On Replenish / Revitalize

Patch 3.0, with edits on 3.1 changes
Replenish talent. 3.1 will see it become Revitalize.

This talent seems to be one that druids either love or hate. Among those that hate the spell, reasons tend to include:

• they don't cast rejuvenation that much, or
• they can't easily see the benefits because it is so passive and uncontrollable, or
• they do the numbers but judge its worth based on the raw mana cost of rejuv, rather than accounting for all the times they cast rejuvenation WITHOUT this buff anyway, or
• they PvP so would like to include PvP talents in their build rather than this, or
• they read bad things about it and never gave it a chance.

Also, they may not've taken into account the upcoming addition of having it proc off of Wild Growth. I loved the talent even before this change; adding Wild Growth just makes it all the more desirable for me, and opens the door to those players who don't cast rejuvenation as often.


(EDIT: the math in this post follows additive probability, which appears to be supported by the gathered WWS data.)

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Getting into the math: Rejuvenation

Personally, Rejuvenation accounts for an average of 28% of my healing. If it's proccing energy back to people, all the better! Following/building on Phaelia's work that it has a proc rate of .9 procs/cast, which matchs the 15% proc chance per tick on the tooltip assuming 6 ticks from Nature's Splendor: review of my own WWS reports has confirmed this. For example, in a recent Malygos/Naxx10 combined raid where I was the only resto druid,

I cast rejuvenation 820 times. Replenish was gained as a proc 734 times. 734 procs / 820 casts = 0.895 procs per rejuvenation cast.

This proc rate assumes the druid has the Nature's Splendor talent, which adds an additional tick to Rejuvenation, for a total of 6 ticks. The 4-pc T8 set bonus will add yet another tick, increasing Replenish's proc rate by an additional amount (EDIT: unfortunately, the extra "tick" from T8's set bonus does not seem to be counted as a tick of rejuvenation, thus does not proc revitalize, but I will leave the math here for now):

To confirm the 15% proc chance: 6 Ticks w/ Nature's Splendor per cast 0.9 average proc-rate per cast 0.9 procs / 6 ticks = 0.15 procs per tick

Adding a 7th tick with T8: (0.15 procs per tick) * (7 ticks per cast) = 1.05 procs per cast

This means that, in the long run, with Nature's Splendor and 4-pc T8, a rejuv is practically guaranteed to proc at least once every time you cast the spell, unless the RNG is especially cruel! Usually this will play out by getting 2 procs in one spell cast, and 1 or (more rarely) none in other casts. Overall, though, assuming you are getting an average of 2.5k heal ticks, your rejuvenation will now not only heal for 17.5k over 18 seconds (with T8), but also it will most assuredly grant at least a small portion of energy to the target as well.

Per proc, replenish will return:

16 runic power to DKs 8 energy to cats/rogues 4 rage to bears/warriors 1% of total mana pool to mana users

With every 18-second (talented) rejuvenation cast, replenish will return an average of:

14.4 runic power 7.2 energy 3.4 rage 0.9% mana pool

To compare how this stacks up against other energy-returning talents, we can look at the per-minute returns, assuming an 18-second duration that is refreshed immediately, resulting in 3.33 casts per minute:

• 47.9 runic power per minute
  • Compare to Butchery (Blood), which is 24 runic power per minute.


• 23.9 energy per minute
  
  • This has been found by others to be a 4% increase in yellow damage, which would correlate to a 4.6% increase w/set bonus.


• 11.9 rage per minute
  • Compare to Anger Management (Arms Warr), which is 20 rage per minute.


• 2.9% mana per minute
  
  • Compare to Replenishment, which is 15% mana per minute. For mana users, this equates to:
  
  
  

  Mana Pool	mp5
  6k	12 mp5
  8k	16 mp5
  10k	20 mp5
  13k	26 mp5
  15k	30 mp5
  18k	36 mp5

  
  

In graphical form,

(Edit: ignore the yellow line)

So, compared to other sources of energy, Revitalize off of rejuvenation is an amazing proc for runic power, very nice for cats/rogues, okay for any rage-starved bears/warriors, and no where near the power of a true replenishment for mana users.

A perk to a raid heal:

In the long run, you can really see the benefits across the whole group, just from using rejuvenation normally as a raid heal. In a single 3.5-hour raid (10-man), I had replenish tick 734 times across the group out of 820 rejuvenation casts, averaging about 3 procs per minute over the course of the raid. Most of these procs were on tanks because I steadily keep rejuvenation on them, but other raiders saw benefit from these procs as well, since I like popping them a rejuv as a raid heal around wild growths (keeps em swiftmendable and lasts a long time).

