I'm not familiar with healbot so I don't know how it works. However, WoW will not switch your target arbitrarily (that would be rather horrible if you couldn't control what you have targetted!). It does target attackers automatically if you had no target prior to that, though, which is what you see happening.

For mouseover users, this is the workaround I use atm:
/cleartarget
/mouseovermacro of your choice
/targetlasttarget

Interesting, I did not notice this myself but I was more focused on the out of range errors blocking my cast. While I'd love a greater range for the radius of WG not sure if the range issue makes this little bonus bug worth it as the OT is not always within range of you on every fight.

The Innervate change is official as of the newest PTR build:
Obviously this has *ahem* interesting consequences for how we value Spirit and to a lesser degree Intellect but it results in around a 15k~ mana restore at level 80 (someone will update us on the actual amount soon I'm sure).

With this change, it'd be 15732 mana returned from innervate. Interesting consequences on the regen stat comparisons, indeed.

Seems intellect is by far the best stat for mana regeneration now. I think spirit needs a little something from the talents to push it in front of mp5 for druids.

Hmm, I suppose another upside to this is that you can effectively gear for balance and restoration at the same time, minus hit rating of course. It seems a little hasty of them to make this change without introducing a spirit change as well though, since they did say something about their intentions to do so. Honestly, spirit was never something to aim for with regen in mind, it was just that it gave spell power in addition to its regen. Maybe they'll introduce a spirit coefficient into replenishment.

So if I understand right, the reason this effects the strength of spirit is because of spirits current effect on innervate. Does anyone have the numbers for how much mana spirit would give during a typical 6 minutes fight just through innervate. Would be interesting to see just how much of an effect this will have on the strength of spirit.

It does potentially mean that druids who lean more heavily towards intellect will be able to survive fights just from replanishment and pots, increasing their raid utility. Emphasis on potentially as I am no where near the gear level to allow this so it is pure speculation.

Is this a definate change or something the devs are just playing with? If so when can we expect to see this implemented?

Deleted. Outdated info is outdated.

It seems that most changes done by blizzard so far were to create overall mana shortage, including Innervates. So far in Ulduar in any fight that's actually challenging enough that someone else could use my Innervate, I need it more and it doesn't appear that this is going to change anytime soon with.

I think the whole discussed Innervate change will enable say feral druids to Innervate a paladin, in which case none of that has anything to do with spirit anymore. For me at least it seems like it would be a net -2k or so change in mana return so I'm not terribly worried about it - I can easily compensate for 2k mana with a bit more conservative healing style.

The only places where spirit vs. int discussion becomes relevant is gems and trinkets. On actual gear spirit competes with mp5 and crit and between those three spirit is always the best option for us - Innervate or no Innervate. Regarding current situation, assuming you have 213 ilvl gear that has mostly pieces with spirit on it, you should have enough spirit after buffs that you'll fill your mana bar with a bit to spare, even without using spirit trinkets. Before 3.1 the amount of mana regen spirit gave oo5sr basically eliminated the problem of ever running out of mana - even if someone didn't actually "abuse" oo5sr regen, they still got enough residual effect from OoC and plain not overhealing like mad that mana was pretty much infinite.

Are you sure spirit beats mp5 with the current innervate changes? Especially if you chain cast the entire fight (as druids do on hard fights)?

Fixing some numbers from above:

Spirit has an itemization cost = 0.4 * MP5.

In 3.0 at 1300

O5SR MP5 = 5*(.001+sqrt(int)*spirit*.00575)

I5SR MP5 = O5SR * 0.3

Innervate MP5 = O5SR * 5

1 Spi = 1.015 MP5 O5SR, .304 I5SR, and 5.073 MP5 during Innervate.

100% casting, Innervate on Cooldown gives 17/18 I5SR and 1/18 O5SR = .569 MP5.

In 3.1
O5SR MP5 = 5*(.001+sqrt(int)*spirit*.00575) * 0.6

I5SR = O5SR * 0.5

Innervate MP5 = O5SR * 5

1 Spi = .609 MP5 O5SR, .304 I5SR, 3.044 during Innervate.

100% casting, Innervate on Cooldown gives .457 MP5.

In next patch, spirit doesn't contribute to Innervate. 100% casting, 1 spirit is only .304 MP5. If you are low on mana and chain casting, switching gear from Spi to MP5 will start to look good.


