Gift of the Earthmother: Redesigned. This talent now increases spell haste and reduces the base global cooldown by 2/4/6/8/10% instead of its previous effect.
If we see this in Live:
Wrath of Air and Improved Moonkin Aura/Swift Retribution Aura
5/5 GotE = ~13.48% =~442Haste Rating
Formula used to reduce the GCD to 1s
((1-x)*1.5/((1+x)*mod)-1)*100=haste%
Where x is the amount granted by GotE (10%=0.1) and mod is haste modifiers (Wrath of Air and Improved Moonkin Aura => mod = 1.05*1.03)
e: I forgot haste modifiers other than haste rating stacks multiplicatively, and this applies to new GotE.
Last edited by copialinex : 10/25/09 at 10:57 AM.
Reason: Wrong math
Reducing the GCD of lifebloom seems to be intended mostly for PvP purposes though obviously it does help those who can't quite hit the haste cap.
As you can see from my armory I don't even have 5k hk on this toon and I avoid pvp as much as possibile since tbc when I wasted half of the expansion by grinding honor on a uber sl/sl warlock for welfare epics for which I didn't have any use.
PVP is something I'm done with so I missed this out!
Originally Posted by Fallenangel
The Lifebloom change was merely for PVP reasons. It has no bearing on PvE and can be ignored completely - you should still gear for the haste cap on rejuv.
Gotta say I hardly consider the GotEM change (to 10% haste, not this one) a nerf. Having actual gear upgrades will be nice, and when you're GCD capped under the new GotEM you are actually stronger - 1s gcd on all instants, faster direct heals etc.
I'm totally with you on gear scaling, I've always found our gearing to be so boring and plain dumb that it's not funny, but shifting completely to haste scaling (yay crit still sucks if you break t9) after a tier of gearing in which you have to pick carefully gear with haste since crit is everywhere just sucks and is not very well thought by them.
Sure we'll be great like now with 3.3 gear, but happens the day the patch hits? We'll still be competitive on our main role in hard modes or raid leaders will bring more shamans and priests? For me I think I'd be chosen anyway since my guildies tend to be quite appreciative of my work, but it's still a concern.
Restoration in wrath seems like a tree (pun intended) with poorly developed scaling mechanisms and this kind of things always bites back toward the end of an expansion (see ferals in tbc).
PS I hope that my previous post isn't untimely, I read the gc answers but as far as my understanding goes they haven't reverted it yet (the lifebloom news confused me even more)
Gotta say I hardly consider the GotEM change (to 10% haste, not this one) a nerf. Having actual gear upgrades will be nice, and when you're GCD capped under the new GotEM you are actually stronger - 1s gcd on all instants, faster direct heals etc.
No, this will be a fairly significant nerf. In order to reach the new 856 haste soft cap, I'll be giving up about 5% crit and 120 spell power. Gaining a 1-second Nourish (when it was already at 1.1 seconds with Nature's Grace) and a 1-second GCD on Swiftmend is not going to make up for that.
Being happy about having better gear upgrades is like losing one of your shoes and saying "well, at least new shoes are more important to me now".
No, this will be a fairly significant nerf. In order to reach the new 856 haste soft cap, I'll be giving up about 5% crit and 120 spell power. Gaining a 1-second Nourish (when it was already at 1.1 seconds with Nature's Grace) and a 1-second GCD on Swiftmend is not going to make up for that.
Being happy about having better gear upgrades is like losing one of your shoes and saying "well, at least new shoes are more important to me now".
There's a big difference between 1s and 1.1s cast time. Having a 1s direct heal on demand - no NG needed - is nothing to scoff at. In raid spam situations, regrowth goes close to 1.1s cast with NG and allows a single druid to blanket the entire raid. Whether that is useful or not remains to be seen.
Giving up 5% crit is about as meaningful as giving up strength. You shouldn't have to give up SP unless you're gemming haste. In that case, you should get CF.
It's not like it was a straight up nerf. We're trading one effect for another. The proper haste is stronger since it affects more of spells (cleansing included) and interacts properly with things like glyph of rapid rejuv.
