The 2.4 Mana Regen Series
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| Karom in Restoration by Orsolya Berecz |
One big question that’s arisen time and time again since the initial discussion of mana regeneration post-2.4 has been how we should value +Healing relative to MP5. It’s a question that kept the [Staff of Dark Mending] and [Rod of the Blazing Light] gathering dust in my backpack because I initially didn’t know how I should best gem them. How you value +Healing relative to mana regeneration will not only be subject to the conditions of an encounter — fight length, assigned targets, intensity of healing necessary — but subject to your personal playstyle, as well. Rather than stating a rule about how much +Healing is equivalent to 1 MP5 — be it from the MP5 stat or the MP5 determined from your personal Spirit and Intellect values — I’m instead going to walk you through the steps to determine your own personal healing value, using an encounter that I parsed using Recount for just such a purpose.
Step 1: Reasoning
The comparison of MP5 to +Healing involves a less straightforward set of calculations than those used to determine the relative values of Spirit, Intellect, and MP5. Whereas the latter deal primarily with up front mana and mana return, +Healing can only be compared to mana return in terms of what you would do with the extra mana returned by MP5, be it in the form of pure MP5 or Spirit or Intellect contributing to your overall regeneration. As this blog is Resto4Life, I’m going to assume that we’re going to use that additional mana to cast more heals, although you could perform a very similar analysis for increasing your total damage (although, from what Mr. Phae tells me, for most DPS casters it’s pretty much DAMAGEDAMAGEDAMAGEDAMAGEheywhere’dmymanago?). For this example and as a personal choice, I’m going to assume that any additional mana — i.e., mana left over at the end of the fight or mana remaining while Potions and Innervate are on cooldown — will go toward increasing my healing output via converting single stack Lifebloom into a cast of Regrowth. For my reasoning on this conversion, please see Regrowth: the New Raid Heal?
On the other hand, +Healing also allows you to do more healing, albeit by augmenting each spell as it’s cast rather than allowing you to cast more individual spells. To help quantify this, we first need to determine the marginal value 1 +Healing or, in other words, how much additional effective healing we could expect to do if we increase our +Healing by 1. Once we know the marginal value of +1 Healing, we can determine the additional mana needed to eke out the same amount of effective healing (through our conversion of Lifebloom to Regrowth) and have a good estimate of how the two compare.
Step 2: Data Collection
The first thing you will want to do is to select one or more encounters that your guild currently considers challenging. Parsing the Maiden of Virtue fight if your guild is currently farming Mount Hyjal will give you a number that’s greatly skewed toward +Healing, so be sure to select something that you find difficult. For this example, I choose the Morogrim Tidewalker encounter. Here was my Recount output for that fight:
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| Morogrim Tidewalker Parse |
As you can see from the output above, Lifebloom is still my greatest source of effective healing, followed by Regrowth. I’ve selected each spell and taken a screenshot of their individual contributions as well as the breakdown of direct vs. HoT ticks. Due to an unfortunate limitation of the combat log, Recount is unable to determine the following:
- How many times your Lifebloom bloomed and for how much.
- How much of your Lifebloom heal over time healing was from a single stack vs. a triple stack.
- How many times Swiftmend affected Regrowth vs. Rejuvenation.
None of these values are included in the above breakdown so we’ll have to guesstimate them. Data items you should also record at the time of your healing parse(s) include your +Healing, Spell Crit %, and length of the fight. At the time I performed the above parse, I had 1749 +Healing and 8.49% spell crit with an additional 50% spell crit from 5/5 Improved Regrowth. The fight took somewhere around nine minutes.
Step 3: Math
While I eventually hope to add these calculations to the Mana Regen Calculator, I’m first going to walk you through setting up an Excel spreadsheet since it’s a great way to go through the math. From the Recount parse above, I’ve recorded the following values:
| Spell, Component | Breakdown from Recount | Total Healed from Recount | Est. Breakdown by Component | Amt.Healed by Component |
| Lifebloom, Single Stack HoT |
0.672 |
308504 |
0.2* | 61700.8 |
| Lifebloom, Triple Stack HoT |
0.672 |
308504 |
0.8* | 246803.2 |
| Rejuvenation |
0.104 |
47787 |
1 | 47787 |
| Regrowth, Direct |
0.123 |
56478 |
0.5654 ** |
31932.7 |
| Regrowth, HoT |
0.123 |
56478 |
0.4346 ** |
24545.3 |
| Swiftmend, Rejuvenation |
0.104 |
37729 |
0.85* |
32069.7 |
| Swiftmend, Regrowth |
0.104 |
37729 |
0.15* | 5659.4 |
| Healing Touch |
0.019 |
8691 |
1 | 8691 |
| Table 1: Gathered Data | ||||
* These values were not available from the Recount parse and were therefore estimated.
** While these values are from Recount, they are not intuitively obvious. To determine them, you must sum the total healed from Hit (Count * Avg) and the total healed from Crit (Count * Avg) and divide this value by the total amount Regrowth Healed for (in my case, 56478). The amount healed by its HoT component is simply 1 minus this value.
In Table 1 above, I’ve included an Estimated Breakdown by Component that represents the percentage of the spell’s total healing that came from the various components of the spell. For instance, I’m estimating that 20% of my Lifebloom’s total HoT healing came from single stack while 80% was from triple stack on tanks. Using these breakdowns, we can determine the average amount healed by component (Avg. Amt Healed by Component = Estimated Breakdown by Component * Total Healed from Recount).
Full Heal Equivalents
The next step is to determine the value of Full Heal Equivalents for each spell and component. A Full Heal Equivalent is the number of times a spell would have to be cast and never been overwritten or overhealed. For instance, if 50% of my Rejuvenation HoT were wasted due to OP Brain Heal, the number of FHE for my Rejuvenation would be 1/2 the total number of times I cast Rejuvenation over the course of the fight. We can determine this number by dividing the total amount healed by each component by the average of what we would expect it to heal were none of the healing ineffective.
