The following is an e-mail from Nichgoul of Al’Akir (EU) who wrote in to share his impressions of the usefulness of spell haste. As I have little experience using spell haste myself, I’m soliciting opinions from those of you who have been able to put together a haste set, either primarily or situationally.
After healing in our recent night in Mount Hyjal, I was annoyed at the fact that, while there were five tanks all taking damage, I could only Lifebloom four of them. While this is a dream scenario for Resto Druids, I had to leave one tank out. Since the changes in 2.4 (spell haste now reducing the global cooldown to a maximum of one second), I have gone about looking up how much spell haste is needed to reach the super-tree mode of having five global cooldowns per rotation as opposed to four.
How much spell haste do I need? *
In theory, the minimum number of spell haste required is 113, although due to latency this isn’t realistic. To be 100% certain that you will make the 5 GCD target, you’re looking at closer to 180-200 spell haste.
Where can I get spell haste?
First of all, start running ZA. While there is no leather +Healing gear that has spell haste in this instance, there are four Druid-usable items that do:
- [Brooch of Nature's Mercy]: +33 spell haste rating
- [Cloak of Ancient Rituals]: +25 spell haste rating
- [Dark Blessing]: +30 spell haste rating
- [Signet of the Quiet Forest]: +30 spell haste rating
The four items alone total to 118 spell haste rating. You can also get gems that increase spell haste, the best of which fits a yellow socket and increases spell haste rating by 8.
What does this mean?
This means that with the gear from ZA and 3 or more spell haste gems, you’re looking close to or are reaching the 5GCD per rotation. (The gear from ZA unfortunately doesn’t have sockets, but if you get items drop that don’t need for regular upgrades, you can socket them for spell haste.)
Is it worth all this effort?
In my opinion, yes. Whether you let this gear replace your current healing gear is more of a personal choice, but the extra time while general raid healing is nice as it means that you can get a Rejuvenation + Swiftmend off quicker and generally have more GCDs to play around with. If you carry this gear with you in your bags you can equip it when necessary. For example, when 4/5 tanks pop up that need healing simultaneously then I would highly suggest switching gear. Here’s why:
If your triple-stacked Lifebloom heals a tank for approximately 700 HPS, being able to stack on four tanks will produce 2,800 healing per second (this is already a larger healing per second output then any other healer can sustain). However, you will be locked down to just casting Lifebloom on the tanks. If, however, you have enough spell haste to cast five insta-cast spells, you will have one GCD free to heal yourself, the raid, or to boost a tank with Rejuvenation. Of course, you could now keep five tanks triple-stacked, which would result in 3,500 HPS, way above what any other healer can match over a sustained period of time. These stats also increase with an increase in your +Healing value; if the 700 HPS were increased to a still-plausible 800 HPS, you’d be looking at 3200 HPS without spell haste and 4000 HPS with it.
This extra GCD also opens up additional spell rotations, using Rejuvenation and Regrowth, for example. **
This rotation doesn’t require full spell haste, just a few items to get the Regrowth off in the second rotation. This cycle costs 742 mana every five seconds:
LB 1, LB 2, LB 3, RJ 1
LB 1, LB 2, LB 3, RG 1A haste-heavy, 5-GCD cycle (requiring around 200 haste rating) can keep up Rejuvenation and Regrowth on two tanks while triple-stacking Lifebloom on all three. This cycle costs 869 mana every five seconds:
LB 1, LB 2, LB 3, RJ 1, RJ 2
LB 1, LB 2, LB 3, RG 1
LB 1, LB 2, LB 3, RJ 1, RJ 2
LB 1, LB 2, LB 3, RG 2I personally believe that this increase in healing per second and the ability to simultaneously stabilize five tanks’ health (or four tanks with a random spell every seven seconds), definitely gives enough reason to go out and start collecting spell haste as a Resto Druid.
* Information gathered from http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t17783-druid_raiding_tree/
** Information and rotation designs gathered from http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t17783-druid_raiding_tree/
Nichgoul is specifically asking for feedback on the above, and I’d love to hear your thoughts, as well!
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@Graylo: Oh, my mistake!! I’ve adjusted the description to be more clear.
