Mana Mana (again)

More mana regen nerfs. They just keep piling up. Spiritual Attunement is the latest victim. And while that isn't a Druid thing, it is nonetheless yet another reflection of the mana destruction we are seeing in WoW.

On the PTR, my Resto mana regen is quite frankly a joke. I am not one to be an alarmist, and yes people are killing the bosses on the PTR with the massive mana regen nerfs in place. But this whole thing seems to really be getting out of hand. And not just a little bit.

I will say it again, not that Blizzard will hear it or get ir if they did hear it, but here goes:

WE ARE NOT OVERPOWERED.

THE CURRENT CONTENT IS UNDERPOWERED.

Please please stop it Blizzard! Healing has been more fun the last few months than ever in this game. At least it has in the opinion of this author who has healed from Molten Core days up until now. With raiders being more bored in WoW than ever before, and more and more people just bailing on the game seemingly every day, putting mana users (and *especially*) healers in mana crunching situations like old days, making it much less fun, is a very bad move.

Now I understand the need for balancing. I really do. many things Blizzard did in the past panned out a lot better than it looked like they would. But this time, their actions indicate (to me at least) that they are not in touch with reality here. Er... actually its a video game... the uh, reality of the virtual reality... ah crap you know what I mean!

I haven't had the guts to wear a Boomkin spec on the PTR yet. I am too afraid of what I will see when open the character pane and check mana regen.

When is Starcrat 2 coming out?

Resto Nerfs INC

NERFS?

In case you have been hiding the last week, there are 2 significant changes queued up for raiding resto Druids. The Druid community is quite up in arms. Its not that often that Resto Druids get all bent out of shape. Our raiding Trees are generally a pretty easy going bunch. But oh they are upset now!

NERF 1: MY MANA!

First let it be known that I am a mana pig. I use it, abuse it, and drool over it. Some mobs hits me for 15k damage? Oh, he hit me. Some mob steals like 3 mana from me? ITS ON!!

We are getting our spirit based mana regen nerfed. To the ground baby! Its really the out of 5 second rule regen that is getting nerfed though. I don't know about you, but I really don't get much time out of 5SR. I could probably take it, but don't really need to. Heck, I have become quite fond of spamming the crap out of Nourish lately. Its pretty inefficient on the ol' hallowed mana bar, but its really fast. Its great for sniping raid heals, I mean for keeping the raid alive. With Replenishment, I don't have to worry about mana very much. Add in a Ret Pally, and I just don't have mana issues. Some mobile fights I will have to think about mana, but very few.

So is this really going to hurt us? Well geared Resto Druids? I don't think so really. If anyone, it is going to hurt people in quest blues just starting heroics. Remember how bad mana was for you back then? I have tried hard to forget. Mana pig, remember?

NERF 2: LIFEBOOM

This is the one that has me scratching my head over here. Basically, Lifebloom costs twice as much mana! But wait, if you let your stack bloom, you get half the mana back. Huh?? Who came up with that one?

So what this means is that if you keep rolling stacks up, you are going to take the mana cost in the shorts. Hard. Well well, mana may become quite an issue after all.

However, there is a possible silver lining here, one that takes quite a change of thinking to get in to. Its Nourish. Its getting buffed. Could even be Godly buffed. You know that spiffy little talent that makes Regrowth crit practically all the time? Its going to affect Nourish as well! The crit chance is actually being lowered some, but still, the "wow" potential is high! If you ahve every done some Nourish spamming, you know how quick those heals start flyng when you get a good crit train going. Now triple that crit chance. YEEEEE HAAW!

BUT WHY?

Why the mana regen nerf? Why the Lifebloom nerf? Blizzard thinks both are too powerful. As they watch raids in Naxx. Think about that one a second... Lets imagine for a moment that we are not going to ignore the elephant in the living room, and step back for a more balanced and subjective perspective. Well that will take about .3 seconds for someone with the IQ of a garden salad to come to an immediate and inescapable conclusion:

Naxx is too easy.

