Arentios

Always, always remember to multiply your number from B by 0.5. Heals are only 50% crits. Simply multiplying by crit percentage assumes 100% crits. Also remember to factor in overheal from the crits. Obviously this would be offset a bit if the set bonus procs Living Seed.

 

Norfair

Also, it's not certain if the crit chance is the same as on our paper doll. It might be that there is a fixed crit chance that does not scale with gear as the wording is different than for example the Rupture set bonus. It says there is "a chance for its healing to be critical strikes" and not like the Rupture bonus that "it can now be critical strikes".

Keep f**king that chicken.

 

heldrath

Any thoughts on whether or not the T9 4PC will have an internal CD? Would be fun to see a lucky string crits off every tick, although the chances of RNG loving you that much...

 

• Lurchington

FeralbyNight (Cat & Bear simulation tool)

Is showing Idol of Mutilation as having no ICD, so maybe resto idols and set bonuses will luck out as well. It's not much to go on though.

 

Toadfoot

Ok, I am going to take a stab at calculating the difference from my raid today. Somebody plz tell me if I did this correctly. WoW Meter Online - Combatlog Replay. Just picked 2 random fights.

Kolg: Rejuv 595,697, T8 154,292 so the T9 would be 595,697x.2(just assume 20% crit rate)x.5=59,570. Is that correct?
Hodir: Rejuv 848,069, T8 191.938 so the T9=848,069x.2x.5=84,806.

If those numbers are somewhat correct that seems like a pretty big nerf. I understand that the T9 has some pretty sexy stats and will actually cause rejuv total healing to go up, but I wonder if it makes up the difference?

 

Mondas

This looks like a drop of around 56%-61% in healing from the set bonus. I haven't done any math on the T9 stats, but I'd find it hard to believe they can pick up the slack from the T8 set bonus. As good as the T8 bonus is Blizzard need to ensure that T9 is not a drop in healing compared to T8 otherwise why go to T9 at all?

 

Omen

So using my XT Data from post #1519 I'm looking at the following:

(a) RJ = 1421523 (45.7% total effective) and 4T8 = 298838 (21% of RJ)

(b) [0.2 * 1.5 + 0.8 * 1] = 1.1 which means a flat 10% increase to RJ
4T9 = 142152 (10% of RJ)

Conclusion: T8 bonus is 2.1 times more powerful than T9 in this particular data set assuming that (1) T9 crits are a 1.5 modifier, (2) it does not proc LS, and (3) ignoring the stat bonuses by upgrading from T8 to T9. So you are correct that the crit modifier would then need to be 2.0 instead of 1.5 for it to match.

 

Anaram

There's absolutely no reason to assume that rejuvenation criticals would proc living seed (unless the talent gets changed). As per talent description, living seed procs off Swiftmend, Nourish, Regrowth and Healing Touch.

Whether rejuvenation crits would proc nature's grace is another question though: if yes, it would certainly give a good chance that any random nourish or regrowth you throw would get hasted.

 

Ezarg

In other words, you're saying this might work like 4T8 - no synergy with anything, may scale with spellpower at most.

In that case this is just a "generalized" glyph of rejuvenation.

 

• Arawethion

For what it's worth, Moonkin have already tested Moonfire crits from 2T9 on the PTR and found that they don't proc Nature's Grace or Moonkin Form regen. I'd expect the Rejuv set bonus to only take the form of extra healing.

Answers to Moonkin questions:
0) Read the TTT/use the spreadsheet: http://elitistjerks.com/f47/t66856-moonkin_pve_dps/
1) Maintain high DoT uptime. Use WiseEclipse.
2) Nothing beats 2T8.
3) Yes, sometimes you cast many Wraths and no Eclipse procs. Deal with it.

 

Rijndael

The conventional druid wisdom is that to maximize HPS what you do is cast WG on cooldown, and mash Rejuv at other times, in other words the WG -> Rejuv x 5 -> WG rotation.

I think in a lot of fights this conventional wisdom is wrong.

