GotEM3.3 and Resto Druid Cast Times

The current PTR changes for GotEM in 3.3 gives resto druids a flat 10% haste across the board. I have not included a scenario where a druid will have both GotEM and Celestial Focus, a scenario where a druid has not maxxed out 5/5 GotEM, nor a scenario with Power Infusion (as it does not stack with Bloodlust), but most other scenarios of raid buff combinations are considered.

NOTE: for a more detailed graph of the GCD with Celestial Focus taken into account vs no CF, click here.

New Cast Times
The following will become our new "base" cast times, before gear or raid buffs are added.

10 -> 9.09 seconds
Revive

3.5 -> 3.18 seconds
Starfire

3.0 -> 2.72 seconds
Healing Touch, talented Starfire (Starlight Wrath)

2.5 -> 2.27 seconds
talented HT (Naturalist)

2.0 -> 1.82 seconds
Regrowth, Rebirth, Wrath

1.5 -> 1.36 seconds
This includes the GCD, Nourish, glyphed but untalented HT (no Naturalist), insta-casts (LB, Rejuv, WG, Swiftmend), and talented Wrath (Starlight Wrath).

1.0 -> .... you're already at the GCD cap. Grats on clippage ;)
talented + glyphed HT



Haste from Buffs and Gear
It is from the new base cast times (with the talents and glyphs included) that raid buffs and haste gear is added.

• Bloodlust/Heroism - from shaman, 30%, or Power Infusion from disc priests, 20%
• Wrath of Air Totem - from shaman, 5%
• Nature's Grace - talent proc, 20%
• Imp Moonkin Aura - from balance druids, 3%, or Imp Pally Auras - from ret pallies, 3%
• Potions/Food Haste Rating
• Gear/Trinkets Haste Rating
  

As a reminder, not all haste buffs will stack with each other. The percentage haste buffs that do stack will do so multiplicatively.




1-Second GCD
The following are the haste ratings required to achieve a 1-second GCD with the listed buffs.

GotEM3.3 and the GCD/Nourish/GlyphedHT
Buffs	Rating required for 1 second
none	1192.36
Bloodlust	160.51
Nature's Grace proc	447.13
WoA Totem	960.32
Improved Ret/Turkey Aura	1062.13
WoA + Aura	855.41
WoA + Aura + NG	166.34

Numbers derived using the formulas at http://www.wowwiki.com/Casting_speed

Misc Questions

Miscellaneous questions that I have seen, and the answers for those that seek them :)
Three sections: Druid Resurrection, Other Druid Spells, and Raiding.


Resurrection:

• "Can druids revive themselves?"

No, druids' Revive spell is a simple out-of-combat resurrection spell. The only way a player can resurrect themselves upon death is by having a Soulstone from a warlock, being battle-ressed by a *living* druid, or by being a shaman who has their ankh available (1 hour cooldown, 40 minutes talented).

• "When do I use rebirth over revive?"

Rebirth is a "battle res" that can be cast while you are in combat, an ability unique to druids (though as mentioned above warlocks can soulstone a target prior to their death which will let them resurrect themselves, and shaman can ankh to bring themselves back to life when they die). Revive, on the other hand, is only useable out of combat. So, if you're out of combat, just use revive! Save your rebirth for when you're in combat and really need to bring someone back to life.

As for when to use Rebirth, I recommend that it be according to the following conditions:

a) that you have the time and mana to cast it without letting others who are currently preventing a wipe to die themselves (from lack of healing or tanking),

b) that the raid is not going to wipe anyway before your target is able to jump in and help (and thus they will just die again),

c) that your target will actually be of assistance in continuing the fight and they are needed for its completion, and

d) the dead person won't immediately die again due to environmental AoE or other damage.

In a raid, I highly suggest letting the raid leaders decide when to use your battle-res, as they should have a better idea of who is most needed and whether or not it should be saved for someone more critical within its 20-minute cooldown.

• "When do druids learn revive?"

Level 12 :) Rebirth is level 20.



Other Druid Spells:

• "Can you nature's swiftness a Starfire?"

No. The only spells that Nature's Swiftness will work with are Nature spells such as Healing Touch, Regrowth, Cyclone, Wrath, and Entangling Roots; Starfire is an Arcane spell, so it is unaffected by Nature's Swiftness.

• "Does nature's grace proc on heals?"

Yes, as long as the heal can crit. Nature's Grace will proc off of any casted spell crit. Nourish, HT, and regrowth will all proc Nature's Grace. The current exception is any T9 set bonuses which cause a DoT or HoT tick to crit (ie moonfire and rejuvenation ticks from T9): current (August 09) research on the PTR has shown that these tick crits from the set bonuses will not proc Nature's Grace (nor Living Seed). Lifebloom's final bloom will also not proc Nature's Grace (nor will it proc Living Seed).

• "Can you make a Force of Nature macro without clicking?"

Assuming you mean to make a macro that will summon your treants without first selecting *where* to spawn them, then no, there is no such macro. Macro conditionals cannot decide in what space of pixels an "aoe on location" type spell will occur; it is the same way with hurricane. What I prefer to do is simply keybind the spell (be it FoN or Hurricane) so that I can have my mouse already over the location I want the spell to occur when I press the button, so that I can quickly left-click and cast it.

• "Does the color of Flight Form change depending on your hair/skin color?"

Hehe, not at the moment :) It has been said that the designers intend to make new skins for the travel forms, though I assume they will be focusing on the older cheetah and seal skins; it is certainly possible that they may decide to add flight form skin colors in the future.



Raiding:

• "Is there a macro to target a mob who has a specific raid icon?"

Unfortunately, no, there is no way for a macro to select a target based on its raid icon (at least not that I'm aware of!). Such things need to be done manually, or you can assist another person who you know is really good at targeting the right mob (sometimes these players are set as a Main Assist).

• "Should you use Soothe Animal on Razorscale?"

Considering Razorscale won't engage until you talk to the dwarves to start the assault, I don't think there's any need to be casting Soothe Animal on the dragon :) She'll aggro when you talk to the NPC dwarves to start the event.

• "How do you enable hard mode Razorscale?"

Razorscale does not really have a hard-mode, except for your raid to dps the Guardian mobs down to about 20% and then stand them in front of Razorscale when she's grounded, so that she'll kill them with her flame breath attack when she stops being stunned. There's no big red button to push, certainly!

Time? Wha's that?

I am forcing myself to take a break from work to type something up, because sanity is a wonderful thing that I should never let go of...

Scratch that, I have no sanity, I just need a breather :) Things usually get very busy this time of year with classes about to start back, so my attention has been split a dozen different ways and I've been put to scheduling classes, designing instructor pages, writing software guides, juggling clients and coworkers, and looking at the strategic plans for the department, rather than doing all that stuff for raids and druidly things.

The raids and druidly things are much more fun.

That said, here're some druid spec tips for dealing with the start of a new school year when working for a university:

University Employee Druid Spec:

• Ignore things like Gift of the Earthmother, because in your haste, you will probably forget something. Or misstype something. Heaven forbid.
  
• Take full Imp Barkskin, Subtlety, and Natural Perfection. These will help manage your aggro from students and/or instructors, or students' parents. If you can reroll Night Elf, do it, as shadowmeld will dump aggro to your next coworker.
  
• Take Imp Tranquility in the form of boxes of donuts or other sweet foods that you will bring in to share with your coworkers, as your party will then be much happier and easier to co-operate with.
• Ignore Genesis in favor of full Starlight Wrath. It's therapeutic, and a good quick-cast wrath to the face will deter those who've aggroed on you. At the very least, it's a pretty ball of light that can serve as a momentary distraction.
  
• Living Spirit, cuz that's what universities do. You'll need a healthy dose of it to keep from being overwhelmed by the amount of school spirit permeating the campus. It's an osmosis thing, beware being hypertonic or they'll just sap you... chain sap you, with no DR.
  