There's a big difference between 1s and 1.1s cast time. Having a 1s direct heal on demand - no NG needed - is nothing to scoff at. In raid spam situations, regrowth goes close to 1.1s cast with NG and allows a single druid to blanket the entire raid. Whether that is useful or not remains to be seen.
Giving up 5% crit is about as meaningful as giving up strength. You shouldn't have to give up SP unless you're gemming haste. In that case, you should get CF.
It's not like it was a straight up nerf. We're trading one effect for another. The proper haste is stronger since it affects more of spells (cleansing included) and interacts properly with things like glyph of rapid rejuv.
I think it's unlikely that Regrowth will suddenly become a useful raid heal. It's too expensive to sustain and the direct-heal portion of it is normally wasted. Regrowth is a poorly-designed spell which has been ineluctably displaced by Rejuv and Nourish.
Talent-wise, getting CF is pretty much out of the question, unless I take the points from Revitalize or Living Seed; neither option is very attractive. I suppose LS could be sacrificed in a pure raid healing build, but I like having the flexibility to tank heal when needed. Revitalize, well, let's not open that can of worms again, but I'm satisfied that it is a valuable DPS boost with the right raid comp. Right now I have 2/3, and initially in 3.3 I will probably ditch NG altogether and go 3/3 Revitalize and 2/3 Natural Perfection. Obviously crit is not strength; crit affects about 15-20% of our heals even without the T9 bonus, and synergizes well with LS for tank healing.
Is it possible to get 856 haste while keeping 4T9 and not gem for haste? Doesn't appear to me that it is.
I don't see a problem with having a raid healing build and a tank healing build. It's been like this since 4t9. There just aren't enough talent points to go around.
Regrowth was overshadowed by rejuv, true. This is the results of several factors, key among them is GotEM. On the haste soft cap, regrowth has 1.67 cast time compared to rejuv's 1. Even with NG it has 1.39. Under the new GotEM, regrowth's cast time will be 1.33/1.11, bringing it closer to rejuv's.
Regrowth is nice for handling with long term dots on a limited amount of targets. The best example for this in existing content is the Anub scarab debuff.
NG I think is often misread as "you have 20% haste". Even when you chain-cast nourish there's a non-trivial chance that it won't be up, and that's before you start to weave in hots.
I don't have nourish/SM as doing 20% of healing, nearly ever. Don't think you refereed to it, but regrowth is not affected by crit nearly at all. The direct heal is a small part of the healing and the spell itself has a inherently high crit rate. The later part is also true for nourish, so 5% lose in crit is less than 1% throughput even under the 20% assumption.
I don't have the luxury of having two healing specs, since my offspec is reserved for tanking or DPS, depending on raid comp. If having two healing specs is an option then you have a little more flexibility in talents, but I doubt that is true (or should have to be true) for the average druid.
Nourish + SM together average about 15% of my healing; on some fights, 20% or even more; on other fights (Hodir, Twin Valks) much less. I've been saying for a long time that the perception of Rejuv as OP was just an artifact of encounter design in Ulduar -- no one complained about it in Naxx, because the devs hadn't gotten quite as lazy yet. ("This boss is too easy! Let's add a raid-wide AOE.") We'll have to see how ICC looks before we know what healing style will be favored.
In any case the GotEM change is clearly a net nerf. I understand the desire to make lemonade and I agree that there is some upside, but let's still call a spade a spade. If stacking haste for faster Nourishes was optimal for resto healing, then we'd already be doing that.
I don't have nourish/SM as doing 20% of healing, nearly ever.
You need to start thinking about what you do out-side of putting your HoTs up then. There are plenty of fights (Northrend Beasts, Jaraxxus, Anub and any 10-man) where we have a lot of left over time after all of our HoTs are up. This will almost disappear come 3.3, I admit (since our rejuv will definitely take a 3s hit to it's duration, it might take a bigger hit because of haste effects), but right now you should be alleviating your tank healer during this time as our mana will stay around for a lot longer than theirs. The tank healer knowing you have their back allows them to take an extra GCD to do things like refresh beacon, refresh earth shield, or Hymn of Hope. Your paladin could even trust you enough to use Divine Plea so you can switch to tank healing for the duration and refresh your HoTs afterwards, completely removing their mana problems from the equation, allowing you to use your innervate more often on DPS and finish the fight quicker.
