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.

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.

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 

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.

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.

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!

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

Back then raiding was different of course. Not everyone could raid or could get into a 40 man team and it showed when folks in Orgrimmar or Ironforge would ogle your shiny purple epics and ask where you got them. There was a clear delineation between the haves and the have-nots which only become more apparent once AQ40 and Naxxramas rolled around. While I was fortunate, or unfortunate if you consider my raiding schedule and my girlfriend’s displeasure, to clear Naxx40 before the Burning Crusade patch the number of people who did experience any substantial portion of the instance is amazing small. The barrier to entry for raiding guilds was exceptionally high and there was no shortcut to gearing up through all of the instances in order.

I’m older now.

I have a wedding to plan, a house to fix up, a well-paying job that I like, people to see, and other games to play. While money will forever be a concern for me it is now one on another level. I’m not worrying that I can’t get all of the games that I’d like to get because I can afford the ones I want. I’m instead worrying about fixing the gutters, having the pool fixed, and creating an addition on the house. Life has shifted my priorities significantly and I’m sure this is the case for many WoW players.

The most precious commodity we have in our daily and weekly lives…is TIME.

Simply put there is not enough time in the day to do everything, see everyone, and be as productive as you’d like without making sacrifices. Those sacrifices are often forsaking recreational things like video games for an evening to enrich other aspects of your life. It is for this reason that I have staunchly stuck to my goal of never raiding any more than three nights a week. If a guild that I am in decides it needs a fourth night because a boss is close I may or may not be able to make it and it must be something I wouldn’t be held accountable for missing. My guild is important to me, but my life and my free time are more important to me. This is non-negotiable.

Mists of Pandaria is attacking my free time constantly with its rather endless stream of things to do. Some of these things I like such as Pet Battles (though I haven’t done any since I swapped servers), running old dungeons, killing alliance players, the tillers, and even some of the dailies. Overall though the vast amount of dailies available as well as LFR and working to cap VP with heroics as needed suck up a large amount of time. The blessing though is that each of these things is bite sized and can done piecemeal throughout a day or the week. Nothing fully intrudes on my ability to maintain my schedule. Worst case scenario is that I stay up a little bit after raid ends at 11 and I bang out my dailies before bed. I might run LFR in the morning or afternoon on the weekend and heroics happen whenever. Managing my time is the largest responsibility I have as a potential husband and gamer.

When I read people clamoring for the return of separate 10 and 25 man lockouts it confuses me greatly. While I agree that someone putting additional time into the game should gain additional benefits, those benefits should not be substantial enough to give them a massive leg up in the raiding environment (with the exception of people spending that extra time on their main raid, e.g. top guilds when content is released). Spending ten more hours than me doing non-main raid content in a week should net you reputation, rewards, extra gold etc. What it isn’t, is a reason to feel entitled to more loot and gear. World of Warcraft has become a lifestyle and as such needs to be planned according to their (Blizzard’s) views on a healthy raiding schedule. They cannot safely design a model that makes the average raider tack on an additional one or two nights during the week to raid a second raid size out of obligation to make their character the best It can be. They  use the word ‘optional’ a lot and while sometimes we all know it might not be, they are aware that separate lockouts with equal loot would NOT be optional for many.

I agree that 25 man raids need to be incentivized, however breaking the lockouts and increasing the gear level slightly is not the way to go. If the ilevel difference is only 8 say, you will still be forced to run the 10 man raid in organized guild runs to maximize chances at tier tokens and those highly contested items shared between classes. This added requirement caters far too much to the people who have unusually large amounts of free time on their hands. These people are the exception rather than the rule and while they may be extremely vocal on forums and boards, do not represent the majority of players out there. If you are that gamer that plays only WoW, or has lots of free time, or maybe you’re single, or maybe you live at home still who knows, please respect others that are just as serious about the game as you and are determined to stay just as relevant as you but have less free time. WoW is not about who can commit the most time to the game and never should be. WoW should be able who makes the best use of their time within the game to reach their desired goals.

I don’t want to dwell too much on the 10’s vs. 25’s thing because that has been discussed to death by people with much better ideas and solutions than I could think up. I’m more concerned with how flippant and callous some players have become about how the shared lockout ‘ruined the game’. Thankfully we have alts for a reason. Forcing too much raiding on one character will burn out players far too fast, especially those with familial commitments. All in all I’m content with how raiding works right now as far as its time commitment and structure. I worry that if things were changed to force me to start adding raid days to my schedule I would probably have to quit the game entirely.

