Legendary Meta Gem – Napkin Math Edition

The Legendary quest line meta gem is incredibly powerful we all know that. I thought though that I would just lay out some quick numbers for those curious about what you’re really getting. This is all basic napkin math though so don’t expect a riveting expose.

Looking at the logs from my guildmate (as I just got my meta last night) you are going to average somewhere in the ballpark of 12% uptime ± 1% depending on the intensity of the encounter. This is pretty significant. During the 4 second window you will more than likely cast either three rejuvenations or 2 rejuvenations and 1 wild growth. There will technically be situations where you may need or want to cast a regrowth and that could certainly squeeze in in place of a rejuv.

Using a 12% uptime, you are looking at approximately 1.8 procs per minute. During one proc of the meta, given intense healing, you will save 26,100 mana casting three rejuvenations and 31,140 mana with 2 rejuvenations and 1 wild growth. Multiplying that out you average 46,980 to 56,052 mana per minute. This equates to 3915 to 4671 mp/5.

Given statistical variation and fight diversity the mp/5 of the trinket will vary ± 380 mp/5 on average but its value can sometimes fluctuate much more than that. There are two things that may affect your benefit:

-The first is that its uptime can get oddly high on some fights. I have seen uptimes as high as 19% in some logs which could push it as high as 7,785 mp/5. It can also drop down to only 8-10% uptime if luck isn’t on your side. Either way you’re getting a sizeable bonus just not one that fits the expected average.

-The second issue is that this isn’t actual mana gained which is something I’d like to take into account but it isn’t really possible. If a proc happens during a moment in the fight you are distracted, or there is down time, a lull, or any other reason why you might not have needed to throw out the free heals you threw out you aren’t actually saving any mana. With wild mushrooms working the way they do though, free rejuvenations can still serve to grow them making the free heals not entirely wasted. I would safely wager that heroic encounters with more difficult damage patterns will allow for greater benefit.

Conclusion:

While this isn’t telling us anything we didn’t already know it does shed some light on potential gearing adjustments down the line. Once you get this meta gem and get a chance to trial run it through some of the more grueling encounters you are currently progressing on, you may find yourself tweaking the amount of spirit you plan on running. Something to keep in the back of your mind.

Druid Forum (EU) Recap – Method

Good afternoon Druids,

It’s a slow news day and things here in Boston have been hectic to say the least. But in light of the blue posters cryptic comment that changes are coming our way for druids its worth looking at some very well written posts from Method on the EU forums. Please understand english (or proper english grammer and spelling) aren’t always their #1 priority, the message is.

Post #1 by Nagura of Method

Id like to say something to the current restodruid situation too, ill just put it in this thread since i kinda liked your arguments.
Im playing a restodruid in Method and i actually dont like whining on forums, but since it doesnt seem like blizzard wants to change something anytime soon, ill just try.

First of all: Since im playing with probably some of the best healers out there, no one can say the healers in my guild or me are doing something wrong.

So here is my opinion:

Restodruids are just too weak right now. We are a pure healing class (no absorb, no dmg reduction cd or hp increase) but still cant compete on healing with other healing classes. 
But thats not the main issue, the main issue is, every other healing class brings some awesome utility to the raid (aura mastery, disc barrier, hp increase from shamans, slt, strong tank cds like painsup, guardian spirit, live cocoon, revival, manatide, manahymn, all sort of absorbing spells) and restodruids have just nothing like this (ironbark is a nice spell, but just not good enough compared to all the other classes cds).
The only raid cd a restodruid has is tranquility, and a shamans healing tide is healing more + they dont have to channel it for 7 secs and a moonkins tranq with heart of the wild is doing double the healing of a restodruids tranq and even more.

The only thing restodruids are good in right now is tank healing, but since paladins are doing good tank healing too + more raid healing + have aura mastery + hand of purity + hand of protection + absorbs, why bring a restodruid?

There is absolutely no reason to bring a restodruid into the raid, unless your raid needs roar and doesnt have enough moonkins, theres a point in the boss-fight where you need to do burst dmg and restodruids can help with heart of the wild or immunity spells are needed (i rly like symbiosis).

I have to say, im raiding 25 man only, and im pretty sure resto druid is not that bad in 10 man compared to 25 man if it comes to pure healing (aka on healing meters), because reju is by far our best healing spell and the reju uptime on 10 ppl is ofc higher than on 25 ppl and consumes less mana, but since 10 man has limited raid cooldowns because of less players, you obviously dont prefer bringing a restodruid over another class in top pve guilds. 

Conclusion: Restodruid cant compete with other healers in its current state.

Another problem is our gear scaling. In my opinion other healers are scaling way better with gear than restodruids do. Paladin with their mastery ofc, shamans get more spirit = manatide gives more mana, discs get more spirit = get more mana from rapture, and so on.
Restodruids gain mana through innervate, and since the manapool is 300k and doesnt change with gear, we always get the same amount of mana. With more gear we gain more int + more mastery, but it only increases our pure healing and doesnt give us anything else and a LOT of our healing is overheal anyway (thanks to absorbs and smart heals).