Even on fights like Twin Val'kyr I've had SM as over 10% of my healing alone, using it almost on cooldown as the wrong colour orb hits a raid member. This actually reinforces a point you make, that I totally agree with, that the change to GotE is more likely a buff in tier10 content as getting a little over twice as much haste in tier10 as we needed in tier7 will be a doddle when crit comes back out of the equation. The fact that in ulduar we could get 600-700 haste without touching our other stats simply because we had no choice but to pick it up since crit was worse than useless suggests to me that 900 haste will come without dropping another stat at all, meaning this GotE change is basically just changing something we would've probably been taking points out of anyway to lower the effect and replacing it with someone that will effect everything else as well as the spells it already effected (I mean, wouldn't we be stacking haste if the Rejuv Glyph change goes into place, anyway, and we would've just taken GotE down to 3/5 to get those 2 extra talent points. Personally 10% haste to Nourish/Regrowth is better than anything I can get out of 2 talent points at the moment). Though the argument that it will increase our gearing choices is questionable, since haste up to that point will far outweigh crit meaning we'll mostly take any piece with sp+haste over any piece with sp+crit, making our gearing somewhat one dimensional, as there's only one balance of stats we'll want: stam/int/spr/sp/haste. I actually liked tier9 because it made us think what the best way to get over 360 haste and stack crit was. Here's to hoping they change Glyph of Rejuv into one that makes Rejuv crit. Though looking at the 4p10 bonus I'm not sure I want to pick that set up.
EDIT: Just found out they're not nerfing Rejuv by 3s any more. Whoops.
I tried using regrowth in Icecrown citadel on PTR and I was reasonably happy with it, enough so that I'll be at least trying a more regrowth oriented build come 3.3. Obviously solely spamming regrowth doesn't seem justified (and perhaps not even sustainable) but it does give us a reasonable amount of burst healing for a cast time in 1.1 to 1.4 second range (depending on nature's grace and exact amount of haste one chooses to marshal).
Compared to 3.2 regrowth gains 10% haste from talents and perhaps 5% additional (at the cost of crit) from choosing haste gear over crit gear in order to push rejuvenation to a 1.0 sec global cooldown.
I'm not sure why you think our mana is more sustainable than tank healers, assuming you're actively using nourish. The MPS of nourish and holy light, for instance, are pretty close to one another, only paladins have 10-15K more mana.
Taking beasts as an example for a tank-healing fight, I prefer to keep LB stacks on both tanks and rejuv the melee as they are most susceptible to bursts, in particular in P2. Yes I can nourish the tanks instead but is there real gain here?
I think the sleeper change of 3.3 is the rejuv glyph. If it, as assumed, works with all haste effects (and not just haste rating) then our rejuvs will tick 2 seconds or less after being cast. In fact the glyph breaks the haste cap and might make it viable to get CF and stack haste.
Re: tank healing in leftover GCD's. I prefer Lifebloom (this is part of a general pattern whereby I seem to prefer LB over Nourish compared to most forum posters). Slow-rolling to 3 is ideal, but if it blooms because I was doing something important, that's fine, just reapply. Lifebloom has higher HPET than Nourish, is partially a HoT rather than fully direct (which is a better complement to consistent Holy Lights), and is extremely cheap. Its mean HPS while ticking (even accounting for slow-stacking) is higher than Rejuv. It's a nice tank heal all around.
Re: Rapid Rejuv--it will be really weird if it's affected by Nature's Grace as well (and I see no reason that it wouldn't be). But I'm still imagining that this Glyph will have rather limited use.