Full Heal Equivalent = Total Healed by Component / Average Healed
To determine the average of what we expect a spell to heal for, we must take into account its base heal (determined from tooltips and applicable talents like Gift of Nature), its +Healing Coefficient, and our value of +Healing. For spells which list a range (such as Healing Touch), we can average the minimum and maximum values. For all direct heals, we’ll also need to factor in our spell crit percentage.
Average Healed = Base Amount Healed + (+Healing Coefficient * +Healing)
Using the values in Table 1: Gathered Data and the formulas above, we can generate the following table:
| Spell, Component | Amt. Healed | +Healing Coefficient* | Avg. Base Healed | Avg. Healed per Cast | Full Heal Equivalents |
| Lifebloom, Single Stack HoT |
61700.8 |
0.6858 |
300.3 |
1499.764 |
41.140 |
| Lifebloom, Triple Stack HoT |
246803.2 |
2.0574 |
990.99 |
4589.383 |
53.777 |
| Lifebloom, Single Direct** | ??? |
0.4533 |
688.017 |
??? | ??? |
| Rejuvenation |
47787 |
1.2610 |
1166 |
3371.402 |
14.174 |
| Regrowth, Direct |
31932.7 |
0.5941 |
1881.613 |
2920.694 |
10.933 |
| Regrowth, HoT |
24545.3 |
0.9716 |
1401.4 |
3100.768 |
7.916 |
| Swiftmend, Rejuvenation |
32069.7 |
1.3145 |
1215.497 |
3514.518 |
9.125 |
| Swiftmend, Regrowth |
5659.4 |
0.8682 |
1252.191 |
2770.625 |
2.043 |
| Healing Touch |
8691 |
1.1467 |
2997.461 |
5003.030 |
1.737 |
| Table 2: Full Heal Equivalent Calculations | |||||
* Assumes Gift of Nature, Improved Rejuvenation, Improved Regrowth, and Empowered Rejuvenation.
** No concrete values are available for the fields marked "???"
Marginal Value of 1 +Healing
To determine the marginal value of 1 +Healing for each component, simply multiply FHE by the component’s +Healing coefficient:
Marginal Value of 1 +Healing = FHE * +Healing Coefficient
| Spell, Component | +Healing Coefficient* | Full Heal Equivalents | Marginal Value of 1 +Healing |
| Lifebloom, Single Stack HoT |
0.6858 |
41.140 |
28.214 |
| Lifebloom, Triple Stack HoT |
2.0574 |
53.777 |
110.641 |
| Rejuvenation |
1.2610 |
14.174 |
17.873 |
| Regrowth, Direct |
0.5941 |
10.933 |
6.495 |
| Regrowth, HoT |
0.9716 |
7.916 |
7.691 |
| Swiftmend, Rejuvenation |
1.3145 |
9.125 |
11.994 |
| Swiftmend, Regrowth |
0.8682 |
2.043 |
1.773 |
| Healing Touch |
1.1467 |
1.737 |
1.992 |
| Sum |
186.674 |
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| Table 3: Marginal Value of 1 +Healing Calculations | |||
Once again, the Marginal Value of 1 +Healing in the Table 3 above represents the additional amount of effective healing we could expect to do from that component over the course of the fight were we to increase our +Healing by 1. As a triple stacked Lifebloom not only has a high +Healing coefficient but comprises a large portion of my overall healing output, it’s understandable that it would have the highest marginal value. By summing these values together, we find an overall MV of 186.7 which is the total additional effective healing I would expect to derive from increasing my +Healing by 1.
Alternative Uses for Mana
We’re assuming that any additional mana we have left over can be used to convert a single-stack Lifebloom into Regrowth. But how much mana would we need to make that possible? Assuming Tree of Life and the [Idol of the Crescent Goddess], it costs 488 mana to cast Regrowth. Since Lifebloom under the same conditions costs 177 mana to cast, we’ll spend 312 additional mana to cast Regrowth instead. How much MP5 would be required to give me 312 additional mana? Our 9-minute fight has 108 ticks. 312 mana divided by 108 5-second ticks equals 2.89 MP5.
We know that an average Regrowth will heal for 3765.2 (summing the average healed for both direct and HoT portions). Because we’re looking at a single stack Lifebloom application, we’re going to have to guess at how much of the bloom we expect to be effective and how much of the HoT we expect to be effective (Recount can’t break down Lifebloom’s HoT portion by triple vs. single stack). I used two sets of values, one an optimistic 75% HoT/65% Bloom and the other a more conservative 40% HoT/20% Bloom. To determine the average effective amounts, we multiply these values by the average base heal for each component:
Avg. Healed Lifebloom75/65 = 0.75 * 1499.8 + 0.65 * 1480.8 = 2087.4
Avg. Healed Lifebloom40/20 = 0.4 * 1499.8 + 0.2 * 1480.8 = 896.1
These two values can be subtracted from the average amount healed by Regrowth (3665.2) to determine how much additional healing we’d expect to derive from converting a Lifebloom to a Regrowth. Under the 75/65 and 40/20 breakdowns, we get 1677.8 and 2869.1 HP respectively.
Now that we know how much extra mana it will cost to convert a Lifebloom to a Regrowth and the estimated amount of additional effective healing we’ll derive from doing so, we can determine the relative value of amount healed to MP5 like this:
Healing equal to 1 MP5 = Addtl. Amount Healed / Addtl. Mana Cost
Amt Healed vs. MP575/65 = 1667.8 / 2.89 = 580.8
Amt Healed vs. MP540/20 = 2869.1 / 2.89 = 993.2
Note that this is the amount healed and not +Healing. To convert these values to +Healing, we have to divide them by the total Marginal Value of 1 +Healing (186.7) we derived earlier, giving us values of 3.1 and 5.3. Therefore, from the above calculations, 1 MP5 is approximately worth between 3 and 5 +Healing. Conversely, 1 HEP equals between 0.19 and 0.32 MP5.