• Revitalize, innervate, and intensity are also known as caffiene. Share the sugar-candy procs, coffee, and soda.
• Dual-spec into Feral and be ready to switch at a moment's notice. Feral Instinct is useful, along with Survival Instincts, Thick Hide, Feral Swiftness, and Survival of the Fittest. Brutal Impact will help buy time. Just avoid Berserk and Mangle... they may be counter-productive. Infected Wounds may also create a panic on a university campus, so close on the back of the swine flu scare.

As always, I would love to hear from others on what specs and strategies work for them in the crazy rush that is the Start of Fall Semester raid. ;)

3.2 Hit Rating Cap

FYI, the hit rating cap has not changed for 3.2.

I want to dispel this rumor!! I don't know where some have gotten the idea that the hit cap was altered in the patch, except that the moonkin Balance of Power talent's text description was changed and is misleading (it's still 2%/4% +hit per talent point like it was in 3.1, they just mis-wrote the new tooltip text). Lissana at Restokin has also pointed this out, complete with Blue-Post linkage. There is no change in the moonkin +hit cap (which you can find the breakdown on here).

Feral druids, your hit cap has not changed at all from before 3.2 (nor your expertise cap, for that matter), and there are no feral +hit talents to even confuse the tooltips on :) The 3.1 feral cat/bear hit cap information here is still accurate.

Maybe we should get a shammy out there to start spamming Purge Rumor. :)

Reworking my Moonkin Offspec

With all 3 healers present in our Wednesday raid last night, I spent the majority of our Ulduar run under cover of feathers. It took a long while to get used to the strange eclipse procs, and I almost turned off Squawk'nAwe since it was only tracking the first cooldown and thus was generally being useless for me.

If any experienced moonkin have suggestions on things I can tweak/fix, please feel free to leave a comment!

Spell Rotation Attempt

Eventually, I settled into this:

1. DoTs and IFF up on boss or large trash thingy (skip if baby trash)
2. Wrath until Lunar Eclipse (out of habit), reapplying DoTs if they fall off before proc. Proc sets off SnA cooldown.
   
3. Starfire through the proc, reapply DoTs at the end.
4. Keep Starfiring to proc Solar Eclipse, reapplying DoTs if they fall off before proc. SnA is still showing Lunar cooldown.
5. Wrath through the proc, reapply DoTs at the end.
   

I just got a bit lost in what I should cast when the Solar Eclipse ended but my cooldown for Lunar (judged by SnA since it was the first to proc) wasn't over yet. After a couple bosses, I attempted to just start weaving wrath/starfire by alternating the casts, so that when the cooldown ended I could quickly proc the next and not have to switch spells midcast. Unfortunately this sometimes resulted in cooldown confusion as a Solar Eclipse would proc first and be monitored by SnA, and out of distraction to moving around, staying alive, etc. I'd forget which one I had already procced, even if for just a couple spell casts.

Moonkin rotation just got tenfold more complex with these eclipse changes. It's honestly refreshing, as it's something I will need to sit down and really teach myself.


Crit??

I think I need more spellcrit. I was running an average 23.55% spellcrit for myself, which felt really low when it came down to procs at important times (like sitting on top of FL killing turrets). At 2500 spelldamage, my wraths were doing all of 3k damage per hit on the turrets, which felt REALLY wrong and made killing the turrets unreasonably slow at times, while the nerfed kittydruid was still beasting out his own damage. Sometimes I'd get a great proc and the turret would die quickly; other times it would take forever. It was frustrating me, and focused me on wanting to figure out how to make my turkeyself better.

The scariest part was when I considered giving up moonkin and going cat spec for my dps dualspec. 2 problems with that: 1) we already have a raiding cat and need the moonkin buffs when I'm not needed healing, and 2) if I don't play turkey, I can no longer say I have 2 druids that cover each of the 4 major druid types anymore :) So, I'm gonna try to make this work.


Mana Use/Re-Spec?

I never once needed my innervate for myself except when I was swapping between tree and moonkin specs (and thus was sent OoM just by the respec). I was running full moonglow and 2/3 Intensity. I was thinking to drop another point out of each and pick up 1 point of imp moonfire and 1 pt of gale winds, like so: 57/0/14 ??

I'm open to further suggestions on spec. I use turkey spec for soloing/dailies, occasional 5-mans (rare), and 10-man Uld/ToC raids.

3.2 Release

It's been confirmed; 3.2 is being released today. On that note, a huge congrats to Fusion (Turalyon - US) for downing Yogg+0 last night as a server first! You guys made it just in time, he got nerfed quite a bit with this patch.

The following is some commentary and pointing out of things I find significant in this patch, as a raider and a healer and a druid!

Cross-Class Notes:

• Epic Gems - Kaeya, my little mining rogue, hasn't seen much of a workout since I've been splitting my WoW-time between my two druids. I saw a lot of titanium nodes while farming Hodir rep on feral-Kae, and had a little pang of regret that I wasn't out mining up titanium ore instead, since I beleive there's a very good chance that you'll get at least one epic gem out of every stack of titanium ore prospected.

• Mount collectors - go pick up your extra undead pony / baby kitty from the appropriate faction vendor back in old Azeroth. The other mounts are purchased through seals, so if you've saved up enough after all the minipets and hippogryph and other mounts, then you have far more willpower on those dailies than I do :) There is also now a ravasaur trainer quest in Un'Goro for horde, akin to the wintersaber trainer line for alliance in Winterspring.
  

• Pet collectors -Shimmering Wyrmling is BoE for the same price of 40 seals as the other tournament pets, but only useable/purchaseable at exalted. If you'd rather save your seals, you can buy it from another player, technically. There are also a slew of little baby raptors, one of which can be purchased from Brianni in Dalaran; the others drop off of various rare-elite raptors around the game, or can be farmed from the raptors in WC, Zul'Drak, and ZG.
  

• Children's Week -This starts from Orphan Matron Aria in the Eventide in Dalaran. You will get one chain or the other between the Wolvar and Oracles, likely dependant upon whichever faction you're currently not hated by. If you want to switch, remember that you can do so by challenging the lich in the cave in eastern Sholozar, and killing the NPC of the group that you no longer wish to be factioned with (it's horrible, I know) while killing the lich. There is also a chance that you can just choose one or the other of the kids from the Orphan Matron and save all that hassle, so check first before going off and switching factions.

• New tournament dailies - If you're exalted with the sunreavers/silver covenant, you get something new to do, if you're like me and are entirely burnt out on the 3.1 dailies. There are also a banner, tabard (with tournament-hearthing action!), and squire available for purchase to those thusly exaltified.

• Coliseum Constructed - built of mountain rock and the limbs of tree druids, the coliseum is finished and is now a raid instance. There are separate normal and hard modes for 10-man and 25-man raids, and all 4 have a separate raid lock-out timer.

• Badges - You can convert down, but all instances will now drop Conquest badges rather than Valor/Heroism. The Coliseum itself will now drop Triumph badges.

• Item Compare - Shift + Mouseover on an item to compare stats with currently equipped. This is a nice addition to the Alt + Mouseover which will let you select from among gear in your bags that can go in that character sheet slot, something that was slipped in amidst a previous patch.
  

Feral/Shifter Notes

• Agility/Dodge - you will need more agility to get the same amount of dodge as previous. The nerf numbers may look scary, but it shouldn't be too huge a drop, as diminishing returns ate up a lot of that before anyway. Resilience recieved similar treatment, meaning that more will be required for (non-feral druids) to become uncrittable.

• Feral changes - base damage from all attacks in the upper ability ranks has been weakened through application of foam to all kitty claws, presumably a side effect of the pedicure recieved when all druids undergo their magical art transformation. Bears can now use rage potions.
  

• Feral Skins - again, I point you to Tigerfeet's beautiful fur/skin assignment chart. Are you happy with your new skin? If not, do you prefer the old skin, or a different one of the new skins? Will you be/have you already visited the barbershop to select your feral colors?

• Travel Forms - Travel form trained at level 16 and Flight form at 60; flying forms can now benefit from crusader's aura. Also, if you have a super-fast flying mount above the base speed of your swift flight form, your flight form speed will scale up to match!
  