At lower gear levels (int = 900), 100% casting, Innervate on cooldown:

3.0 1 spirit = 0.474 MP5
3.1 1 spirit = 0.38 MP5
3.1.2 1 spirit = 0.254 MP5

You are wrong. If spirit in 3.1.2 is worth (approximately, for a reasonable gear level) 0.25 mp5 then mp5 is a better value for regen even if you have something like 30% out of 5 second rule time. Yes obviously spirit is slightly better for throughput because of the spellpower talent. If you are not running out of mana regen stats are pointless, but the whole point of this discussion is to compare regen stats. There are plenty of fights in Ulduar where mana is an issue, by the way, especially Hard mode fights. Right now mp5 looks better than spirit, and int looks FAR better. The conclusion is that unless Blizzard makes additional changes, we want to be rolling on Moonkin gear, and Shaman/Paladin jewelry.

Moonkin gear is pretty similar to ours (much to their dismay) so that is somewhat a moot point. Jewelery still favors the normal mix (Int, Spi, SP, X) from preliminary valuations - so the Mimiron-25 hard ring is better than the Algalon-25 quest ring for example. The Paladin jewelery like Pyrelight Circle (Int, SP, Crit, Haste) seems to be coming out as one of the worst rings available to us from Ulduar for what it's worth.

What can I say... I wrote that if you're not running out of mana, out of the three stats you have a choice on typical gear spirit is the best choice and this is because it contributes to spellpower. I stacked spirit before, and I didn't use much of the oo5sr regen, and therefore the whole spirit change has not affected me in any particular way. As such, stacking mp5 is pointless for me - your mileage may vary. You could use crit + haste gear alternatively - all depends on how much you use direct heals.

Straight mp5 was always better for regen while casting itself than spirit - this is nothing new and it hasn't changed at all. The point is that if spirit is good enough, it's better because of its contribution to spellpower. Mana regen doesn't have to be skyhigh - it only has to be good enough and stacking it through the roof doesn't make any sense to me. There is no mystery to be solved here.

So it's only about comparing int and spirit. And this can only take place in gems and trinkets. I don't see too many trees gemming for mp5 - most people gem for spellpower. And the reason is simple - it's hard to stack some serious mp5 here while the sources of spellpower beyond your basic stats on the gear are very limited so every bit helps and with 19 per gem it adds up quickly. On the other hand trinkets were and always will be more of a "whatever-you-managed-to-get-your-hands-on" thing and also they are a great way to customize your gear for particular fight or run since it's easy to have 2 or 3 spares in the bag.

I might add that mp5 enchants are far and few between.

I think that "having enough mana for the fight" is more a topic how to actually accomplish this without doing some ludicrous things with your gear. Running out of mana really means poor effective HPM. So the question is more how to increase overall and individual HPM of the raid, not whether we should be stacking int rather than spirit since that's pretty much impossible with current gear choices. Unfortunately poor (or let's say insufficient) HPM can be a result of many different things so this cannot be easily answered by saying that INT is better than Spirit or some other math magic.

Additionally I'd like to point out that the "Restoration Itemization" thread has a very extensive and fairly accurate comparison of INT to Spirit...

Kind of. We take spirit over mp5 because spirit is much cheaper on the item budget. It's really a no-brainer when you're trying to choose between 80 spirit and 25 mp5. The spirit to SP is really kind of gravy; it adds up to a nice +SP bonus, but when you're getting upgrades that'll give you +15 spi, that's only 1 SP, which is fairly insignificant.

Running out of mana is not necessarily poor effective HPM. It's also a sign of being undergeared, or geared poorly. Such as too much throughput stats.

I don't take spirit gear because it has spirit. I take spirit gear because it gives me that much mp5 and that much spellpower (even if that's 1 spellpower...) Taking your example, if 80 spirit equals 20 mp5 and 12 spellpower, and the alternative is 25mp5, then really you're choosing between 5 mp5 and 12 spellpower. Spellpower increases your raw HPM and HPS while mp5 does not but lets you last longer.

I understand that you're simply implying that the best gear for us is INT + Spirit + SP + mp5 combo, which does appear here and there. Which is more saying that mp5 really trumps haste and crit. I think even GC acknowledged that much (I vividly remember a post claiming Blizz puts haste and crit to make items lower level).