Final Thoughts
Unlike some previous articles, the purpose of this article was not to give you a concrete value for how you should personally value +Healing relative to MP5. These calculations were based upon a very specific fight under specific conditions but, if applied to your own circumstances, could help you determine your own value (alternatively, you could just wait until I’ve built the math into the Mana Regen Calculator). I wouldn’t consider these conditions ideal as I’m still learning to leverage Regrowth and would like to see a larger portion of my overall healing coming from that spell rather than Lifebloom. Nonetheless, I feel like this "educated estimate" is close enough to have made several gear decisions upon it, including which staff to use and how it should be gemmed.
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@Graylo: Oh, my mistake!! I’ve adjusted the description to be more clear.
April 20th, 2008 at 12:23 am
Whoa. Gonna take a bit to digest all of that but thanks for all the work you put into it.
April 20th, 2008 at 2:32 am
Wow, that’s alot of math. It makes my head hurt just thinking about it. But it is some useful stuff!
April 20th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
Hi there,
Thanks for taking the time to work up and share all this great information. It definitely succeeds at providing a way to make more educated decisions, amid a sea of stat combos to choose from!
Even if someone didn’t want to work out all the math, it at least helps to get you thinking about the right things.
It’s interesting to me how the process of making these calculations highlights some of the ways in which teamwork is so important in groups. Some of the numbers could be very different, depending on how other party members perform, how organized people are, or even what kind of party make-up you have. In particular, the Full Heal Equivalents values could change a lot, having a direct effect on the final Marginal Value of 1 +Healing. Fortunately, if you play a lot with the same people over time, you’ll probably be in a consistent groove and have less variability to worry about in collecting data and making your gear choices.
April 20th, 2008 at 7:10 pm
Phae, I think my head exploded.
April 21st, 2008 at 12:08 am
I don’t really understand math-language very well so I can only base my comments on experience (5/5 MH, 7/9 BT and working on Illidari Council right now).
Last night we were actually trying Illidari Council with 8 healers: 2 Resto Druid, 2 Shaman, 2 Priest, 2 Paladin.
My raid buffed stats were:
Int 610
Spi 677
+Heal 2034
Regen 916/371
(Armory: http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Nathrezim&n=Kuhbi ; using the cloth shoes off MH trash with +18Heal gems instead of the PvP ones though)
My objective as a healer is to keep the people I’m assigned to alive and helping the others healers in my group with their job. I was assigned to the tank that was taking them most damage as his primary healer with a paladin and priest supporting. So I kept 3xLB, Rejuv and Regrowth on him at all times, while using swiftmend to soften out spikes. Additionaly I used every free GCD available to me to put rejuv/lb on other tanks or people who needed a heal. Whenever I could savely do so, I even used Regrowth. Unfortunately I don’t have the stats available any more, but I’d estimate Regrowth to be aproximately 20% of my total healing in this fight, or less. Using it any more would interefere with keeping my other HoTs up, especially Lifebloom. And the more tanks there are, the harder it gets to squeeze in a regrowth. Also remember that it is easy to put on a normal HoT before someone takes damage, with Regrowth you have to be casting it either after they’ve taken damage or estimate when they will take damage and start casting 2 seconds before it hits them. Which is both hard and holds the potential of wasting a lot of HPM when you misjudge.
Now I was in a tank group with Affli Lock, 3 Tanks and myself, giving Innervate to the Shadow Priest so that he can keep supporting his group. Between using Mana Pots on cooldown (haven’t done that one in a while!) and equipping my trusty Blue Dragon, I really didn’t have mana problems. If I got low on mana in the last 20s before I can use another mana potion, I’d just reduce my healing to LB and Rejuv which kept my mana stable until the cooldown was up. I might get into trouble by using more max rank Regrowth though, but I don’t see it helping me in my objective: to keep people alive.
As said I am mostly healing tanks and they usually only need one Regrowth per tank every 27s (2/5 T5). When another raid member is in dire need of a heal I usually Rejuv+Swiftmend (more expensive and only marginally faster, I know).
Casting an additional Regrowth isn’t going to help _me_ much I think and as I don’t have mana problems, too. So the only thing to go for is: +heal.
It increases my total healing more than any additional mana (which I don’t use anyway) would and increases my HPS which is the deciding factor imho. We scale so insanely well with +heal that I try to abuse that as much as I can
/wave
Kuhbi
April 21st, 2008 at 2:05 am
Phae, this is great. To be honest, I didn’t get all the details the first time reading it so I’m going for todays first coffee and then I’ll go through it all over again.
Thanks for your remarkable effort!
April 21st, 2008 at 3:18 am
Dear Sprout
really really really thanks for your efforts… worth a ton of gold in my mind!
Cya
Neve
April 21st, 2008 at 7:02 am
First of all once more good job Phae. I just finished reading it and I msut say taht I did not have the energy to digest everything…
I have to say that I agree with Kuhbi though.
Mana regeneration has been buffed twice since 2.3 while most of the fights have remained the same.
To that end, while my guild is now knocking on Archimonde’s door (4/5 MH - 4/9 BT), I have to say that I rarely find myself out of mana. And not only that, I rarely have to use Mana Pots. I have bought a mana pot injector and haven t used it once, since the random mana pot drops are enough… On top of that, many times I can spare my innervate for a S. Priest, another healer or even a mage.
The only fight I am finding myself out of mana in case I don t chain pot, innervate myself and use the bangle trinket is Archimonde himself, and this is probably because of too much random raid damage since we are still learning the fight. This is actually the only fight that I am spamming regrowth as well. If you take into account that I also have to dispell my group, keeping lifebloom on the MT is kinda difficult, especially with the fear rotation, fire avoidance etc. So regrowth spamming for MT to smoothen spikes (Archi hits like 10 trucks) and lifebloom/decursing for group, while keeping NS+HT for myself in case of fear->fire->curse or even a burst all-together (Happened to me twice already).