Caster notes

• Replenishment Nerf - a very slight nerf, but one to note for those players who often have mana difficulties. "Replenishment: This buff now grants 1% of the target's maximum mana over 5 seconds instead of 0.25% per second." This is 0.25% less mana per 5 seconds, a 20% nerf in overall replenishment regen. In turn, however, mp5 itself has been increased by 25% on all items. This will lead to a reconsideration of mp5 vs spirit for many druids; personally, while I had previously considered mp5 to be of significantly less importance than spirit, I may now consider them equal. Whether one stat is needed over another will probably depend on the tree's own current spellpower vs mana problems. Monitor your mana, druids!

• Innervate - 3 minute cooldown (from 6), but at half power. Use it more often and share the mana love if you don't need it. Of course, as always, if you need it for yourself, use it on yourself! I've heard recently that there are still guilds who order an innervate be used on someone other than the druid. Sigh.
  

• Resto changes - lifebloom's final bloom has been nerfed (again), which mostly makes me worry for the General Vezax fight. Since its timing was so unpredictable in whether the target would need the heal by the time it bloomed, however, I think that overall this nerf will have minimal impact on PvE healing. Empowered Touch now boosts Nourish by 20%, making it a much more attractive talent to druids who use nourish regularly (it was in my spec before, and I'm keeping it, certainly).

• Turkey changes -Eclipse has separate cooldowns for lunar and solar, which will allow for more proccing and the "weaving" of starfire/wrath cycles... for more information, I point over to Graylo's recent post regarding the Eclipse procs. Panzerkins (Owlkin frenzy) will also regen mana through the proc, which is quite nice for soloing/leveling.

And because we were all very worried about this (I know I laughed each time I saw it!):

Cenarion Set: No longer reduces the (nonexistent) cooldown on Hurricane. Instead, the set bonus increases the damage done by Hurricane by 15%.

Changes I'd like to see for PvE Resto Talents

Patch: 3.1

This is a run-down of "faults" I see in the resto talent tree: those talents that I am "forced" to take but find little to no use for as a PvE healer, and the talents that I feel are relatively useless to most any type of druid, and some ideas on ways they could be changed.


3/3 Nature's Focus
What's wrong?
This talent is PvP, or solo/leveling PvE. With the advent of dual-spec, few raiding PvE resto druids are seriously soloing in their healing spec! I have little to no use for the talent, never mind that both of my "oh shit" heals are instant-cast (NS+HT, Swiftmend), along with lifebloom, WG, and rejuvenation. I can pop barkskin on a 1-min cooldown if I really need some interrupt resist.

Alternative Talents:
The alternative available is to put 3/5 points in Furor, which has no benefits for a tree druid at all.

How could it be changed?
Perhaps Furor could be given some treeform utility useful specifically to a raid setting, such as increasing treeform spirit or mp5 (would be interesting to balance in the light of all of the recent 3.2 mp5/replenish changes); Nature's Focus would then still be a talent of choice for PvP and solo/leveling builds. Alternatively, Nature's Focus could also include a buff where your helpful spells have a chance to proc that same level of interrupt reduction to your target, or provide a +healing received buff to your direct-healing target (regrowth, nourish, HT) akin to the balance talent Earth and Moon (albeit much smaller to account for its teir 1 position, and perhaps limited to only buffing your own heals/HoTs rather than everyone's).


3/3 or 2/3 Subtlety
What's wrong?
This is a pvp and leveling talent, or one for those druids whose tanks are reaaaally weak on picking up adds and keeping threat on them. Serious raiding guilds, and even most casual raiding guilds and pugs, do not have this problem. In TBC, "world threat" was a huge issue for healers, but WotLK brought with it insane amounts of increased tank AoE threat and AoE tanking. Now, if a tank has at least touched a mob, it shouldn't be running off towards the healers. If a tank hasn't touched a mob, then of all the healers, a druid's going to end up with the aggro regardless of this talent, unless they just aren't healing.

Alternative Talents:
The alternatives available would be to put those points instead into Naturalist (when I don't cast HT without NS), Furor (see comments on Nature's Focus Options above), or putting 1 of 3 of the points into Tranquil Spirit and giving up on the last two talent points as some sacrificial offering to the Spec Gods.

How could it be changed?
Well, if Furor were to be changed to have some PvE raiding tree usefulness, I could easily see moving 2 points into Furor from this tier (thus capping out Furor at 5/5 with the points from Nature's Focus). Alternatively, and I feel crazy for suggesting this, Blizzard could add more mobs/bosses that have a chance to dispel buffs, as Epoch Hunter did in Old Hillsbrad Foothills, so that our anti-dispel portion of the talent would actually feel useful.


2/2 Improved Tranquility
What's wrong?
This is, pretty much, a sub-60 (pre WG) leveling resto druid talent, or filler for those that are *purely* raid healers and choose to not cast much in the way of nourish/regrowth. As a party-only heal with a relatively long channeling time, Tranquility does not see the use it had back in the vanilla raiding scene. These two key aspects: party-only and channeled, are not addressed by the talent, only the threat (see my comments on WotLK threat in the Subtlety section above) and the cooldown (which assumes druids are using it at all). Tranquility is more often used, imho, by moonkin or feral druids, or resto druids not yet high enough level to take Wild Growth; the ferals/balance druids aren't going to invest their talent points this deep in the resto tree unless they're taking NS instead, so they won't be taking this talent. Wild Growth's introduction and 6-second cooldown more or less removed Tranquility from most raiding restos' action bars and minds.

Alternative Talents:
There are alternatives for where to put the 2 talent points, certainly; the reason I mention it is because I pity the talent. I honestly don't see many druids taking this talent, and those that do don't seem to be making regular, strong use of this talent to the degree that makes up for them not putting those points in a different talent, such as revitalize, living seed, empowered touch (particularly with the 3.2 change of adding nourish to the talent), and/or nature's grace. If it's taken, it's viewed as filler, or with some spark of hope that it may actually be useful, if they ever find a situation where they need to cast Tranquility, while remembering fondly the days of ZG and MC where pretty lights were cast frequently and with fervor. As such, I feel like it is now a dead spot in the druid talent tree, in need of some tweaks to bring it back in line with the other options available.

How could it be changed?
The talent could, perhaps instead of threat reduction, address the limitations on what players it can heal or the fact that it is channeled (cutting the channel-time in half and providing the rest of the healing by a HoT buff, for example, thus allowing the druid to continue casting other heals while the spell finishes itself). Depending on how extremely different it makes Tranquility, they may remove the cooldown-reduction from the talent to help balance the changes.


~~ What are your thoughts? ~~

Patch End of the World

I do get a small giggle out of all of the "Sky is Falling!" posts, comments, and complaints. It happens on every patch, to greater or lesser degrees; if anyone or anything is being decreased at all, *someone* will complain. Often, if something is increased, *someone else* will complain, too!

I don't spend time on the PTR, and by the time it's gone through the first few rounds of PTR changes, things will have again changed or been polished to a degree. Once things get down to the final countdown for live release, then I'll really look into what the changes mean and how I--and my friends and raid--will have to adapt to them.

Just because something is going on the PTR doesn't mean it's going to be in the live game.

It's a test realm. Thousands of players will be checking it out, and developers will be looking over the results to see what worked and what didn't. Blizzard isn't out to destroy a class; if they really wanted to destroy a class, they'd remove it from the game. Yes, they may make mistakes, but they have smaller patches and hotfixes for that. In the end, it shakes loose those players who were in the class as a "flavor of the season," and those still with the class will adapt to the changes and move on. If you truly love playing the class, you will find a way to make it work.

We saw it with the addition of (omg ugly and slow and no HT rank 4's!) tree form, we saw it with the nerfs to lifebloom and regrowth glyph, we saw it with the destruction of using down-ranked spells, and we saw it with the holy pallies' previous mana regen nerfs, just to name a few examples.

