Resto Druid - Legion Talents

[Nerxyrall]

I pushed this change - thanks for the feedback. I thought I had read somewhere that Ironbark counted towards mastery, but that looks to be just a flat 20% bonus granted by the Stonebark talent.

I´m pretty sure it counted in an earlier build. But got removed sometime later.

[Tiberria]

Apparently, a stealth beta build just went live with some tuning changes.

- Cenarion Ward changes from 6 second to 8 second duration but nerfed from 350% per tick to 220%. The net result is a nerf from 1050% of SP over the duration to 880% (16.2% nerf). CW-Flourish also gets a fairly significant nerf from this. It goes from 2100% of SP down to 1540% of SP
-Lifebloom buffed 25%
- Infusion of Nature (WG mana cost reduction) nerfed from 3% to 2% per trait. The net result at a full 3/3 in that trait is that WG just got a 3% mana cost increase.

This is probably a slight buff overall? However, it's a further hit to the Rejuv build, because CW was going to be the default talent for that build, and because the 3% HPM hit to WG makes it even more marginal as to whether its worth casting without Flourish/Incarnation/SoTF buffs available.

- - - Updated - - -

Also - Hurricane has been outright removed. We can stick a fork in any reasonable path for levelling as Resto at this point. We are also now the only healing class without an AoE damage spell.

WG direct heal trait buffed from 60% to 100% of SP
Dreamwalker buffed from 150% to 250% of SP

[Koor]

This probably less than helpful compared to what you are asking for, but I threw together a small addon that calculates real time hot count per target and displays that value as a fluctuating bar. I am not a regular poster here, so I can't post links, but search "hptbar" on wowace if something like that piques anyone's interest.

Edit: I was able to add the mastery-value (it was quite trivial to add) for a given HPT value, but I don't think this is all that useful since it does not track healing gained from successive mastery stacks - just displays the multiplicative strength of mastery at a given interval. Would something like displaying how strong mastery is relative to haste a given interval be better or is just more useless fodder without actually tracking the healing gained from mastery over an actual combat cycle?

I have an idea about this, but unfortunately don't have the time to code it now.

Instead of tracking the number of hots on the target and deriving the mastery contribution from it, we can make an addon that works in reverse:

The spellpower and versatility can be queried at real-time to account for temporary buffs. Then, the addon could trigger on heal events, and for each heal, using a table of spellpower coefficients, calculate the expected heal amount without mastery by:

heal_no_mastery = min(spellpower_coefficient * spellpower * (1+versatility) * (2 if crit), missing_hp)

Then, the actual mastery contribution can be accurately calculated using actual_heal - heal_no_mastery, and summed over the entire combat duration.

Then, the number of hots can be calculated in reverse by dividing the mastery contribution percentage by the mastery stat percentage (which can also be queried in real time). For example, if we calculated 25% mastery contribution and we had 15% mastery rating, we had 25/15 = 1.67 HotS on average.

[elunaria]

I have an idea about this, but unfortunately don't have the time to code it now.

Instead of tracking the number of hots on the target and deriving the mastery contribution from it, we can make an addon that works in reverse:

The spellpower and versatility can be queried at real-time to account for temporary buffs. Then, the addon could trigger on heal events, and for each heal, using a table of spellpower coefficients, calculate the expected heal amount without mastery by:

heal_no_mastery = min(spellpower_coefficient * spellpower * (1+versatility) * (2 if crit), missing_hp)

Then, the actual mastery contribution can be accurately calculated using actual_heal - heal_no_mastery, and summed over the entire combat duration.

Then, the number of hots can be calculated in reverse by dividing the mastery contribution percentage by the mastery stat percentage (which can also be queried in real time). For example, if we calculated 25% mastery contribution and we had 15% mastery rating, we had 25/15 = 1.67 HotS on average.

Certainly something worth investigating, though I think accuracy will be an issue when healing targets that have mods which increase or decrease their healing taken as this will impact the actual heal, but not the computed heal estimate, but you might be able to pull these mods from the target -- I know those heal/shield estimate mods can account for it. On a semi-related note, I just pushed some changes which add calculation of average HPT for a given combat segment (the interpolation math is kinda kooky so if anyone wants to crosscheck my stuff, TIA ). Currently dumps results to the ChatFrame.

Still messing around with trying to pull contribution from mastery effect.

[Deleted]

So with the nerfs to CW it seems like SotF + Prosperity is going to be the default build for now I assume? Also considering the tranq changes.

[theburned]

Apparently, a stealth beta build just went live with some tuning changes.