Of course our mana is significantly more sustainable than any class except disc priest when each is played properly. Just take a look at how most druids gear, they sacrifice a lot of regen for tiny amounts of throughput. For instance, people are actually dropping so much regen that they're beginning to drop Insightful meta in favour of Ember, that's dropping 60mp5~ for a measly 25sp. You won't see a paladin, for instance, doing anything of the sort for a long time (unless they're stupid) and they lose less regen as their 2% extra int is a lot more than ours. If you're not sure why I think such a thing, you should frequent the other class healer's forums more often and see what lengths they go to to optimise all attributes, instead of just concentrating on spell power like we do. The main reasons behind this are: we have two stats that work in tandem to increase our regen - int and spirit - and there's only 4(5 before haste cap and 5 with 4p9) desirable stats and 5 stats on our gear. Paladins and shamans not only don't have two attributes that work together (they have int/mp5, which don't complement each other at all) but they also don't have mp5 on every piece of their gear as they always want 6 stats (stam/int/mp5 & sp/crit/haste) and have to pick 5, where as most druids have spirit on every piece of their gear.
Yes, you can Nourish the tanks and the benefits I listed above (which you so conveniently missed) outweigh the benefits of using Rejuv instead of WG to heal the melee. Keeping LB SLOW-stacks on both tanks is part of the necessary HoTs to keep up, as well as Rejuv and Regrowth, if you're rolling LB I can see exactly why you might think you have the mana problems a tank healer has, since you're now using 3 times the amount of mana of slow-stacking in return for less than 50% of the extra throughput since you're not getting the bloom. Not even slightly worth it now that Nourish is as strong as it is. We have more than enough time to start weaving Nourishes in dependent on the fight, I find when I don't I'm sitting looking at my HoTs waiting for them to tick off, which is not productive.
I don't see a reason the rapid rejuv glyph won't be a default glyph that you only take out for specific fights. Ulduar fights favored rejuv blanketing for many of the hardmodes and ToC is a bit too short and dull to make a dent, but the 5-1 rotation is not the best way to heal most fights.
Looking specifically at ToC, I'd use the rejuv glyph for the first 3 bosses and possibly even twins. If you only have 1 tree, though, you probably want maximum rejuv coverage for twins so the glyph isn't optimal. Anub P2 scarab debuff gains from the stronger, faster rejuv. PC-style dots are also better healed with it but Anub p3 has very specific circumstances which probably prohibit the glyph. I wouldn't draw a lot of conclusions from Anub though since it's a unique fight.
This is mostly from the perspective of raiding with 2 trees most of the time. With glyph, you can cover 2 groups so with 2 trees that's 4 out of 5 groups. The 5th group can be made a tank/resistant melee group, although now it might contain a holy paladin - it's hard to keep track of the changes divine sac takes each PTR patch.
Regarding gearing: druids gear for SP because int and spirit both have rather minor secondary effects. Paladins get tons of benefits from int. In addition, the HL-style healing has "big enough" heals and therefore tends to focus on regen. It's possible that with ICC gear paladins will shift towards gemming more throughput - which to them means haste. Holy priests gain 40% more SP from spirit than we do and also have Holy Conc procs so it is more valuable regen wise. Meanwhile druids have the only non-scaling mana regen ability in the game - innervate. Shamans are not gearing or gemming for regen, quite the opposite. Shamans are the new paladins, they are after crit/haste gear.
They don't really know that you are covering for them if all you're doing is nourishing here and there. It's mostly up to the tank healers to coordinate their maintenance casts between themselves.
As stated above a rolling LB has a lot better HPM than nourish and is spread out over time rather than a bursty heal.
WG is only good for healing 1 group, and is generally a bad preemptive heal. If you are keeping full hots on 2 tanks and rejuving 8 other melee you don't have a lot of GCDs left.
If you're using innervate on yourself as standard (i.e. every time, instead of the times you mess up), you need a slap and a wake up call especially whilst you're gemming 23 sp in sockets that could net you 17 sp and 10 spr or 17 sp and 10 int. As I also stated above (which again, you seem to be good at not reading, making me question why I said them in the first place, let alone why I feel the need to repeat it to you), if you're not slow-stacking LB on tanks as part of your necessary HoTs then you also need a slap and a wake up call, I'm sorry but you can't convince me that when you've got 1 tank and nothing else to heal that you're spending 100% of your time keeping LB(slowstack),RJ and RG on one guy. If you're keeping 8 melee HoT'd because of healing in phase2 Northrend Beasts, you're wasting at least 6 lots of potential Nourishes every 18 seconds (and the damage could not come at all during those 18 seconds) to deal with a bit of damage that comes once in a while that is much more effectively (and quickly) covered by a shaman using Chain Heal. Yes, they switch off the tank to do that (or just chain through tank), but they don't take 8 GCDs to do it and they can give the healing when it's required, as can a holy priest, rather than trying to pre-empt it.