I guess then a question is how much is "too much" throughput stats? While we can improve our gear by getting the drops and buying the badges, there is only so much we can do about throughput stats since there isn't that much of a choice out there. Really we should rather work under assumption that the fights are balanced around people having average mix of gear with regen and throughput stats, as I can't imagine Blizzard balancing all the fights around people fully geared in just regen gear - that just doesn't make any sense since pretty much noone will ever achieve that. If Blizzard put a lot of gear out there with throughput stats, they did it to make following instances sufficiently challenging.

I think that what people are complaining about right now is that they are sufficiently geared (mix of 219 and 226 gear with mix of throughput and regen stats) and they are still running out of mana on certain fights. In that case I think it is poor effective HPM, since they have the gear they are expected - or simply whoever they are healing is taking too much damage (so they are forced to use suboptimal heals to keep them alive), or not killing things fast enough. If I'm geared sufficiently for the fight and do things right, the raid is doing things more or less right, I should run out of mana after using Innervate and perhaps a pot more or less when we hit enrage timer or the boss slams the ground.

Its not so much that the change to innervate in and of itself is a nerf. Napkin math suggests that they are actually buffing it quite a bit for most players, while obviously taking out its ceiling/scaling. Unglyphed Innervate now grants 15732 additional mana over 20 seconds. Currently, sitting at nearly 1200 Int and 1150 Spirit (Raid buffed) my own innervate grants 10601 additional mana over the same amount of time. Even at 1300/1300 Innervate only returns 12557 additional mana. For me personally they have increased the effectiveness of Innervate by 48%.

You have to remember, as it currently stands innervate allows 400% of our Mana regeneration to continue while casting for 20 seconds, but through talents we already regen 50% of our Ooc mana regen passively. To calculate the real benefit on live we must subtract that 50% from the total over the 20 seconds. So in reality Innervate only allows for 350% of our spirit based Ooc mana regen to continue. Since this new innervate isnt based off of our Mp5, We can calculate its full value as positive mana regen from using this ability.

So overall this is a positive change for us, but it is a ~20% nerf to spirit as a regen stat. Honestly this changes nothing currently. Our gear will still have tons of spirit on it, I doubt we will abandon our High Spirit Leather with this change, and we continue to not gem for pure spirit. Will this change our selections for a few rings? Possibly. However this shouldnt change our gemming choices a bit, with the exception of using a slightly different combo gem to replace the Spirit/SP one. Even then, i havent looked at all the gems available in a while, i'm not sure if there is a better gem for that color to compete with.

@Erdluf

Just a nitpick in regards to your 3.1 Mana regen formula. They nerfed the coefficient by 60%, not the entire equation. It doesnt make a huge difference, as the only non multiplicitive part to the entire formula is +0.01 (Seriously, what is that?) but for correctness sake the level 80 coefficient should be multiplied by .6, and not the entire formula.

Ezarg,

"I don't take spirit gear because it has spirit. I take spirit gear because it gives me that much mp5 and that much spellpower (even if that's 1 spellpower...) Taking your example, if 80 spirit equals 20 mp5 and 12 spellpower, and the alternative is 25mp5, then really you're choosing between 5 mp5 and 12 spellpower. Spellpower increases your raw HPM and HPS while mp5 does not but lets you last longer."

I'm not sure we're arguing about the same thing. I'm saying that it's true that on a one point to one point basis, mp5 is a better regen stat than spirit, however in a real gearing environment you will find that the much larger quantity of spirit will outweigh the mp5. It's like trying to maximize the weight and you have the choice between a pound of feathers and a half pound of lead BB's. One lead BB may weigh more than a feather, but the sum mass of the feathers outweighs even the more individually massive BB's.

"you're simply implying that the best gear for us is INT + Spirit + SP + mp5 combo"

I'm not implying this at all. Spirit+Int+mp5 items are rare, and it's a good thing, too. Mp5 eats up itemization value that is put to better use in spirit and int. I can't think of many (any?) items in an ilevel bracket with all the regen stats that are better in terms of regen compared to other items that are just int+spi in that same ilevel. I also would hesitate to directly say that mp5> haste or crit. One is regen, the others are throughput. It's apples and oranges, really.

"I guess then a question is how much is "too much" throughput stats?"

My response is when you run out of mana. Anything short of this, and the sky is the limit.

