Some issues with the new 5.4 build Conductivity talent.

[Tiberria]

I don't know how much appeal making it instant cast would really add to the talent. You already typically have it down to about a 1.5 second cast time as is, which is just above a GCD. It would slightly increase uptime, but the output gain still wouldn't be competitive with AG/RS, so it still would never be used outside of Ra-Den style fights. Plus, I think the value of having it instant cast is a little dubious, because you generally need people to be stationary to effectively use HR in the first place.

[Krekko]

The talent has it's "Almost there, needs that "AHA!" moment tweak. As we get to the wire though I wonder if we'll actually see it. If not, thankfully we do have alternatives on the tier and it's not such a gimp tier, but it would be nice to have this actually fully actualized.

[Deleted]

This should really get fixed! Talent is utterly bad at this time. Don't know if it's a tweaking thing or not so i'll still be hopefull.

[Tiberria]

The talent has it's "Almost there, needs that "AHA!" moment tweak. As we get to the wire though I wonder if we'll actually see it. If not, thankfully we do have alternatives on the tier and it's not such a gimp tier, but it would be nice to have this actually fully actualized.

If this was Dragon Soul, the talent would be perfectly viable. However, it is only balanced to give the same amount of throughput as RS and AG in ideal conditions (raid stacked and not moving). Even in that situation, AG is arguably better because on most fights, controllable burst healing is stronger than the same approximate amount of passive output. Given the fight design of the last two tiers, it's a talent that only has relevance about 5% of the time, and even then is at best on par with the other talents.

That level of extreme situational use just doesn't work for the current talent design. They probably should scrap the talent completely and replace it with something that gives Lightning Bolt an Attonement type mechanic or something. If they really want it to be a "Healing Rain talent", they should probably just change it to "increases the healing of your Healing Rain by X%", with the output gain being on par with what you would get from RS/AG.

[Krekko]

Heh, yeah we are one expansion too late on the full usefulness of the current state of the talent.

It's fine to have talents which have a "little niche" and situational use (or preferential use, like burst vs controlled) but this is not the case at all. It sucks that it comes down to even wanting to say "Maybe they should scrap it" because I think they're always onto something when they start it just sucks to see that fall through.

Perhaps with the next expansion they'll make Healing rain be a rolling uptime as baseline, and having a new talent that will work hand in hand with the spell instead.

It's just so close to live with so much to work on it that I can't imagine much really coming of it in the end.

[Tiberria]

The entire talent feels like it is taking up more development resources to make it work than its worth, and they still can't get it right. I would favor scrapping it altogether next expansion, and pulling SLT out of being baseline Resto to take that talent spot. SLT vs AG would be an interesting choice for DPS, and all 3 would be an interesting choice for healers.

If they insist on leaving it as a Healing Rain talent, here is what my suggestion is.

"Increases the duration of your Healing Rain to 20 seconds"

That would give throughput on par with AG/RS for Resto, because you would be able to maintain 100% uptime of ULE powered HR by making the duration long enough to cover both waiting for ULE's cooldown, using the ULE GCD and re-casting Healing Rain. It would also be a significant HPM gain that would allow running at lower regen levels.

[Deleted]

Isn't that just worse than the current incarnation of the talent that already gives you full ULE uptime for 40 seconds? The talent itself is fine, because it both increases ULE uptime and HR uptime, while also heavily reducing mana cost and freeing a lot of GCDs. Side effect: you no longer have to watch CDs, so you can conentrate on more important things.

It loses out to AG (which one could argue is by far more powerful than both alternatives), only because consistent healing just doesn't fit very well into the current healing and encounter design.

But the talent itself would have been absolutely amazing on Garalon, while healing the kiters for example. I think the talent itself is fine, it's very good in some specific situations, but it could do with some minor buffs in other areas (like making HR instant). I'm pretty sure it would have been my go to talent all throughout the first tier for the mana-gain alone.

[Deleted]

Can someone on the ptr verify the exact details of the 40second duration part for me. Does it now have a max duration, start to finish, of 40secs? Or can it be maintained indefinitely but with a max of a 40 second window?