Could that be the real problem with mana regen and lifelboom? Nah... couldn't be that. Don't get me wrong, I don't think these nerfs are going to be nearly as horrendous as the doomsday posts on the WoW forums would lead one to believe. I am however totally convinced that they are based on a very faulty premise, and that the root cause is that Naxx is just way too easy.

Wild Growth Nerf: Aftermath

So it has been a little while since the 6 second cooldown was added to Wild Growth, and we Druid folk have had some time to adjust. How much has it affected our healing?

LOLHAELZ?

Let's go back to the time before the nerf. On some fights, it was very effective to simply run around the raid in circles spamming Wold Growth. It required little more from a player than 1 working finger, one hand to move your character, and a pulse. In some situations, it was remarkably efffective. This was what Blizzard did not like.

Take Sapphiron for example. In 25 man, 2 Druids running circles could put out a tremendous amount of effective healing on a raid. No skill or brain required, just run and spam. On Lootavon, er Archavon, it was pretty much the same deal, even though all that group healing wasn't needed.

There were however, and are, boss encounters where spamming Wild Growth was not such a brainless non-decision, where it was actually a smart and effective healing strategy. Malygos, when the entire raid gets tossed and spun is a very good example. Wild Growth saved a lot of lives.

DOOM INC

The fights we were most concerned about were Sapphiron and Malygos. These fights were where WG made the most contribution, and doing those fights without the WG spam sounded like a bad thing.

On Sapph, there are other options of course. Chain Heals by the Shammys of course could play a much larger role in raid healing. My thinking was that we keep a Pally or two on the MT, maybe with a Priest because they are good at healing anything, and the rest on the raid. Sounds good.

Malygos was an even larger source of worry. How would we keep everyone alive? I guess make sure everyone is topped off, cast what HoTs you can, and hope for the best?

AND WE GO!

On Sapphiron, much to my suprise, the difference was neglible. Hey whaddya know, Druids have other good heals too! SNAP!

On Malygos, I ended up assigning 'preferred groups' to Druids and Priests. Of those in range during the flying fun, stick HoTs on people in the assigned group first, then any others you can hit. I spread the Priests out across as many groups as we had Priests, so they could PoH the group when we land.

Worked like a charm! To my surprise, we seemed to actually have less chance of dying than before! Huh?!?! It may have been due to healers paying closer attention, or being more focused. I did make a big deal on vent out of the challenge we would be facing; that probably helped too.

CONCLUSION:

How bad is the nerf, now that we have had some time to digest it, adjust to it, and use it?

Not even an issue at all. And I thought it was going to be catastrophic!

Quick Off Topic:

Added the spiffy new header a few weeks ago! The background is actually a shot of Moonglade. I was messing around with some blurs, and accidentally put one on the wrong layer, the entire background. Before I hit the undo button, I looked at it and really liked the almost ethereal feel it gave, so stuck with it.

I used WoW Model Viewer for the caps of the forms. I liked having them all looking at you as you are looking at them. The eye contact thing seemed cool. Except for the Boomkin. He is either basking in his power and glory, or very unhappy about the insanely low spell power coefficient on Starfall, not sure which.

Queue Queue

(Puts on movie-trailer-guy voice)

On a regular afternoon, without warning, a vanquished enemy makes its return. And this time, its taking no prisoners.

THE QUEUE (subwoofers rumble)

What will you do? Where will you go? Do you really think you can just come home from work and log in to raid? You wil be stopped DEAD by...

THE QUEUE (subwoofers rumble louder)

Its back, its bigger than ever, and it won't go away. It won't leave you alone. It won't give you a chance, because this time, its serious.

THE QUEUE

(quick cuts from behind individuals that are in front of their computer monitors:

"Aw man"

"What the..."

"One THOUSAND FOUR HUNDRED?!?!"