To that end, I must say that spamming regrowth is still quite innefficient, no matter the mana cost reduction.
As for stats, I also agree with Kuhbi. I go for pure +healing. If u check my armory
) and because I am getting marks of Illidari cheap from gbank. In case I feel that I need a boost, I use a healing elixir and a draenic wisdom one with godlen fish sticks or some other spirit + stamina food.
http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=dunemaul&n=dimtauren
My BT/MH drops are gemmed with Teardrop crimson spinels, like my new badge gear. Once the badge vendor is out on our server, I m gonna use the same on my shoulders as well, since I m sticking with them for a while.
I really like the way it scales.
As for the two mentioned staves, I would gem them with +heal as well.
I am currently using the staff from Solarian which has a HUGE spirit modifier that I really like when I am on the tank group.
However, when I am on the healer group, I really wish I had either the staff from ZA or a mace+off-hand combo with large +heal, cause I feel that the spirit is kinda wasted there… (again it s a matter of fight, I usually stay in ToL form anyway).
The other healers also use spellsurge to enchant their weapons, but I never liked that and never had mana problems myself so I just go for +81 heal.
Finally for consumables…
Using flask of mighty restoration is a HUGE waste of money… I only do it cause I am required to (well I like it in Archimonde wipe-fests
April 21st, 2008 at 10:37 am
Very nice, I was able to come to similar conclusions, now that i have been toying with spell rotations using a lot more regrowths (about 30% of my heals using recount too)
Rejuv is 2nd and lifebloom 3rd depends on the fights, sometimes they will switch but will always be close.
I’m also using swiftmend whenever its up which is a lot witht he T6 set bonus.
Of course I have to chain drink mana pots on some fights but I am now able to top the healing charts again from time to time (thank god for the redeemer’s stone).
The way I see it, we droods are faced with a new challenge with this new mana regen, we either keep on doing what we do and be a ‘’support healer to help mitigate damage”, use our innervate on dps casters and avoid using mana pots, or really stand out and take back our role as MAIN healers and rethink our whole healing strategy.
BTW, with regrowth now one of primay heals I was able to do 35% of the healing on illidari council last week, and will try to do it again tonight to make sure it’s not just a recount fluke.
My guild heal team is amazing and very competitive which pushes us to get better and always rethink our strats, we downed Kalecgos last week and I have changed my healing style (and spec, 60 points in resto now) based on WWS reports from the world’s top raiding droods.
Good luck fellow droods and let’s show the shamans, priests and paladins what we are capable of
April 21st, 2008 at 11:18 am
@Tone: Definitely the case. If the raid composition were such that you were assigned to only heal 4 tanks, you wouldn’t find any extra time for Regrowth at all.
@Kubhi: I envy such a diverse raid composition. Lately we’ve been working with 3 Resto Shaman, 1 Paladin, 1 Priest, and 1-2 Resto Druids. WTB more direct healing! (Just TRY to ask a Shaman to direct heal someone and watch their hackles — tails? — rise!)
From the conditions you describe — logically giving away your Innervate to the Shadow Priest for the good of his group and having to scale back your healing to only Lifebloom while you wait for potion cooldowns to come back up — it sounds to me like you may be overvaluing +Healing relative to regen. After all, regeneration isn’t only for ending up with a little mana at the end of a fight, it’s for making sure you can continue healing steadily throughout. The HPS stream on your assigned tanks dropping from Lifebloom x 3 + Rejuv + Regrowth (plus the capacity for a Swiftmend) vs. having only 3 x Lifebloom is really significant. In essence, you’re probably cutting their HPS down by half, making spikes much more likely and having no tools available to you to counter them when they do occur.
As you say, Rejuv + Swiftmend costs around 50% more than a Regrowth for only 0.25-0.5 seconds more. I actually do the same thing sometimes, but I’m learning to switch instead to a Regrowth since it also affords me the ability to Swiftmend the person if they continue taking damage.
Regardless, 3-5 +Healing to 1 MP5 is a considerable value to assign to +Healing. Prior to 2.4, I was equating around 8-10 +Healing to 1 MP5 so its value to me has essentially doubled. Also, keep in mind that this analysis is performed under the assumption that I’m never running out of mana (or being forced to scale back my healing because I’m so low). If I were, I’d want to value regen even more highly.
Basically, if you ever reach a point where you are able to a) maintain Lifebloom stacks on assigned tanks and exclusively use Regrowth for raid healing, b) roll Lifebloom + Rejuv + Regrowth on multiple tanks with no spare time for raid healing, or c) were assigned 4 tanks on which to roll Lifebloom on (again, no spare time for raid healing) — and assuming you were never running out of mana — you would want to focus exclusively on +Healing. If you’re still using Lifebloom for raid healing or are running out of mana (or having to scale back your healing while waiting for your potion cooldown), you still need mana regen.
@Dimitris: The purpose of this article was not to give you a concrete value for how you should personally value +Healing relative to MP5. Crunch the numbers for yourself using whatever healing change you would make if you had more mana and you’ll have a good idea of how you should value the two. If you really do have infinite mana and you don’t think there’s a way for you to increase your HPS output beyond where it is, you may find you value +Healing even higher (which will shift the number DOWN from 3-5 +Healing to 1 MP5 to 1-3 or even lower).
Spamming Regrowth is not inefficient as a good deal of its healing is up front, like a Flash Heal. It’s not somehow more efficient to cast a cheap Lifebloom that heals for 800 HP before it’s overwritten by Chain Heal or Prayer of Mending. Yes, you’ve saved yourself mana, but you’re kidding yourself if you think you’ve healed someone. If you have as much mana as you say and are using Lifebloom as your raid heal, you should switch. For more information on why Regrowth is preferable (and some math behind it), see Regrowth as the new Raid Heal.
