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 1

A 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 2

I 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!

Related Posts

• Spell Haste to Affect Global Cooldown
• Mailbag: “Tree Tactics 101″ from Bigtoy of Cho’gall
• 2.4 Mana Regen: Valuing +Healing

With the changes to mana regeneration in Patch 2.4, it’s worth revisiting my earlier post on Blessing of Kings vs. Blessing of Wisdom. Just as before, the MP5 from Blessing of Wisdom is straightforward:

Paladins can also pick up a 2-point talent from their Holy tree called Improved Blessing of Wisdom. This talent increases the MP5 from Blessing of Wisdom by an additional 20%, from 41 MP5 to 49.2 MP5. Since this Blessing grants pure MP5 it is unaffected by Spirit, Intellect, or percent time inside the Five Second Rule.

While the effective contribution of Blessing of Wisdom is pretty cut and dry, Blessing of Kings is not so straightforward. It grants an additional 10% to both Intellect and Spirit which, in turn, affects your overall mana regeneration. The easiest and quickest way to determine its contribution to our mana regeneration is to use the Mana Regen Calculator to find our regeneration without Kings and then again with it. I’ll use myself as an example, but obviously you should do the same using your own stats:

Raid buffed but without Blessing of Kings, I have around 640 Spirit and 540 Intellect. With Kings, those numbers jump to 704  and 594. I can plug these values into the MRC as follows:

As you can see, my mana regeneration increases from 401 to 455, an increase of 54 MP5 from Blessing of Kings alone. This is in addition to the other benefits afforded me by Blessing of Kings such as 800 more mana, 16 +Healing to my Tree of Life aura, and some extra hit points from the Stamina increase. For me, at least, there is no question which of the two buffs I’d rather have if required to make the decision. In general, my order of preference for Blessing requests is as follows:

• Trash Fights: Salvation, Kings, Wisdom
• Boss Fights: Kings, Wisdom, Light *

* Of course if the boss fight is an aggro-sensitive one, you might interpose Salvation before or after Wisdom. Examples of such aggro-sensitivity can include needing to heal through an aggro wipe, adds that spawn throughout the fight that will need to be picked up by one or more tanks, or a threat-sensitive pull. (Thanks to commentor Treibh for these examples!)

Related Posts

• Blessing of Kings vs. Blessing of Wisdom
• MP5 vs. Intellect
• Revaluing Spirit

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:

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:

* 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:

* 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

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 Lifebloom_75/65 = 0.75 * 1499.8 + 0.65 * 1480.8 = 2087.4
Avg. Healed Lifebloom_40/20 = 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. MP5_75/65 = 1667.8 / 2.89 = 580.8
Amt Healed vs. MP5_40/20 = 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.

Related Posts

• MP5 vs. Healing
• 2.4 Mana Regen: Regrowth as the New Raid Heal?
• Nordrassil Raiment and Regrowth

Pookies Is Not a Bear published an article today entitled Let’s Talk about Raid Buffs, Baby in which he details his evaluation of several elixirs and the Flask of Restoration using the Mana Regeneration Calculator to determine the net improvement afforded by each. It’s not only a useful comparison of raid consumables but a great step-by-step example of how you can perform these sorts of comparisons yourself. Thanks, Pookies!

And for a look at the use of long-lasting Wizard Oils, be sure to take a look at reader Mynd’s blog post on Optimization in which he compares the benefits of [Superior Wizard Oil] to [Golden Fish Sticks] (which thankfully stack).

• Read Let’s Talk about Raid Buffs, Baby by Pookies
• Read Optimization by Mynd

Related Posts

• Mana Regen Calculator Featured
• 2.4 Mana Regen: Valuing +Healing
• A Passport to More Places to Visit

Note: The Graph, decision tree, and calculator have been updated as of 3/17/2008 to correct a couple of logic errors and to add the marginal values for Spirit and Intellect vs. MP5.

To help you determine the value of your personal MRC and resulting base mana regeneration. I’ve created a JavaScript-based mana regeneration calculator. It determines how you can optimize your Intellect vs. Spirit ratio by taking into account the following variables:

• Current Intellect and Spirit (raid-buffed)
• %FSR
• Fight Length
• Number of times Innervate is used
• Cast Frequency (for determining proc rate on the two trinkets included)
• Intensity (or Meditation) and Dreamstate
• [Darkmoon Card: Blue Dragon], [Bangle of Endless Blessings], and [Primal Mooncloth] set bonus

From these variables, we can determine the following:

• Mana Pool
• Spirit/Intellect-based Mana Regeneration (excluding the effects of additional MP5 from gear)
• Recommended Spirit if Intellect is held constant
• Recommended Intellect if Spirit is held constant
• Returned mana during Innervate and whether Innervate will completely refill the mana pool
• What type of weapon is recommended during Innervate

Continue reading ’2.4 Mana Regen: The Mana Regen Calculator’…

Related Posts

• MP5 vs. Intellect
• Revaluing Spirit
• 2.4 Mana Regen: Getting the Most out of Innervate