Huh, that wasn’t what I expected
11/09/2010Hi, guys! Just checking in to let you know that my NaNoWriMo is still going strong and that it is almost certain now that I’ll be back to raiding come expansion. Be prepared for number crunching galore.
Speaking of, I’ve been playing the druid quite a bit and I was very surprised to see how little healing has changed. I was frankly expecting a real difference, given what I had been reading from other people. There has been so much anger at the changes, with people quitting the game or changes mains, but… Well, it really is almost totally the same! In fact, the first night I came back, I had a conversation with another non-Tree about it and we agreed that it is almost exactly like T9 with a dose of old, old school added in. There I was, rolling RJ like always (my internal timing was whacky, though, I’ll admit!). Really, the only change has been that I replaced my Nourish button with RG, which made me laugh. It was as if WotLK never happened, as if it was TBC that was leading into this new expansion! I suppose I’m slightly more thoughtful about who gets my SM now, but just barely. It has always been my favorite spell.
On the shaman front, -really- nothing has changed! I just walked in and went to town. Well, I suppose I’ve replaced LHW usage with HW, but that’s just such a minor change that it isn’t worth noting.
It will be at least a month before I think of touching the priest or the paladin, as I need time to get back into the healing swing of things on these two. Frankly, I’m not looking forward to logging onto my paladin and seeing how things are now. She was my pride and my main focus for so long that I almost want to leave her enshrined in my memory, undefiled by change. We’ll see, we’ll see…
Moar HPS! 
I keep being told it’ll be different when we care about mana. We’ll see. Right now? Like you, only I am having to think where to Swiftmend to get Efflorescence to be most helpful. I’m happy, I like druid heals and I don’t want them to be all weird.
I can see it being somewhat different at higher levels, but I think it just means being more mindful of gearing and of healing assignments. Right now I’m reforging every piece of gear away from Spirit to give me as much crit and haste as possible, but at 85 I’m sure that I’ll need to keep my regen high. Gemming INT/haste will also probably be the way to go, since INT will give spellpower as well as being the other side of the regen equation. (I’ve not heard if they changed the Spirit to INT regen formula yet.)
Really, it just seems so… overblown. I just get to see my character now instead of a Tree, really. LOL
Try a little Mastery. I am no theorycrafter but I changed a lot of spirit to Mastery, so I have 18% bonus healing on targets already affected by one of my hots. in 5 and 10 mans, that’s, like, everyone.
Actually, Mastery is not really worth it at all, compared to crit. It doesn’t affect our primary heals (RJ and WG) at all, whereas crit has a large affect on nearly every single one of our heals, primary and secondary alike. So really, unless you are primarily healing with RG (which I wouldn’t recommend, regardless!), then going for Mastery over crit is going to be a huge throughput loss.
Why wouldn’t it affect RJ and WG? It affects all healing done on targets that already have a HOT up which is, like, all of them in a five man and most in a ten man. If I already have a bunch of RJ on the raid and then throw WG, most of them are going to get a nice boost. In my ten mans it seems to help a lot – I can keep the raid up and the tanks fairly stable with just hots, letting the other healer concentrate on tank heals.
I’m trying to think of how to explain this more clearly… Mastery does not apply to any heals on targets that do not already have a HoT on them. Thus, when you apply a RJ to a person, it is not triggered because there is no HoT on them yet. If your WG hits people with RJ, it does trigger the Mastery. However, crit has the chance to trigger 6+8 times every less than one second during a raid, yielding more throughput when it triggers than Mastery does when it triggers and at a higher trigger rate. At 85, the game may change due to triage and mana considerations, but the game right now is “get as many people covered with RJ as we can,” meaning that it is only when you top off someone with your RJ via SM/RG/lucky use of WG that Mastery comes into play. Crit is in play at all times, now that our HoTs can crit on each tick.
In my defense, the mechanics were about half of the reason I changed mains. The other half of me had been playing a druid for so long that I felt I really needed a change of pace and that I had grown to a point where the character wasn’t “me” anymore and I wanted something that was more in line with who I am now.
I wasn’t too impressed with the mastery early on, either, in fact I would have thought the priest mastery might have been more appropriate for the druid and vice versa. I still would keep plenty of spirit around though, for mana regen purposes. I understand at 80, it’s tempting to lose all of that, but I am personally going into Cata and going into 85 very cautious with my mana bar.
There are already times right now where I’m bone dry of mana and that could be either me not being used to the new way of healing and conserving mana or it could mean my class/spec is still having some issues with that not being balanced out.
I do look forward to you covering druid topics and I do definitely chuckle at the idea of your new main being a druid. Look how far we have come!
Spirit vs. Crit/Haste reforging at 80 really depends on your level of gear and your spec.
Everything is subject to change once Cata hits.