[Aleksej89]

Can someone on the ptr verify the exact details of the 40second duration part for me. Does it now have a max duration, start to finish, of 40secs? Or can it be maintained indefinitely but with a max of a 40 second window?

At the moment it can not go above 40 seconds - but it can be indefinitely prolonged by casting specific spells.

Unfortunately it is a weak talent, even with the new 4 second extension buff...

[Tigrian]

The entire talent feels like it is taking up more development resources to make it work than its worth, and they still can't get it right. I would favor scrapping it altogether next expansion, and pulling SLT out of being baseline Resto to take that talent spot. SLT vs AG would be an interesting choice for DPS, and all 3 would be an interesting choice for healers.

If they insist on leaving it as a Healing Rain talent, here is what my suggestion is.

"Increases the duration of your Healing Rain to 20 seconds"

That would give throughput on par with AG/RS for Resto, because you would be able to maintain 100% uptime of ULE powered HR by making the duration long enough to cover both waiting for ULE's cooldown, using the ULE GCD and re-casting Healing Rain. It would also be a significant HPM gain that would allow running at lower regen levels.

I like this idea. I dunno about balance, cause i'm bad at that, but i do feel like slt vs ag is an interesting choice and one that could change on a per fight basis; which was the intent of the talent system to begin with. Ever since its inception i have despised conductivity.

[Aleksej89]

I like this idea. I dunno about balance, cause i'm bad at that, but i do feel like slt vs ag is an interesting choice and one that could change on a per fight basis; which was the intent of the talent system to begin with. Ever since its inception i have despised conductivity.

I also greatly despised Conductivity since MoP got released...

IMO, at the very least for Elem/Enha, Conductivity should make Healing Rain be instant cast and perhaps even off the Global Cooldown.

Even then it would be a bad talent for Elem/Enha, but at least it would not be HORRIBLY OUTRAGEOUSLY AWFUL...

[Deleted]

I also greatly despised Conductivity since MoP got released...

IMO, at the very least for Elem/Enha, Conductivity should make Healing Rain be instant cast and perhaps even off the Global Cooldown.

Even then it would be a bad talent for Elem/Enha, but at least it would not be HORRIBLY OUTRAGEOUSLY AWFUL...

It was never generally a bad talent, it was just awful for raiding. For Challenge modes, solo'ing and questing it was superb as if gave you awsome healing when pulling huge packs and CL'ing them down. The more players it had to heal though, the worse it became as the other two talents just pulled much better numbers. I personally didn't mind this as I had a choice which talent to go with depending on what I was up to at the time. Seems a lot/most people now view talent choices as more about what to pick for individual raid fights rather than expanding this to include things you can get up to outside of that. Shame really, I'll be sad to see it go.

[Tiberria]

It was never generally a bad talent, it was just awful for raiding. For Challenge modes, solo'ing and questing it was superb as if gave you awsome healing when pulling huge packs and CL'ing them down. The more players it had to heal though, the worse it became as the other two talents just pulled much better numbers. I personally didn't mind this as I had a choice which talent to go with depending on what I was up to at the time. Seems a lot/most people now view talent choices as more about what to pick for individual raid fights rather than expanding this to include things you can get up to outside of that. Shame really, I'll be sad to see it go.

It was awful for challenge modes too. As DPS, you could not afford the DPS loss of dropping Healing Rains and still meet the timers on a lot of the challenge modes.
As a healer, it still performed far worse than AG/HTT even in a 5 man, and the burst healing when things were going haywire was more valuable, and you didn't even necessarily want to use HR in the first place all the time, because CMs are mostly tank damage. For soloing, it was a complete waste of time to bother with dropping Healing Rains; all that does is slow you down when AG, even without using it without Ascendance would top you to full in a couple seconds if you ever got low. The only use I could see it remotely having is using it to heal 5 man heroics as Ele or something.