It's well understood that as long as the target of your heal is at a health deficit WG and Rejuv are the highest healing per cast time spells. There are some encounters where targets are ALMOST ALWAYS at a health deficit, such as Sapphiron and Mimiron phase 2. However, in a lot of fights in Ulduar the damage pattern is different, and in fact targets are at a health deficit SOME of the time but the rest of the time they are full. In other words, the damage is "bursty." Examples: Ignis jets, Hodir frozen blows, Freya tremors, XT tantrum. If you look at your HPS graph during these abilities, it looks like a parabola: HPS starts off slow, quickly builds up to a peak and then goes back down to nearly nothing. Here's an example from Hodir:

Event Horizon Fight Statistics - ulduar_25_062409

The key point about damage like this is that at SOME POINT (I ll call it the proactive/reactive healing breakpoint) it becomes no longer worth it to cast HOTs because by the time these HOTs do much healing, the entire raid will be at full hp. At that point it becomes a better idea to cast quick direct healing spells, because they will give you more healing per cast time as the raid-wide health deficits recede, and people are topped off to full. As soon as people are all full, it becomes worth it again to cast Rejuv x 5 -> WG in preparation for the next burst. Note: the existence of the 4 piece tier 8 bonus pushes this point further in favor of Rejuv spam, because it gives Rejuv more effective healing quickly.

What direct healing spells are worth casting? Right now it's a tossup between Nourish and GHT. GHT is faster for one cast, and will heal for more on average, but Nourish is easier to spam because of Nature's Grace, and is boosted by residual hots floating around on the raid, so it probably has equivalent throughput. In 3.2 Nourish will just be better.

Am I making sense, or am I missing something?

 

Grizabella

Rij, I think you might be splitting hairs. In one sense you are basically saying "Don't put HoTs on people that don't need them", which, I think, any druid would fundamentally agree with.

The problem is that before most of those bursty phases you mention, you could spend almost the whole downtime laying out your tank HoTs and then spamming the raid with RJ. You don't have all that much time to shift into sniper mode. I think any seasoned druid will flow with the fight as you are suggesting.

EDIT: In my opinion, you are better off laying out HoTs all over the place as insurance, than maximizing your HPS by doing point-healing that other healers might catch without druid help. This is why i am gHT for the moment. I'm not interested in having the "biggest" single target heal I can, I want the fastest, because I'm only going to use it if I feel it is needed to make a save.

 

Rijndael

I don't think I am splitting hairs. I am interested in the following question: at any given moment what is the optimal spell to be casting. Right now the community says: "on hardmodes always spam hots." The point is, I don't think this is always optimal.

 

Orin

In response to Rij, I use a mix of Nourish and Regrowth depending on the situation and if I think the followup hot tics of Regrowth will be good vs the quicker Nourish heal. It's a rare day that I simply Rejuv/WG spam for an entire fight and expect that to get the job done 100%.

 

Mahalo

I think a lot of it depends on your healing makeup. We roll with a disc priest, a holy priest, a holy paladin, myself and usually an additional shaman or paladin. My role is raid healing on almost every fight with a handful of hots maintained on the MT to help smooth spikes. Particularly I focus on taking care of healers so they don't have to pull off of their current assignments, which helps us stay on our pre-assigned targets.

If I use a direct heal on a non-tank it tends to be regrowth since I'd rather have a slightly slower cast that applies a HoT that I can Swiftmend later if needed. For a tank, I'll usually fall back to nourish spam as it is quicker and will benefit from HoTs already on the tank. GHT just doesn't appeal to me as most of our spot raid heals tend to be handled by Flash of Light or Lesser Healing Wave.

Don't forget though that with 4P T8, your rejuv is instantly picking up some slack on raid heals so you're not just laying down a pre-emptive blanket as there is a front-loaded heal taking place. EDIT - but yes I do think direct heals warrant a 10-15% allocation on most fights. Really depends on how many other good raid healers you have available.

 

Jurik

As long as your Rejuv will tick at least once, there is more than one target in need of healing, and you are using 4pc t8 bonus, Rejuv is pretty much equal to Nourish. The fact that Rejuv can be cast while moving, continues to provide healing to any further damage incurred, is unaffected by pushback, cannot be interrupted/locked out, and can be swiftmended makes it a better choice in the vast majority of cases.