This early in PTR development, nothing is final. If you're fretting over changes, the best thing you can do is to think hard on how you'd adapt to such changes, then get on the PTR and really test things out. See what works and what doesn't, then accurately summarize on a forum/blog post how the changes affected your playing style, what things you did to accommodate for the changes, and if you were still able to perform your role in the situations you tested. Such a description will go over far better than an untested, aggressive rant.

---

That said, here is a run-down of my comments on the current PTR patchnotes.

- Argent Tournament:
While many may've held off on turning in the final quest to become Champion of their last race-faction in order to keep the dailies available, it will now be time to finally turn it in and get that Crusader title, as doing so will now make a whole new set of dailies and quests available. I am looking forward to the hearthing tabard and the addition of yet another pet!

- Zepplin Org - TB:
This seems to be the horde version of the boat from Auberdine to Stormwind, allowing lowbies to quickly cross the world to reach the most popular city of their faction.

- Stair of Destiny Portals:
It will be very nice having a quick port from Stormwind/Org to the Blasted Lands, particularly for those players ~58. I wish this had been added back when Karazhan was a popular raid, but ah well :)

- Mailboxes:
Let there be moar.

- Dalaran Children's Week:
A bit late, but I suppose better for that it gave us all time to get all of those PvP achievements for the previous Childrens' Week out of the way.

- PvP:
While the Commander/Justicar Kae within me chides me for this, I'm honestly not that interested in the PvP changes. I did listen to that former PvPer in me, though, and at least gazed down the battlegrounds changes. Things of interest include the support of "Twinks" by being able to turn off experience gains (they are a significant enough chunk of the player base, apparently), the lowering of battleground durations to 1600 points/resources or 20 minutes for WSG, and the reduction of the amount of time it took to cap a resource node or pick up the EotS flag.

- Orc Racial:
Enhancement Orc Shammies rejoice, fist weapons are now included.

- Emblems:
Emblems of Conquest for EVERYONE! Tis like a gumball machine. Heroic 5-man? CONQUEST! Naxx 10? Conquest!! Want something from valor/heroism vendor? Just convert em! I'm just waiting for the time to come that they combine the vendors into one all using Conquest badges, like some crazy reverse NPC mitosis.

- Mounts:
Covered by other bloggers in most cases, so I will be brief on this. Yay for faster, younger scraggedy crow-form, and yay for level 16 cheetahs. Zoom Zoom. For those in Northrend, you will be interested in the removal of the "no flight" zones over Dalaran and Wintergrasp, provided you stay "a healthy distance above the ground" while flying.

- Mana Regen:
Mp5 on items increased by 25% in power. Poor spirit.

- Replenishment:
Small nerf on the amount of mana it returns, though it will also be less spammy for those that have replenishment gains showing up in their combat text.

- Chef's Hat:
Increases cooking speed!

- Blackened Dragonfin:
Now only takes 1 fish per, rather than 2. The melee will rejoice.

- Waterlogged Recipe:
New reward chance from fishing daily in Dalaran, earns "several" Dalaran cooking awards when turned in. Tradeable.

- Raptor Hatchling Pets:
Baby raptor pets drop off of rare and elite raptors around the game now; one can also be purchased from Brianni in Dalaran.

- Druids -

- Innervate:
Got cut in half. You can have half now, and half in 3 minutes. This means you only restore 7,866 mana per innervate at level 80, so you won't want to wait until you're almost OoM before using it, like we did before.

- Lifebloom:
Bloom nerfed again. Syll said it best, I think, with "But it seems that in Blizzard’s juggling act, most of our spells are hackey sacks and Lifebloom is a flaming bowling ball." 20% of the bloom has been reduced by 20% on the base and on the spell power coefficient." Pity, I was just adapting to using the bloom as a heal! But, as it is usually all overheal anyway (except when I use it on Vezax ><) this probably won't be a big deal to PvE raiding druids.

- Feral:
Had a nerf coming. I was out-DPSing better geared players on my feral druid, and my guildie feral was indeed a beast on DPS. This is not to say I haven't seen terribad ferals as well; feral does take some skill to play well, as they juggle all of the DoTs, buff, and the positionally-dependant Shred. I just hope that through PTR testing, the nerf results in them being brought into line, rather than drug through the dirt with a muzzle and declawed.

- Balance of Power:
Reduction to spell damage taken, as opposed to reduction to chance to be hit by spells. I'm not sure how this will affect the turkeys as far as spell damage they take in a PvE raid, but I imagine it'll be nice as a small damage reduction in the boss AoE.

- Eclipse:
Wrath and Starfire have been split to separate cooldown timers, and cannot be active at the same time. So, conceivably, you can pew pew with one buff up, then get a crit on the last buffed spellcast and proc the other one. It should result in more time spent with one eclipse or the other procced, as you would want to get a proc off of one while the other is on CD. In a way, this may make Moonkin spell use even more confusing to learn, but overall increase the DPS done.

- Empowered Touch:
A straight buff to Nourish. I already specced for this talent, since I use NS+HT quite a lot in my ten-mans, so I am looking forward to having this talent provide a buff to my nourish as well.

- Imp Barkskin:
The patch change is again a PvP change, making the dispel-reduction only work for the Barkskin buff itself. This doesn't change anything for PvE.

- Glyph of the Claw
For the baby ferals.

- Other Classes' changes of Druid interest -

- Hunter Traps:
Each type is now on a separate cooldown, rather than shared. This means they can ice-trap that aggroed mob on you even if they just laid down an explosive trap.

- Rogues + Axes:
Rogues rolling on axes. WTF. Like we trees really needed more axes being swung around the raid. Seriously? ;)

- Shammies:
Chain heal got buffed, and they can now put 4 totems down all at once, rather than in separate GCDs. Their NS is now also at a 2-minute cooldown, rather than 3min: be jealous!

- Warlocks:
Banish can now be canceled on a target by recasting banish at it. No more waiting for the banish to wear off!

RP: Revive and Rebirth

Revive and Rebirth,
by Kaelynn Mistrunner
Cenarion Circle Library

The ability to heal is born into every druid. Our deep connection with nature allows us to summon those powers of growth and mending, marshaling these forces within ourselves and applying them to our allies to mend their wounds. No matter the path a druid chooses to walk, the ability to heal remains with us.

If our allies’ will to live is strong enough [Do you wish to accept? Yes / No ], we may even summon them back from the dead. This ability is not unique in Azeroth: the divine powers of the priests and paladins mimic this call, and shaman are also capable of bringing others back to life with the power of nature. Such resurrections require intense concentration and no immediate threat to either the unconscious or to the caster themselves. The Cenarion Circle's teachings, however, hold a secret to imbue life into our fallen comrades without such limitations!

Young druids are taught this art through the focus of a seed. Through the seed’s own rapid growth urged on by our connection to nature, we can link such rapid awakening to our fallen ally, helping them quickly burst back to life through the shell of their mending flesh. Just as a sapling will still strive to grow through burying leaf litter, late frosts, parasites, and the looming shadows, so to will our ally strive to rise up in the face of adversity! [combat flag ;)]

In time, a druid can learn to eschew having a real seed present, eliminating the need to carry such things in order to so quickly and efficiently resuscitate a friend. The druid knows the growth of the seed, can feel within themselves the sapling’s strength and will to grow, and can imbue these feelings into their work without having the seed physically present.

Regardless of having such a reagent present or not, this power’s benefits come at a price of time. The focus required to so quickly connect the idea of a growing seed to a near-death friend is draining upon a druid, and such a focus of lifeline energy requires at least some time to recharge. This recharge time, sometimes referred to as a Cooldown, seems to be universal across druids, and limits how often we can marshal such a power to circumvent the standard limitations of resurrection.

Druids are capable of the standard resurrection ability used by the aforementioned shaman, priests, and paladins, in tandem to our seed-driven resuscitation. There is no recharge time on this more standard power, as while it does still require focus, it is only ever done in a calm, uninterrupted setting where there is plenty of time to marshal the forces of nature required to grant the fallen friend a chance to wake up from their dieing sleep.