Things to come:

I’m currently working on my primers for the first 8 heroic encounters that I have completed as well as an update to my guide that has languished at ’4.3′ for a while now. I also have a part two to my magic post as well. So much to write so little time.

I’ve been playing the game for a very long time and because there are so many experiences and stories tied to it, it has become a rather important hobby throughout my life. I’ve met friends playing the game and I feel that, strangely enough, it has made me better at playing strategic games in general. Evolving as a magic player has meant learning some critical higher level concepts such as evaluating threat levels, tempo, timing, card advantage, and understanding gains in board position. I certainly haven’t mastered all of these things mind you, but simply trying to understand them all has altered my brain for the better I think. This story though is going to be largely anecdotal but hopefully enjoyable all the same.

Where it all began

I started playing magic with some friends around or just before the revised base set came out while in 8^th grade I believe. I had some cards from the unlimited set before that however we at school honestly didn’t know what was good and what was bad which has me kicking myself to this day! Innocently enough, like most other kids my age, it began with a “hey, what’s that game you are playing it looks like fun”. Oh if I had only knew what I was getting into then! I dabble in it a little bit at the time and made some very, very crude decks where the only goal was to make giant monsters and attack my opponent. I had no concept of mana ramp up or casting cost balance in my games. If I could plop Force of Nature down onto the table I was a happy camper. There was a great sense of wonder surrounding the game that drew me in much like multiplayer online games do. I had a small community to play with and we bonded over a new and thrilling hobby.

My closest friends had independently all been starting to play at their respective schools which turned out to be pretty awesome. Over the next few months, with The Dark and Fallen Empires already released, we started playing together. We all had completely different concepts of what a good deck meant and I found it fascinating. This card game that had one unified rule set could foster a myriad of play styles, decks, and card value systems and within each of those permutations you had infinite variations beyond that!

I gravitated towards blue/X control and made it my business to acquire the rarer cards such as Vesuvian Doppleganger, Wrath of God, Skull of Orm, Maze of Ith, Control Magic, Clone, and Dance of Many and put together a clone and control deck. Another friend gravitated towards the chaos that was Red/Blue and managed to get Shivan Dragons, Rock Hydras, Granite Gargoyles, Seasingers, and such. Our other group members went Black/Blue and Green/Black respectively. We had some of the most epic and political games of magic ever for kids that age…at least to us they were. It was always up in the air who would win and we enjoyed the randomness.

We continued to play throughout the next couple of years in high school picking up more and more cards as the sets rolled out (we bought the heck out of Ice Age, Alliances, Mirage, Visions etc). Each of us created new concoctions that expanded our areas of expertise. I made more aggressive decks, the aggressive players made some control decks, and we even had our fair share of combo and land destruction. None of our theory was ever right and sadly multiplayer doesn’t prepare you for a real duel. At the time I honestly didn’t even know there was anything more out there! Our Magic playing tailed off before my senior year and we ended up preferring less insular activities but I never forgot about it.

College

Day 1 freshman year of college during orientation changed EVERYTHING. I was sitting down in a circle with a bunch of other engineers in my group and I struck up a conversation with the guy next to me (who is now a good friend). Somehow we ended up talking about magic because he, a seasoned tournament goer, frequented a little place called Your Move Games. For those that aren’t aware YMG was a pretty big force in the magic community at the time and was frequented by some rather iconic players such as Darwin Kastle, Rob Dougherty, Chad Ellis, David Humphreys, Michelle Bush, Zvi Mowshewitz among many others. This card shop was also literally a stone’s throw from my university. Holy crap!

I was encouraged to take a trip down there and play some sealed deck in order to get back into things. Urza’s Block was the current thing and man was it completely different than I was used to. The power level felt higher (bear in mind I didn’t do old school tournaments which were no joke) and I was trying my best to put up a good fight. (This was also the first time I needed to get a DCI number which completely confused me. My friend’s number was only 4 digits long which shows just how long he had been in the scene.)  After playing a few local tournaments and getting my butt handed to be by excellent players I started to learn quite a bit. I wasn’t making the same mistakes twice and my sealed deck building was improving albeit slowly.

