Nature's Grace update

I have re-edited my original post with this update, but wanted to highlight it now, since it's pretty interesting.

• Nature's Grace will also reduce your GCD.

What does this mean for us?

• Turkeys: your talented wrath spell does not clip the GCD with NG procs.
• Trees: nourish does not clip the GCD with NG procs. Our insta-casts will also have reduced GCDs during the 3-second proc.

For moonkin, it is pretty self-explanatory. It's still awesome for them. I had seen in my own testing that my wraths were not clipping the GCD, but couldn't be certain if it was due to latency or not, but seeing this confirmed on WoWwiki settled the matter for me.

For resto, the nourish aspect sounds to have been the deciding factor in whether or not druids took this talent post-3.1's release. The assumption that nourish would then clip the GCD made some druids shy away from the talent.


What about HoTs?
While drifting to sleep last night, I had a sudden question dance around my mind like a leaf on a sudden spring breeze: if the proc now affects ALL spells cast during those 3 seconds, and will reduce the global cooldown by 20%, would it not then reduce that global cooldown for our insta-cast spells as well? How would that play in with Gift of the EarthMother? Is it not cumulative?

Going by my current steady haste rating of ~300, my NG-procced Nature's Grace should reduce my GCD to approximately 1.1 seconds. A further reduction by GotEM, even with only the 4 points I put into it, would drop the GCD squarely against the 1.0 second minimum GCD time.


Latency?
My head's still a bit muzzy from the flu, so I don't want to sit down with full math right now, but I have a further question to ponder on:

When I was testing both Nourish and talented Wrath, I assumed that a 20% GCD reduction would make the GCD to have the exact same timer as the spells themselves, since they all have the same base timer of 1.5 seconds. I noticed, however, that the GCD was (almost) always a little bit faster than the cast bar.

As you can see by this screenshot of my quartz casting bar with 0.2 seconds left of a 1.1 second cast with 260ms of latency, the GCD ticker attached to the bottom says that the GCD is just ahead of the orange cast bar; 260ms = 0.26s of latency, but this doesn't match the GCD's tick spacing, so it isn't bumping the tick ahead by that much. Not only that, but the GCD ticker wasn't always that exact distance from the wrath spell cast: sometimes it was closer, othertimes it was faster. Sometimes it was slower. It confuses me greatly, since the only difference between them was latency and what mob I was shooting at. What I found, though, was that higher latency (260ms, 501ms, etc) made the GCD faster than the spell's own cast bar, and lower latency (90ms) made the GCD slower. How accurate is the Quartz GCD tick? How much is our GCD affected by latency?

My thought is that the latency was affecting Quartz's ability to estimate the GCD, since I didn't notice ever having it clip the GCD. However, the mobs tended to die fast when I was getting the NG procs (that whole crit thing), so a lot of my spells were being interrupted by my target being dead... so I suppose for real testing, I should go find a target dummy, or practice nourish instead!