Make spell costs scale with gear

It's long been a problem that Blizzard can't balance mana limits for healers across all the tiers in an expansion. As healers get more gear, they inevitably get more mana, but the cost of spells never increases. Eventually healers get to a point where they have plenty of mana, and they become only interested in increasing the size of their heals. Ghostcrawler sometimes calls this "graduating" from mana concerns.

To see how this has played out in Cataclysm, consider druid healers as the expansion has progressed. Beginning healers use nourish almost exclusively, considering healing touch ridiculously expensive. Firelands raiders, meanwhile, use healing touch almost exclusively, and have little reason to bother with nourish. Additionally, I can attest that in quest gear, the level 85 heroics are nearly impossible to heal without running out of mana. Yet, again, in Firelands, mana just isn't a concern. You can't be stupid about it, but I no longer feel like I have to wait to refresh lifebloom, or that I need to switch to nourish whenever possible, or that I should bother cancelling a heal if I see someone else landed a heal ahead of mine. I just take it easy and worry about other things than mana.

There are a number of ways to fix this situation. One of them is to stop giving more mana with more gear, but I think that would take away a lot of the character of a mana-based class. Assuming they don't make that change, the only alternative is to make the cost of spells continue to increase at higher gear levels.

There are a number of ways to make spells cost more. Here is a simple one: Intellect increases both the power and the cost of spells. Intuitively, the idea is that intellect allows healers to use more mana at once. It's like using both barrels of a double-barreled shotgun: it does twice the damage and uses twice the ammo. From a balance perspective, as healers gear up, they would observe not just their regen improving, but also their rate of resource usage. They'd have to balance these increases with their gear choices.

Blizzard has already decided that in Panderia, intellect will no longer increase the size of the mana pool. That change matches well with the one I describe. I wonder if they will take a try at it? Throughput versus regen is one of the more fun itemization choices in Warcraft, and right now you only have much of a choice at certain particular gear levels.

Bouridon on managing mana

Bouridon has a great post up on choosing spells and abilities so as to use mana efficiently. It's well worth a read.

One thing that I'd quibble with is that I haven't see the value of passive regen going away when you get full epic gear.

None of the following will really matter if you don’t have an adequate amount of spirit for passive combat mana regeneration. While you may have to stack some spirit at lower gear levels (346ish iLvl), once you start getting some purple pixels this will become less important as your gear will provide more than enough.

What is happening with the Straw Hat Pirates is that as we get more gear, I don't have regen issues on the on-farm bosses, but we immediately go to work on more difficult bosses where there's a lot of healing. On progression bosses, I still find mana to be a significant concern.

I frequently run into druids who think of regen as something to get enough of and then you stop. This point of view is only helpful if you have a set number of raid bosses you will ever attempt and then stop. For the most part, I don't think it's very helpful to optimize for on-farm bosses. In theory, you can optimize for repeatability, but once you start out-gearing an encounter it's going to be pretty repeatable no matter what you do.

Given the small percentage of guilds that have Sinestra down, there are precious few of us who are likely to hit the end of progression before the next raiding tier comes out.

Valuing proc-based throughput

There's an interesting discussion on the Elitist Jerks resto-druid forum on the question of how much value should be placed on proc-based throughput. This is highly relevant because the Mandala of Stirring Patterns is one of the best pre-raid trinkets available from the point of view of sustainable healing per second. However, a lot of its throughput comes from an int proc that only has 20% uptime.

Note I am writing here only about the throughput improvements. Everyone agrees that the regeneration benefits of a proc are at least as good as a static improvement that has the same average benefit. As long as you finish the fight with at least one mana left, you don't care whether your mana descends at a steady rate or that it goes up and down in spurts as your procs come and go.

To evaluate this question, one premise I assume is that we are talking about progression content. It is a separate question to consider content that is on farm, where your raid reliably beats it and you want to beat it more reliably and more quickly. For such content, it doesn't matter that much what you do, much like it doesn't matter how you level, so I find it much more interesting to talk about how to address progression content.

For progression fights, it's highly unrealistic that players will be at max health throughout the fight. What's more likely to happen is that players hover around 50-75%, and you race to get them above 75% before the next wave of incoming damage happens. The cycle is that health bars drop after big damage, they float slowly up as healers heal like mad, and then they go down again at the next wave of damage.