If they're any kind of half decent healer, they know when you're healing the target and can see the difference it makes. You can leave mana management to the tank healers, if you feel so inclined, but personally I'd rather help than sit around twiddling my thumbs or doing something as unproductive as spamming Rejuv on raid members not taking consistent damage. WG is good for 6 people, in a given area, it has nothing and I mean nothing to do with what group they are in. It is a convenient way to get people to max health that have other incoming healing whilst also giving a Revitalise effect that is very useful and I agree it is a very bad pre-emptive heal, but since the damage on the melee in phase2 Northrend Beasts is random and not consistent, ergo not pre-empt-able, it being a bad pre-emptive heal has nothing to do with it being a good heal for the job. So when you're healing to the best of your ability (and not just mindlessly spamming RJ on everyone you can think of) you're going to have a lot more time for Nourish. Hence why I told you that you should be using it more.
Innervate is an integral part of a resto druid's regen. That's the way I see it and I will always assume I'm using it on myself and with good reason. I view it as non-self-cast mostly since ferals have no use for it. Other healer class regen methods that are self-cast are part of the base class because they assist all 3 specs.
Trading 6 SP for 10 int or spirit is a reasonable tradeoff, one most druids would do.
I did specifically mention 2 tanks, not 1, as is the cast in P1 and P2 of beasts.
Slowstacking is one option to treat LB. It's certainly not the only one, and calling rolling lifebloom totally unviable is plain-out false. A rolling lifebloom has more HPM than nourish and isn't RNG susceptible.
When I said group for WG I meant "5 people". I did forget the glyph so that's 6, but it is still a poor preemptive heal that can be soaked up by pets and the tanks themselves. I also saw WG not hit the maximum number of targets when they were at full HP.
And now for the cream. Did you seriously question preemptive healing as a resto druid? Burst kills raid. Burst in P2 of beasts is the fire+knockback, and melee are more susceptible to both. Rejuving them is the best thing you can do to reduce the burst potential on your raid and that is what you need to do.
ToC is not the rejuv heaven that was Ulduar. It doesn't mean that preemptive healing is dead or that you should avoid it. As a general rule melee will always be good targets for rejuv since they clump up and revitalize procs for them are useful.
Innervate is an integral part of a resto druid's regen. That's the way I see it and I will always assume I'm using it on myself and with good reason. I view it as non-self-cast mostly since ferals have no use for it.
It may happen that your raid only has resto druids in it, or perhaps a lot of people that could put Innervate to good use (arcane mages, holy priests, etc). It is not difficult to make small gearing changes to vastly improve your efficiency. If I put on the Naxx relic and Spark of Hope, I can easily give out my Innervate without overly adverse effects on my throughput in many fights.
As far as my generally nonplussed reaction to Rapid Rejuvention, here's a somewhat in-depth outline of how I see its interaction with the main strengths of our healing:
Think about the basic reasons we like HoT's in the first place, as compared to doing all healing instantly.
1) Automatic healing of small damage. If a raid member takes damage from an RST ability, and they have a Rejuv on them, they get topped off while all the other healers are doing other things, without ever having to divert attention to that particular event.
2) Faster healing of medium damage. If a raid member takes significant damage and needs direct heals quickly to avoid a risk of death, the HoT a) does some healing before the direct heal arrives, and b) allows the direct healer to leave them short of full HP and go heal someone else more quickly.
3) Implicit AoE effect. When many raid members take damage at once (Ground Tremor/Black Hole Explosion), you want AoE heals. People love their AoE heals that cover 4 (Chain Heal) or 6 (Circle of Healing) targets, but they don't hold a candle to Rejuv. Rejuv heals up to 17 people simultaneously.