FYI, if you’re wearing BT/MH gear, you probably don’t want to be using the Bangle of Endless Blessings. Crunch your numbers with the Mana Regeneration Calculator and include the Bangle as one of your trinkets and it should tell you if it’s overkill (VERY likely).
Flask of Mighty Restoration is less to us than a Draenic Wisdom. It’s unfortunate because, as you say, it is nice for wipe fests so you don’t have to continually down fresh consumables. From what I can tell, the [Flask of Supreme Power] is spell damage only, which is a shame. =( WTB Healer equivalent (140 +Healing, yes please).
@Falina: Obviously I’m in agreement with your point of view. Falina’s e-mails have helped influence this article and helped bolster my confidence in the superiority of Regrowth as a raid heal when compared to Lifebloom. I also prefer to consider myself a “main” healer over just a healing totem for the tanks to mitigate spike damage … especially since doing one doesn’t have to preclude the other.
@Everyone else: Thank you for the kind words! I’m so glad this is helpful to you. =)
April 21st, 2008 at 1:40 pm
I love these articles, even though I don’t understand all of it. :p
I was wondering if you ever decided which staff you were going to use over your Ethereum Staff, or if you are going to keep using it? I have the Ethereum and Dark Mending staff and I have to say, with the changes to 2.4, I feel the Dark Mending staff obliterates all, probably only being topped by Archimonde’s staff. I linked my armory to show you how I gemmed it.
Continue with the great work! And goodluck in your future raids.
April 21st, 2008 at 2:00 pm
@Zertoss: I actually didn’t get the Ethereum Life-Staff until last night (on our very first Solarian kill!) and I was really annoyed because I JUST finished farming the materials for an 81 +Healing enchant for my Staff of Dark Mending. However, when I took a look at the Ethereum Staff, it looked like a really big upgrade to me: more base +Healing, no “wasted” itemization points on MP5, great balance of Spirit, Intellect, and Stamina. I do lose the ability to customize it via gems, but even with those gems (I was using a combination of +Healing and Spirit gems; weapons don’t always follow the same rules as the rest of your gear because of weapon swapping during Innervate) it was quite an upgrade. Of course now I have to:
- Farm 10 Primal Life for 81 +Healing for the ELS
- Buy or Trade for 3 Brilliant Dawnstones for my Staff of the Dark Mending
- Buy the materials for a 30 Intellect enchant to my Staff of the Dark Mending
- Sell my Rod of the Blazing Light (my old Innervate weapon of choice).
Upgrading one’s gear too quickly is really expensive! Luckily, the ELS is beautiful to look at. I can’t wait to see what it looks like with the gold swirls from 81 +Healing! =)
April 21st, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Congrats! Funny enough, I got my Ethereum staff, then a few days later the Dark Mending staff dropped. -.- The only reason I don’t use my Ethereum staff as my main weapon (it’s now my innervate weapon, thanks for the links to those great Innervate mods btw!!) is because I am not hurting on spirit anymore (501 unbuffed, might be overkill but I am the MT druid). When it comes down to it though, it’s personal preference, and even now I’m not sure that the Dark Mending is overall better due to its 0 spirit (although the +heal is simply amazing), and since the badge gear came out, I really am not hurting on +heal (went from 1934->2077). Your article sure has got me thinking.
Darn it, I might’ve wasted my +22 gem! :p
April 21st, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Phaelia:
Of course I agree, if I do go OOM it would be wise to increase my mana regeneration before going for other stats.
I’m using Illidari Council as an example because right now it’s the only fight in which I experience mana problems and actually _need_ to use potions. Giving away my Innervate to the shadow priest so he can help keep 2 priest’s, a shaman’s and a paladin’s mana up hinders my own abilities to some extend as I’m basically wasting 12000 mana that could be spent on healing. Also I feel that our priests do gear and heal in a rather inefficient way and thus require a lot of help with their mana (SPriest + Resto Shaman and they still run out of mana FAST) but I lack any experience with their class to comment on that any further.
If I say that I have to reduce my healing done then it will be for aproximately 20 seconds (I start conserving mana at ~2000 mana to be able to squeeze out more heals if things go bad) and the tank will have all of my HoTs on him regardless. Also I am very conservative with my use of potions (read: I’m cheap
) and usually start using them way to late into the fight, thus wasting a lot of mana.
I do not quite agree that Regrowth is _the_ new raid heal for us, it pretty much depends on many factors which heal I will use:
1) How much health are they missing?
2) How likely is another hit on the player?
3) How much time do I have left before I need to refresh my LB stacks?
4) Is there someone already casting a heal on that player (e.g. RoS or Bloodboil where our Priests are spamming CoH/PoH and I will usually rotate single Lifeblooms on people to help out)?
5) How is my mana situation?
I think we can all find many more factors which dictate our choice of spells and I do find myself casting Regrowth a lot more than I want to. It may be good to do so, but it /feels/ so inefficient. Maybe that’s a relict of the pre-BC days
April 21st, 2008 at 3:53 pm
Great work! Always love reading your articles.
Using recount, you can somewhat figure out the amount of healing done by triple stack lifebloom. Instead of looking at the effective healing done tab, go to the heals taken tab. Click on the tank that you were triple stacking, and it will pull up a list of who was healing the tank and how. Should be fairly close to the triple stack healing done.
To see how many times your lifebloom has bloomed I suggest using wow web stats, but it still retains the problem that you don’t know who’s lifebloom’s bloomed. The final bloom is credited by the person that has the hot on them, so its untrackable for the most part. Fortunately most of the time I am the only resto druid in the raid and don’t have to worry about this.
Are you taking into account that if you overwrite a hot it doesn’t consider it being cast? This gave me a lot of problems whenever I was trying to figure out my MPS back in the day. What I ended up doing was making all my hots macro’s that in addition to casting the spell, would output text to a private channel saying the name of the spell. I then saved the chat log (with timestamps) and compared it to my combat log to figure out the true overheal of my hots. By doing this you also knock out the question of “is swiftmend using my rejuv or regrowth?” and “who’s bloom is it?” Unfortunately, its a pain in the butt to work out.