If your healing is sufficient for the content and for the skill of the raid members at dodging fire, then the peaks and valleys of health in the cycle will be about the same. When I see my guild lose in such raid encounters, it's due to either unhealably severe spike damage, or it's due to players standing in fire. The former I can't do anything about. For the latter, I theoretically can help with, but when I fail to do so, what I see is the health bars going down fairly gradually.

For the content I'm familiar with, which is about half the Cataclysm raid bosses, the length of the cycle of hurt is on the order of thirty seconds. For example, on Argolath, a meteor slash comes in around 10-15 seconds, but it hits a different half of the raid each time. Thus you have 20-30 seconds after a player is hit by one meteor slash to heal them back up for the next one. Furthermore, any one wave of hurt tends to take off something like 50% of everyone's health bars. It's pretty rough, but it's not like many Wrath fights where everyone would suddenly lose 75-90% of their health.

How does proc-based versus static throughput compare in this environment?

It seems to me they are actually pretty close. First of all no proc is going to be wasted. Since players aren't at full health in the steady state, there will always be plenty of healing to use the proc on. Second, if you don't get a proc at the ideal time, it should just mean that players hover at a lower health for a little while. You will be able to pick them up just fine when the proc eventually comes around.

This is a minority view on the thread I linked. The majority view is that it's better to have static int instead of an int proc even if the average int goes down by 10-20%. The main arguments are just what I addressed above: they argue that many of the procs will be wasted, and that the procs might not be there when you need healing the most. In short, the proc won't save lives. I just don't see it. Saving a life only requires an emergency heal of 10-20% of a player's health, and for healing on that magnitude it doesn't matter what your immediate throughput is. What's more important is whether you can push the raid back up high enough to survive the next spike, and for that procs are fine.

Perhaps things are different in heroic mode, and there is more a need for emergency, unpredictable heals. I wouldn't know. At the rate my guild is going, I'm not sure we'll be doing much heroic content before the next tier comes out.

As well, I'll certainly agree things are different in a lot of ways once you master a tier and have everything on farm. You'd rather avoid proc-based gear for on-farm content. Additionally, sustainable throughput is much less interesting, and in particular haste is a lot more valuable.

Druid love in 4.0.6

The 4.0.6 patch notes are out, and druids are getting a lot of little improvements.

The Mount Up guild achievement works in flight form. Yay! This achievement is much better for druids now. I hardly ever use a mount other than flight form, and now this achievement works for it.

For restoration druids, the most interesting change is that nourish is now very fast if you have at least three rejuvenates up, and rejuvenate takes much less mana now. Lissanna has some good discussion of the issues. This means that when raid healing, you can sprinkle around rejuvenation just like in Wrath, but unlike in Wrath, you can use nourish instead of regrowth as a top-up spell. Additionally, when you have mana problems and have to cast fewer rejuvenates, your hps won't drop as much as much as it does right now. All in all an interesting change; it leaves maximum throughput exactly the same, but it significantly increases sustainable throughput.

Among other tweaks to moonkin, wild mushrooms are improved. However, it's still not clear anyone will use them. Gray Matter writes:

It's fair to say that Wild Mushroom has been a flop in Cataclysm so far. They are difficult to place. It's difficult to make them affective given their very small radius. Overall they just weren't worth the effort. I've tried to use them in several fights but in most cases they were a waste. The question is will these changes cause people to use them?

For my part, I don't think it's worth bothering making wild mushrooms do more raw damage, or damage to more targets. They will either do more than hurricane and starfall, or less, and whichever one does more is the one that will be used for aoeing. Instead, focus on what's interesting about them: they can be targeted during quiet periods of the fight, and they can trigger fungal growth, an aoe debuff. The former strikes me as hard to make an interesting feature, so I'd focus on the latter.

Jacemora figures that melee stat priorities might be changing:

My only problem with the changes is that we are coming into content that supposedly is melee unfriendly according to Paragon who is on the edge of raiding progression… So I see this as a nerf because I have a feeling to be viable we have to run out of the action a lot. Even without that info I have this strange feeling they hid a nerf in there somewhere. My guess from these changes is that Mastery value just fell some… maybe haste too. I am thinking (without any math) that after agility, Crit might be the more attractive stat now… but probably not. It does however look to make our DPS more weapon dependent now though doesn’t it… bah, I suppose that has been the case for a while now anyway ever since the fixed our poor scaling in BC.

Which direct healing spells on hard fights?

The common wisdom so far is that in 4.0, druids should mainly use regrowth for direct heals, even on targets that already have a regrowth hot. This makes our healing very similar to 3.x except that we use regrowth instead of nourish.