May 12th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
While it is definitely true that the healing output afforded by having 5 GCD’s available for tanks is amazing, I don’t think it could be sustained for very long. You are looking at a minimum of 880 mana per cycle if you just used Lifebloom. At that rate you would burn through 10,000 mana in ~57 seconds. Even figuring in a full mana bar’s worth of innervate and chain potting you would be out of tricks in 2 and a half…maybe 3 minutes max.
May 12th, 2008 at 5:56 pm
True, you would run out of mana fast Miyra, but the situation proposed in the email is not the average case. For runs like ZA where there are only two tanks, this allows you to squeeze off more raid heals in between keeping lifebloom up.
One of my biggest annoyances with ZA is the spirit bolts that Hex Lord Macaroni dishes out to everyone. Usually tossing one rejuv on each person keeps them alive, but unless I start those early, I only get 6 or so off, relying on the other healers, and what resto druid likes to do that? With spell haste, you could possibly keep LB on the main tank while dishing out the rejuvs. At this point in the game, I’m overhealing more than I’d like to anyway (while still topping charts), so spell haste would be a good way to regem some gear.
Btw Phae, love the cartoony tree on the left.
May 12th, 2008 at 8:00 pm
Another good reason to look at spell haste is if you, like me, are druid-healing-challenged and have trouble maintaining even a 3 character triple stack; spell haste gives you a lot more room for error.
May 12th, 2008 at 9:51 pm
The only druid who’s had any luck with spell haste in our raid set up is our Moonglow/Dreamstate healer. I can’t personally comment on the effectiveness, but if you’re rocking a ToL build, I’m not sure how viable stacking spell haste really is. One thing’s for sure–I’d never stack it as a crutch over other stats. In addition to the items out of ZA, there are a number of haste-stacked items out of BT as well, most notably:
Shroud of the Highbourne
Belt of Primal Majesty
Botanist’s Gloves of Growth
And yeah, a few items out of Sunwell, and a few crafted leather pieces as well.
May 13th, 2008 at 2:31 am
I think spell haste became a very good supporting stat with that GCD change in the last major patch. It helps your four rolling Lifebloom stacks not to collapse like a house of cards with every little disturbance or lag. That’s a good thing - it gives you some more room to… breathe.
I was never sure to aim for the five-GCD-rotation but one point convinced me that this is might be a good idea indeed: it perfectly scales with +Healing. So even if you loose some +Healing because you chose the spell haste gear the additional spell in your rotation will overcompensate that at ease. It also makes you stand a bit out of the crowd(forest?) since your gear differs from those other trees in your raid. That is a good thing too and it might support the overall tree performance in your raid.
Hm, I think I will give it a try. Unfortunately, I hate ZA. Really. Bad luck for me. And the trolls.
May 13th, 2008 at 2:38 am
I’m in the process of putting together a haste set. So far I have enough (173) that I mess up my 4 LB rotation if I have it all on because I don’t quite have enough to hit 5 LB stacks. I’m hoping that we’ll have some more haste gear drop this next timer so that I can pick it up and play with it. I definitely want to test it out on Kalecgos…some of the combinations we get with the way the portals fall out would make putting out faster heals much better.
A nifty trick for Hex Lord is to put on full shadow resist gear if you’ve got it. It makes the spirit bolts completely trivial.
May 13th, 2008 at 8:37 am
Admittedly, I’m usually a tank. But as a responsible Druid, I maintain a very solid healing set as well for respeccing tree when the raid needs it. That said, I was absolutely floored with the ease of maintaining multiple stacks on my last Kara run.
I don’t pretend to be a leet healer, I know better. I’ll never roll 5 stacks on tanks, and probably not 4 either… but I used to be somewhat challenged to maintain 3 (I’m an old-school click portrait+press hotkey type). That all changed with the Brooch of Nature’s Mercy from ZA. It kind of fell into my lap after none of the other healers wanted it or needed it one run - and the difference it made was huge for me. I found myself able to easily roll Blooms on three tanks on several of the trash pulls, even slot in an occasional Rejuvenate, and never be afraid of losing them from being a 1/4 second late. For a guy who doesn’t usually run as a healer, I was able to post over 40% of my total raid healing over the entire Kara instance.
