Build 8885 and 8905 Changes

Published on September 6, 2008 by Phaelia
Spells and Talents
11 Comments

Several Resto-related changes occurred with the release of two beta builds this week:

• Tree of Life mana cost reduced from 978 to 684 Mana. Now increases healing received by raid members by 3% (instead of 25% of your spirit) – Shapeshift into the Tree of Life. While in this form you increase healing received by 3% for all party and raid members within 45 yards, and you can only cast Restoration and Barkskin spells, but the mana cost of your healing over time spells is reduced by 20%. The act of shapeshifting frees the caster of Polymorph and Movement Impairing effects.
• Improved Tree of Life now reduces the mana cost of your heal over time spells while in Tree of Life Form by an additional 5/10/15%. (Old – increases the effect of your Tree of Life Aura by 5/10/15%.)

We knew there was a possibility of a change to Improved Tree of Life with the recent change to Buffs and Debuffs, and this change from an improved aura to an additional mana reduction is going to make Druids more efficient than ever. This improved bonus is additive with the base aura of 20%, bringing the total mana reduction on heals over time to 35%. And before you worry about the revision to the form’s description to no longer include mention of Remove Curse, the spell has been moved from the Balance tree to the Restoration tree.

Nature’s Focus now affects Wrath, Entangling Roots, and Cyclone – Gives you a 23/46/70% chance to avoid interruption caused by damage while casting the Healing Touch, Wrath, Entangling Roots, Cyclone, Nourish, Regrowth and Tranquility spells.

The change to Nature’s Focus is odd in that it frees Moonkin from having to spend three more points in the Balance tree but requires an additional 3-point investment in Restoration when the spec already complains of too many essential points being lumped into Restoration. I’m not sure of the rationale with that change other than to grant Restoration some additional solo capability, but I’m guessing we’ll see at least one more round of talent slimming for our feather-bottomed brethren.

Abolish poison now lasts 1 minute on the target. (Previously lasted 8 sec)

Stupid-OP-Shadowsteppin’-Hemo-Rogue-Say-What? Oh, I’m sorry. You can’t talk right now because your mouth is full of Barkskin! ^_^

Healing Touch base healing reduces for all ranks. Mana cost also reduced.

In the process of testing the [Glyph of Healing Touch], (thank you, Leiyan!) I discovered that the base, untalented casting time of Healing Touch has been reduced from 3.5 to 3.0. That means with the Glyph and a Nature’s Grace proc, I was casting Healing Touch in 0.4 seconds with just a little bit of spell haste. This is pretty cool, but remember that you have to wait at least 1.0 seconds before casting again (or 0.6 seconds after the spell completed) since nothing can currently lower the Global Cooldown below 1.0 seconds. I suspect that this is a bug of some sort since my spellbook listed ranks 1 and 2 of Healing Touch as insta-cast, rank 3 as 1.0 seconds, and ranks 4+ as 1.5 seconds (when I removed all haste items).

Again, I’m pretty sure this is a bug so I didn’t investigate coefficients too much further, but it appears that the Glyph is actually reducing the healing done by less than 50% (an approximate 46% reduction to the base and 39% to the spell power coefficient). Combined with the casting time reduction, this would result in an HPS increase over an un-glyphed Healing Touch of somewhere between 36-52%, depending upon spell power. This would ostensibly make it the highest HPS raid heal available to us, though again, more analysis and a confirmation of whether this change was intention is needed. This would also slightly reduce its HPM.

Shift Happens Guildmate Arielore and I spamming Healing Touch in Stormwind Park incredulously.

P.S. With the  changes to allow the use of items in Feral forms, it is possible to switch to Cat Form, begin drinking, and activate Prowl. As with Shadowmeld, however, you cannot begin drinking while prowling and retain stealth.

11 Comments

• Andrige

  Woohoo, thanks for the confirm on that drinking in forms Phael ^^ It’s especially awesome since it’s just doable with a macro to instantly drink and instantly prowl after

  1:23 pm on 9/7/08
• Emee

  Mmmmm, we are going to be so incredibly mana efficient! And being able to cast remove curse, woo! That made my day (doesn’t take much I know). Interesting about Healing Touch, I can’t wait to see how that plays out live.

  Emees last blog post..Why I love Healing

  1:37 pm on 9/7/08
• Ermengol

  Wow. Just.. wow. I am soooo staying restoration when WotLK comes..

  1:55 pm on 9/7/08
• Tiagantar

  1 minute on abolish?? 35%! Mabey the deathknights won’t pwn our face in after all..

  3:56 pm on 9/7/08
• Oni

  I saw this video on Youtube a little while ago. And since then I’ve hoped we’d be able to eat AND fish in all forms. As a feral I’ve always been a bit jealous of trees and boomkins for their ability to eat in their respective forms.

  5:52 pm on 9/7/08
• cisko

  Wait – what? I had missed the HT cast time reduction. So with 5 points in Naturalist, it will be a 2.5 sec cast. Wow, that’s… interesting. I’m still adjusting to HT being a bigger part of the spell rotation, and this just adds to it. My gut feel is that healing is going to be a lot more complicated, with more choices to make. And I think that’s a good thing.