Among the replenish numbers from rejuvenation, this resulted in almost 14k mana returned to myself, 13k mana to our often mana-starved prot pally with a relatively tiny mana pool, and 1500 rage to our feral tank. I think that's pretty impressive for a purely passive proc on a spell I cast to heal with, imo.

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PTR 3.1: Procs from Wild Growth

Assuming that the revitalize will have the same 15% chance to proc per tick as rejuvenation does on live server, a base of 7 ticks of wild growth per cast results in the same chance to proc per spellcast as does a Rejuvenation with both Nature's Splendor and the 4pc T8 bonus. An important difference to note is that Wild Growth lasts 7 seconds, and Rejuvenation lasts 18 seconds (talented): 62% less time taken to have the same number of ticks occur.

With every 7-second WG cast, revitalize will return an average of: 16.8 runic power 8.4 energy 4.2 rage 1.05% mana pool ...per person hit by the WG.

This is pretty amazing, especially when you then consider that each cast will hit 5 people (or 6 if you have the wild growth glyph), and the casts per minute equate roughly to 8.6 casts, or 10 casts if you have a large group (so that you aren't overwriting ticks on individual people) and you are casting WG on every 6-second cooldown.

Casting chain WGs every 7 seconds, revitalize will return a per-minute average of: 144.5 runic power 72.3 energy 36.1 rage 9.03% mana pool - much closer to the 15% of replenishment. ...per person hit by the WG.

Frankly, I'm worried that they're going to nerf the proc chance on Wild Growth. The PTR tooltip does not say specifically that it has a 15% chance to proc per tick of Wild Growth: that is simply being assumed. (EDIT: Update: the WoWhead PTR tooltip has been updated to re-include the 15% proc chance for rank 3, I noticed as of 4/12/09). I do hope that they will release the exact proc chance after they are done testing on the PTR and release this change on the live servers.

An important PTR note to include is that spirit-based mana regen is being nerfed, which may make these small extra procs to mana users quite more useful when these changes go live.

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Short of the Long:

While entirely passive, this talent can return a lot of energy to the people you are healing, provided you actually make use of rejuvenation and have buffed it to have more ticks. It's no innervate, but it is well worth a 3 talent point investment, in my opinion. With the upcoming changes to include wild growth, there is little reason not to take this talent, unless for some obscure reason you rarely cast either rejuv or wild growth at all.

The key to working with this talent is to avoid casting the spells JUST for the purpose of the revitalization. Rejuvenation and Wild Growth are powerful heals if used properly, and together, they make up an average of 50% of my healing. Cast the heals to be heals! Let revitalize do its magic in the background. The spells that the talent affects are still great healing spells, and healing should remain their primary function in your mind.

Of course, in the case that there's not much for you to heal and/or you have plenty of spare mana, you can still decide to throw this around the raid just to grant extra energy to expedite dps. As flexible as druids are renowned to be, we would be remiss to completely ignore that the talent could be used as a small boost to our buddies' energy, even though the mana cost to ourselves is quite inefficient for something that isn't really healing them (again, assuming they aren't taking damage). This usually occurs when you find that your raid is outgearing an instance.

When you do find yourself in this situation, be aware that some classes may be better targets than others based on how useful that amount of energy may be to their class--or their playstyle. My priority as far as replenish is concerned is thus:

1. Deathknights (but only the DKs that actually USE UP their runic power),
2. Cat Druids (most of their damage is based on yellow hits),
3. Rogues (less of their damage is based on yellow hits than cats),
   
4. Warriors and Bears (favoring whoever is the most rage-starved),
   
5. and then Mana Users (tanks should always have rejuvenation ticking, regardless).

Deathknights in particular receive an amazing amount from its proc, and I've had several DKs thanking me for it. Sometimes I will cast it on DKs before a boss pull so they can tick up the power to buff Horn of Winter. For others, the change is much smaller so they don't usually notice the tick themselves, but it is still a bit of energy that they did not have before.

So, I really like this talent, even before Wild Growth is to be added to it. Wild Growth's addition only empowers this talent further in my eyes.

~ Of course, if you find holes in my math, please let me know :D ~

Kudos to Phaelia of Resto4Life on her original work regarding the Replenish talent.