While all such powers are commonly referred to as resurrections or “resses,” when making a distinction between the two druidic powers of resurrection, the standard power is referred to as a “Revival,” and the seed-sped resurrection is called a “Rebirth.” In the course of training, a druid will first learn to master the simpler Revive. Once this has been accomplished, the teachers will move on to the way of the seed when they feel their charge is ready. Learning to use the Rebirth power without a seed present is an ability a druid will then learn on their own, at their own pace [Glyph it!].

Winds guide you, druid.

The GCD

Patch: 3.1.2

Building upon my previous post regarding the 3.1 Nature's Grace, I wanted to look into the 1-second GCD limit and figure out at what spell-haste rating it would come into effect for caster druids.

EDIT 3/21/10: 3.3 Resto druid GotEM changes are in a new post, found here. All moonkin stuff in this post should still be current.


Base Hasted GCD limit:

Ignoring both Nature's Grace and Gift of the Earth Mother (as well as any other raid buffs or potions), it will take 1639.5 haste rating at level 80 to reach the 1-second GCD limit (which is 50% spell haste). The conversion from haste rating to % at level 80 is 32.79 %/rating.

Base Formula: HastedCastTime = BaseCastTime /(1 + (% SpellHaste / 100)) 1639 haste rating / 32.79 = 49.98% Spell haste at level 80 HastedGCD = 1.5s /(1 + (49.98 / 100)) = 1.00013 seconds

Going from 1639 to 1640 haste rating will push you to a 0.9999 second GCD (at level 80), just below the hard-set 1-second limit; thus, 1639 haste rating is as close as you can get to a 50% spell haste unbuffed by procs/talents/potions/abilities/etc. You are extremely unlikely to see this raw amount of haste rating on your gear in the current game, and if you do, you are probably severely gimped in all other stats. Do not try to get that much haste rating.

I repeat: do not try to stack haste on your gear to reach that 1639/40 limit. There are many raid buffs and talents in the game that will boost your haste for you, instead.

---

Other Haste-effecting Procs, Buffs, and Talents:

• Bloodlust/Heroism - from shaman, 30%
• Power Infusion from disc priests, 20%
• Wrath of Air Totem - from shaman, 5%
• Nature's Grace - talent proc, 20%
• Gift of the Earth Mother - resto talent, EDIT: 2% per point
• Celestial Focus - balance talent, 3%
• Imp Moonkin Aura - from balance druids, 3%
• Ret Pally Auras - from ret pallies, 3%
• Trinkets
• Potions

Raid-wide buff spells do not stack with each other if they provide the same buff. Thus, the haste from imp. moonkin aura will not stack with the haste from imp. ret auras (the other parts of the moonkin/ret auras still work, like the spell crit), and Bloodlust/Heroism does not stack with Power Infusion. There are 3 distinct raid-buff categories here, in which the buffs do not stack within their category:

• Bloodlust/Heroism and Power Infusion
• Imp Moonkin Aura and Imp Ret Aura
• Wrath of Air totem
  

The distinction for Wrath of Air is that it is a generic haste increase, while Imp Moonkin and Imp Ret specifically say "spell haste." Why they decided to do this, I don't know, but if it's stacking the aura with the totem, should we really argue? ;)

---

Notes on Haste Math:

My assumption is that each of these buffs will also reduce the GCD, proportionally. Note that when it comes to calculating hasted cast times, whether you apply a 3% haste bonus or a 20% bonus first does not alter the outcome of your cooldown time. Haste will also stack multiplicatively (crit, on the other hand, stacks additively).

3% first: 1) 1.5s -(1.5*0.03) = 1.455 seconds 2) 1.455s - (1.455*0.2) = 1.164 seconds

20% first: 1) 1.5s -(1.5*0.2) = 1.2 seconds 2) 1.2s - (1.2*0.03) = 1.164 seconds

HOWEVER, if you have any talent that reduces a cooldown/cast-time by a set amount rather than a percentage (ie -0.5 seconds), it MUST be taken into account first before applying any percent reductions, including haste from gear.

---

Moonkin vs Resto GCDs:

The following charts assume that:

• Celestial Focus and GotEM will stack with raid buffs.
• Moonkin will have both Celestial Focus and Imp Moonkin Aura.
  
• Resto druids will either have 0 points in GotEM, or 4 points, or 5 points.
• GotEM will only reduce the GCD of Lifebloom, Rejuv, and Wild Growth.
  
• Raids may or may not have a WoA totem
• Resto druids' raids may or may not have a moonkin or ret pally.
  
• Wrath of Air totem (edit) stacks with Moonkin or Ret pally talented auras.
• Moonkin and Ret haste auras will not stack.
  
• Bloodlust will stack with all other raid buffs (excluding Power Infusion).
• All haste buffs and talents will affect the GCD.
  

NOTE: The GotEM haste variable in these resto tables is no longer accurate.
For updated resto druid tables, go here.

---

So what does all of this mean?

Any time a line in the graphs above dips below 1 second (the heavy red line), the GCD is at its 1-second limit. The GCD can never be less than 1 second, no matter what kind of spell haste or buffs you have! This is a hard limit put in place by the game's developers and designers.

The haste that you have on your gear, as well as buffs and talents, will push the 1.5 second baseline GCD closer and closer to this 1 second limit, as shown above. What buffs and talents you have will impact how much haste is needed to reach this 1-second GCD limit, and may impact your choices in what talents you take (such as how many points in Gift of the Earth Mother) and how much haste you put on your gear as a insta-casting-fiend of a resto druid.

Bloodlust:
In most all cases, getting Bloodlusted will reduce your GCD to its 1-second minimum. The few cases that it does not are when you have low haste rating on your gear, have no moonkin/ret pally/WoA totem, and are not using a spell that has been reduced by GotEM.

GotEM:
Remember that this talent will only reduce the GCD of lifebloom, rejuv, and Wild Growth. Spells such as remove curse, abolish poison, and Nature's Grasp will not be affected by GotEM. However, in regards to GotEM: the higher your haste rating, the fewer points in it you will need to reach the base of a 1-second GCD.

To reach a GCD of 1.0 seconds with GotEM (rough estimate):

• On average with only a WoA totem, each 150 points of haste rating beyond 500 will reduce the number of points you need to spend in GotEM by 1.
• On average with only a ret pally or moonkin aura, each 150 points of haste rating beyond 550 will reduce the number of points you need to spend in GotEM by 1.

For a more accurate assessment, I am reminded to link over to Phaelia's calculator at resto4life!

Take into account your trinket use, potion use, and Nature's Grace procs as applicable.

Nature's Grace:
This talent will reduce much more than just your GCD, but my focus in this study is looking only at its impact on the GCD (which has particular importance with instant-cast spells). Proccing it in combination with GotEM will assuredly reduce your GCD to the 1-second limit, even if you have but 4 points in it and low haste rating. For other insta-cast spells such as Abolish Poison, you cannot count on GotEM to contribute, but the cooldown will still be lowered significantly by the NG proc. NG itself has the same % GCD reduction as a fully-talented GotEM, and though it is proc-based, it will effect all of your spells.

For turkeys, this talent is pretty much a necessity, and should be factored in on any haste calculations. Graylo at Gray Matter has a great post about the "soft haste cap" for moonkin, assuming Nature's Grace.

---

TL:DR!

In summary, you have a 1.5 second base global cooldown (GCD), and it can be lowered down to a minimum of 1 second by haste rating and talents and raid buffs. Depending on your expected raid buffs and talents, you can determine what sort of haste rating is "overkill" for your GCD, since it would always push against the 1-second minimum cap.

Why is this important? For any spell that takes longer to cast than your GCD, it's not! (Such as Starfire, regrowth, etc). But, if you're casting lots of insta-casts or quick spells such as nourish, wrath, or talented+glyphed HTs, the GCD is a big deal, because it is often your true limit to your cast time. If you over-stack on haste without accounting for talents and raid buffs, then you're wasting stats on your gear.

The exact makeup of your raids, spec, and spell rotations will determine your "soft cap" for haste for your GCD. You can browse through the charts to see what best applies to you (where the heavy red line is the 1-second cap), and look at the haste rating on the x-axis from there.