[Rarch]

It was awful for challenge modes too. As DPS, you could not afford the DPS loss of dropping Healing Rains and still meet the timers on a lot of the challenge modes.
As a healer, it still performed far worse than AG/HTT even in a 5 man, and the burst healing when things were going haywire was more valuable, and you didn't even necessarily want to use HR in the first place all the time, because CMs are mostly tank damage. For soloing, it was a complete waste of time to bother with dropping Healing Rains; all that does is slow you down when AG, even without using it without Ascendance would top you to full in a couple seconds if you ever got low. The only use I could see it remotely having is using it to heal 5 man heroics as Ele or something.

Yeah, I completely disagree. For Challenge Modes it's absolutely fantastic, because you're pulling fast enough that AG isn't up as often as you'd like, but not so fast that you can't almost always pre-cast it as the tank charges in, before you would be DPS'ing anyway. It's better than AG for quick pulling as Ele because it's always up, you don't have a CD like AG. I do all the Heroic Scenario healing in Ele spec with Conductivity as well and I haven't missed a bonus timer in a long time, because we can run with 3 DPS and I'm able to do over 100k DPS while keeping everyone healed in HR. I haven't healed a 5 man in Resto spec since I started raiding MSV (although I haven't honestly run a 5 man at all in a while).

Actually before I stopped doing Heroic Dungeons, we were running a WW Monk tank and me healing in Ele for 95% of the trash/bosses. For maybe a hand full of pulls throughout all of the instances, I would switch to Resto or he would switch to BrM, but never both. Conductivity is fantastic for all of those times when you want to move fast, and don't need all the throughput of AG, which is a lot more often than you would think outside of Raiding.

This isn't even touching into the solo'ing ramifications of losing the live version of Conductivity on DPS specs, mostly Ele. It's gonna be a crying shame to lose it.

[Aleksej89]

Just to update from the latest PTR build:

Without any haste gear or effects, Conductivity now gives 4 seconds to Healing Rain per one of those specific spells cast.

With haste gear or effects, Conductivity gives less and less of an increase to Healing Rain - but the amount that Haste decreases Conductivity by seems to have been lessened.

Overall current Conductivity is bad for Elem and Enha in PvE, especially since the more Haste you obtain - the weaker Conductivity's bonus is (especially for Enha).

[Lavindar]

(...) the weaker Conductivity's bonus is (especially for Enha).

With is stupid in my opinion, was not going to use it anyway, but this only make it worse.

[Krekko]

I think it'd be cool for conductivity to follow you, TBH "Stormbringer", would be cool to work in synergy with Elemental (water + electricity) though I know it will never happen. Or have a "Torrential" aspect to it where it spreads out/heals more heavily.

[Primaryjane]

I suppose I fall in the 1% but I love (live) Conductivity as Enhance for pretty much everything except raiding, at which point the whole tier is useless. It's a great way to keep the group alive for heroic scenarios or just general grouping for rare/dino hunting. I will truly miss this talent, and will most likely leave that tier empty (and I hope many more do as well) to show them how much time they wasted with this change.

I would only take this piece of shit talent if the 5.4 changes were ADDITIONS and not overhauls, to the live version.

This would be the perfect change IMO

[Lavindar]

I suppose I fall in the 1% but I love (live) Conductivity as Enhance for pretty much everything except raiding, at which point the whole tier is useless. It's a great way to keep the group alive for heroic scenarios or just general grouping for rare/dino hunting. I will truly miss this talent, and will most likely leave that tier empty (and I hope many more do as well) to show them how much time they wasted with this change.

This would be the perfect change IMO

I love the live version of conductivity as well, even in raid, I remember my guild first Jin-Kun kill, all our healers dead, our casters dead, only two meele, and two tanks, 15% of the boss remais, and all my Maelstrom procs going for Healing Rains, the four of us were topped almost every time, the best kill from the tier.

[Deleted]

I suppose I fall in the 1% but I love (live) Conductivity as Enhance for pretty much everything except raiding, at which point the whole tier is useless.

If you think Ancestral Guidance is useless in a raiding environment, you're doing something terribly wrong.

I will truly miss this talent, and will most likely leave that tier empty (and I hope many more do as well) to show them how much time they wasted with this change.

Yeah, that'll teach them.