So, my opinon? A massive Spell Haste set to roll 5 LB stacks is probably a pipe dream for most of us… but having just one or two of these pieces can make the job way, way easier for the average Tree!
May 13th, 2008 at 9:32 am
I’m not too sure of the math or mechanics but haste could also benefit you while healing for high raid damage fights like the 1st boss in BT. I’m currently spamming Regrowth Rank 8 and it would be nice to shorten the spell cast getting it closer to 1.5 sec like Flash Heal. It could also be helpful on the second boss in MH when the 2 second cast time is too long to save raid targets trapped in ice.
May 13th, 2008 at 9:48 am
I currently have around 110 spell haste, and love it for one reason, faster regrowth and an extra rejuv / swiftmend while hotting the tank.
My last recount data shows a drastic change in my healing since the last patch. I have adapted my healing to be able to use all my mana and an innervate on most fights. I feel i didnt heal enough if a fight is over and i still have mana…
my heals are currently spread at 30% lifebloom, 30% rejuv, 30% regrowth and 10% swiftmend.
I could use dark blessing thats always in my bag to increase it a bit but love my immaculate staff of recovery too much.
(not to stroke my e-peen, but i finally got all my 4 T6 pieces on sunday
very very happy drood.
oh, and all the sunwell T6 for droods (belt, bracers, boots) have spell haste so its there for a reason, figure out why and how u can maximise whats given to your arsenal, its a personal analysis but one that must be done.
May 13th, 2008 at 6:39 pm
Noressa Said:
Since the change to haste was announced, I started collecting my set. Going on my latency (usually over 200-300) I found that to attain a 5gcd cycle, I needed a minimum of 250 spellhaste, which I currently have. To make it easier to maintain, I also have another haste ring which brings me up to 281. That said, the only time I maintain 5 lifeblooms is for ROS, which makes that situational currently.
Stacking haste I believe is absolutely the next step to healing as a resto druid. The decreased cast time allows for more regrows, lifeblooms or rejuvs to the raid between refreshes:
Refresh Lifebloom (1.3)
Regrow target 1 (1.73) +2.13
Regrow target 2 (1.73) +3.86
Regrow target 3 (1.73) +4.76
Regrow target 4 (1.73) +6.49
Honestly, I don’t regrow 4 targets between. .5 seconds isn’t much time to allow for hitting the keys perfectly. Frequently I’ll be refreshing lifebloom, hitting regrow on a couple targets and then either raid healing briefly or waiting for the tanks LB to get refreshed, hit that, then raid heal again.
So far the only fight where more haste hasn’t proven useful as a stat over healing (currently for me) is Brutallus where the extra healing on burns (where I’m at) is worth more then getting their lifebloom off that little bit faster.
I wouldn’t advise anyone to use haste over +heal/regen until they are at a point where they can bring in more regrows, or up to another gcd for lifebloom.
May 14th, 2008 at 11:38 am
Haste is definitely good for boosting HPS on multi target encounters such as 4 or more tanks or trash. I have started looking into haste gear since they announced the change to haste but it is still a secondary endeavor for me just because haste doesn’t increase our HPS on single targets (like it does for pallys and shammies).
@Nichgoul It is certainly interesting that you use 5 tanks on Hyjal trash waves. I was just wondering how your raid is set up. Does your guild just have a lot of well geared tanks?
May 14th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
Spell haste becomes better with the amount of +Heal you have. The following list is the amount of +Heal required to produce the same HPS if you were to stack +Heal or Spell Haste (this includes talents).
Heal Touch 969.15
Rejuvenation 2,324.75
Regrowth (DH) -966.81
Regrowth (HoT) 1,940.42
Lifebloom (HoT) 3,022.11
Triple Stack (HoT) 3,022.11
Lifebloom (Bloom) 2,068.69
Please note that a negative number means that you need 0 +heal for spell haste to be more effective!
As its been said, the only two boss fight situations where 5 triple stacks can be used are Kael ph2 and RoS ph3. So the benefits to spell haste are for raid healing, not boss healing.