It seems you forgot to put any other coefficient like Living Spirit talent, imp. MotW and Kings into the equation. If you do that, 3 spirit will give more than 1 mp5 (at least at Naxx/Ulduar gear level), meaning that on itembudget terms spirit will still give more mana than mp5 will. Not to mention the spellpower bonus and some out of FSR bonuses (like Mimiron phase changes).

What's the best raid healing rotation for 25man Ulduar? So far I've been using WG ( Every cool down )and Rejuv. I SM when needed but my biggest problems is picking nourish or regrowth. Is nourish spamming really the best way to fill in the time when your WG is on cool down? I only see myself going oom more often. Fights like Mimiron, XT and Freya. Hard modes on Freya are a lot of aoe dmg. I felt like i should be doing more but raid was still dying.

What you're looking for is high Healing Per Second (HPS), and since everyone is taking damage and your hots will rarely be overheal, you can treat them as healing for the full amount. I'm going to use numbers based on a recent WMO parse, which I know isn't ideal, but its good enough for our purposes. I'm also assuming you're haste capped.

Rejuvenation: 2,300ish/tick for 6 ticks is 13,800 per cast, 1s cast time, giving 13,800 HPS.
Nourish (unhotted): 5,800ish per cast, 1.3s cast time, giving 4,461 HPS.
Nourish (single hotted & glyphed): 7,300ish per cast, 1.3s cast time, giving 5,615 HPS.
Wild Growth (glyphed): Average tick according to a recent WWS is 779. 6 ticks on 6 targets is 28,044 per cast, 1s cast time, giving 28,044 HPS.
Regrowth: 5,300 direct + 1,500ish/tick for 9 ticks is 18,800 per cast, 1.7s cast time, giving 11,058 HPS.
Swiftmend: I only used one, which landed for 9,600ish. 1s cast time makes it 9,600 HPS or thereabouts.

What all these numbers demonstrate: when you know for sure that someone is going to get use out of your hots, you should avoid direct heals. For maximum HPS you need to be casting Wild Growth as often as possible (where it'll hit the maximum number of targets), and getting Rejuvenation on as many people as possible in between. Regrowth is also a solid choice, but the longish cast time and the front-loaded nature of the heal means it doesn't (in my opinion) mesh as well with what other healers are likely to be doing (which is sniping targets on low health). If you absolutely must top someone up ASAP, Swiftmend should be your go-to button.

As you will have noticed, even glyphed, Nourish just can't compete in a situation where a hot will be fully effective. Obviously it has its uses, but healing heavy and constant raid damage isn't one of them. You need to work together with your other healers: your hots can do an enormous proportion of the healing, but you'll need other healers to handle spikes. If you have to stop hotting to cast Nourish, your HPS takes a dive and the raid as a whole suffers. On a similar note, if you're wishing you could cast Swiftmend more often than the cooldown is up, then the other healers are letting you down (or something else has gone awry). My favourite 'partner' for Mimiron P2 is a Holy Paladin; I hot everyone in range, leaving her able to focus on people who dip low rather than having to freak out and try to heal everyone.

For fights like XT or Razorscale where the damage is a bit more random/spiky/concentrated, I don't feel like druids make the best raid healers to be honest. For those fights I usually ask for/recieve a tank healing assignment and the classes with the stronger & faster direct heals take over the raid healing role.

What all these numbers really demonstrate is that you do not understand the difference between HPS and HPC.
Rejuvenation is not 13,800 HPS but rather 787 HPS for 18 seconds per cast or 13,800 health per cast.
Wild Growth ticks 7 times not 6 giving you a total of 32,718 health per cast. This breaks down to 4674 health per second per cast or 779 health per second per target per cast but you then have to factor in the cooldown which stops this becoming excessively strong.
Swiftmend is a 9600 heal which has a 15 second cooldown resulting in a 1948 HPS if used on cooldown (ignoring crit for now).
note: all of those numbers are before overhealing is factored in and does not weight the GCD differences in.

Also the assumption that hots will and do heal for the full amount is laughable and you would be closer to reality at something like 50%.
On Iron-Council for example you have a 3000/3 damage aura which equates down into a 1000 HPS drain. RJ will cover it so that you only need 213 additional HPS to increase players health rather than stabilize it and as WG is going to be doing an additional 566 on targets with both the chances of there being no overheal is going to become impossible at a certain point (and all this is assuming you are the only person raid healing on Council-25 which is unlikely).