Now something about our mushrooms. It was a nice idea and i rly like it because you actually have to think about what youre doing and not only brainless press a button and smartheal ppl, but its rly hard to find a good use for them in most of the fights since players have to constantly move around. I would suggest to give the druid an ability with a cd on it to move all 3 of the mushrooms to another spot (with their current absorbed reju heal), just like shamans can move their totems. Or let us just place the shrooms one by one on another place while keeping the already absorbed reju overhealing.
Also mushrooms are currently healing pets too. So in a 25 man raid with hunter, warlock and dk pets on the boss, the mushrooms just heal a LOT less on the players itself if u put them in melee range. The mushrooms should only heal players, i dont see any use of the mushrooms healing pets.

Also increase the wildgrowth range to 40 yards (from the target casted on), since theres no point to let it on 30 yards, its just annoying.

And we need some useful lvl 90 talents. Our natures vigil is “okay” for resto druids, but we only use it for the 10% healing increase anyway, no one needs the little dmg it does (its just annoying if it breaks cc). But a 10% healing boost every 1,5 mins is just not as good as other healers lvl 90 talents, its too weak to count it as a healing cd. Our heart of the wild passive int/stamina increase is “okay” too and the 6 mins dmg cd is nice for maybe 1 fight out of 10, but other healing classes can do the same dmg without a 6 mins cd on it (monks/disc priests) and they can even heal while doing dmg, and we are doing 0 healing with the cd up, if we dont want to waste it. And dream of cenarius is just bad. So its nice to have hotw or natures vigil, but its just way worse than other healing classes lvl 90 talents.

But even if you would change those things i suggested, we could still not compete with other healers. I dont have a solution to make druids stronger, i think we just need some sort of utility for the raid to make us useful. It wont help to just buff our healing spells like reju or wildgrowth, it wont change a lot.
And the paladins mastery need a nerf finally. Its simply too strong and gives other healers (especially restodruids) no chance to get even close to their healing, but i think thats already known, i dont know why it takes so long to nerf an op healing class while dps classes get balanced/nerfed/buffed way faster. Paladins are just doing up to 40% of their healing with their mastery, thats just so wrong.

So yes, i like playing restodruid and im one of the very rare restodruids playing in the top pve guilds right now. So i would be very happy to see some changes soon so i dont have to reroll another class, just like many other top healers already did.

Post #2 by Owld of Method

As we’ve discussed it extensively with Nagura I’m roughly of the same opinion. And we’ve discussed it on our healing channel and we could see how people are disagreeing on this as well.

All of your ideas show one thing : druid haven’t evolved when other classes did. Druid playstyle is still the same, they just replaced some constrains with others.

Druid has long been a class with a lot of constrains that others did not share. We used to have to keep Mastery up and a 10s Lifebloom. Some will say that other classes have/had different constrains but I strongly disagree. Ours are not tied to our healing but are direct constrains to our gameplay, making it an actual pain to play our class to an above-average level.

The clear lack of potent smart healing spells that have no downside, Wild Growth being heavily lacking behind compared to CoH, Divine Star, Chi Burst, Chi Torpedo, Healing Stream totem or even Light of Dawn (when it was actually used), is making druid an excluded class. 

The lack of passive spells, that does the job for you without having to worry, is just mindblowing. We have close to nothing that is removed from our attention and actual actions and is free of constrains. Things like Earthliving, Restorative mists, Ancestral Awekening, HST, Prayer of Mending, Echo of light, Divine Aegis, Attonement (lol), Beacon of light, etc.. are simply making druid a subpar class.

We now rely more and more on a Rejuv blanketing, hoping that the target you just rolled Rejuv on will not get 4 smart heals instantly. You barely control your healing and it’s relying on a lot of RNG when there is quality healing to be done.

I’m not trying to say other classes have it easy. I’m simply stating the simple fact that they have the tools required for every situation and resto druid is just a pale alternative.

There have been way too many passive spells, smart heals, absorbs, procs and CDs added to the game and given to the classes during the past 2 expansions. All of them besides druid have seen their playstyle overhauled and now fit with the current content. Druid is just the same old stuff and this is why it’s currently lagging behind.

The change to mushroom was a good idea, one that has been around since CATACLYSM BETA, 3 years ago when mushroom was first introduced. And when it comes, it’s with 2 major constrains : 3 gcd and a build up mechanism.

Having played this game for more than 7 years, I think “continually evolving” should be called “permanent BETA”. There is no regularity and no precise view as to what classes should do/be. The amount of time it takes the devs to fix things like disc priest pre-5.2 is astonishing. The amount of time it will take them to fix paladin mastery will probably be on the same level (aka not before 5.4).

As much as I would personnaly hate it, the only way to fix druid is to give it the same attributes as the other classes. So you can understand my point here is a list of ideas (not at all that I want them all together applied) :

- Living Seed should be buffed to work on hots and proc on any damage as well as post-absorb. On the other side you reduce all our hots by a certain %.