4) Easy healing of damage over time. A Rejuv significantly cancels out any DoT on the target, allowing them to take few or no direct heals and be less susceptible to a spike death for the duration.
5) Coverage of tank spikes. This is was the main driving force behind Lifebloom's dominance in TBC; it's much less of a factor currently, due to comparably weaker HoT's and Rejuv's slow tick rate compared to Lifebloom.
6) Swiftmend enablement. Don't forget about this--Rejuv provides a secondary effect to people who take sudden them by allowing us to use our instant heal on them.
The tradeoff being made by Rapid Rejuv is that the HoT gets to do higher HPS while ticking, at the expense of being able to affect fewer targets at once. But looking over the purposes of HoT's outlined above, I think most of them are better served by having more simultaneous targets than they are by having the HoT do higher HPS.
1) Here, having the Rejuv on the person at all is more important than having it tick quickly. While there's a tiny chance that a killing spike will come before the HoT tops them off, the primary value of the HoT here is obviating the need for a direct heal. It's better to increase the probability of HoT's being on targets in the first place.
2) This is more balanced, as we're trying to heal someone up quickly, but it's still not clear that focused healing is better than spreading. The situation is very similar to (3).
3) This is really the heart of the issue. Faster healing up of targets, or more targets? Here's why I like more targets: people will die if they take another hit before receiving "enough" healing (i.e. to survive whatever it is). Direct healers are going to be moving around the raid topping people off one by one. The HoT's are there to protect all those who aren't the first ones topped off. Having a HoT tick slowly on someone carries a small risk: maybe a hit will arrive right before the tick that would have saved them. Having someone entirely unhotted carries a much bigger risk: they're in danger all the way until the direct heal arrives. You're going to allow fewer deaths to random events (as an average matter, individual situations may vary) when you spread your healing across all low-HP targets.
4) Similar to last one. Being unhotted is bad--the target drifts downwards between direct heals and is in danger of dying to a spike (think Twins--surge/orb). Being imperfectly hotted isn't a big deal--the target loses net HP, but stably and consistently and probably without significant danger of death.
5) Faster HoT's are better here, obviously, as there's only one target. When you're try to focus tank healing, you'll use the Glyph. The tank HoT's still will never play as large a role as they did in the past, however.
6) Faster HoT's are a strict loss here. It just reduces the chance you'll be able to Swiftmend someone when you want to, for no benefit.
Wound up being long, but there you go. In the current content, I'd use Rapid Rejuv on:
1) Beasts, probably Glyph. The most dangerous part of the fight is Gormok, so I may as well take the faster tank HoT. It's hard to judge because nobody else is seriously threatened by anything.
2) Jaraxxus. We're actually not very strong here; I couldn't say either way. Can't think of an important advantage to either.
3) FC. No glyph. A faster Rejuv isn't likely to save a focus target, where the action happens within a second or two. It's here to top off assorted random damage and enable Swiftmend.
4) Twins. No glyph. This is the fight where Rejuv is very strong, and the Glyph just cuts against that. We want to dull the effect of the damage aura on as many people as possible.
5) Anub. No glyph. 18s duration, 3s tick, perfect against Penetrating Cold. Not going to mess with that. And for residual heals against Leeching Swarm, Rejuv is already overkill and the last thing you want to do is speed it up.
1) Rejuv is not very good for this sort of healing anyway. This is better handled by the AoE heals like WG or CoH, alternatively by JoL.
2) If this is a RST ability, generally the glyph will be useful here. Grip on Kologarn, pot on Ignis, and PC-style debuffs (although not PC itself). Even if the duration is longer than 12s, you can just cast it again. That's what I like about the glyph - it's a potent HPS increase per target. That's a strong effect, no matter how you toss it.
3) That is where the glyph is most questionable, yes. As I mentioned our raids usually have 2 trees. Glyphed each druid can cover 10 targets, so it's not bad and does distribute the healing more evenly - with 2 druids blanketing you have some overlap.
4) That really depends on the fight. I'd argue that a glyphed rejuv is better here just because the HPS of rejuv on a single target is increased by 50%.