Keeping this in mind, what can you do with Regrowth? Yes, it is mana intensive, but it will net the best results with spell haste.
So, could see a single tank rotations like…
LB, RG, RG, RG
Which requires the same amount of haste, 118, in a perfect world.
Some quick napkin math puts this rotation about 400 HPS higher than a triple stack lifebloom and 4 single stack lifeblooms. Of course the mana requirement is off the wall, but hey, show regrowth some haste loving too!
Personally I give much higher priority to +heal than spell haste. I’m consistantly on tank healing, and believe I should be doing everything in my power to perform my role the best at it that I can. Any raid healing I do is just icing on the cake. It’s a great strength that resto druids can raid heal while tank healing with nearly no loss of efficiency (no gcd for swiftmend/NS), however, they don’t have the tool set to raid heal effectively. Using regrowth/lifebloom for raid healing is like trying to ram a square peg in a round hole, those spells just aren’t made for it. I sometimes wonder if regrowth is made for anything, but thats for another time. I leave maximizing raid healing to CoH and Brain Heal, I’ll help where I can, but I don’t allow raid healing to take away from my job, tank healing, in raids.
With that being said, iLvl from items is not always a straight +Heal vs Spell Haste. Spell haste sucks up iLvl from stam, int, spirit, and mp5. There are a bunch of items that you can pick up where you sacrifice no +heal. Gems are a different story however…
May 14th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
Bleh, forgot that if you have 3 tanks spell haste opens up the window to have a regrowth or rejuv on the third tank. So spell haste does help tank healing on more than 2 boss fights.
Sorry for the double post!
May 14th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
It’s not actually your latency that matters with keeping LB stacks up, but rather latency variance. The GCD is activated client side (since 2.3?). If you are lagging by a full 2 seconds, consider this example (which ignores human error and local hardware speed):
LB1 at t=0 hits at t=2s.
LB2 at t=1.5 hits at t=3.5s.
LB3 at t=3 hits at t=5s.
LB4 at t=4.5 hits at t=6.5s.
LB1 at t=6 hits at t=8s.
The difference between your two LB1 (i.e. tank 1) hits is only 6 seconds despite the 2 seconds of lag. What would matter though is if the first occured with 0 latency and then your latency spiked to 2s. In that case you’d have a difference of 8 seconds between LB hits, meaning you lose your stack.
Because of this, what matters is:
How stable your connection is.
How fast your computer is.
How fast you are.
I’m sitting at 221 haste right now and still cannot consistently maintain 5LB stacks. I have never had an issue maintaining 4 with 0 haste, and generally had room to spare. Consider that with a 4 cast cycle you have 1 second of “error” space, or 0.25 seconds to waste per cast. To have the same 0.25 seconds to ‘waste’ per cast, you’d have to get 5LBs in 5.75seconds, a GCD of 1.15seconds. That would require 478 spell haste which is not at all feasible. Generally it’s accepted that around 200 spell haste it might be feasible to keep 4 up, I’m personally aiming for 250 minimum though and doubt I’ll be confident until 275-300 range. You have much less room for error even at that level of haste. It’s often better to be sure and keep 4-stacks up rather than go for jackpot with 5 and lose a stack at a critical moment.
Also, Sheshonk raises a really good point about HPS that’s not to be overlooked (math here: http://elitistjerks.com/724279-post864.html). However, the reality of the situation is that you are more often trading regen for spell haste. I’d also note though, because of this I will also always socket for +heal even in my haste set.
All that said, haste rocks. I use my haste set on 9 out of the 14 T6 boss fights (varies a bit depending on heal assignments). Haste changes combined with improved efficiency in 2.4 have made regrowth a much more important part of my healing arsenal. What it’s really done is allowed us to raid heal effectively in fights that don’t cater to druids quite as well. You can fit more regrowths in, and you can get them off faster. I’m actually able to contribute to random burst raid damage now, and can even compete with Shaman chain heals on fights like Gorefiend now. I also burn mana much faster in this set, and so feel there’s a use to my massive regen (and also equip my regrowth trinket with this set). Pre-haste, I had accepted that there were certain fights where I would never top the meter, but now it’s a viable goal in every encounter.