- Lifebloom should always account for more than Beacon of Light on tanks. Simple logic = more constrains should reward more. Whether you buff it or nerf paladins, doesn’t matter. It’s still mindblowing for me to see how stupidly powerful Beacon of Light is and requires close to 0 attention. I’ve been complaining about this since early Cata (when LOD was transfering, what a joke).

- Change Nature’s vigil so that 10% of all your healing is evenly distributed in the raid. Make it 20% or 30%, considering how much better everyone else’s 90′ talents are.

- Change our mushrooms, again, so that you maintain the build up and make it so you can put 3 at the same time.

- Remove the f**cking pets from Wild Growth and Mushrooms targetting. This should just be common sense. You litteraly can’t pre-hot with WG, everything goes on pets.

- Harmonize Tranquility, Divine Hymn and Healing Tide totem. Either your remove the channeling, or your nerf the sh*t out of HTT.

- Make our gear scale better, thanks.

Honestly I have plenty of ideas to change every single spell we have to make them more competitive, not healing more but just to expand our toolkit.

ROUND UP

I understand that many of you feel anger and hurt at our current state in 25 man raiding and I totally get that. We feel under-appreciated and undervalued. But the truth is it is because we are less useful and less potent. The sooner we come to terms with that and hope that Blizzard tries to improve us or put us on par with the other healers (25m specifically) the sooner we’ll improve.

I think many of the points brought up by both of them echo sentiments many of my fellow druid bloggers. We need improved raid utility, improved smart or attention free healing, moving or perhaps non-channeled tranquility, moveable or player mounted mushrooms, WG and WM:B not hitting pets, any other combination of issues plaguing us fixed.

I don’t have the energy today to write a really long and thoughtful number crunching post and quite frankly they said everything perfectly fine.

Resto Druid Roundtable (My First Podcast)

This past weekend was my first ever chance to be on a podcast and it was a real treat to be invited to Team Waffle’s Resto Druid Roundtable to discuss 5.2 content and our current quality of life.  We talked about everything from glyph and talent choices, play styles, current performance in PvE and PvP, and much more.

It was my honor to join with the following people to make it happen:

Arielle – the host of Team Waffle and runs The Inconspicuous Bear

Hamlet – Druid trainer who runs a blog as well as manages Tree Calcs

Jasyla – 25 man resto druid raider and blogger who runs Cannot Be Tamed

Sodah – 12 time druid gladiator, an impressive source of PvP information

You can go take a listen here 

 

 

A Fresh Look at Soul of the Forest (5.2 Napkin Math Edition)

I ended up breaking my 4 piece Tier 14 set fairly early on in order to clean up my leg slot (and get spirit) but found myself still using Soul of the Forest for certain encounters. Because of this I wanted to do another round-up of Soul of the Forest (and the many ways it can be used) in order to evaluate what we really end up getting out of it. All of this math is based upon a theoretical situation where each wild growth will find a sufficient number of targets that are in need of its full healing potential.

I understand that that there are situations where less than 6 (or 5) people are wounded and that does change the math considerably. I’ll try to address that to some degree here.

First let’s get the math out of the way before everyone’s eyes glaze over permanently! This is perfectly world stuff though and does not accurately simulate actual boss battle damage models.

Wild Growth potential throughput on paper

With my current test setup my wild growth healed a single person (8 ticks) for 49,989 health. I am running slightly above the 3043 break point.

With Glyph: hits 6 people and can be cast approximately 6 times per minute. This will heal for roughly 6 x 6 x 49,989 =  1,799,604 health per minute.

Costs 13,740 mana each time for a total of 82,440 mana, an overall HPM of 21.83

Without Glyph: hits 5 people and can be case approximately 7.5 times per minute. This will heal for roughly 7.5 x 5 x 49,989 = 1,874,587 health per minute.

Costs 103,050 mana per minute, an overall HPM of 18.19

Wild Growth with the Glyph and Soul of the Forest

With my current test setup my wild growth healed a single person (14 ticks) for 87,589 health, or roughly 75% more than a non SotF Wild Growth as we expected.

This spell will be cast approximately 4 times a minute healing for 6 x 4 x 87,589 for a total of 2,102,150 health per minute. This is roughly 302K more healing than without SotF talented.

Costs 54,960 mana per minute, an overall HPM of 38.25. You save 27,480 mana per minute which is approximately raw 2,290 mp/5.

Wild Growth without the Glyph and Soul of the Forest

With this setup you will be casting 7.5 Wild Growths per minute. I will say we average out to 3.75 non SotF casts and 3.75 SotF casts. It doesn’t line up evenly with the minute marker so that is just a crude breakdown.

Non-SotF Wild Growths will heal for 3.75 x 5 x 49,989 = 937,304 health per minute

SotF Wild Growths will heal for 3.75 x 5 x 87,589 = 1,642,304 health per minute.