One day my friend asked me to come help him playtest some decks for a tournament that he was interested in going to. I asked “what do you mean playtest?” Again…there are so many dangerous questions I asked back then that I had no idea the significance of! He explained to me that it was common for people to mock up decks, especially ones with expensive cards, in order to test them out against each other. Often times the match ups would be played over and over to understand win percentages and value of adding or subtracting cards. This seemed like a really fun idea to me as it meant I would play lots of games of magic with decks that I had never thought to, or could afford, to build.

That’s when he busted out Tolarian Academy.

For those that don’t know this degenerate competitive deck, that forced restrictions and bans, used cards such as: Tolarian Academy, Windfall, Mind Over Matter, Lotus Petal, Stroke of Genius,

and many other nasty blue cards to create a combo capable of going off on turn one. The problem was…it was the longest most cerebral turn ever. At one point I went and took a power nap on the couch in the dorm’s common area while he worked through it. Needless to say that I wasn’t having a ton of fun but the delivery we got tasted great.

I mostly did casual magic and limited through the next block (Mercadian Masques) which I didn’t find to be all that great but the people were good and I was learning more and more.

Invasion Block

A big turning point for me was probably Invasion Block. The cards in this set really appealed to me and it sucked me in further than I thought I ever would be. The power level, color interaction, and themes present made for some of the most exciting limited play I had done to date. I liked being able to play 5 color green in limited, or bust out some rather deadly three color guild deck that had tricks up every sleeve. For some reason G/B/R or U/B/W appealed to me but I was certainly not limited to them.

Invasion/Masques standard was the first format I started playing constructed. I cobbled together a mediocre rebels deck while my friend played the dominant deck of the format Fires of Yavimaya. Fires was your iconic R/G beatdown deck that had three all-star cards in it: Blastoderm Blastoderm, Fires of Yavimaya, and Saproling Burst’.

Saproling Burst was particularly mean because on the turn it was played, with Fires present, represented 12 points of creature power with haste. The deck was about as straightforward as you can get but it was deadly.

A favorite moment of the Masques/Invasion tournaments was my friend playing Fires against a Mono-blue deck with creature counters, control, and bounce, and it killed by way of  Ankh of Mishra and Parallax Tide. Fires won game one and he strung out game two to make sure that the blue player had no win condition other than Ankh and Tide but still lost. He knew with the sideboard present there wasn’t any way Fires was going to win this matchup against the rogue deck. So what does he do? He mulligans down to zero cards in hand, says go, and never drops a land. Not one. His opponent was livid and crying over to the judge. He couldn’t win and would certainly be decked eventually as he took a full hand to start. Game, set, and match.

One of the first times I experienced the rock paper scissors aspect of magic was playtesting with him at the tail end of this standard rotation. There was a rumbling through the circuit that people were playing a blue/white control deck using Blinding Angel and Mageta the Lion to create a lockdown control deck. I mocked up the deck, shuffled it and went at him in duels. I won every, single, game. It wasn’t even close. He was a better player than I was and I had NO familiarity with the deck what so ever. It was almost as if the deck played itself. Eerie as it was it just kept spitting up cards to counter everything he did and rarely did it break a sweat. We then modified his sideboard to deal with this deck because any match-up with an auto loss game 1 needed some attention and fast.

Invasion onward

I continued to play casually while at college but I couldn’t go over to YMG as often as I’d like. The people there were still awesome and I continued to have a great time and got in quite a few memorable games. One of my worst limited losses ever was to one Darwin Kastle who proceeded to drop Sapphire Leech  turn two and Sleeper’s Robe  turn three. I never recovered from the card advantage despite throwing up a flier as he poured out a perfect creature curve. After Invasion, Odyssey block came and went for me with little fanfare. Classes were tough and time limited.

Regionals!

When Onslaught block came out I found myself back in the thick of it. We were playing a lot more and I was loving the flavor and of the set. I was so excited that I played in my first Regionals tournament.

A quick moment of clarification: On top of the tournaments that are held for players to gain access to the Pro Tour circuit and local games, there are public tournaments that are held to funnel players into their country’s world teams. These are Regionals, Nationals, and ultimately Worlds.