Yes its back, and it seems to be practically everywhere. The login queue has returned. Its inbred brother too, the dreaded "Additional instances cannot be creater. Try again later."

Many folks in our guild zoom home from work, whip up some dinner and log on just in time to raid. Now they are lucky to get on a half hour after the raid has started. This sucks for them, and hurts the raids. Everyone is losing here.

Heck, I am the guild leader and raid leader, and had to miss a raid the other night because of the queue. I was late, the raid was full. Wouldn't have been fair to boot someone out just so my tardy big Tauren butt could have a spot.

So what's the deal here? Why the queues again so suddenly?

Some think the cause is lots of people off work and school for the holidays.

Some blame Christmas, based on the idea that tons of people got WoW.

There are also of course some wacky conspiracy theories, real tin foil hat stuff.

Others think its a combination of many factors.

Its interesting to note that for such a widespread issue, there has been no acknowledgement from Blizzard that there is even a problem, let alone any info on whether or not they are planning to do something about it.

What can we do about it? For now, about all we can really do is... queue queue.

Random Resto Ramblings

Wild Growth Nerf INC

As you probably know, Wild Growth is going to be on a 6 second cooldown come patch 3.0.8. While I am not thrilled about this, I can definitely see the reasoning behind it.

In its current state, its pretty easy to abuse. For example on Sapphiron, all it takes is a pair of Trees running in circles around the raid, spamming WG, to pretty much counter the entire AOE/Aura mechanic of the fight. I can't see that as being the intention of the encounter designers.

On the other hand, some fights are going to get interesting. Phase 1 Malygos, when the raid gets tossed and whirled, comes to mind. Thats going to get interesting. While that phase isn't hard at the level of say, Sunwell, that specific part of that specific encounter is going to be out of wack with the intended difficulty level. Between the WG nerf and the corresponding CoH nerf, I suspect that the damage done to the raid is going to have to be pulled back a little bit, perhaps 10 or 20 percent.

HT Spam?

After reading the excellent post at Resto4life about current healing values (http://www.resto4life.com/2008/12/15/direct-healing-in-wrath/), I got thinking about the possibility of a HT spam spec. With the tremendous throughput of glyphed HT, it looked to be worth a try.

Before I get in to the specifics, a little history!

I first started raiding on my Druid back in Molten Core. At that point, if you raided on a Druid, you were a healer, period. We had Regrowth, Rejuvination and Healing Touch. Regrowth was horrendously inefficient, so it was pretty much out the window. Rejuv was a bit weak but not too bad. It was a milestone to have your Rejuv tick for 400. As raids progressed in to BWL, it became obvious that the most efficient and effective heal for a Druid was a downranked Healing Touch, specifically HT rank 4.

Druids spammed HT4 through BWL, AQ40 and Naxx. It was a bit boring, but overall pretty good.

Then the pre-BC patch came out, and something drastic happened: Hots stacked! If 2 Druids both put Rejuv on a single person, that person would have 2 Rejuvs ticking away. This was a huge huge change to Druid healing. On Patchwerk for example, instead of complex HT4 spam rotations, smart healing coordinators would have Druids keep up Rejuv on all the tanks.

Then came Burning Crusade and Lifebloom. Nearly all healing Druids went with Lifebloom as their primary heal, using it with other Druids like the Patchwerk healing strategy I described; roll hots across all the tanks. Or, roll hots across the raid.

At this point, there was a second heal spec to consider, which came to be known as the Dreamstate spec. It was actually originally the HT/Mana Battery spec. The goals of the spec were to be able to cast gigantic HTs, and to have ridiculous mana regen. This spec was very, very, very hard to master, but incredibly powerful. Instead of being reactive or preventative, it was as *predictive* based healing style. HT was far too slow to react to incoming damage, you had to accurately predict the damage and wind up your massive heals before the damage happened. Done correctly, it was by far the highest throughput single target healing spec that WoW has ever seen. It was also a very misunderstood and often maligned spec, mostly because very very few knew how to use it correctly. Make no mistake, having one good DS Druid in your raid made a *massive* difference.