Your total healing done per minute with this scenario is 2,579,609 health per minute. Costs 103,050 mana per minute, an overall HPM of 25.033

So here are the totals for all of the conditions we have investigated:

Regular Wild Growth /w Glyph

-   Health per minute: 1,799,604 baseline

-   HPM: 21.83

-   MP/5 difference: Baseline, 0

Regular Wild Growth w/o Glyph

-   Health per minute: 1,874,587 (+75K)

-   HPM: 18.19

-   MP/5 difference:   -1,717 mp/5

SotF Wild Growth /w Glyph

-   Health per minute: 2,102,150 (+302K)

-   HPM: 38.25

-   MP/5 difference: +2,290 mp/5

SotF Wild Growth w/o Glyph (alternating)

-   Health per minute: 2,579,609 (+780K)

-   HPM: 25.033

-   MP/5 difference: -1,717 mp/5

Take this with a grain of salt

We know firsthand that not EVERY cast of your wild growth is going to heal 6 people when glyphed rendering the glyph less optimal for that moment in time. We know that raid damage isn’t even going to warrant the spell being cast for periods of time. That aside these numbers still provide useful information.

Comparing this ability to Tree of Life is quite difficult to say the least. Using the most common example of SotF /w Glyph, you would have a theoretical healing gain of 906K every three minutes with a mp/5 gain of 2,290 constant. I can’t really model the mana savings from Incarnation’s clearcasting (though that is a legitimate usage of the spell to begin with) but in order for it to be comparable throughput wise, 20% of your healing done over 30 seconds would need to equal 906K. For that to happen you’d need to be putting out somewhere in the realm of ~200,000 HPS. The thing is, for periods of insanely intense damage that is NOT easily done but you will get up fairly high. You just need to tailor your usage of the spell to get the best mileage you can really.

While it seems like this post is an ad for Soul of the Forest be advised that it is not the case. Soul of the Forest is a nice passive style benefit that gives you mana back and boosts your throughput by a sizeable amount. Its effect averaged out through the course of an encounter is very strictly controlled by how the fight plays out and how closely you are able to adhere to the theoretical numbers above. Depending on how periodic the damage is you may find yourself going for stretches without having an opportunity to fully 100% benefit from your wild growth. Tree of Life has the advantage of being something you can plan and tailor your use to maximize its benefit on a per encounter basis. The catch is that sometimes there’s no one moment where Tree would be substantially beneficial and then it turns into a mana saving temporary boost cooldown.

You will more than likely find yourself waffling between these two abilities as you progress through normal or heroic mode encounters. I know for a fact I carry plenty of tomes of me in order to swap the talent on the fly.

Disclaimer: This is very napkin math-y. If you are one of those other math loving folks out there and you spot an error in my numbers please let me know so that I may address it as soon as possible.

Feeling The Balance Burn – Heroic T15 content

I was really hoping that the druid changes would leave me feeling more empowered and to be honest for the first week of Tier 15 it did. I genuinely felt like I was getting a lot more healing done and being productive.

Then we accepted another Discipline Priest. This makes 2 Disc Priests a Monk and a Paladin in our primary healing core. I’ve found that the absorbs do tend to do a number on what I have available to heal. But I shouldn’t let that get to me. It’s time for heroics right?

Well, the problem I have with heroics and granted I’ve only done two so far in this tier is Blizzard’s lean towards periodic heavy hitting raid AoE attacks that can be planned around. When you have things like Ionize or Dire Call in an encounter you are giving absorb healers a chance to maximize their efforts which is great! But it also means that there may not always be as much for others to do when absorbs and burst are the preferred method for dealing with it.

On Horridon last night I was feeling quite a bit of frustration as I played my heart out and just wasn’t seeing the numbers that I thought I should. Our disc priests were rocketing ahead absorbing up the dire calls like mad and I was doing what I could to blanket heals where needed and have wild mushrooms available in exactly the right spots where the raid will be as we kite mobs.

I’m still feeling lackluster though. I am also seeing a couple issues with the predictable pattern and absorb plan when it comes to our healing. When priests are able to completely or mostly negate the damage from an effect on people within the raid (but not everyone) it cause my wild mushrooms to be incredibly erratic. Despite a handful of people being near them if half of those people got shielded up the wazoo the mushrooms would simply overheal them like a boss. I sometimes got upwards of 50-60% overheal from the mushrooms despite great placement.

My second gripe is one that I touched on in my previous post. When the raid is taking rather significant damage and I can’t overheal with rejuvenation at all (which is theoretically fine mind you) I don’t ever get that option to provide burst healing. If an encounter does periodic damage to people at a rate where every couple of ticks of rejuvenation might end up overhealing due to other healers healing then I would at least get to store up some for a big burst when another raid wide ability decimates us. When everyone is hovering or struggling in health I don’t like losing the chance to recharge that spell. It is what it is though we simply need to trade off our burst for effective rejuvenation healing at that point I suppose.