I don't have exact numbers in front of me, but I think that the HPM of Rejuv is slightly higher than Nourish even if you assume Rejuv ticks only once, due to the cost reductions from Tree of Life, and a lot of Druids use the idol to further enhance this property. From a HPS perspective, each Rejuv takes 1 second to cast and restores ~4300HP (assuming it ticks once), which is about the same HPS as Nourish which takes about 30% longer to cast and restores about 30% more. Rejuv has the advantage of providing ~1800 HP the instant the spell is cast, but has the disadvantage of not ticking for the last 2500 until 3 seconds later.

The main situation where you'd want to use Nourish over Rejuv is places where only a single target is taking heavy damage (eg. Napalm on Mimiron-Hard) so you can't rely on spreading rejuv around. Or, in situations where someone will die in less than 3 seconds but more than 1.3 seconds if they don't get at least 2000 HP (eg. Gravity Bomb during a Tympanic Tantrum, or if someone is about to get flattened by a Shadow Crash, Falling Icicle, Thorim's Lightning Wave, or another predictable raid hazard). Of course, in these situations Nourish and Rejuv are inferior to Swiftmend, which provides an instant 10000 HP heal. Unless that spell is already on cooldown, or there is a particular reason to be saving Swiftmend, Nourish should still not be your first choice.

This all adds up to Nourish being a very niche spell outside of tank healing.

 

Rijndael

You are looking at the worst possible case for Nourish. Nourish has a close to 50% crit chance (with Living Seed to boot), is boosted by any left over hots, and can be spammed at close to 1 second cast time (due to NG) once it crits. In 3.2 we will likely lose the tier 8 bonus, and get another coefficient boost to Nourish from Empowered Touch.

 

Jurik

The worst possible case for Nourish would be landing it with no HoTs. Assuming that every single Nourish target will have at least one HoT is very far from worst case, especially if you're advocating raid healing with it. Also, recall that Living Seed only triggers when more damage is dealt to the target. Under the situations where you are considering using Nourish, the majority of raid damage has already been dealt, and most Living Seed healing would be sniped or wasted.

I'm also under the assumption that things will change for 3.2, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. In 3.1-land, Rejuv with 4 piece T8 is still the way to go.

 

Paininabox

In a raid healing situation, I find that you can't really count on NG being up. Of course, you could go into a "top off the raid" mode where you start chucking nourishes around and then it'd probably be up. Unfortunately, I don't think that's a common practice.

Level 80 Restoration Druid Spreadsheet here.
(v1.41)

 

Vazu

Your "worst case scenario" is basically hard mode fights in Ulduar right now. If you aren't working on hard mode content, Nourish gets better and better. The more time you have to stop and cast, the more effective it can be. Nobody is saying Nourish is bad. It's just not that useful right now when the raid is taking huge amounts of damage. Here are the only times I really cast Nourish for any noticable amount.

Iron Council (Hard mode): Basically just to top the tank off quickly after a Fusion Punch.
Freya (Hard mode +3): Help healing people with Nature's Fury debuff or roots.
Mimiron (Hard mode): Help healing people with Napalm.
Veax (Hard mode): Toward the end of the Animus phase, I will help our Priests and Paladins with the tanks. But it's only very briefly until the Animus dies.

..and thats about it man. Every other fight in Ulduar as long as your healing Priests and Paladins are competent, 95% of my effective HPS is Rejuv / WG.

 

Eddyqw

Not to beat a dead horse, but: of course he is. Lets focus on raid healing for a moment. You should ALWAYS look at the 'worst case', because if you assume the 'best case' or even the 'average case' scenario on a single cast, whoever you're healing might die if you're unlucky. Healing is about ensuring that everyone stays alive, and do that you have to assume your heal won't crit, and/or will heal for the lowest possible amount. This (deservedly) inflates the values of our more consistent spells like Rejuvenation, and devalues spells like Nourish that rely on some randomness for their efficiency.

You can use the 'average case' if you're talking about sustained HPS and HPM over a long period on a single target, which pretty much encapsulates tank healing. As pretty much everyone seems to agree, Nourish is great for tank healing. I think (aside from those areas that Vazu mentioned, which are honestly more akin to tank healing than raid healing, as its a single target taking relatively high sustained damage) that Nourish is lacking for a raid healing scenario.