I had fallen in love with Astral Slide  and Lightning Rift . These cards played on my familiarity with the old Urza Block cycling ability which I enjoyed. The deck was fairly straight forward and the decklist was basically a giant list of mostly 4 ofs…many that were affordable for me which was important. I’m pretty sure my list was something like:

4 Lay Waste
4 Wrath of God
4 Exalted Angel
3 Slice and Dice
4 Astral Slide
4 Renewed Faith
3 Teroh’s Faithful
4 Lightning Rift
3 Starstorm
4 Secluded Steppe
4 Forgotten Cave
9 Mountain
10 Plains

The deck absolutely destroyed creatures. It killed em and it killed them good. The problem was that this deck was in a format with three other very strong control decks: Psychatog, Mirari’s Wake, and Mono Black Control. All of these posed a significant threat if their defenses get built up.

What I did, and I was proud of it at the time (though I discovered later I was far from the only one) was create a unique transitional sideboard that combatted those decks specifically. It was:

2 Boil  3 Earth Rift   4 Pillage  4 Stone Rain  2 Wild Fire

This gave me 19 land destruction spells when you add in the 4 main deck Lay Waste (cycle fodder) which brought control decks to their knees if they didn’t have a strong counter spell heavy opening hand. I piloted this deck through 11 grueling rounds (over 11 hours for reference) and ended up in the top 32 which made me quite happy. My friend who was running Black/Green oversold cemetery ended up making top 8 and Nationals.

As the Onslaught block unfolded and we gained access to Eternal Dragon  and Decree of Justice  the deck went from obscure to very popular in a fairly short period of time. I kept on playing it at local tournaments but when the next regionals rolled around with Mirrodin in the mix I opted for something different.

* Tooth and Nail *

I have a long standing love for this card for some odd reason. I liked the tool box nature of it and what it can do when resolved. For 9 mana though it should be pretty amazing though right? The deck was bounced around from pro to pro each taking their own spin on it when writing up articles. The core of the deck revolved around using land fetching spells that could get you anything you wanted Sylvan Scrying  and Reap and Sow to put together the Urza Lands. Once you did this you would cast absurdly powerful spells such as Mindslaver, Oblivion Stone , and Fireball as well as the titular spell of the deck.  I loved the simplicity of the deck though: Cast Tooth and Nail, place two Darksteel Colossus  in play or one of your many toolbox creatures that live in your deck or sideboard, Profit! While I did rather well with the deck, and loved every minute of it, I never top 8’d anything. The biggest problem that existed at the time was Skull Clamp . A degenerate card that shaped the metagame and I was stubborn in not making a deck that used it while it was legal.

After Kamigawa was released I opted to play a rogue deck in the next regionals because at the time I didn’t want to just net deck. There were so many interesting deck options at the time so I felt like it was as good a time as any other to try. The deck I was obsessed at running was a variation on a theme originally created by Chad Ellis over at Your Move Games. We were talking about doing goofy and ultimately crazy things using Auriok Salvagers to generate a control deck. Now if you flash forward to today everyone knows how good that card is with Lion’s Eye Diamond and Black Lotus earning itself a spot in a handful of notable combo decks. At the time though it was less powerful but just as fun. Pairing him up with Trinket Mage

The Spellbombs Aether Necrogen Pyrite Sunbeam and Engineered Explosives  . The fun kick in the pants combo that the deck could sneak in very easily was flipping Erayo . The deck basically worked on the backbone of Auriok Salvagers using countermagic, sensei’s divining top, hand destruction, and board sweeping to stay afloat. I came up shy of the top 8 but I ended up faring very well with it

Non-major tournaments

While I have cited some of my more enjoyable tournament decks I was also frequenting FNM at YMG as well as the occasional PTQ and GP. I was trying to earn my chops or at least have fun trying. What I liked about FNM though was that I could pilot odd creations and rogue decks just for the ever loving heck of it!

My favorite rogue deck that I played was, and you’ll probably laugh, the Beacon of Immortality   False Cure  deck. The deck was one of the most basic things you’d ever imagine. It’s goal was to drop Wayfarer’s Bauble turn one in the hopes of ramping to Solemn Similacrum and Wrath of God or Akroma’s Vengeance if creatures were the problem, or Duress and Persecute if they weren’t. As soon as I hit 8 mana the two card combo would straight up kill them regardless of life total. Yes it was bad, and yes it was janky, but the sheer rogue-ishness of the deck allowed me to win the first FNM I played it at.

I dabbled in Mirrodin Block constructed playing both Affinity and Red/Green artifact hating stompy. Both of which were fun but I didn’t get enough experience with the format to excel.