This may come off as whining but its more that I’m just feeling frustrated. I want to feel useful and relevant. Someone in my guild said yesterday “it must be easy to rank as a resto druid right now, no guilds are taking them to the hard stuff”. While that’s clearly an exaggeration and I, and others, are clearly being taken to raids…it is still a rather dangerous mentality that is floating around out there. As fights become predictable or people gain familiarity with encounters the absorb mechanics and smart heals will continue to be very favorable and these are strong healing classes to begin with. No one likes playing the healing class that all other healing classes unanimously agree is the weakest of all of them.

Wild Mushroom Usage in Throne of Thunder

I wanted to write a post based off of my experience with all twelve bosses last week during normal modes pertaining to the use of our new Wild Mushroom Bloom. There are a multitude of ways to use them in each fight and I found their healing to be fairly useful. You will often find them doing anywhere between a few percent of your overall healing to upwards of 12 or 14% depending on how things work for you.

Before we get into the fight specifics let us look at what it does for us and what tools we want to use to help the cause

Addon and Weak Aura

There are two very simplistic methods that I have seen to track the mushrooms that use very little screen real estate. The first is a weak aura created by Civilian on the Elitist Jerks druid forum, the link to the import string is here http://pastebin.com/yVzjUjXc . This happens to be what I am using currently. There is also a mod available that does roughly the same thing with a nice little UI setup. The link to that is here: http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/shroomhelper Thanks to WTSHeals for pointing me to that option.

Effect

Wild Mushrooms as you know cap out at roughly 1/3 of your overall health give or take a little bit. With three planted you get roughly your total maximum health. For me right now my mushrooms store up to 490K bonus healing. Applying Naturalist and Mastery bumps this up to roughly 674K healing done. Assuming a 18% chance to crit in raid environment you will generally average 795K healing done based solely on the overheal bonus. In reality that number will fluctuate above or below that amount by potentially sizeable margins if RNG is in your favor or not. For now we can use that number as a numerical average.

The base heal is slightly less reliable as it is subject to diminishing returns. I would say on average it will heal a single person somewhere between 7 and 15K which is not insignificant but not necessarily relevant to the current discussion.

Uses

For me there are a handful of uses for wild mushrooms during fights. I generally rank them as follows:

Raid Wide: You won’t necessarily hit everyone in the raid but there are certainly encounters where you can arrange for a large majority of the raid to be grouped up for a specific mechanic. This also benefits other ground based heals as well such as your swiftmend. I’d say on average when attempting to do this you’ll probably hit 15 to 20 people with it given some might end up outside of the area of effect. This will result in roughly 63K down to 50K healing per person. This is basically like hitting everyone in the raid with half of a crit regrowth simultaneously. Not insignificant.

Cluster: For some fights where you are required to be in smaller groups or spread out in a wider area you can position it such that the people near you or near a specific marker are affected by the mushrooms. This might be anywhere from 5 to 7 people. This would end up as on average 175K down to 125K give or take. I have found that ‘melee’ as a general group can often qualify as a valid cluster to mushroom on some encounters.

Small cluster or single person: When you can’t guarantee any sizeable number of people will be in any one place at any one time but you do know where one, two, or three people of import will be at any one time then this is a viable option. If you hit between 1 and 3 people with this then you’re looking at between 800K down to 275K for this situation. If no more useful options are viable this is useful on tanks. Just be careful with your placement if you are designing this to be used on tanks. I’ve had a few encounters where if placed wrong the melee creep up and steel some healing away from the tank as pure overhealing.

Personal: If all else fails drop the mushrooms roughly where you’ll be hanging out at any point in the fight. IF you do this do not push the growth of the mushrooms. Simply use them as needed to give yourself a self-heal to deal with the encounter’s mechanics.

 

THONE OF THUNDER

All of this aside my usage of Wild Mushrooms varied wildly over the course of our clear of the place last week

Jin’Rohk the Breaker

Movement: Moderate

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: Low

Tanks being stationary: Low

Mushroom Viability: Low

I personally found wild mushrooms to be extremely lackluster during this fight, and honestly any of the first three fights. This is not to say that they were useless. This is one of a few encounters where I viewed wild mushrooms to simply be a manner of delivering free healing. I did not push them to grow nor was I ever attached to any particular planting of them. When I saw where the raid was grouping up in a puddle I dropped some mushrooms and proceeded to heal as normal. Sometimes I dropped them around the boss. Anything you get from mushrooms in this encounter is purely gravy and shouldn’t consist of anything more than a couple % of your overall healing done.

 

Horridon

Movement: High

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: Very Low

Tanks being stationary: Low

Mushroom Viability: Low

This is another encounter that I would classify as not mushroom friendly. It’s not really even that friendly for swiftmend althought you’ll still get enough mileage out of its effloressence. This fight is clearly better suited for rejuvenation, wild growth, and incarnation lifebloom spreading. I think this is a fight that if you tried too hard to shoehorn mushrooms into it that you’ll actually come out with a HPS loss because of the hoops you’ll jump through. I learned this the hard way because in my desire to provide this type of information to you the reader I was doing just that.