• Always remember that while haste may be worthless beyond a certain point for you for your GCD, it can still affect other spells you cast, if they take longer than a base of 1.5 seconds to cast. Your use of these longer-cast spells will in turn affect your overall soft haste cap, depending on your spec, class, raid makeup, and healing style/turkey tactics.

~ As always, I have an ear open for comments on the math and any buffs or druid caster talents I may have missed or misinterpreted!

As a random note, I myself run about 320 haste rating with 4 pts in GotEM and full Nature's Grace. This doesn't put me at the 1-second cap, but meh :) ~

Revitalize: WWS report

I've been keeping an eye on my raids' wws reports, and wanted to share some of the charts I put together using last Tuesday's raid, May 12th, 2009, lasting approximately 2.5 hours (Flame Leviathan was cut out, where no one was using spells/abilities).


PROCS PER HoT APPLICATION
First, here is a sample of the number of Revitalize procs vs. the number of times Rejuvenation or Wild Growth was "applied" as a buff by that player. I am assuming that the buff applications from WWS are the number of times that spell was given to that player edit: the applications are the number of times the spell was given FRESH to that player; the applications are not counting the number of times the HoT was renewed before a previous version wore off.

• Wild Growth fresh-applications were pretty even across the board (among melee), with a 6-target splash across 10 people (+ pets).
  
• Rejuv applications were focused on the two tanks, of course, and both tanks saw a greatly increased number of revitalize procs from this. NOTE: tanks' rejuvs were often refreshed before they ran out to keep them swiftmendable, and these refreshes are not counted in the applications numbers, but they did contribute significantly to their overall procs of revitalize.
  

Revitalize is definitely proccing fairly regularly. The proc chance itself is given as 15% per tick, but I cannot judge the exact number of ticks based on the HoT's application alone: though my Rejuv has 6 ticks and Wild Growth 7, each spell may be over-written by a fresh Rejuv or Wild Growth before each tick has occurred. For this reason, I don't want to try to reverse-engineer an exact procs/tick rate right now, like I did pre-3.1 :)

The data stands fairly well on its own since most of the spellcasts were (usully) made specifically to heal the targets, so there is no need to argue for its mana cost. Those times I did cast it specifically for the revitalize portion for the DK, warrior, and/or cat, I did so when I had plenty of mana to spare. I did check to make certain that the feral druid never cast Rejuvenation over the course of the raid, so his untalented spellcasts are not skewing the procs (no offense, Cel!).

• I want to reiterate that Revitalize WILL PROC even when the healing from the HoT's tick is not applied (due to the target being full health). The game will not apply the healing to a full-health target, but the game will still give that hidden tick a chance to proc the power return.

REJUV vs. WG
Now I will be comparing the FRESH applications of the spells on the individuals, and their resulting revitalize procs. Note: 24% of my healing done was Rejuv, and 23% was WG.

• When Rejuv > WG applications, procs per combined FRESH spell application (rejuv + WG applications) were roughly 60-65%.
• When WG > Rejuv, procs/freshapplication = ~45-50%.
  

This makes me scratch my head, since Rejuv has 6 ticks (I have Nature's Splendor), and WG has 7 ticks (thus should have a greater number of procs per spbuff application). EDIT: those who had Rejuv > WG were tanks, and their rejuvs were very often renewed as well, so each "application" may have had 6 ticks or 20 or more. For dps/ranged, WG's 7th tick was sometimes over-written as its cooldown is up before the last tick occurs, but not to the same level as rejuv was, since rejuv is usually a permanent fixture on my tanks, while WG is not permanently upon the raiders. This constant renewal resulted in the higher rate compared to those who received more fresh WG's than fresh rejuvs.

Combining all 6 classes resulted in a 54% procs per fresh application, with WG > Rejuv. Combining every member of the raid (13 total due to some switch-outs for Emalon) resulted in a 50% procs/fresh application rate, again with WG > Rejuv. Remember that this estimate is also including every procs from the unaccounted time that rejuv or WG was RENEWED on the target, thus extending the chance for ticks. Unfortunately, given that procs are not specified as coming from rejuv or WG, and that any given cast of my WG may have hit 1 target or 6, that number of refreshes can't easily be found, even when parsing manually through the combat log.

This chance will fluctuate per person, per raid size (chance of over-writing a Wild Growth is less when there are more targets to choose from), how frequently the caster refreshs Rejuv vs letting it tick fully, and probably a slew of other variables hiding. This is just the estimate derived from my playing style in a 10-man raid on a single night.

• Important: Any given spell application could proc once, twice, even three times or more before the buff wears off, or it may not proc at all! Also, the procs are determined for each individual's own buff ticks, so while one person may proc on a wild growth tick, the others who have the same wild growth upon them may or may not get a proc themselves at the same time. It is for this same reason that ticks can't be counted up in a combat log to compare against procs, because the HoT may proc revitalize without actually ticking a heal.
  

CLASS SPECIFICS
Now, let's ignore the craziness of procs per fresh applications vs refreshes, and just look at the breakdowns of individual players' power gains. I have selected a Prot warrior, Deathknight (blood), Feral Druid (cat form), Prot Pally, Warlock, and Resto Druid (me!).


The returns from revitalize are all shaded in the pale violet-blue, and I included the raw power numbers returned by each element. The prot pally had quite a few other smaller returns from misc things that I cut out to reduce clutter, all returning less than 6k mana each over the raid night; I also only counted the feral druid's energy returns, ignoring the rage and mana he gained while briefly in bear or caster. Otherwise, each of the other classes shown show their full power returns per type for the night.

• Prot Warr: massive rage returns with rejuv kept on, taking up roughly 1/3 of their rage power gains, equalling or surpassing their rage returns from bloodrage and shield specialization.
• Blood Deathknights: between WG and some occasional thoughtful Rejuvs, it beat out his own runic power regenerator, butchery.
• Kitty Druid: it's no Tiger's Fury, but as any feral kitty will tell you, more energy is a wonderful thing. Surprise ticks of energy make for happy kitties (and rogues), and bloody mobs.
  
• Prot Pally: matches/exceeds mana tide totem's returns, and that shaman had to intentionally put that totem down; also matches illumination. A relatively small portion of the returns, but noticeable.
• Warlock: same relative percentage (and amount) of mana as the prot pally was returned to the lock by revitalize, though the lock received fewer ticks. This is because warlocks have larger mana pools than prot pallies, so each proc restored more mana (as 1% of mana pool). A small slice, but that's less life-tapping and thus less healing you need to give them, I suppose!
  
• Resto Druid (myself!): Lifebloom's 3.1 change of refunding half its mana cost on bloom has really borked the energy meters, and innervate is not included since it only speeds up passive regen (atm). Again, though, it matches mana tide's contribution (a 5-minute cooldown), and that's pretty nice when I catch a WG splash or keep rejuv on myself for environment damage/aoe.

10-MAN vs 25-MAN RAIDS
Your use of WG and Rejuv will affect how useful this talent is for you. The more players that are in your raid, the smaller the proportion of players you will see this proccing on (from your own spells), due simply to the limited proportion of the targets you can cast on at any given moment. It will not, however, reduce the raw amount of power returned to your raid: it only spreads it out, just as your healing done is spread out among your targets. Having more resto druids with the revitalize talent in a 25-man raid will increase the proportion, of course.

Having more players in the raid as targets for your Wild Growth will impact how often your WGs overwrite themselves on your targets as well, which affects the "application" rate.

If you are raiding with other druids who do not have revitalize, it may throw off your own measurements of fresh HoT applications vs revitalize procs from your WWS reports. Know at least that since HoTs are not overwritten by other casters, your own spells will not be affected negatively by raiding with druids who do not have Revitalize, unless the other druids also use an unglyphed Swiftmend and thus remove your Rejuvs (fail!).

The thing to ultimately keep in mind is that if you're casting these spells anyway, this is purely passive power regen for your targets. You don't have to specifically cast it as a buff at someone, nor do you have to drop down a totem for it. You just have to heal, which you'd be doing with or without this talent.