April 22nd, 2008 at 9:34 pm
Wow. I really appreciate the time and effort you have put into figuring this stuff out. I was doing pretty well with mana before 2.4 and now it seems endless most of the time. Since I’ve been reading your blog, and combined with my own personal experience, I’ve learned a lot lately. I have had Rod of the Blazing Light sitting in my bank for a while now, but lately I’ve decided to make it an Innervate weapon my gemming it with 3 +8 spirit gems and a +20 spirit enchant. I haven’t had the opportunity to use it in a raid yet but testing it solo it seems to make a huge difference in Regen. I should look into addons too. I have to go back and read more on your reasoning on having a high intellect Innervate weapon.
I always like to increase my +healing as much as possible unless i start to have problems with mana, which to me is falling below 50% too often. I haven’t taken the time to mess around with the calculator yet. I have the new alchemist stone, too, so I get a lot from a mana pot. Now I usually can’t decide to Innervate or take a potion now, since both return me to full mana rather quickly.
I have one question. Do you believe a staff is better than a good Mace/offhand combo? The Ethereum staff looks good, and may be an upgrade for my current Light’s Justice and Aran’s Soothing Sapphire. I just wonder what you think. Also I wonder how the staff would compare if I were to get the offhand from Al’ar (it dropped on our first kill last week and our Priest got it) and maybe the mace from Lady Vashj, or Naaru Blessings.
I used to get mark of the Illidari free from the guild bank and use Flask of mighty restoration but for now I’ve switched to Draenic wisdom and Healing power. I had no idea how good the Draenic wisdom really was, and being able to use a healing power alongside it is great.. Now I just wish there was a healing flask.. preferably a Shattrath one. After reading about wizard oil it never dawned on me to look at Supreme Power, but as you said its a shame that apparently it only affects damage.
I’ll have to play with this math sometime. Thanks again and I wish you well for your raids and your guild.
-Prime (Primevalus, Alextrasza US)
April 23rd, 2008 at 7:44 am
@Phae
I agree on the baggle thing. I have about 600 spirit anyway buffed so no problem anyway. I ll keep it on the bank
For your comment on raid healing with lifebloom.
Again it is very dependent on the damage expected.
For Archimonde fight for example, I was on MT and my group (lock, healadin, hunter), trinketing out of fear in rotation with other groups.
So damage from fire was pretty random and in DoTs. So even if Prayer of Mending or chain heal temporarily healed over this, The HoT kept ticking along with the ~1,5k DoT on almost everyone on range. And since people learned the fight and avoided fires more efficiently, less spamming was required on them and we could focus on the tank.
And not forget that regrowth is far easier to get “over-written” by a flash heal eg cause of the slow cast. Not to mention the gcd and cast time wasted.
Druids are not designed to spam big heals. they are awesome to smoothen damage and keep ppl alive until someone throws a bigger heal (even the druid himself)
If you want to take a better look, check below
http://wowwebstats.com/knb35fkdeithu
I didn t even innervated myslef and had more than enough mana to spam moonfire on the last 10% free-kill phase.
We are now trying Bloodboil which is a really different fight. Damage is consistent this time a bit bigger and more spread. We are again on the spam healing / ooming phase of learning a fight…
About the dark mending staff, don t underestimate it. If you are on MT group use the Etherum Life Staff. If you are with casters use the ZA one gemmed with teardrops. Of course I have the luxury of 3-4 spellsurges while I m on heaelr group, but again, I don t think a druid has much mana issues anyway…
Again, I believe that current semi-endgame or even endgame itemization provides more than adequate mana regeneration, so favouring pure +heal in gems and enchants is realy more helpful.
April 23rd, 2008 at 8:56 am
Thanks for the great math here, your work and blog are appreciated!
You pointed out that the values can change a good amount based on playstyle and encounter.
But one more thing I’d like to point out that the “worth” of MP5 can change dramatically based on how much +healing you already have (and vice versa). So to new trees just growing up, don’t start stacking mp5 like a madman if you only have +500 healing without doing the math for yourself. The value of +healing is very high when you don’t have much, and the value of regen becomes much higher the more +heal you have.
April 23rd, 2008 at 10:43 am
@Zertoss: I’m worried I might have wasted my 22 +Healing gem in the badge legs. I’d wanted to pick up two pieces of Tier-5 for the Regrowth set bonus, but didn’t realize my guild now has access to T5 legs. ^_^ D’oh!
@Kuhbi: It sounds like what you’re doing is working for you. However, I don’t entirely agree with a couple of the stipulations on deciding whether to use a Regrowth or a Lifebloom:
1) How much health are they missing? If they are missing a smidgin’, we should use a Lifebloom or just let a Chain Heal or PoM hit them.
2) How likely is another hit on the player? I don’t think this is actually a factor. It speaks to the issue of your Lifebloom being overhealed by another player. The up front direct heal on a Regrowth is always going to be better for them since a LB is probably going to be overwritten by someone else.
3) How much time before we need to refresh LB? This is less of a factor than many seem to think. How many times do we really find ourselves in the situation where we have 1.5 sec for a LB on another player but not 2.0 sec for a Regrowth. That 0.5 a second is only 10% of our interim. =)
4) Is someone already healing the player? If someone is already healing the player, we should ignore them regardless.
5) How is my mana situation? This is definitely valid, but we never want to get ourselves into a situation where we can ONLY use a Lifebloom (hence the value on regeneration).
I think a big reason that Regrowth FEELS inefficient is that it feels clunky and slow compared to the RAT-A-TAT-TAT of hitting Lifebloom every 1.5 seconds and jumping around like a Garbanzo bean. Really though, the 0.5 second additional cast time of Regrowth is pretty insigificant (though if you have to heal on the run, Lifebloom is always going to be a good option).