Meanwhile, the Blizzard is trying to change healing more fundamentally. We have mana problems now. We have three direct heals to heal from: small, medium, and large. Nourish, Regrowth, and Healing Touch. The small one is mana efficient, and the medium one is fast, and the big one is efficient but very slow. They all have tradeoffs, so Blizzard hopes we'll be choosing among them.

On fights that aren't demanding, the new conventional wisdom is the way to go. On less demanding fights, you have plenty of mana, and the healing isn't difficult. Just heal like you used to except use regrowth instead of nourish. Do use Thorns. Further, if it gets really boring, remember that you can throw out some dps spells and crowd control now without losing our healing buffs.

I've recently raided on fights that are a bit harder, at least for our group, and the story is a little different. Specifically, we did Algalon (yes, the old Ulduar boss!), and heroic Blood Queen. I'd like to share a few notes about that.

First, on Blood Queen, I had mana problems. I've reforged all my spirit to mastery, under the theory that on fights that are hard, it's usually tank death that is the biggest risk of wiping, not raid member death. Still, my in-combat regen is around 550-600 mp5. It's not enough for the most mana-intensive fights, so I had to tone back on the regrowths and rejuvenates a little. People with a wild growth didn't get a rejuv on top of it, for example. On Algalon, to contrast, mana wasn't as big of a deal. Dps in T10 gear is overkill for this fight, so the fight doesn't really last long enough for mana to be a big issue.

Second, I think healing touch would have been useful on both fights, had I been a pure tank healer. The tanks were taking high damage (something that should change in Cataclysm), but not so high that they would die in three seconds even fully hotted. So if I were in a 25 man and assigned to tank heal, healing touch would have been great. I'd keep up all hots, and cast healing touch as a filler. In a 10 man, though, healing roles aren't as sharply defined. The cast time of healing touch is an eternity if you see a dpser drop below 50%. Thus I mostly used regrowth even on Blood Queen. All I can say is, remember to hit innervate early rather than waiting until you really need it. You want to be hitting innervate early and then at every cooldown.

Third, I really wanted to save swiftmend for the tanks. I'm having a fun time with efflorescence, and on most fights I'm wasting swiftmend so as to place an efflorescence circle somewhere convenient. On both of these harder fights, though, I found that the tanks occasionally dipped below 50%. Swiftmend was much better used for those situations. I would have rather dropped efflorescence in the raid somewhere, typically the melee, but putting it on the tanks is a good second-best.

Finally, our cooldowns add an extra dimension to the play. Tree of life and tranquility are both good things to pop when things get nuts, and it's fun to plan ahead for when that might be. On Blood Queen, the time to use them is after she fears everyone and starts throwing blood bolts. I use tranquility on the first round, and our raid is practically invulnerable. I use tree of life on the second one, and berzerko tree's instant regrowth and improved wild growth really help keep everyone up.

Regen stats

While mana is still plentiful at level 80 -- you get enough regen just by the mandatory intellect and spirit on our gear -- it looks like things will be different in Cataclysm. We won't be able to just stack all throughput stats. We need to watch out for mana as well.

Rank 4 Healing Touch did some math that compares intellect versus spirit for mana regeneration. In short, at level 85, one point of spirit gives about 0.5 mp/5 and one point of intellect gives 0.90--almost twice as much!

What this means is that, as things stand, spirit is mediocre Always stack intellect in preference to spirit. You'll get better regen, and you'll also get spell power to improve throughput. Further, when comparing same-ilvl gear, always prefer the gear that has no spirit, no matter what else it has on it. Even if you need the regen, you can make up the lost regen by gemming half as much intellect as the spirit you gave up.

Personally, I find this a little disappointing, and I hope Blizzard rebalances the regen stats. I find it fun to balance regen versus throughput, and even to balance different kinds of throughput (crit, haste, mastery, spell power). On the regen side, it makes no sense that the one stat that is purely for regen is underpowered. It becomes one of those things where players who read the tool tips and follow basic logic end up playing worse than players who go snoop around on the Internet for obscure calculations.

It seems like all Blizzard would have to do is double the regen from spirit and halve the regen from replenishment. Then, intellect would be a so so regen stat but also give throughput, while spirit would be the place to go if you are really hurting for regen. Intellect would still win out for most people, but at least spirit wouldn't be so bad that people avoid gear with it.