 

Anaram

I somewhat disagree with this sentiment. Killing bosses isn't about having a perfectly reliable strategy and executing it perfectly. It's more about having a sufficiently good strategy and executing it well enough. On first kills it's also about simply getting lucky.

In a similar fashion, the job of a healer is not to save people but rather to keep people alive. The best way to keep people alive is usually to avoid situations where someone needs to be "saved", and while you are in this situation it's usually averages that count much more strongly than the worst case scenario.

While being able to save people is a very good quality in healers, I think much too often people consider this the only quality of a good healer (this is the opposite end of the spectrum from blindly watching healing meters, really). A great healer will also have the ability to push out great throughput (especially in situations where nobody needs saving).

I feel like I'm rambling here a bit but let's put this the other way around: crits can be extremely helpful to stop you from "falling behind" (having so many people fall in danger zone that picking them up gets too low). Every time you cast a nourish you fall a bit behind due to it having a worse throughput than rejuvenation/wild growth, but when you land those "good" nourishes on a hotted target and crit on top of it, you fall a lot less behind (or not at all) thus making it a lot easier to catch up. When there is anything from 3 to 7 raid healers in a given encounter, the crits & procs will largely even out. Sure, if you are counting from that one single nourish to crit and for the living seed to save someone then your strategy is probably set up to fail. However, when you are just looking at the raw numbers needed to keep the raid alive, those crits and procs certainly do count.

 

Ezarg

I don't want to be spiteful about this, but by this argument it would be best if we all respecced to boomkin, since dead things don't hurt (usually). But more to the point, I completely disagree with this idea - we have spells like swiftmend and glyphed healing touch that are uniquely designed for the sole job of saving people. The only class that can compete with us in the "saving people" category are priests (especially disc priests, but holy priests are not far behind.) Saving people is especially crucial on first kills when usually things go south at least once and you have to save a bunch of people quickly then dig yourself out of that sustained healing hole.

 

Grizabella

I agree.

In the past 2 months, I went from severe need of gHT, to a partial need, to zero-need this week.

We have the normal mode bosses on farm, so my SM and NS/HT are quite enough to get me through the rare mistakes our raiders might make. Nourish is making up less than 3% of my heals now and my HPS is also looking much better for it

 

Funkychicken

A lot of the discussion in this thread is focused on nourish and it seems slightly misguided as it is a highly situational spell and should not account for a large amount of a properly played resto druids healing, especially in 25 mans. Rejuv and wild growth are much better for raid healing, and lifebloom x3, rejuv, and the occasional regrowth are better on the MT. Thus I continue to advocate a build that skips most talents buffing nourish in favor of added utility and survivability (see post #1590 on the previous page). I will probably continue to use that build or something very similar in 3.2 barring significant changes.

A little bit of reasoning... Generally swiftmend's short cooldown and large heal makes it my go to spell in what other druids seem to be thinking of as 'nourish situations'. Case in point, for the examples quoted swiftmend is significantly better in terms of HPM and HPS. On fights like IC hard and Vezax hard (towards the end of p2) I am spending all of my GCD's on rejuv and WG to cover the heavy raid damage and simply trust the MT healers to get it done with a small HoT buffer on the MT from me. The extra GCD gained from swiftmend vs. nourish directly leads to increased HPS, while nourishes higher mana cost makes it less favorable in mana stressed situations. Furthermore, the lack of a cast time on swiftmend is extremely useful on fights with high movement components like Freya +3 and Yogg-Saron.

Nourish is really a highly situational spell and theorycrafting regarding the use of nourish is overdone in my opinion. People should be focusing more on the proper use of swiftmend, and to a lesser extent NS/HT. To illustrate, the only time I cast nourish is if:

1) Swiftmend and NS/HT are on cooldown and someone is going to die if they don't get *my* heals quickly.

2) There is a large tank healing event i.e. plasma blast.

3) Something has gone wrong and I need to pick up the slack of a dead paladin or disc priest.

#2 is predictable and does not occur in most fights, #3 should hopefully not happen very often, and #1 happens infrequently enough that nourish rarely exceeds 5% of my total effective healing on Ulduar fights.