5) This is not trivial at all. A rejuv tick hits every 2 seconds or faster. Especially if y'ou combine it with the normal rejuv glyph, a 5K tick will save your tank here and there. If only LB was affected too...
6) Not much to say here Again with 2 trees less of a concern.
I'm not sure why NRB is the example being used but . . . things I'm doing during NRB that don't involve Nourish spam:
NRB Phase 1: Keep Regrowth, LB, RJ up on active tank, keep RG, RJ up on tank-in-waiting to deal with persisting Impale bleed. RJ anyone that gets hit by fire and anyone with Snobold on them. Wild Growth melee after stomp. Nourish a target that was slow moving out of fire. Maybe pop a quick Nourish or Swiftmend on a tank if it is dropping very low but definitely not spending my time spamming Nourish. We have two Paladins that are very good at managing tanks -- the best thing I can do for them is give them a consistent underlay of sustained, even hps to heal over (RG, LBx3, RJ) and not jam back-to-back Nourish throughout the fight.
NRB Phase 2: Again, keep RG, LB, RJ up on both tanks throughout. RJ on anyone that gets hit with Bile or Burning. WG for when it hits a group of melee or a group of ranged that weren't properly spread out. Same thing on Nourish or Swiftmend to tanks as needed but not spammed.
NRB Phase 3: Very light healing here. Same strategy as above on tank. RJs to top anyone swatted about. WGs to frozen folks. WG and RJs around the raid after being slammed to wall. Once they are covered, I actually throw in moonfire and some wrath spam on Icehowl. Really boring phase.
Phase 1 and Phase 2, I'm active on pretty much every GCD. Phase 3 I'm not active every GCD on heals which is why I throw in some damage. Outside of NRB, there's a similar strategy and coverage to Jaraxxus. Twins it would be counter-productive as a druid raid healer to spam anything but RJ/WG, and Anub'arak is 2 phases of DPS (because healing is that nominal in them) followed by a P3 heal strategy that varies but more likely has a druid doing PC coverage rather than Nourishing tanks.
In my mind, play your role which is raid coverage and tank underlay healing (not tank primary healing). The only real reason I can see for consistent, sustained Nourish casts such that it would become >20% of my overall output would be a situation where I am assigned to primary tank healing -- which, as I run assignments for our guild, is not going to happen unless all of our Paladins suddenly boycott the game. Anyway, plenty of people are being very effective as a RAID healer without spamming Nourish on tanks. We don't need wake-up calls.
Obviously you are trading off 'spread' for 'focus.' The question is whether Regrowth is a good enough 'spread' HOT for Rejuv to become our 'focus' HOT.
It seems to me that if Regrowth casts at 1.1-1.2 seconds with NG + new GotEM + Icecrown haste gear, then it essentially acts like a more powerful Rejuv + 4 pc t8. And as we remember, Rejuv + 4 pc t8 was very powerful, since you could control where you land it and make sure the initial instant tick covered a health deficit. Furthermore, even if you overheal the direct heal portion of Regrowth, it is likely to leave Living Seed behind, which acts as a free large tick for when they DO take damage. There are three problems with Regrowth, the first is that it's relatively expensive, the second is that it has weaker HPS ('focus') than even unglyphed Rejuv (to compensate for Regrowth having better 'spread,') and finally it's not instant.
Regrowth expense I don't see as a big issue with Icecrown gear. In high raid damage situations like Twins where most of Regrowth will not go to waste I think it is efficient enough for general use. In situations where there isn't uniform high raid damage you would want to use direct heals or the new 'focused' Rejuv anyways.
The weaker HPS ('focus') issue isn't really an issue since Regrowth gains 'spread' over even an unglyphed Rejuv in exchange, so overall HPS is almost the same.
Having to stand and turret is a limitation, but druids have options of instant hots as a temporary stopgap while they move.
The other thing about Regrowth is that if it starts seeing general use for raid healing, you can boost its throughput by 10-15% with the glyph (you won't see 20% gains due to the way the glyph works in practice). Rejuv does not have a pure throughput gain glyph.