SUMMARY
If you're using rejuv and WG, there's no reason not to get this talent. Every bit of mana regen adds up, and for those classes with limited power regeneration options, talents like this are a blessing. Warriors/bears, rogues/feral kitties, and DKs don't have as many options for power return as mana-users, and for some of them (such as DKs and warriors) the returns can be a significant part of their overall power returns. This in turn will increase damage output and tank threat, giving you shorter combats to heal through and quicker boss/trash kills. It will also give DKs/warrs/bears that extra little bit of power to help start off threat, or to get in an interrupt early in the combat.

Modelling revitalize is a headache. You can mathematically estimate chances, but who's to tell what will happen in the real raid, when you're throwing spells about and refreshing them before they tick fully? The best way you can really determine how good revitalize is, is to look at what it did. Look at how it impacted your raid, who it boosted, how it may've even given you as much mana back as the priests' hymn of hope gave to you over the course of the raid.

I whole-heartedly support this talent.

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!

My 3.1 Dual-Spec Choices

With two druids, I'm gonna have all 4 major specs to play with.

Curious, she knelt along the water's edge, feeling the sun-warmed mud and moss squish up between her roots as she leaned her trunk forward to stare at her reflection in the still waters. The face that greeted her mirrored her movements and expressions, but was wholly different in form: a small, hooked beak, curving horns, and feathers of cream and sand replaced the golden bark and autumn leaves she knew herself to have. Calmly, she studied the reflection with a druid's spiritual wisdom, wondering what the lake was showing her of her inner self.


Kaelynn: Resto, Moonkin.
I will be raiding with both, though using the turkey for dailies, too.

• For the turkey, I chose Typhoon over Starfall out of consideration for breakable CC, since it is a cone and I can control it better (and tend to be good about aiming the knockback). If I have aggro problems, I'll rearrange to take Nature's Reach.
• Resto spec choices are not changing from pre-3.1. I love the build, and think it will adapt well. If you want reasons, you can see my rambling about all the talent points here.
  

Kae: Cat, Bear.
She is currently level 76, so the builds are going to be generic for pugging/leveling purposes.
I am less certain of feral builds since I haven't raided with one since November (08), but these are the specs I'm gonna try out. If I find I need to change them as I finish leveling her, so be it :)

• Nurturing Instinct applies to heals from iLotP, so it will be a good passive for soloing or pugging.
  
• I am least certain about the points in bash for bear, and will probably leave those points for my last two levels' worth of decisions.

Nature's Grace, Haste, and Cast Times

EDIT: observations about Nourish, Wrath, and the GCD; May 6 2009
EDIT: GotEM 3.3 link; Oct 14 2009



Nature's Grace reduces your casting time during the proc by 20%. The base cast times (not accounting for gear, buffs OR GotEM) with the proc are such:

• Healing Touch: 3.0 -> 2.4 seconds
• HT w/ Naturalist: 2.5 -> 2.0 seconds
• HT w/ Naturalist + Glyph: 1.0 -> 0.8 seconds
  
• Regrowth: 2.0 -> 1.6 seconds
• Nourish: 1.5 -> 1.2 seconds
• Revive: 10 -> 8 seconds
  
• Rebirth: 2.0 -> 1.6 seconds


• Starfire: 3.5 -> 2.8 seconds
• Starfire w/ SW: 3.0 -> 2.4 seconds
• Wrath: 2.0 -> 1.6 seconds
• Wrath w/ SW: 1.5 -> 1.2 seconds

**For cast times accounting for 3.3 Gift of the EarthMother talent changes rather than NG, please see this post**


Nature's Grace and Spell Haste
Here, I am expanding the cast-time calculations from the list above to account for spell haste. The calculation for hasted spell-casting at level 80 according to WoWwiki is:

HastedCastTime = BaseCastTime /(1 + (% SpellHaste / 100))

With 20% extra from NG, where:
BaseCastTime^NG = BaseCastTime - (BaseCastTime x 0.2) = (BaseCastTime x 0.8)
then,

HastedCastTimeNG = (BaseCastTime x 0.8) /(1 + ( % SpellHaste/100))

• Note: Applying this 20% before or after your own spell haste does not matter, like it did with the old 0.5 second flat reduction (which had to be applied before accounting for haste). I tested applying it both before and after the haste, from haste ratings of 0 to 1650, and they had the exact same results. HastedCastTime^NG = [ (BaseCastTime) /(1 + ( % Spell Haste/100)) ] * 0.8 = (BaseCastTime x 0.8) /(1 + ( % Spell Haste/100))

Using this HastedCastTime^NG formula and converting for Haste Rating at level 80, you can compare your haste rating with various spell/talent/proc combinations to see what the cast time would be:


I shaded the standard GCD as it scales with haste. "NG" is for the spells being cast under the effects of Nature's Grace. The GCD itself will be reduced by Nature's Grace procs; the reduced GCD timer follows the same line in the above graph as the hasted Nourish (until it reaches the 1-second GCD limit), plus some additional buffer time granted by individual latency.

What this means is that Nourish and talented Wrath will not clip your GCD, even under the effects of NG procs.


Proc Duration
Another small change is that the 20% reduction to cast times will now last for 3 seconds, rather than only affecting the very next spell you cast (that is not an insta-cast) within 15 seconds. Because of this, you will likely get two spells off (sans Revive) with this cast time reduction before the proc wears off, assuming you are not casting any insta-casts during the short proc. This is certainly a boon for balance druids.

Resto druids:
The original 15-second duration provided much more leeway to make use of the haste around applying lots of HoTs, and having this cut to 3 seconds may result in a loss of the buff at times without it being used by a spell other than insta-casts. We should consider, however, that since it does reduce the GCD during those 3 seconds, it is allowing us to cast more HoTs in that time as well, barring the 1-second-minimum GCD limit.


Short of the Long
With the Nature's Grace proc now scaling with spells rather than being a flat rate, your longer spell casts will see a much larger reduction, and your short spells a shorter reduction which will prevent some of them clipping the GCD as they once did. Both your normal haste and the NG-procced haste will affect your GCD just as much as they do your normal spellcasts, so your Nourish and talented Wraths will not clip it.

The proc has NO internal cooldown, so it will proc on each and every spell critical (except for channeled crits such as those from hurricane). This can offset the shorter duration by chain-proccing during a series of crits.

I consider this talent to still be essential to any balance druid as well as any resto druid who finds themselves casting regrowth, swiftmend, and/or nourish with any kind of regularity. While WG, lifebloom, and rejuvenation may be our most-used heals, nourish's boosted place as a flash heal for use when swiftmend is on cooldown makes this talent quite useful, and the fact that the proc will reduce your GCD by 20% around any HoTs cast within those few seconds of duration are what makes this talent truly shine among the trees.

THRONS!

The History of Thorns
Long, long ago, back when I was a tiny level 60 elf running about the newly-minted Arathi Basin healing the Marshal group in its repetitive battles against the Warlords (the pugs usually just fled in terror and gave no real fight), I posted up details of my "PvP healing spec" balance/resto mix to my guild. I had taken the full points in brambles, and commented about how it "tore apart rogues," and then promptly got laughed at by the rogues in the guild who said the damage shield was nothing to them.

To which I replied, sure, per hit it's not much. Thorns wasn't single-handedly slaughtering the rogues on the field, but apparently my rogue guildies could not grasp the concept a healer's dps exaggeration :) Consider how I'm not DPSing, yet can make each member of the horde team take that damage every time they attack anyone in my raid, and the numbers add up to something quite nice for a passive. Consider those moments when it's down to the line, how you're nearly dead but can manage to squeak by to kill your opponent first, or before their buddies do you in, and those thorns sapping away your health could've done enough damage to prevent that victory? If all I was doing was healing, how can such passive damage be laughed at?