Sheshonk, you’ve commented that you think you should do everything you can to focus on tank healing so spell haste isn’t that useful. However, I believe there’s a point where the marginal gains on tank healing are outweighed by the vast gains on raid healing. Your comparison of regrowth vs. LB for raid heals isn’t fair, because a much higher % of the regrowth heal will typically hit when compared to a LB raid heal. Further, I think you have to agree at some point improved raid healing outweighs the minor hot strength increase on the tank (I lose about 100 healing for my 221 haste). Otherwise, you would be cancel-casting HTs on the MT between HOT refreshes, not raid healing (and I’m betting with that kind of single target focus treeform wouldn’t be needed either, at least not for mana efficiency). And of course, if that’s what you’re doing then haste benefits the HTs drastically so you could actually improve your tank healing with a haste set as well.
May 15th, 2008 at 6:11 am
@ Zackoria, we used 5 tanks for that fight that time but sometimes use four, it depends on the gear of the other tanks in the raid i presume, not to hot on that area, the majority of our tanks are nicely geared MH yes.
@Sheshonk, you made it sound in your comment that spell haste is only useful to raid healing, but this is not what i ment with my email to phae, after just doing this 1st boss and 2nd boss in MH, a situation where i am pretty much just healing the tanks it allows for a great set of combinations of hots on the tanks which increases your healing alot on the tanks. For example some other times we have done this fight there has been two resto druids, it took me and the other druid alot of work to test out and trial different healing combinations together that net together to produce a huge amount of healing on the tanks, which fluctuates over focusing on different tanks depending on the situation mid-pull. Having some spell haste gear for this situation even thou there is no raid healing means you could get an extra lifebloom stack up, or and extra reju, which would have been highly useful in that situation.
(ty for the people that have left your comments
May 15th, 2008 at 9:35 am
@Nichgoul: Aye, striving to use the most triple stack lifeblooms effectively is a goal to be sought after. In my previous post I was only talking about boss fights, where there are only two places, ros ph3 and kael ph2, where more than four triple stacks could be used to full potential. In a three tank situation, having haste for a rejuv/regrowth in the 3rd tank would be handy. A lot more fights use three tanks. No four tank fights spring to mind except for fathomlord.
On Hyjal trash my guild rarely uses four tanks, much less five so wasn’t even thinking about your situation. We rely on imp bliz, and, when possible, necro hasted tanks to control waves. At one point we did use a prot pali, which would be superior on paper. Unfortunately, in practice our other tanks would become bored during trash and take a mental vacation, so on heavy abom waves our prot pali would get insta gibed by a knockdown (since he was tanking nearly the entire wave). In your situation spell haste for additional rejuv or triple stack lifebloom would rock, but I wonder about the raid as a whole.
There are many different ways to skin a cat, so take this with a grain of salt, but back when I was learning Hyjal we struggled to make it through Azgalor trash. Things have changed since then, 2 sets of badge gear are out and s3 arena gear, but your raid may have issues getting through those waves with so many tanks (and therefore less DPS). If you are running into the problem where you can’t drink between waves, a haste set that doesn’t have much mana regen could become problematic. Then again, those combat mana pots you can buy with pvp marks are a godsend.
@Kalaghan: Hah, thank you hitting my logic from a different angle. I’m not in the business of cast canceling HT, unless there are no other tank healers around. That nearly never happens, but there are of course exceptions. Being the first into a Kalc portal comes to mind. Since my shameful EJ post (branded with a warning, so disappointing how one sentence completely devalues an entire post), and now this one, I admit spell haste is growing on me. Even if it wasn’t, I’m forced into it with sunwell gear.
Maybe I worded things poorly, but I meant that on paper regrowth is better for raid healing than lifebloom on paper . Regrowth on paper nets a much bigger spell haste bonus than lifebloom on paper, making it an even better raid heal choice. In a world where mana is of no concern (hah), you have to keep a swiftmendable hot on the tank(s), and not using a ridiculously high paperdoll haste value (general rule of thumb double whatever haste value you find on paper) rotations while would look like…
Single Tank = triple LB tank, RG tank/raid, RG raid, RG raid = 118 haste on paper
Two Tank = Triple LB tank, Triple LB tank, RG tank, LB raid, LB raid = 118 haste on paper
Three Tank = Triple LB tank, Triple LB tank, Triple LB tank, RJ tank, LB/RJ raid/tank = 118 haste on paper
You can get better gains if you run at ~250 spell haste paperdoll, but that would require ~500 haste depending on human reflexes/steady connection.
