pally.

As to it being, specifically, not BiS, I think it is. Even being extremely conservative with the proc's boost being a 3-5% increase in healing, that would put it even above many upgrades in SP. Also, the staff is a bad example, because MH+OH combinations are always superior to 2handers, even accounting for the enchant.

That leads me to believe that Blizzard continues to think that we use spells like Nourish a lot more than we actually do.

For it to be that much, all three items on my list would have to be true, wouldn't they? I think that's extremely unlikely.

With regards to point 2, how do you reconcile GC's comment that "The proc is probably better than you guys are assuming (even for druids" with your conjecture that it won't work on spells that comprise ~70%+ of our healing?

With regards to point 3, if the proc can't stack with itself then you may as well say that it can't stack with PW:S, Divine Aegis and Sacred Shield - meaning that it is totally a Shaman weapon.

At any rate, this bickering and baseless vapourcrafting over a proc that has not yet been tested in game is pointless. If your guild doesn't want to give it to a Druid then that sucks for you - I'm sorry. But justifying that decision by unfounded speculation on the proc doesn't help anyone.

You're still stuck in the rut of thinking that it will affect direct heals only. The tooltip is distinctly vauge, indicating that it uses "healing spells". I think this is significant, because they have no problem specifying direct heals (source: [Forethought Talisman]).

Not necessarily, in my opinion. Of course this is all speculation, but even if they completely screwed us with the proc I'd think it would at least be a 2-3% healing increase, which is more (I think?) healing increase than an additional 50 SP weapon would give.

Hello guys
I would like to ask something about Wild Growth!
I noticed that it is buged (atleast i think it is) and i will try to explain how:
In most of the fights as a target i have an enemy target (boss since i am only PvE based) and if happens that target is out of range from some reason i cant cast wild growth, it keep says "out of range"! I didnt had this problem before Ulduar patch, i updated all my addons but its still the same!
Does any of you guys have same problem or i missed something?

The same logic would lead to the conclusion that it would not proc from overheals at all.

Not really. The game already measures direct overheal, thus it's much more likely to be used. Unless Blizz has secret HoT overheal being counted behind the scenes but denying that info to the combat log, it would require recoding for HoT overheal to be calculated and implemented and thus has a lower chance of being used.

I'm having the same problem. Sometimes when I try to cast it (even on myself) I get the Out of Range message. I'm using Grid and Clique to heal, but like Debeljko they are up to date. Anyone have a fix for this?

We already know that, via Replenish, HoTs can 'tick' and not report that tick to the combat log. We also know that the combat log does report partial overheal on HoT ticks so it seems to me like all the reporting functions are in place to allow the 15% shield to proc from ticks that are not directly reported to the combat log.

However, I'm arguing from the standpoint of someone who has not seen their code so obviously I could be wrong.

That's a terrible resto druid weapon. Not only does it have less spellpower than a 1 hander + off-hand combination, but it also has crit, which is by far the worst 'auxiliary stat' for druids since so much of our healing comes from spells which do not crit.

Ok, let me put it another way. Every legendary so far has been BiS for the intended classes/specs. This is almost certainly going to continue -- to suggest otherwise you would need strong evidence. You are disappointed in an item you don't even know the full effect of. Your whining is a bit premature, in other words.

Even taking into account the 81 spell power on staff enchant?

If you put 2 spellpower gems in there + the enchant, it will give you a total of 706 spellpower. If you use Ironmender as your Ulduar off-hand (74 spellpower), you would need a 1h mace with 569 spellpower to break even. Afaik those are not in the game yet except for that PvP 1-hander which not everyone will be a fan of getting. Also you would gain more intellect and spirit than you would via a mh/oh combo. So I wouldn't say it's terrible.

About the legendary, GC says it like there's more to it than what you would think of first glance. Maybe when it procs you get a buff (Blessing of the Ancient Kings) and every heal you do creates a shield of 15% of the amount of healing. If it works on hots, it could be pretty good for a resto druid as well on some occassions, where the shield gets "eaten" in between ticks, on things like Mimiron p2, trampling, frozen blows, etc. Too bad we have to wait at least another 2 months before someone is able to create it.

Yes I get the same poblem. Razorscale is constantly getting targeted for some reason and then I can't Wildgrowth or Swiftmend useing Grid + Clique. If I remove Razor as a target then I am fine. It also seems to happen with the flame things he drops. They get targeted somehow, and then my heals don't work.

Especially considering speculative nature of this whole discussion, I think everyone takes into account that this can be (and probably will be as long as we raid Ulduar) BiS for resto druids. However, I'm disappointed in the margin by which this is going to be BiS for certain classes because of the stats.

The wording on the proc makes it fairly clear how that's going to work for pallies - they cast Holy Light and they get a 15% shield (either from effective or total healing) one way or another.

For everyone else that's much more mystifying. For shammies casting chain heal - does it proc off the first person? Or all of them? Or randomly? And what exact total is used for the shield effect? What about earth shield or healing stream totem (I know pretty much nobody uses that but it's something they have) - I guess out of luck here but who knows.

A lot holy priest healing comes from Renew so you run into same problem as Rejuvenation. Although generally speaking priests are casting way more direct heals than druids. If you talk about Empowered Renew, you can compare this to Regrowth. But other than that PoM, CoH and a few select other frequently or less frequently used priest spells are direct heals and will benefit from the proc directly without any HoT-proc magic.

For discipline priests this could be either fantastically good or horribly bad.

And for druids over 60% of my healing in last run came from HoTs and that's only because I decided to experiment with HT spec and HT came out at 16% whereas SM came out at 8% and this pushed my regrowth down to 4% and Nourish down to 0. So overall, counting blooms direct heals were around 32%. Otherwise normally now it's more like 80% from hots and 20% from direct heals. I like the list that Melador gave - the chances that the proc itself is going to be very effective for druids is rather slim.

So the point is that if this is BiS for druids by say a margin of 5%, then it's going to be BiS for pallies by a margin of 20% based on the proc alone, not counting other stats, and it doesn't require figuring out how exactly it works to come to that conclusion. And the auxiliary stats push that even further.

This issue has already been discussed in this thread. Just use a makro instead of just the spell: Makro solution clicky