Drafting!

I was around the Mirrodin block going into Kamigawa block that I really came into my own drafting (though I did draft Onslaught quite a bit). While I’m sure I’ve lost all my skill at it, I thoroughly enjoyed getting my hands dirty playing at Your Move Games. Yup I was still going there though the crowd had shifted somewhat. Rob, Chad, and Darwin still came by and I got to play test Darwin’s games a few times but my interactions were more with the other folks. There were a lot of people there that shaped my further game development, one of which is the now well-known Jackie Lee.

I was less interested in the main draft event. I much preferred the independent team drafts that started towards the tail end of the Thursday evening and went into the wee hours of the morning (1 to 4 AM). As you can probably gather I was between jobs and working odds and ends stuff at the time. The team drafts were usually 2 on 2 or 3 on 3 events where the strategy was obviously quite different. Everyone at the table was not your enemy and you had to be aware that the one opponent next to you that you have been feeding all the good cards to has to play every one of your teammates. The winning team took home all the cards so it was also, in some way, like gambling but much, much, more fun. I think I can safely say that I won games much more often than I lost them and my card collection benefited greatly.

This drafting went all the way through Kamigawa block and Ravnica block with the culmination of it, and most fun I’ve had, occurring in Ravnica. While I am sad that I don’t play with them (though I have been meaning to try to sneak over and draft with people in Cambridge sometime) I’ll always remember the times I had there and the wealth of knowledge present. Now people there at the time weren’t all well-known but I can at least say that I got my share of wins…and losses…against Jackie Lee and a few other major players who I’ve come to respect greatly. We were all just kids messing around back then though. A different time for sure.

Since then

Not long after that I started work at my current company and I have been with them since. Time constraints, and ultimately world of warcraft, prevented me from partaking in magic more since then. In fact I think I can safely say that raiding is what killed my time with Magic: the gathering. Without anything to keep me current I drifted farther and farther away from the game and almost lost touch with it entirely. Then something crazy happened.

My childhood friends all came back together and said that they missed playing Magic. We saw it as an opportunity to all spend time together just the guys and socialize all while playing a game that we love. In that sense it was one of the best things that ever happened. Sure I had traded in my competitive one on one edge for a more multiplayer one but it has provided us so much entertainment it was worth it. The hardest thing though was getting my multiplayer deck building chops back up. I started reading The Ferret’s Serious Fun articles on Magicthegathering.com and expanding my horizons. I’ll have more to come in my post about multiplayer and the decks I roll with in my next post!

The numbers:

Spirit Regen:

Let us assume we have a modestly geared raiding druid who currently has 14,750 intellect (with HotW) and 9,000 spirit baseline. There are other factors that will increase regeneration and we will add those in in a moment.

Spirit regeneration = (.001+Spirit*(sqrt(Int))*Base_Regen)*5

Using some known character sheets and crunching some basic math I’ve come up with a value of .00374 for Base_Regen which means this druid’s spirit based regeneration is 20,440 mp/5. With the 50% in combat tax we get 10,220 mp/5. Given that we only really care about in combat regen we can apply the 50% penalty to the Base_Regen value reducing it to .000187

With the addition of mark of the wild and spirit flask/food (which are taboo to some I know) the druids stats change gaining 700 intellect and 1250 spirit. He now has 15,450 intellect and 10,250 spirit. These changes change our regeneration to 11,912 mp/5.

There is of course more spirit based regeneration to take into account. Let us assume this druid is using the Darkmoon Faire trinket and Shado-Pan Valor Point rep trinket. I’m going to, at least for now, set the Relic of Chi Ji at 1,250 average spirit, and the Scroll of Revered Ancestors at 899 average spirit. This 2,149 additional spirit for this druid when raid buffed yields 2,497 mp/5.

The last thing I’d like to add is mana tide totem. Not everyone has the benefit of having one of these available should you raid in a 10 man but it is worthwhile noting what it grants you. Let’s assume that the shaman has 10,000 spirit (I know it is probably low) spirit raid buffed when activating the totem. This grants you 20,000 spirit for 16 seconds every three minutes. With a 9% uptime this gives you an average spirit bonus of 1,800 or 2,091 mp/5.