Then came Wrath of the Lich King, and the complete destruction of any downranking. The old DS spec was dead.

Or is it? I decided to try out a DS spec again, based around glyphed HT. I was running about 2100 heal, with about a 19k mana pool and 200 haste. Mana regen was about 1100/300, very high. The build was:

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=0VGfzbIohZZfVouVdxbuq0R

The goals of the build are the same as the old school DS build; maximize HT and mana regen. There are a lot of 'throw-away' points in there, unavoidable to get DS and as deep in to resto as possible.

So I fired up the spec and off we went to Naxx. Patchwerk was on the menu, a perfect chance to try an HT spam spec! Woot!

Keeping in mind that I was not geared specifically for the spec (would want to emphasize int for better mana regen from Replenishment for example), the results are still a good indication of how it can work.

First thing I noticed is that my glyphed HT had a cast time of .85 seconds. You read that correctly, point eight five seconds. Mmmm, this is looking interesting!

Patchwerk inc, let the spam begin!

Pause. I use Quartz. If you don't know what it is, oh are you in for a treat!

http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/quartz.aspx

(That link is at Curse.com. Based on past incidents, proceed with caution. It is probably available elsewhere)

So I am in the habit of several quick button clicks at around what my next cast time will be to minimize delays due to server/casting latency. Again, if you don't know what that is about, you are probably missing a ton of your peak possible efficiency. You really do need to get Quartz, or at least understand what it does and why.

The HT cast bar goes, gets to the red, and I start the clicking for the next... what the? Oh snap, HT cast time is shorter than the freaking GCD! This seems like a minor thing, but it seriously screwed me up. I got through the best I could, but old habits can be very hard to break.

After making some marginally effective mental adjustments, the HT spam proceeded. In short, I could not make it as effective as it looked like it should be on paper. My overall throughput was not all that stellar. I really didn't dig the whole thing. I respecced after the fight.

In conclusion, I couldn't make it work. That doesn't mean that it can't work, just that I couldn't make it work. As someone who healed through all the BC instances as DS, I figured I would be more qualified to make a new HT spam spec work than most. Perhaps I will revisit it in the future. I also may revisit it without the HT glyph.

On the State of Regrowth

Good Lord its an efficient heal, at least when it doesn't get stepped on by other heals. However, this post just reached the 12 mile long mark, so I am going to shut up for now, and plan to revist the RG thing some other day.

Swipe! Now with 50% More Threat!

A hotfix went in today that increases the threat generated by swipe by a whopping 50%!

Whoa. Didn't see that coming. And of course the QQing has begun in full force. I swear, if Blizzard decided to send everyone 100 gold for Christmas, to one character per account, there would be a massive QQ outcry.

Thats not fair to people who earned their gold the hard way! (translation: I am an elitist snob)

Hey! What about people that have like 35 alts? They got 3500 gold!!! (translation: I didn't read how it works, and am probably the guy in your raid who asks 'So wuts this guy do?' after the raid leader spent 5 minutes explaining the fight)

Some guy in our guild has 4 accounts. He got 400 gold. Thats not fair to me! (translation: I totally fail at the whole greater reward for greater effort concept, and am probably still angry that they won't give me a raise at work even though I slack off more than the rest of my department put together)

100 gold is a slap in the face! What am I going to do with a measly 100 gold? (translation: I am self-entitled ungrateful little worm who thinks everyone owes me something for just being me)

So back to the swipe buff! How can this be a bad thing? I see this as a win for everyone. DPS gets to unload AOE harder on big pulls. It hasn't been an issue on a lot of pulls in heroics, but I have been seeing AOE nukers getting unwanted attention on some AOE pulls in Naxx. It would probably be better for them to hold off a few seconds more of course, but heck, everyone is nuke happy! Even me! So, this is going to be a very cool change in raids.