- Cenarion Ward changes from 6 second to 8 second duration but nerfed from 350% per tick to 220%. The net result is a nerf from 1050% of SP over the duration to 880% (16.2% nerf). CW-Flourish also gets a fairly significant nerf from this. It goes from 2100% of SP down to 1540% of SP
-Lifebloom buffed 25%
- Infusion of Nature (WG mana cost reduction) nerfed from 3% to 2% per trait. The net result at a full 3/3 in that trait is that WG just got a 3% mana cost increase.

This is probably a slight buff overall? However, it's a further hit to the Rejuv build, because CW was going to be the default talent for that build, and because the 3% HPM hit to WG makes it even more marginal as to whether its worth casting without Flourish/Incarnation/SoTF buffs available.

- - - Updated - - -

Also - Hurricane has been outright removed. We can stick a fork in any reasonable path for levelling as Resto at this point. We are also now the only healing class without an AoE damage spell.

WG direct heal trait buffed from 60% to 100% of SP
Dreamwalker buffed from 150% to 250% of SP

Lets start off with WG, its 3.33% pr point to 2%, overall a 4% nerf, I find it very weird to hit this talent, personally I never found this trait particularly good to begin with. Though I can see that they might have some issues if you start getting 3 relics for this one it could provide some issues.

Cenarion ward, needed to be put more in line with the other talents by itself, prosperity is not a particularly good talent when alone so the oppurtunity cost of taking either of the 2 other talents is slightly lower, as for dungeons I don't believe this goes as much of a nerf to CW rather than Flourish, a longer duration and still quite strong healing pr tick, coupled with LB buff this is probably a buff to our tank healing. This hits flourish pretty hard in dungeons. Which means stonebark will come at a lower cost when tank damage is high.

The buff to both dreamwalker and nature's essence more than makes up for the HPM lost from WG, and making the baseline stronger.
I can understand hurricane being removed from feral and guardian affinity, but not balance affinity. Both Guardian and feral have some okay aoe abilities, but it was worth jumping out of bear/cat form to cast hurricane for aoe packs. Not that this changes much as you will still jump in and out of forms to cast sunfire, swap between cat/bear for swipe/thrash.

It's not like there was much of a point levelling as a healer on live already with the changes to the initial 13 points costing close to nothing, aswell as being fully hfc geared. Sunfire is still aoe, and so is swipe + thrash, so we are not without one, but we have even less of a reason to pick boomkin affinity, while I dont really see this as a problem.

[Wildmoon]

Is hurricane still in te game for Resto?

[Pitacalo]

I can understand hurricane being removed from feral and guardian affinity, but not balance affinity. Both Guardian and feral have some okay aoe abilities, but it was worth jumping out of bear/cat form to cast hurricane for aoe packs. Not that this changes much as you will still jump in and out of forms to cast sunfire, swap between cat/bear for swipe/thrash.

Don't we still have lunar strike with the balance affinity for aoe?

[Keiyra]

Is hurricane still in te game for Resto?

No, it was just removed

- - - Updated - - -

Don't we still have lunar strike with the balance affinity for aoe?

5 Yard aoe is not much of an aoe.

[Pitacalo]

True, hope they will place hurricane in the balance affinity then

[Tiberria]

Lunar Strike isn't an AoE spell. It's just basically what they renamed Starfire to. All that we have for AoE right now is Moonfire multi-dotting and the Sunfire cleave application (with its terrible 5 yard range).

[Davryn]

So you guys believe that the overall loss to our final artifact power for Resto is negligible if we level from 100 to 110 as boomkin or feral, upgrading only the DPS artifact as we are leveling up? I assume that DPS spec (w. semi-upgraded artifact) is also going to be desirable for Suramar and World Questing?

[Wildmoon]

No, it was just removed

T_T it was such a cool-looking spell.

[Tiberria]

So you guys believe that the overall loss to our final artifact power for Resto is negligible if we level from 100 to 110 as boomkin or feral, upgrading only the DPS artifact as we are leveling up? I assume that DPS spec (w. semi-upgraded artifact) is also going to be desirable for Suramar and World Questing?

The impact is next to 100% negligible. For that matter, if you look at the calculators that some people have built estimating the artifact traits gained by playing 2 hours a day for the first 3 weeks after hitting 110 (probable time frame for release of raids) vs playing 16 hours a day, the player playing 16 hours a day only gains 1 extra artifact trait in 3 weeks. You hit a point of diminishing returns on artifact gains past a certain number of traits until you can increase knowledge level (time gated) to the point that what spec you level as is 99.9% negligible. Not only that, but 90% of the artifact power you get while leveling is from items, and you can just save all those items to apply to your Resto artifact.