 

Council

Movement: Moderate

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: Moderate

Tanks being stationary: Moderate

Mushroom Viability: Low to Moderate

This is a fight where you can get some usage out of wild mushrooms with consistancy. As long as you aren’t trying to force the mushrooms up to full potential before popping them you can certainly place them at the feet of the bosses as they are empowered. Being able to offer some nearly free healing to the tank and/or melee is perfectly fine. Expect it to still be a small percentage of your overall healing done but the mana cost of detonation is so low that there is generally no harm in doing it. There are some parts of the encounter with enough significant AoE damage going on that the 3 GCD’s to plant the mushrooms will be a detriment. Use your better judgement when doing so.

 

Tortos

Movement: High

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: Very High

Tanks being stationary: Very High

Mushroom Viability: Very High

Tortos was the first fight that screamed to use mushrooms. I had a specific spot on the ground somewhat near the boss that the raid would group up on just prior to every quake. Ground based AoE heals were planted there and fully charged mushrooms were detonated immediately after control of our characters returned. I believe I was able to have mushrooms prepped for every single quake. I think organization and coordination worked to trivialize this encounter once we knew exactly how to manage it. I found it helpful to call out on vent for people to group up for mushrooms as sometimes people’s brains turn off mid fight.

 

Magaera

Movement: Low

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: Very High

Tanks being stationary: Moderate

Mushroom Viability: Very High

Magaera was another fight where wild mushrooms were perfect which was pleasant immediately following Tortos. We just grouped the entire raid up near the front of the ridge and had all of the frost beams and fire behind us as needed. Adjustment was required but in general I was able to use fully charged mushrooms for almost all of the rampages and even some of the acid ball barrages from the venomous heads. The value of mushrooms is highly dependent on your raids strategy but for us it worked out perfectly. Any fight with extremely predictable intense raid wide damage is a huge boon to wild mushrooms (and to pre-hot’ing as well). Become familiar with the rate at which your raid is killing heads and plan accordingly.

 

Ji-Kun

Movement: Moderate*

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: High

Tanks being stationary: High

Mushroom Viability: High

* Raid members tasked with killing the hatchlings may or may not have difficulting taking part in your wild mushroom detonation depending on the timing

This is a fight where if you are NOT required to fly to any of the nests, you can utilize wild mushrooms extremely well. I organized a spot for raid members to run to for Quill to pick up some quick ground based healing and wild mushroom detonation. IT was of course up to the raid members to immediately scamper away to a safe spread so they did not die to Caw. This of course lasted untill we made a third nest team and I was assigned to it. Once I was going to the nests I had literally no way to reliably stack or maintain the wild mushrooms. Once you go to the high nests it is impossible to keep track of their progress. It is a single phase fight though so if you are on the platform you can consistantly use bloom throughout the whole encounter.

 

Durumu The Forgotten

Movement: Very High

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: Very Low

Tanks being stationary: Moderate

Mushroom Viability: Low

For two out of three phases of this encounter, that repeat with regularity, people are pretty much always moving with the exception of the blue beam soakers and the tanks on occasion. I would recommend using wild mushrooms for the encounter but very judiciously. You aren’t really looking to power them up any more than would be done from run of the mill overheal. I used mushrooms almost exclusively on the tanks for this encounter as I wanted a huge heal available for the tank during the red/blue/yellow beam phase especially if I was constantly on the move (yellow). Don’t exepct this to be overwhelmingly useful here and do NOT force it. Simply place them and charge them when it is convenient and confer with your tank on the best placement to give them the most amount of wiggle room.

 

Primordius

Movement: wtf?

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: wtf?

Tanks being stationary: wtf?

Mushroom Viability: Myself only

I have little I can offer on this fight. Somehow we did it in only a matter of minutes where it is intended to be a 7+ minute encounter for others. Stuff was going on, people were taking a ton of damage, the world was flying on its head and somehow by the grace of our good healing core we held it together. That being said I only really used mushrooms at my feet and prairie dogged it while we held it together. Perhaps if this fight is done properly then they might be better? Unsure.

 

Dark Animus

Movement: High

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: Low to start, High at the end

Tanks being stationary: Low to start, High at the end

Mushroom Viability: Myself to start, then Tank, then raid

I started off with a charged stack of mushrooms on my spot where I tanked one of the animus adds. I used that as a buffer so I could begin healing other people with lifebloom on myself. If my animus ever made headway OR another animus passed by following someone dodging explosions I could pop the mushrooms to absorb the much larger hits. Once my animus was killed or taken off of my I dropped my mushrooms on the nearby tank picking up other animus. Is there a plural of animus? I don’t know. Anyway, when the final Dark Animus was spawned and the raid worked on burning it down before the soft enrage killed us all I found that mushrooms worked fairly well on the raid. Here’s the rub though. With Dark Animus as well as the final phaes of Iron Qon it is extremely difficult to use Wild Mushrooms because your rejuvenation is doing much less overhealing. Any scenario where the whole raid is being pummeled by AoE damage that is consistent and keeps people from being topped off the less you’ll be able to utilize Bloom. This is something you’ll need to be aware of and you may want to place and charge a set of shrooms before the raid damage intensifies to the point where you’ll no longer fill them up.