Conclusions:
I think the new Rejuv glyph is something I might end up carrying full time, and using Regrowth as a 'spread' hot for high raid damage fights instead, if I can sustain it.
Regrowth will be a nicer spell in 3.3 for sure, and I can see using it as a main supplement to Rejuv for raid healing. I think you're overplaying its ability to really perform the same role as Rejuv though:
1) The hot is far weaker. Half as strong. It's misleading to think of Regrowth as simply providing more spread due to a weaker hot and longer duration (as I've said above, I usually like having better spread), because the total is simply so much lower. You're increasing spread, but very, very inefficiently. Switching from a Glyphed to an unglyphed Rejuv increases spread with perfect efficiency--0 total throughput lost in the process.
Rejuv can cover 17 people at haste cap. Regrowth, at the same amount of haste and with NG, will cover about 22 people (going by mean cast time in my spreadsheet). Small gain for gutting the size of the hot.
2) The direct healing portion is of dubious. Sometimes there's someone at low HP, and now we can both heal them and leave a hot, which is nice--it's the reason the spell will see raid use in 3.3. But that's a small percentage of the time overall. This is not analogous to the 4T8. The 4T8 was a small heal at the beginning of a strong HoT. Useful for something if the target had taken even a little damage, but wasting it (which was common, since we often HoT people at full HP) was no big deal. Regrowth is a large direct heal that leaves a weak HoT--casting it for the HoT only is a heavy waste. Moreover, the 4T8 was instant, which was a big deal.
On the topic of innervate, I personally usually never have to use it on myself. The only fight where I can really justify using it on myself is heroic twin valks, because we use the door strat where you barely ever get enough orbs hitting you for the buff.
I flat out avoid using nourish, the way it is right now for 25 mans. Spamming it is just so ineffective because of its mana cost. Usually our direct healers can handle the their roles well, and I barely have to do more than keep a few hots on the main tank because our pally and disc priest take care of them well. This leave me to focus almost entirely on the raid, in which my job is to blanket and predict incoming damage.
Since we're using NRB as an example, I'll go with that.
I mostly just keep hots on the mt (rejuv, full lb stack, regrowth), keep the melee rejuved, and help handle fires and a rejuv on someone with a snowbold. I wg the melee right as stomp hits, and the rejuvs help keep them up as well.
P2 I keep the melee rejuved because they are the most likely to take a sudden spike of damage, especially if a group of them get burning bile or toxin. I help with hots on the tanks, and wg when a sudden aoe from bile or toxin hits (if people aren't spread out enough...).
P3 I usually keep at least the melee rejuved, since they always get knocked back, and I like keeping rejuvs on the healers for the frost aoe. Wg on that aoe, then rejuv as you see a crash coming with everyone topped off.
In heroic NRB I always use my innervate on our pally mt healer, who can nearly keep the mt up by himself in p1 with HL spam.
Maybe it's just my healing style for 25, but I find that other class' direct heals atm are much more efficient, and watching the raid and predicting damage is my forte. Swiftmend for emergencies is another tool I use to make it so I need not cast.
What we should be seeing next patch is that casting regrowth instead of rejuvenation should not result in a HPS loss (or at least not a significant one, I haven't really crunched the numbers) which in itself is very important - surprisingly often the best healing strategy focuses on everyone using highest HPS spells (even if that isn't always the case, obvious).
I think in a general situation glyphed rejuvenation and regrowth will complement each other very nicely. Obviously in situations where even unglyphed rejuvenation is excessive it will probably be better to simply choose some other glyphs. Still, regrowth is looking promosing enough that in most current fights I would use glyphed rejuvenation.
A thing to remember is that constant and even raid damage (like twin valkyrs) isn't really effectively all that constant and there are seldom 15+ "perfect" targets for rejuvenation. Melee DPS generally have higher health pool and receives more healing from judgement of light and leader of the pack than ranged dps. I think most of us who have healed twin valkyrs with a soaker-based strategy would concede that some people run significantly higher-that-average risk of dying. Being able to focus a bit more on them shouldn't hurt.
10/24/09, 6:59 AM