As far as Balance affinity, I don't think it's pointless. Even if Feral Affinity is more DPS, unless we are given melee immunity in raids like MW and HPally, doing DPS in Cat Form is going to be unusable on a lot of fights. If our damage output is relevant, we're forced into Balance Affinity, because we are only doing as much damage as other healers when you take a DPS affinity and use it. If the damage contribution is irrelevant/doesn't matter for a fight, we will just end up picking between Guardian for the 10% damage reduction and Feral for the 15% run speed. In theory, you could probably take Feral Affinity for the run speed and then just take Renewal instead of Displacer Beast, because Renewal adds a slight amount of extra throughput. I doubt it will be attractive to do that though.

[Davryn]

The impact is next to 100% negligible. For that matter, if you look at the calculators that some people have built estimating the artifact traits gained by playing 2 hours a day for the first 3 weeks after hitting 110 (probable time frame for release of raids) vs playing 16 hours a day, the player playing 16 hours a day only gains 1 extra artifact trait in 3 weeks. You hit a point of diminishing returns on artifact gains past a certain number of traits until you can increase knowledge level (time gated) to the point that what spec you level as is 99.9% negligible. Not only that, but 90% of the artifact power you get while leveling is from items, and you can just save all those items to apply to your Resto artifact.

If that's the case, then we might as well use our artifact power on our DPS weapon as we're leveling, to speed up leveling (and world questing later), right? There's not really a strong need to save up the artifact power to use on the Resto weapon?

[Nevcairiel]

If that's the case, then we might as well use our artifact power on our DPS weapon as we're leveling, to speed up leveling (and world questing later), right? There's not really a strong need to save up the artifact power to use on the Resto weapon?

That is the general consensus. Level 1-13 cost 6500 AP, level 14 costs 6840 AP. So for the price of one more (early) level (which comes out to maybe a tenth of a level after a week of farming), you get 13 in your off-spec artifact, for easier leveling and max-level solo play.

Definitely a good idea to level up your DPS artifact for leveling and solo farming, at least to rank 13.

[theburned]

Don't we still have lunar strike with the balance affinity for aoe?

Lunar strike (resto) is not aoe, and I dont believe it ever was.

[elunaria]

Still messing around with trying to pull contribution from mastery effect.

I have good news on this front, i just pushed an update for wowace.com/addons/hptbar which should accurately capture healing contribution from mastery for a combat segment. Currently the summary of this contribution is still lazily dumped to the chat frame, but I've also begun experimental integration of LibGraph for nicer visualization of these data points.

The LibGraph stuff in the latest push is currently only used for displaying historical HPT data (which I've now realized is somewhat useless as a metric and will likely prune the parts that are really of no help). Fair warning for guinea pigs that the graphs are currently behaving a little wonky because I am not too familiar with how to use the library.

I should be able to work the kinks out this weekend which should lead to being able to display side-by-side time-series data for both base-healing & mastery-affected-healing.

[Wildmoon]

Has they said anything about the removal of hurricane. This is annoying.

[elunaria]

the number of hots can be calculated in reverse by dividing the mastery contribution percentage by the mastery stat percentage (which can also be queried in real time). For example, if we calculated 25% mastery contribution and we had 15% mastery rating, we had 25/15 = 1.67 HotS on average.

I pushed an update which leverages your method of calculating average HoTs - so far the results seem to reliable, but I'm still working the kinks out of the accuracy of the combat metrics as I've stumbled upon several bugs.

I'm going to need to track HoT effects by spell ID since only the triggered effect of Cenarion Ward benefits from mastery, but both spells are called Cenarion Ward, so for the 30s it is up, it is erroneously being considered as buffing mastery.

Aside from that, has anyone else noticed weirdness with Cenarion Ward's interplay with mastery. It seems to be fine when I test it with Healing Touch, but when it comes to hots, I seem to get a larger than predicted bonus from the Cenarion Ward heal. It's a pretty tiny bonus and it's only there for 8 seconds so it's not like it is game breaking, I'm just trying to understand why it happens.

Lifebloom (Base): 2657
Lifebloom (+CW): 3076
Lifebloom (+RJ): 2968
Lifebloomr(+RJ+Germ): 3280

Rejuv (Base): 6373
Rejuv (+CW): 7379
Rejuv (+Germ): 7121
Rejuv (+Germ+RG): 7867