One thing people are saying is that this will make Bears the best AOE tanks in the game, making Pallys and others obsolete. This is wrong. Swipe still only does 180 degrees. Pallys get 360, T-Clap does 360. DKs do amazing and strange things for full radius aggro too. Nobody is going to lose their job because of the swipe buff.

This is going to be awesome! I am hoping I can go Boomkin tonite instead of heal, in order to really stress out our Bear tank, I mean to see this in action.

Boomkin Bugs?

General Stuff
So, here we are a few weeks in to Wrath of the Lich King! It has been for Druids so far.

Let's see. We had a Bear with over 45k hitpoints tanking Hatefuls last night. A Boomkin was hitting 3600 DPS on the same fight. Resto is better than ever too. Man, its a good time to play a Druid.

Currently, our guild has 4 bosses left in Naxx. Seems like most of the guilds on the server that finished BT are at about the same point, or a little ahead.

Thats the state of other stuff. How about the state of Druids? I have spent most of the time since the expansion came out doing the Boomkin thing. And its good. Very, very good.

Why is it so good? Many reasons. There is good gear that supports the spec. The talents that make up the spec are very nicely done, best they have ever been. All those things and more make it a glorious time to be a Boomkin! And of course the two big bugs help too.

Huh? What two big bugs? What are you talking about? Boomkin seems to work fine. I have to agree, it does seem tobe working quite well. Especially with the two bugs working in our favor!


The Hit Bug
When was the last time you saw a spell miss? Really think about it for a second? Been a while hasn't it? How is your hit rating right now? Well, mine is sitting around 150, which is way way below hit cap. During a typical 3 hour raid in Naxx 25, I will usually see like 1 spell miss. No seriously, 1.
The Boomkin hit cap is a hard number. Depending on who you talk to, it is usually quoted as being around 350, with talents. Any less, and against raid bosses, you should be missing. At 150, you should a LOT. I don't. And neither do other Boomkins I have talked to.
What possible explanations are there for this? Maybe the Dranei racial is helping, but probably not since I play a Tauren. Talents help, but not enough to add up to 18% hit. Other players in the raid have stuff that helps too right? Again, not even close to 18%.
And the plot thickens! I soloed Ony the other day, who is a skull level boss. That means she is 3 level higher than you as far as hit goes. I missed a lot of spells, about what one would expect. So why there and not in Northrend? Your guess is as good as mine.
So Boomkin hit rating is wacked. Right now, you need very little in raids. I can dig it!


Starfire Crit Crit Crit Bug
I probably don't pay as much attention to damage meters as most do. I do keep an eye on them usually, see where people are at, where I am at, and that kind of stuff. Since I lead our raids, I need to, at least to an extent. But I don't five in to my own stats like I probably should.
During a heroic 5 man with a guildie who is much smarter with stats than I am, he asked me what my crit rating was at. I told him around 20%. Turns out that for the last 20 or 30 minutes, I had been around 70% crit on Starfire. Now I am not *completely* oblivious, it did seem like there were a lot of bouncing big numbers flying around my screen. But I hadn't really thought about it that much, since I was not doing the whole eclipse proc-watching thing.
I started checking my post-fight stats a bit more, and sure enough, my Starfire crit rating is 2-3 times what it should be. I checked Recount on our other Boomkin in raids a few times, same thing.
I am very upset about this massive oversight on Blizzard's part. Not.


Working As Intended
Probably not. Sure am going to miss these two bugs when they are gone, but for now, YEEEEEE HAAAAA!

UPDATE:

Our glory days of free hit seem to be over. Misses have, sadly, returned to a casting rotation near you. The number most thrown around now seems to be 250-ish, assuming a Shadow Priest in the raid, without the Dranei racial.