  I would give a lot for bears to be able to fish like this. Or even better, to be able to fish in Aquatic form… how cool would THAT be? I don’t know how that mechanic would work… but the thought is so cool that I don’t care! Maybe a new Fishing ability: Feral Fishing. Trained from any fishing trainer – or even requires completion of a quest. Can be used in any feral form. Requires the same cast time as regular fishing. Operates at melee range, so to fish a spawn point you go stand in the pool. Doesn’t require a fishing pole — but you probably still want one to take advantage of +fishing lures and lines.

  Won’t happen I’m sure. But I can dream!

  ciskos last blog post..Druid items – from Healing to Tanking

  10:10 am on 9/8/08
• ools

  Any idea if Engineering grenades can be used in feral forms?
  Thanks!

  4:11 pm on 9/8/08
• Hokuto

  Heh, abolish got reverted to 8s. I saw that coming.

  Also, what do you think about the new, nerfed “Gift of the Earthmother”? I was loving the idea about a 1s GCD… Oh well.

  “# Gift of the Earthmother (Tier 10) changed to – Reduces the base global cooldown of your Rejuvenation and Lifebloom spells by 2/4/6/8/10%, and causes your Healing Touch and Nourish spells to refund 1/2/3/4/5% of their base cost for each healing over time effect on the target.”

  I can only hope that we’ll have so much haste gear around that it’ll get inevitably to 1s anyway.

  12:26 am on 9/11/08
• Ermengol

  Ouch, I liked “Gift of the Earthmother” so much.. I think I’ll still get it, but instead of 2/3 Living Spirit and 5/5 on GotE I’ll leave it 3/3 and 4/5 or something like that. Too bad, but it’s true it would be making haste useless for HoT-druids again..

  Anyway, with so many good talents around, I still don’t see Healing Touch in the picture.. There are just too many choices before Naturalist, and I feel really comfortable with HoTs. Maybe it’ll be great for 5 and 10-man instances, but in 25, where there are many direct-heal experts, I’d rather keep my distinctive style

  1:54 am on 9/11/08
• Arielore

  Hey Phae,

  I did alot of testing on the gcd of the fast HT. It is still 1.5s without haste. But at those casting speeds latency really chews into the rate of casts you can sustain without using a stopcasting macro.

  I was experiencing wildly variable server latency between 92 and 332ms while testing using the below procedure. I was so annoyed I actually wrote an addon borrowing quartz methods to give real numbers with high precision. In fact the gcd was easy to find using the wowAPI.

  GCD test procedure;
  Use this macro once and then spam your normal HT button. But try and avoid getting the spell isn’t ready message by watching the the cooldown on the button.

  /script Stopwatch_Play();
  /sw 20
  /cast healing touch

  checking the results;
  A GCD of 1.5 will result in 13.3 casts of HT
  (QUARTZ showed a latency that was between 92 and 332ms)

  my runs with 12.93% haste, 8.19%CRIT
  1CG11111111111C==>15casts
  111111CG11111==>13CASTS
  1111111111111==>13CASTS
  11CG111111111==>13CASTS
  1111111111CG1==>13CASTS
  11111111111111==>14CASTS

  my runs with 1.45% haste, 13.64%CRIT
  CGC(GC)G11CG1CG1<==13CASTS (SWEET GRACE PROCS TOO!)
  111111111111<==12casts
  CG11CGCG1111<==12casts
  111CG1111111<==12casts

  Key
  C=crit
  G=Natures Grace
  (GC)=A natures grace cast that crit

  5:39 pm on 9/11/08
• Phaelia

  @Andrige: No worries. That’s a good idea.

  @Emee: If nothing else, I think the fast-casting Healing Touch will help us stand up to Arena teams whose DKs make using HoTs a death sentence.

  @Ermengol: Me too!

  @Tiagantar: It’s back to 8-seconds. Return to face-pwnage.

  @Oni: I definitely think bears should be able to fish by hopping into pools. And Cat Form should get a “VERY UNHAPPY debuff while swimming. ^_^

  @Cisko: All these changes and new spells makes me wonder what kind of a gamepad I’m going to need when the next expansion is released. I’m already having a hard time fitting everything I want onto my action bars, even with an alt key.

  And the feral fishing would actually be pretty easy to implement. There’s a quest in the Draenei starting area where you have to swim into a pool and use a net to catch fish. I imagine bears could do the same thing sans net. And maybe instead of fishing lures, bears could rub themselves with some stinky stuff to help attract fish!

  @Ools: I’m afraid that I’m not an Engineer to test that, but I’ll ask my guildmates to see if any of them know. Good question!

  @Hokuto: The chance to GotEM is pretty disheartening. I guess they decided that the combined effect was too powerful, even for a 5-point talent that’s nearly at the bottom of the tree. *Sad panda*

  @Ermengol: I’m guessing there must be a reason for all these direct “raid” heals being made available to us. I’m expecting them to be useful in some regard.

  @Arielore: Thank you for sharing your results; that’s very interesting! You should put that modified stopwatch addon up. It sounds really useful to theorycrafters.

  12:27 pm on 9/12/08

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