Feral/Turkey Sketches

I spent some time stick-figure doodling various bears, kitties, and moonkin :D I hadn't really done many bears before, so they took a bit of time to settle into the style of my others.



I think Scythe will like the "WTF" cat.

Hurricane Shifting

I've noticed recently that if I attempt to use hurricane while shapeshifted (non-moonkin), it will de-shift me back to caster, but it will also cancel my hurricane, making me have to cast it again. Whether this bug is intentional or not, it's wasting my mana, and a bit irritating to have to re-target and cast again :)

I've been using this macro to get around it:

#showtooltip /cancelform [form:5,spec:2] [] /cast [noform:spec2] [] Hurricane; [form:1/3,spec:2] Survival Instincts

...which works well for a Resto (primary) Feral (secondary) specced druid. If you'd like a bare-bones variety without Survival Instincts, you can try out:

#showtooltip /cancelform /cast Hurricane

...though if you have a moonkin spec (where moonkin is form:5), I recommend going with:

#showtooltip /cancelform [noform:5] /cast Hurricane

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!

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%.

Moonkin +Hit Cap

Patch 3.1 - 3.3

The hit a moonkin wants to aim for is 10% +hit, or 263 hit rating at level 80.

Why?

17% hit is needed overall to hit a raid boss at level 80 (~level 83 mob).

• Of this, 4% is gained through the Balance of Power talent.
• Another 3% is gained by having IFF or Misery (from shadow priests) up on the boss.
• This leaves 10% hit to be made up for on your gear.
  

What about non-bosses?

A full chart of spell-hit compared to level difference can be found here at wowwiki. Long story short, though, for a PvE mob that is the same level as you, you need 4% spellhit to overcome the base miss chance, which is made up for by Balance of Power alone.

The following spellhit numbers assume base -hit chances. Any further affects that increase your chance to miss, such as Choking Cloud, are not included.

• Level 80 mobs: you need no +hit gear or IFF/misery, unless there is a special -hit reduction being applied to you.

• Level 81 mobs: 95% chance is 1% more than Balance of Power. You will need to use IFF/misery, or have about 27 hit rating available to make up for that 1%.

• Level 82 mobs: 94% chance is 2% more than Balance of Power. You will need to use IFF/misery, or have about 53 hit rating available to make up for that 2%.

• Level 83 mobs: 83% chance to hit; this is a large drop from the level 82 mobs. You will need a total of 17% spellhit, requiring Balance of Power, IFF or Misery, AND 10% spellhit on your gear, which is 263 (262.3) hit rating.

It is extremely unlikely that we will come up against anything above this level in the current PvE expansion. Any misses that occur when at the 17% "cap" will be due to external -hit effects.


Draenei party members!

They'll buff you with another +1% hit rating, reducing your hit rating requirements by around 27 (26.23 to be exact). Moonkin who raid with draenei will only need 9% additional hit rating over Balance of Power and IFF/Misery, which is about 237 (236.07) hit rating.


And PvP?

The base PvP hit chance for equal-level players is the same as for an equal-level mob: 96%. This is covered by our Balance of Power talent, so unless your opponents find a way to reduce your chance to hit with spells, you should be covered. If they do reduce it, you can use IFF to increase your hit by another 3%.

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? ;)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 :) ~

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!

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.