@Sheshonk: Thank you for this tip! While the Full Heal Equivalents value should make tracking overwritten/undocumented HoTs unnecessary, the idea to track the composition of Rejuv + Swiftmend and Regrowth + Swiftmend is great!! And while I used to be the only Resto Druid in our raids, we’re now regularly running with 2, making it a lot harder to get bloom totals. Maybe I’d have better luck in ZA where you’re less likely to have more than one Druid.
@Primevalue: To determine whether you should be gemming/enchanting your Innervate weapon with Spirit or Intellect, use the Mana Regen Calculator with your current Spirit and Intellect values. As a general rule, if your Innervate is completely refilling yoru mana bar, you’ll want to be using an Intellect weapon for that temporary increase to your mana pool so that you get more back. I am very envious of the Alchemist’s Stone. It’s far and away the best mana regeneration trinket, though it does require you to use Potions to actually be effective. ^_^ I prefer the Ethereum Staff to Light’s Justice + Aran’s Soothing Sapphire because I like Spirit. I haven’t considered Vashj’s mace + Al’ar’s offhand, though. I’m probably sticking with what I have for now, though, as other healers in my guild could really use the upgrade more than I could.
@Dimitris: If you don’t see a problem with having enough mana to spam Moonfire for the last 10% of the mob’s health, I’m not sure what to tell you. I think your raid would be better off if you’d use some of that mana to heal more earlier on.
“Druids are not designed to spam big heals. they are awesome to smoothen damage and keep ppl alive until someone throws a bigger heal (even the druid himself)”
This sounds like the quote from Tharfor where he says, “I notice when I’m raiding with mine that I don’t do very well on the healing meters, but that’s just because of the way that druid healing works.” I’m not willing to accept that we’re intended to be a healing stream totem. And with the changes to regeneration and the cost of Regrowth, we needn’t be just that, either. I outhealed our best Shaman last night by a fair margin … all by pushing myself. If you think you’re going to end up with extra mana at the end of the fight (to put to whatever purpose), you can logically scale up your healing. ^_^
@Coren: It’s definitely the case that MP5 and +Healing should be taken into consideration together. I push new raiding Druids to reach about 1200-1250 +Healing before switching to a HoT-based build, and I think the same sort of step-up between +Healing and MP5 should also be considered (though admittedly I haven’t set anything like that up). Good point. =)
April 23rd, 2008 at 12:21 pm
I wonder why people always claim that druids do badly on the healing metres and why that would even be a problem? It is only in single-tank + high raid damage encounters that CoH-Priests are able to claim more “healing done” than anyone else. And Shamans are usually not too high on the meters in my guild, simply because CoH is THAT amazing in Black Temple (the place is /made/ for healing Priests) The more thanks there are, the higher I go and even by spamming just Lifebloom into the raid it’s fairly easy to do “well” on the meters.
A healers performance is measured in people alive after the boss is dead, everything else is just details. (which of course can be important!)
@Phaelia: I might have not explained my points properly
1) Health missing: if someone’s missing HP but not enough that the player would be target for a direct heal of another healer right now and there is both the chance that he’ll be tanking further damage and I do have mana+time, then I will put a lifebloom on him. In fights that require them to be topped up /NOW/ (Najentus) then I might resort to Regrowth, too.
2) Likelyness of another hit: or to be precise, any damage taken even if they’re at 100% health. I put a single lifebloom on warlocks with low mana and Shadow Priests in general whenever I can afford to do so. Warlocks can safely lifetap and Shadow Priests might not kill themselves as easily
I’m not sure that Regrowth is the more efficient solution for countering overheal. For one it’s much, much more expensive than lifebloom. If a lazy Paladin gets there before you and his FoL crits for 3000 on the player (or however much it hits at T6 level) your 3300 Regrowth Crit might just have gone to waste. After that it’s HoT will continue to tick for 21 (27) seconds. In some fights that’s great (Council, Bloodboil) and in others it’s just plain waste (Supremus).
What I wanted to say is that you need a feeling for the fight and the situation. Putting a pre-emptive HoT on somebody or simply pre-casting a heal before someone takes damage at all is the high art of healing for me
3)Time to refresh LB stacks: actually I find that point rather critical. You really don’t want to lose your tripple Lifebloom stack on your tank(s). While Regrowth might only be a two second cast, there is always the possibility of spell-pushback! (unless you spend 5 talent points and have a concentration aura, both of which I do not have) This issue grows with increasing frequency of raid damage. A chance, I know, but annoying none the less.
4) Someone else casting a heal on a player: It really depends on how much health they’re missing and who’s healing them with what. After a while you get a feeling for the time it will take for someone to be healed, how much health they will gain and who will be healing them. There are many times when a single (chain-)heal will not be enough heal them to full, so I will apply a single lifebloom that will do the job
5) Mana: I’m under the impression that I can “pull my weight” pretty good without _excessive_ use of Regrowth. By excessive I mean making it one of your primary spells, which I try to avoid because it eats through my mana so insanely fast. I’ll use it if I have to, but I try not to.
Using Regrowth a lot isn’t bad and absolutely respect any healing style that keeps people alive.
One last point that just came to my mind. Making extensive use of Regrowth requires compromises in your gear selection, e.g. gearing and gemming for mana reneration. And that is much, much more than you would need if you were using Lifebloom and Rejuvenation only. For these two spells all that mana regenration is wasted (not quite wasted, but your power is re-directed into another spell) and you actually lose a lot of power on your lifebloom, simply because you trade +healing for regeneration. Both ways work, they just require drastically different styles of play. Changing your style of play or even trying a different one will require a high investment because you lack stats for one of them.
April 24th, 2008 at 2:45 am
@phae
Nononono you misunderstood what I said… Keeping someone’s health on a smooth level does not mean you are not doing much healing or that you do not top the meters… You did not check the link I sent you.
http://wowwebstats.com/knb35fkdeithu?s=301-631
I was 2nd on healing against better geared priests and paladins… That sais it all.