 

Iron Qon

Movement: Moderate

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: High

Tanks being stationary: High

Mushroom Viability: High

Iron Qon is a four phase fight where the effect of your mushrooms will vary wildly. The first phase consists of your raid clustering and spreading around specific locations in sequence in order to force him to do his fire attack and keep his energy down. This attack does a significant amount of damage divided among your group. We did two pulses per group in succession with three groups taking turns. My group consisted of 7 people so mushrooms would be hitting everyone for roughly 25%+ of their life which coupled with the other healer and my HoT’s was enough to easily recover from the first of the two attacks. I simply used Tranquility and Incarnation to absorb the brunt of the second in each of the first two times my group soaked. I rate this is very high bordering on amazing usage of mushrooms.

The second and third phases have lots of spreading out and movement and are not necessarily great for mushrooms so I wouldn’t push too hard. If you can casually charge them under the tank and melee then by all means do so but don’t force it.

The fourth phase was grouping up again and mushrooms worked great here. I couldn’t necessarily pop them more than a couple of times as the raid damage was significant enough at the end that I had little to no overhealing done. This is an odd drawback to the wild mushrooms. There are times we would love the AoE burst the most and cannot actually charge them up to do so. This is OK because those situations are the ones that make Rejuvenation shine. When it doesn’t overheal it is one of the most effective heals in the game hands down.

 

Twin Consorts

Movement: High

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: Low

Tanks being stationary: Moderate

Mushroom Viability: Low

There isn’t much to say about this encounter really. As a healer all your raid leader needs to tell you is “spread out, don’t get hit by stuff and heal everyone”. The fight is technical and the constellation running is some of the coolest stuff that I’ve seen but the fight doesn’t have you doing anything particularly unusual. I ended up using mushrooms where the tanks were positioned when possible to get some extra healing on the melee but it was not a high priority. Bloom when convenient but do not push their growth here.

 

Lei Shen

Movement: High

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: Moderate

Tanks being stationary: Low to Moderate

Mushroom Viability: Moderate

I will add a disclaimer that I was not in for the kill so I cannot go into extensive details about the last phase of the encounter. What I can tell you is that I was utilizing mushrooms for the first and second phases and intermissions. As you move from pillar to pillar it is easy to plant the mushrooms where the tanks and melee are going to be. Depending on which pillar you are at you’ll have more or less healing to do so you can use your own judgment on how much you want to try to force their growth. Even if you squeeze a little healing out of each Bloom that is still more than worth the minimal mana it takes to detonate it. During intermission however I recommend getting a fully charged mushroom stack online as you get into your quadrant so that you can utilize it during Static Charge if you get one. Mechanics, RNG, and movement play a huge role in whether or not you’ll get effective blooms during this encounter but you can certainly utilize it for some effect. I can write more about this later.

 

Final Words

Now that we’re starting heroic modes I’ll have more to offer on those later. Sometimes heroic modes require more grouping up for healing as needed or more spreading out to avoid new mechanics. All of this and more will affect how much we can or cannot use Wild Mushrooms.

I’d love to hear about your experience with them and what you have thought about them so far! I hope everyone is having a good time in Throne of Thunder!

 

Magic Mushroom Buff…where are we going dude?

So where are we going with these Wild Mushrooms! …and how did we get here?

It’s no secret that right now restoration druids are at the bottom of the pile. We don’t offer any significant raid cooldowns that other classes don’t do better and we have no spammable AoE burst healing. In any fight where the raid groups up we should, barring any skill variance, fall behind other healers and even more so if the fight caters well to spirit shell. This isn’t to say that we are not useful as druid healing is, as always, incredibly potent at helping to stabilize the raid.

Blizzard ‘seems’ to be acknowledging this with their change to wild mushrooms. Their idea is to allow us to take a percentage of our rejuvenation overhealing, which will happen when our heals get sniped in frantic healing situations, and funnel it into a sizeable mushroom bloom when needed. What this does is allow them to keep the bloom cooldown at 10 seconds, but arrange it so that should we want these mushrooms at full potential the cooldown effectively becomes much longer and requires additional mana in the form of rejuvenation casts.

Functionality:

The current build suggests that each mushroom can ‘store’ up to 33% of our total health pool as additional bonus healing (completely subject to additional tweaks) and upon release will split the healing done among all targets within range. With three mushrooms this would be a total amount of bonus healing equal to 100% of your total health or approximately 460K (before mastery and other such bonuses).

Limitations:

Other AoE effects state that a fixed amount of life is returned per tick and is usually subjected to diminishing returns. Ghostcrawlers terminology seems to imply that this healing done is split evenly between all members caught within the blast. This also seems to imply that there is no diminishing returns and that the effect is simply limited by the amount you were able to store in the mushrooms and the number of players involved.

Speculations and Assumptions:

I am assuming that his terminology means that the amount healed is not divided by some fixed number in the anticipation of healing a certain number of players. Swiftmend for example heals three people for a fixed amount and will not increase the amount healed if only one person (the MT for example) stands within it. If that is the case then the ability can be used in some creative ways.