As to single stack lifebloom raid healing, I really wonder if getting a 5th one is worth it. Given that the final bloom is usually overhealed, lets focus in on the hot portion. It takes an obscenely high amount of +heal, 3000, to have spell haste be better. Spell haste has less, and less of an effect how far off 3,000 +heal you are. Depending on what your overall +heal is, at some point, effective healing would get a better return using a single stack, even if you are in a situation of +100 heal vs 5th gcd. I don’t have the time to number crunch this, but am masochistic enough to find the answer sooner than later. Maybe going as far as to dust off my hot overheal tracking mod.
May 15th, 2008 at 11:48 am
Those options are all actually 113 haste I think, except 2 but I’m pretty sure it’s just a typo. I’m thinking you intended to have a RJ tank in the middle (not Regrowth).
And as for your suggested cycles, mine right now typically is a variant of the first (I really only use significant haste when RG raid healing is useful):
1: 3xLB tank, rejuv tank, Raid RG, Raid RG
2: Refresh LB, RG Tank, Raid RG, Raid RG
3: Refresh LB, rejuv tank, Raid RG, Raid RG
4: Refresh LB, Raid RG, Raid RG, Raid RG
Rinse & repeat.
I’d also note that while on paper all 3 options you presented require 118 haste, the first option having only 4 casts per cycle makes it slightly easier to maintain. I like your idea of a “double paper doll” rule. I think I’d go with:
Haste Required = (Paper Doll Haste)*(1+X/4) where X is the number of spells required in the cycle. It varies by person, but that puts me at 226 haste for the current cycle (which I occasionally lose but not often with 221 haste), and 254 haste for a 5LB cycle (which is what I’m aiming for, cause I can’t manage it yet).
Edit: That’s a shame you got a warning for your post, I didn’t realize that. I have to say my only issue was I couldn’t make the jump in your math for some reason and had to work it out for myself to confirm it was right. Kudos to you though if you could see the path with fewer steps.
Oh and also, the LB bloom only requires 2069. I sit around 2400 raid buffed in my haste set, so on fights like Gurtogg where you’re letting the bloom expire it’s also very useful (that’s also how I start out P3 ROS).
May 15th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Just as a note, Kalaghan, I’m currently only able to usually maintain a 5gcd cycle with 280 haste. My standard set is 250, and while occasionally I get one or two to stick, it’s not frequent enough for my taste at all.
http://wowwebstats.com/cyzc4n5gqxwv3?s=1815-2222&bl=0&fia=28&fiaa=a&fit=1
This is the last WWS we have of RoS, which is the only time I use full haste (subbing signet of the quiet forest in with haste over the exalted Hyjal ring.) It was only the second time I had worked with 5x haste, but for the second phase, you’ll see I was maintaining 5 for the most part.
As an aside I’m fully capable of keeping and maintaining a 4x LB cycle without haste, I think I’m honestly still adjusting to the gcd spark and when it’s safe to hit the keys vs. being too early or too late.
May 18th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
Been doing some reading on cast times and from what I saw actual cast time is…
Actual Cast Time = Paperdoll Cast Time + Latency Time + Human Error
The thing of interest is human error. The new spell queue apparently is flawed, and the faster you hit your spell cast button, the better.
So, you either have the choice of pounding your spell button, or downloading autokey.
http://elitistjerks.com/746707-post1423.html
That leaves the final part of human error: actually targeting someone to heal. For this I’d recommend a small raid frame, so something like a 5×5 grid with a width of 1 inch would be very beneficial.
May 20th, 2008 at 8:48 am
I haven’t found anything to indicate it’s actually tied to latency, but rather how your latency varies. Is that what you were referring to above? As for the whole autokey thing, that seems pretty cool and it looks like it can be bound to mouseclicks too (so it’ll work with healbot)! Woot!