And again 3rd on yesterday’s kill with a slightly different healing assignment where I was not on the tank all the time.
http://wowwebstats.com/o6vydqqw1gxao?s=15492-15867
And really I don t think that I could have spent more mana since I am casting on gcd usually. Which also proves that I had mana left not because I slacked but because I have much more mana regen than I need… And I don t think that regrowth would make things better in any way… Maybe it would make things worse cause of the mobility required…
Oh and Tharfor is a useless moron that needs to l2p a druid… His post had been given value because it was blue but still the dude is far from mastering his class.
April 24th, 2008 at 7:33 am
“Oh and Tharfor is a useless moron that needs to l2p a druid… His post had been given value because it was blue but still the dude is far from mastering his class.”
True words and I’d like to add that Blizzard as a whole has no clue about druids at all. See spell haste on Druid gear and 4pc T6 bonus.
Blue posts on Druids should be taken with a truckload of salt at all times.
April 24th, 2008 at 8:51 am
@Dimitris: This is the link you originally posted: http://wowwebstats.com/knb35fkdeithu One where you were fourth on the meters behind both Priests and a Shaman. I did check it, I just didn’t see why you were sharing it. ^_^
@Kuhbi: You make some excellent counterpoints. Regarding the gear compromises you need to make when using Regrowth: remember that as your +Healing continues to improve, each point of additional +Healing is worth less than the one before, because it gives you a smaller overall improvement. On the other hand, Spirit and Intellect both have exponentially increasing returns. The more you add, the more you get out of them. Obviously, you wouldn’t want to ignore +Healing completely in favor of mana regeneration, but a “healthy” (haha!) mix of both is likely best.
For me, pre-2.4 I stacked MP5 like a … MP5 stack of pancakes. Er … anyway. Post 2.4, I’ve managed to juggle most of my gear around, replacing much of my items with Int/Sta/MP5 and +Healing with Int/Spi/Sta and +Healing instead. As a result, my mana regeneration is just crazy, my +Healing has shot up probably 150 points, and I’m able to give away my Innervate in about 50% of fights. All this while increasing my use of Regrowth. Now, I think this is a special situation as my guild has been making some pretty phenomenal progress, giving me access to items that I previously did not have. But I don’t know if rebalancing your stats is all that difficult, especially when you consider Gems and Enchants.
April 24th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
I haven’t done the math here, so please correct me should I be wrong:
I think that there is a limit to how much mana regeneration you need. That limit is defined by what spells you use and at which frequency. Let’s forget the obvious differences of LB and HT for a second and focus on mana/hps on a single target. Casting a Lifebloom every 1.5s for 172 Mana is obviously less taxing than cating a HT every 3s for say 800 mana. Now let’s say HT did more HPS than LB at the cost of more mana and I already have enough mana regeneration to sustain casting LB (because it’s dirt cheap). I have two options: I can up my regeneration so that I can sustain spamming HT to increase my sustained HPS or I can increase my +healing so that I can bring LB up HT’s HPS.
Once I have enough regeneration to keep spamming HT I don’t really need any more, because I wouldn’t use it anyway. So I’d go for other stats like +healing.
My healing style consists mostly of LB and Rejuv with the occasional Regrowth thrown in. Therefor I’m using gear that gives me enough reneration to sustain spamming LB and other heals at a lesser frequency. Any more regeneration would be wasted for me. To increase my HPS I go for +healing instead.
Your approach seems to me like the opposite, increasing your reneration to sustain casting a spell that has inheritly more HPS but higher mana cost.
Of course, both ways work.
Thinking about this I’m not 100% sure that my line of though is correct, as it involves a lot of abstraction because you can’t quite compare LB and Regrowth like this because they work in completely different ways.
I wasn’t aware that +healing scales so badly? After all Empowered Rejuvenation should increase it’s effect by 30%? Also, with a tripple stack of Lifebloom I tend to notice any increase or decrease in my +healing value quite a lot. A drastic example would be the difference between feeling worthless in Karazhan at 1400+Healing when we started out and beeing bored out of my skull there with 2000+Healing now
Also, changing your gear might just involve swapping out some gems. But please keep in mind that a single rare gem costs 60 Gold or more (on my server at least), with epic gems beeing much more expensive! You’ll need to do quite a few daily quests to earn the gold for it, making it expensive and thus time consuming.
April 28th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
@Kuhbi: I think you have things exactly right. How much mana regen is needed depends on your spell usage. If your mana regen goes up, you can afford to use more costly spells, provided it makes sense to do so. Both of our spell retinues are based both on experience and preference; my experience has lead me to add more Regrowth to my mixture of spells, particularly during large amounts of “splash” damage. But if your style relies primarily on Lifebloom and it’s working for you and your guild, it makes sense that you wouldn’t want to emphasize regeneration.
When I say that +Healing scales “badly” it is because adding a tablespoon to a cup is more signficant than adding it to a gallon. Every point will yield the same return, but the percent increase to your overall effectiveness afforded by each additional increase actually goes down. On the other hand, mana regeneration very interestingly scales UP. This means that it’s going to be much easier to “cap out” on your regeneration once you have found the rotation and casting composition that works for you. =)
Thank you for the well thought out response! It’s great to have you as a reader and commentor!
April 28th, 2008 at 6:56 pm
Quote Phae
This is the link you originally posted: http://wowwebstats.com/knb35fkdeithu
/quote
Well the initial link included 4 tries on Bloodboil with weird assignments. You had to drill down a bit. The second link did that for you ^-^
And once again today on first bloodboil first kill, two trees with similar healing style (75-80% lifebloom) outhealing paladins and a priest with the same healing assignment (on the tanks).
http://wowwebstats.com/hjcdc5n4zosu3?s=10794-11385
The shammies and the priest were on raid healing with chain heal and CoH so no competition there…
And of-course no mana problem. With an innervate on me I didn t even had to pot once.