Sure, it was tiny then. I laugh myself now when I think back to level 60 thorns damage, in spite of the buff from the Cenarion T1 set and the talent. I remember coming across the giant Anubisath Defenders in AQ40 and wishing MY thorns did over 100 damage per hit! The rogues weren't laughing at THOSE thorns. Some people enjoyed sending thorns requests to my WhisperCast just for the humor of it... [Rygel] whispers: THORNS are painful to sit on! ...but overall, it was a buff overlooked in the grand scheme of things, compared to the powerhouses of Kings, MoTW, AI, and Fort.

As time passed, I never gave up on thorns. Damage increased as levels went by, of course, but it's still pretty minuscule, particularly compared to the amount of health players have now vs back at level 60. Percentage-wise, the damage has increased about 300% base of what it used to be, but health has gone up that same percentage or more as well. 18 damage (38-39 if fully buffed out) to a player of 6k to 8k health is one thing... ~80 damage is a drop in the bucket compared to 20k health and certainly compared to 40k health.

But, I still buff up my tanks with thorns (the ones who don't do it themselves as bears) when I'm not too lazy to shift out of tree form to do it (which is a lot of the time). I still toss them around to my buddies in our rare stints of PvP. I always make sure to do it when we need full buffs, just in case the damage done is necessary for that tiny little extra straw on the scale of survival, or to shorten the fight into the limits of mana. We've seen fights where a simple food buff saved the life of a tank, and thus kept us from a wipe; getting that extra damage in is no different.

Level 80, Pre-3.1

	Ret aura	Thorns
Base Damage:	112 holy	73 nature
Talents:	Improved Ret Aura (Sanctified Ret 3.1)	Brambles
Talented damage:	168 holy	127.75 nature

Thorns also receives a spellpower buff based on the spellpower of the person it is cast on (pre-3.1 patch). Unfortunately, in PvE, the most useful people to cast thorns on are tanks, and they really don't have much spellpower, unless they're a crazy prot pally still clinging to TBC spellpower-tank ideals (....), so really, the buff is miniscule.

Sample of a no-brambles-talent Thorns damage from a 10-man webstats report, pre-3.1 with target-based spellpower buff:

Prot Pally: 138 damage

Feral Druid: 82 damage

Resto Druid: 202 damage

Ret aura is passive, raid-wide, single-click to cast it on everyone in range, with no duration. Thorns is single-target, actively cast, and only lasts for 10 minutes (excluding yourself if glyphed), and doesn't include any of the additional benefits of ret aura (from paladin talents). I've not complained much on this, as buffs are a tricky situation to balance game design around and our shapeshifts have their own passive auras, but when comparing these damage shields, Thorns is noticeably lackluster. As a radical idea, I do wonder what would happen if thorns was built into the moonkin aura through some kind of major glyph!

I would imagine that it is for this damage difference that the 3.1 thorns buff is going in (or being fixed): that Thorns will now receive an extra damage increase based on the caster's spellpower.


3.1 Change

Those who have tested have found that:

• +spellpower is now from the buffer, rather than the buffee
• +spellpower boost does not change after swapping gear (ie to feral kit)
• Cast by a moonkin with Brambles (and Earth and Moon and full 25-man raid buffs), it was about 500-600 damage: a substantial increase over the base 73.

Well, I think that "tearing apart the rogues" is a bit more realistic with such numbers. The kitty druids will probably be upset about this, too. Either way, I think people are going to be asking for Thorns again.

When buffing, we could increase the damage further by casting it while a +spellpower trinket is procced or popped, and any feral druid may want to consider either swapping to a spellpower offkit when buffing themselves, or asking their tree/turkey buddy to apply it for them. As a note, the damage done by thorns has always been counted as damage done by the person buffed, rather than the person who cast it: as such, all threat (as well as the damage meter numbers, for those concerned) go to the person buffed, and not the caster.

Now, what is the exact percentage of spellpower that adds to the thorns damage? I have seen some quote 13%, but I am concerned that it may be not accounting for Earth and Moon or Stormstrikes, or other raid buffs. So, I took matters into my own paws and let some mobs hit on me!

Spellpower coefficient:

With 1919 spellpower, my thorns hit for 200 damage. Base thorns damage: 73 200 - 73 = 129 bonus damage from spellpower on the thorns 129 bonus / 1919 = 0.0661 = 6.6%

For sake of comparison, I ran the same calculation on other spellpower amounts + thorns damage numbers, as well as from estimations pulled from WWS reports, and came up with the same percentage.

So, bit 'o theorycrafting, with 6.6% of your spellpower to add to your thorns damage, the above table shows what your thorns damage would be per your spellpower. I added lines to account for additional damage from 3/3 Brambles (+75% damage), and even when you have both 3/3 Brambles and are keeping Earth and Moon active on the target (+13% additional damage). If you are looking to take only 1 or 2 points of brambles, cut the Brambles damage increase (above the base thorns damage) by 50% and 25%, respectively. If my math seems off, please do let me know.

If you have Stormstriking Shammies running about your raid, you will see your thorns get buffed by that, as well, possibly even glyphed.

My remaining questions, however, are:

• Will it overwrite the thorns buff on a feral druid, even if it has a shorter duration than the feral's own glyphed 50 minute thorns? UPDATE: Yes. The thorns cast by a druid with higher spellpower cannot be overwritten by one of lower spellpower, even if glyphed for the longer duration.
  


• Is Brambles worth taking for moonkin for this damage increase over other available talents, taking into consideration the Treant aspect as well?


• Why is the 50-minute duration of the glyph self-only? Why could it not at least increase the duration of non-self thorns to 30 minutes?

At least the first one will be testable Tuesay night, assuming the servers are stable :)

Wild Growth

Simple tutorial on the use of Wild Growth.

Wild Growth (WG) is the druid restoration 51-talent-point spell. It is an AoE heal that you cast on another person: it does not automatically center on yourself, like Tranquility does. Also unlike Tranquility, Wild Growth can be cast on other raid members (as well as mobs and bosses, in fact!), rather than only your party. It has a 6-second cooldown and a 7-second duration, with a total of 7 ticks of healing applied during that time. The ticks occur quickly at first, and then slow down towards the end of the spell duration.

Because it can be cast upon other raid members or enemies and its area of effect is centered upon your target rather than yourself, Wild Growth requires a bit of finesse to use effectively; if you miscast the spell, its cooldown will prevent you from having another chance for 6 seconds, and in the healing world, that could mean deaths.

---

Here is the diagram style I will be using to illustrate WG. The little colored circles are people, and the big blueish circle is your Wild Growth's area of effect. It has a 15-yard radius centered on the person (or pet or enemy) you cast the WG on; the whole circle is 30 yards in diameter. Yay geometry!


If you cast WG on yourself, only those people within 15 yards of you will receive the HoT: yourself included. Everyone else is left out and is sad. Or angry. Maybe that's why I made them red.


If you cast the spell on someone else (you have a 40-yard range to target with), then they, and everyone else within 15 yards of them, is eligible for the spell (assuming they are friendly targets in your raid/party). Now here is the tricky part: only 5 total people/pets can receive the WG heal within that circle, including the target of the spell. Your WG will automatically choose the 5 people/pets who are currently lowest in health (by percentage). Everyone else will, again, be left out.


Remember: this is not based on who is furthest away or closest. If they are in range of the person you cast the spell on, they are eligible, and will receive the heal if they are one of the 5 who need it the most at that moment in time. This means that it may not put a heal on your actual target: WG may instead splash on 5 people and/or pets that are lower in health than your target.

Due to this, you can choose your target carefully, selecting them not because they actually need the heal, but because they are within range of the most people who ARE in need of the heal. These targets are commonly referred to as "Bridges."

If no good Bridge is available, you can move and make yourself the Bridge. This will let you cast your WG upon yourself, and have it splash heals on the people who are in your 15-yard range.


Notice in the above diagram that there are 5 other people hit by the WG, though you targeted yourself. This means that either:

• you were the highest health out of the 6 total people in the area of effect, and so the WG applied its heal to the 5 others within your splash range and you simply served as the Bridge; or
• you picked up the Glyph of Wild Growth that is now available in patch 3.1, and so your WG can hit 6 people :)

Hope this helps!