Charging the mushrooms

Depending on the encounter a set of mushrooms may take somewhere between 20 and 30 seconds to fill up if people are taking damage. You could certainly game the system by placing multiple rejuvenations on players who are not hurt (especially if they have any way to increase healing received) to speed it up. The new 4 piece Tier 15 set bonus seems to have a rather interesting synergy with this as well. With this new set bonus each time rejuvenation heals (1 initial 4 ticks at base cast, 5 ticks at standard haste levels) it gains a 6% increase to healing done. For those using the first haste break point it means it ticks at 100%, 106%, 112%, 118%, 124%, and 130%.

If one were to get your haste into the mid six thousands, something feasible in t14, and more than likely really feasible in T15, you could use the tier 15 set bonus along with the new Soul of the Forest to pull off interesting shenanigans. Let’s say your rejuvenation ticks for 15,000 base non crit. With the 70% haste from Soul of the Forest and T15 4 piece bonus your rejuvenation would tick 9 times for a total of ~190,000. This one rejuvenation, if entirely overheal would contribute 47,625 bonus healing to each mushroom which is about 1/3 of what it can store. Each additional rejuvenation would each contribute 25,875 bonus healing. This means one supercharged rejuvenation and 4 regulars might be enough to fill up your mushrooms provided they were overhealing.

While this can speed up the process of charging up the mushrooms I don’t know if giving up Incarnation is worth it nor might it be worth it to encourage a playstyle focused on gathering up overhealing. All of my numbers are entirely speculative though as I’m pulling some stuff out of the air and much of the ability isn’t anywhere close to finalized.

Use

So the question is what do we DO with this new version of wild mushroom. The answer is…it depends. With some tier 15 gear you’ll probably be able to get your HP up to 470,000 or 480,000 with somewhere in the realm of 23 to 24% mastery provided you don’t change your haste target. Let’s say this gives us a bank of 595,000 bonus healing in your mushrooms (198,400 individual mushroom). Right now mushrooms heal for 10K give or take a little bit. I don’t know exactly how much because…well I don’t care to know. With diminishing returns in 25 man it probably dips down to the 6K or 7K range more than likely.

Assuming that the bloom splits the bonus healing evenly with no penalty on top of the core explosion then on a 23 person group (often times the tanks aren’t standing on your side of the boss when grouped up) you have 26K healing per person and something like 32K per person if you get the core explosion too. This means you can heal each member for a whopping 6.7% of their life. This is a little less than two ticks of rejuvenation on everyone. I’m not going to say that I’m particularly excited about this because it doesn’t feel like a massive benefit for the amount of time and mana invested. I’d like to know if someone has the math on how much per person Healing Rain gives over its duration.

In a 10 man raid things change slightly. Let’s say the tanks are standing on one side of the boss and you have 8 players standing on the other side. In this scenario each player would be healed for 74K from the bonus healing and 80K if the core explosion is added. This would be ~17% of everyone’s health which is almost like feeding a healthstone to the whole raid. Now we’re getting somewhere.

If you push it a little further and refine the explosion to cover only select numbers of people then you will see even more burst potential though highly focused. They would heal one person for 600,000, two people for 300,000, three people for 200,000, four people for 150,000 etc. You have the potential to provide a spare lay on hands for the tank or some sizeable heals for anyone forced to soak a certain mechanic in a known area of the battlefield.

Catch

As with everything there are considerable catches to this spell.

-Just as before you must deal with the 3 GCD’s to place them.

-You must now charge them up and monitor the amount stored within them though I would wager a guess someone will create a mod to track this for you.

-Then you must time your detonation to maximize its effect. There is a risk a good portion of your explosion will end up overhealing if you are trying to heal say half of your 23 people who took damage while clustered together.

-The raid or raid member(s) might be forced to move away from the designated location making your effort for naught. The counter to this is that the mushrooms should be quite large and easy to spot so your designated people might still be able to run to them and get healed.

Verdict

I find their idea interesting but ultimately somewhat underwhelming given the setup. It doesn’t seem like they will be amazing at solving some of our current weaknesses which is a reliable tool to handle burst AoE damage in raids and a reliable tool to keep us even when the raid is grouped up doing AoE healing. In those scenarios the ability will be going off only every so often and not for a significant amount compared. There is some serious potential In using them on smaller groups of people but there is a high level of coordination involved making sure those people are near the mushrooms at the time you need to detonate them. This may end up being a high risk, high investment, poor or risky reward type scenario. You could have fabulous luck with it and you could have absolutely abysmal luck with it.

Tank Healing – potential to be a free lay on hands every 30 or 40 seconds  during a fight with some coordination if the cards all fall where they need to fall.

25 man Raid Healing – potential to be a modest heal among your raid (28-30K), a medium heal among your melee or ranged (50-75K), and a decent heal among a small group of players (75-125K) if everything goes right

10 man Raid Healing – potential to be medium heal among your raid (75-95K) , a decent heal among just melee or ranged (100-150K) if everything goes right