Friday, March 20, 2009

T8 Ulduar Druid Relics

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I stumbled across this while perusing The Daily Druid:

"Druid T8 Restoration Relic — Increases the spell power of your Nourish by 187"

How much will this actually increase our Nourish's healing? To figure it out, we need to look at the spell power coefficient for the particular spell, which is 66.1% (source)

According to the tooltip, Nourish hits for 1883 - 2187 (with no spellpower). Let's say you have 2400 spellpower in a buffed raid. 66.1% of that spellpower is 1586.4. So your Nourish will *actually* hit for 3469 - 3773.

If you have this relic, it'll increase the bonus healing of your Nourish by 187 - meaning that for this one particular spell, your spell power is NOT 2400 - it's 2587.

66.1% of this new number, 2587, is 1710.

So instead of your Nourish landing for 3469 - 3773, it'll land for 3593 - 3897.

Meh.

The only nice thing about this is that Nourish is getting a crit buff through our talents, if you take Nature's Bounty. So you might actually notice a decent increase in spellpower with the relic if you have those talent points. The 20% extra with a HoT helps as well.

Overall, it just seems kind of mediocre to me. It seems like they're really pushing Nourish here, when all we really wanna rock is HoTs.

What are some other relic mechanics they could have used? This is what I've come up with - and why they would work, or not work.

1. Decrease the cast time of Regrowth by .1 seconds.
This would be nice, but would help turn Regrowth into a heal that's comparable to Nourish, only *much* more powerful. Especially for those people who have a lot of haste - they would get this relic and only use Regrowth rather than Nourish.

2. Increase the spellpower of the Lifebloom tick by some smallish number.
This is exactly what Blizzard is trying to lean away from - making LB a overpowered per second heal. I don't see this happening any time soon.

3. Reduce the mana cost of Nourish by some number.
I actually like this one. I personally would like our relic to have some kind of mana conservation aspect to it, especially with all the mana regen nerfs going on. Lowering the cost of Nourish would essentially make it similar to what the T8 relic is now (in terms of the 'mana cost/amount the heal hits for' ratio), but for some reason I like this one better.

Any suggestions from you guys?

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6 remarks:

Maraetha said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Maraetha said...

I'm not a Druid so I can't really say what's a good idea or not.
I think druids are already pretty good with their hots (the 2 in my guild are amazing). But ofcourse some improvement can't hurt, maby they want it a bit more balanced by adding a direct heal? I wouldn't know...
I'd say with the mananerf they maby get an ability:
"30% chance that your nourish spell gives your next spellcast half the manacost"?
Or like the priests
"50% of your critical heals have a chance to give a free flash heal"
(Nourish for the druids then...) But I know the regrowth of you guys crit like crazy so that would be a bit OP :P
That if they really want druids to use Nourish...

-Deleted comment above due spelling. Sorry!-

Unknown said...

Well i was thinking that relics only improved base abilities of our class but seeing that there will soon be a Relic of Mangle and Insect swarm which are skills you need to spec for, Id like something along the lines of A relic for wild growth that reduces its cooldown or gives gives a bigger initial tic when it starts. I dunno. Or chance on swift mend to increase spirit by 150.

Author said...

Glyph of "We made a mistake with your Lifebloom" Reduces the mana cost of LB by 50% :-D

Averna said...

@Jack: I like that swiftmend -> chance to increase spirit thing.

@Sneakyfox: Lollllll

Anonymous said...

I've already ranted all over my blog about how I hate the entire relic system. They don't have interesting bonuses anymore. It's always just increasing stats in a way that isn't fun, interesting, OR helpful. Just throwing +spell power to all spells on a relic would do more for us than +spell power to any one spell alone.

I may be sticking with the rejuv idol, just to help with mana issues, since rejuv is part of both my raid healing and tank healing strategies. It's not ideal, but the whole relic system is broken.