Additional class/common sources of regen:

Innervate is our class’ primary source of mana regeneration outside of spirit. For right now there are two scenarios I will entertain. I am going to assume a fight that lasts roughly 7 to 7.5 minutes during which there is at least a short period of ramp-up in the beginning. During this fight if it is less taxing you will more than likely use two innervates. If the fight is heroic and it hits the ground running you might use 3 (30 second mark, 3:30 mark, and 6:30 mark). Let’s opt for two innervates for the moment and we could always average it up to 2.5 if you so desire. Two innervates yield 120,000 mana. Divide this out over a 7 minute encounter and you have 1,429 mp/5.

Mana potions are not terribly significant but they are generally useful as they can offer you some mana in a lump sum at a key point between innervates if stuff is going wrong. I don’t remember the exact amount but if you are using the channeling potion that returns 40,000 or so mana back you’ll be giving yourself another 476 mp/5.

I am not including the priest hymn or Omen of Clarity because I don’t have the exact math to back it up. Given that Omen casts, while mana saving, are free they don’t really factor into fight longevity anyways. They are still, of course, awesome.

Total:

What we are left with us the following: 11,912 + 2,497 + 2,091 + 1,427 + 476 = 18,403 mp/5

Constant Spells

There are certain spells that you are going to cast whether you like it or not. These spells are: Lifebloom, Wild Growth, and Swiftmend. These spells are good enough and potent enough that they will be used on cooldown and must be utilized to their fullest over the length of an encounter. As such you can almost think of them as constant sources of mana drain. Whatever is left over after that is fair game for…well the one other bread and butter spell we have really. Yes Tree of Life changes the math entirely but as that is technically an option I’m going to forgo the math on that at least for now.

Lifebloom will be recast approximately 3 times every minute. I am assuming there will be some amount of target swapping. This produces a negative 885 mp/5 drain on your mana.

Swiftmend will be cast approximately 4 times every minute. I am assuming aggressive use of this spell as it provides significant benefit to multiple targets or it can provide supplemental healing to your tank as required. This equates to a negative 1,700 mp/5 drain on your mana.

Wild Growth is generally good enough to be cast on cooldown however I know that not all fights require it to be cast ALL the time especially right off the bat. White you can technically cast the spell 6 times per minute let us assume that based on fight mechanics it only averages out to 5 (though it might be lower if the fight is less AoE taxing). At 5 casts per minute this equates to a negative 5,725 mp/5 drain on your mana.

If you think about your mana as a budget then these abilities constitute your rent, insurance, student loans, food etc. They add up to a total of 8,310 mp/5 drain.

What’s left

If our napkin math is holding up we can figure out roughly what we have remaining. Our regen provided us with 18,403 mp/5 and we remove 8,310 mp/5 from it leaving us with 10,093 mp/5. Our simulation here is extremely crude mind you but we can approximate, using this, just how much we have to spend on rejuvenation and regrowth as required.

Assuming the 7 minute encounter that I hypothesized above, this regen provides you with 847,812 mana in addition to your base 300,000 mana for a total of 1,147,810 mana.

Every non-clearcast regrowth consumes 17,820 mana or 1.55% of your complete remaining mana supply, every rejuvenation consumes .9% of your compete remaining mana supply, and every tranquility consumes 1.4% of your remaining mana supply.

An example of what you *might* end up using is:

2x Tranquility = 2.8%

15x Regrowth = 23.25%

80x Rejuvenation = 72%

Leaving you ~2% mana for wiggle room and casting additional spells as needed

I do understand that regrowth usage is entirely subjective and is fight dependent. You might find yourself using way more of it depending on burst requirements for both tank and raid members.

Character Growth

As the player develops his gear he or she will acquire additional intellect and spirit on their pieces in approximately a 1:2 ratio purely by way of item level. He or she may also opt for sidegrades (or gem) that grant additional spirit at the expense of other secondary stats and maintain a constant intellect level. The amount of mp/5 required to gain 1 additional rejuvenation over the course of the 7 minute battle is 114 mp/5. To achieve this they must add either 98 spirit, or 85 spirit and 42 intellect.

Note: As the fight gets longer than 7 minutes the above complete mana pool numbers will shift significantly however the amount of spirit needed to add rejuvenations also drops (though each rejuvenation added is a smaller % of your overall healing done). If the fight lasts for say, 10 minutes, then the amount of regen needed to add one more rejuvenation becomes 80 mp/5. This means only 70 spirit (or 60 spirit and 30 intellect) is required to grant you an additional cast.