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So I've been playing around with my talent points a bit.
There are always talents that are no brainers: Living Spirit, Swiftmend, Gift of Nature, Nature's Swiftness, etc. But what about those few different 3 point talents in our resto (and balance) tree that require some picking and choosing? The ones that you *could* take, but oh - wait - then again, I could take this one over here! Or - what if I put 2 points in there, take one point from that over there, and then stack the other three here?
Hm.
Of all the talents in our trees, these are the ones that I find to be "opt in" or "extra" talents. Essentially, you put all your mandatory points where you need them, and then look at the points you've got left and think, "Hm, which should I take?" Keep in mind that I'm not even considering any Healing Touch talents here - this is strictly from the basis of a standard talent spec, focusing on improved hots.
Natural Perfection
Living Seed
Nature's Grace (balance tree)
Revitalize
Natural Perfection: is a nice little crit booster. We've got Nature's Bounty in the resto tree, and Nature's Majesty in the balance tree, both of which will boost Regrowth and Nourish, and Natural Perfection will increase this as well. If you accidentally pull aggro or an add comes after you, there's also a chance you'll take reduced damage, which goes nicely with Barkskin. This mechanic is also *really* handy in arenas and battlegrounds.
Should you take Natural Perfection? Yes, if you're planning on taking Living Seed or Nature's Grace (more on them later) - both of them rely on crit to proc, so pairing them up with NP is a great idea - AND if you use a lot of direct heals, like Regrowth and Nourish. If you're more of a hots-heavy healer, then this probably isn't worth the three points.
Living Seed: As was just mentioned, this talent relies on crit, which goes really well with Natural Perfection. The more crit you have, the more times Living Seed will proc. Now, how much does Living Seed actually heal for? Just for a benchmark here: in the past five raids, Living Seed has consistently accounted for 3% of my healing. That's a nice chunk of passive healing there! Let's look at it from a different angle: Let's say you hit your main tank with a Nourish crit for 10,000. This plants a 3k Living Seed on her. The next melee swing that hits her lands for 8,000. 3k of that is instantly healed up. Note that Living Seed is reactionary - it doesn't *mitigate* the damage You also know that it will rarely be a wasted overheal - it only "blooms" when the target takes damage, so it's a very efficient mechanic. Should you take Living Seed? I think it's a great choice if you use a lot of direct healing spells. I know that I use Nourish a lot on the tank AND the raid, so regardless of my role on any given fight, Living Seed is proccing quite a lot. It's a bit of an extra cushion, which is very helpful on intense fights.
Nature's Grace: I always poo-pooed Nature's Grace, because of it's 3 second limitation. "When it procs, it's only active for three seconds? Pfft. Lame! That's like, one spell!" Well, actually, it's like two spells. And get this: Nature's Grace is amazing. Take this situation:
1. You Rejuv everyone you can in anticipation of raid damage.
2. Massive raid damage comes in.
3. You WG the melee.
4. You start to spam Nourish on everyone you can, which is buffed from all of your hots.
5. Nature's Grace procs, giving you a one second Nourish (or close to it).
6. Your second Nourish crits again.
7. Your fourth Nourish crits.
8. Nature's Grace continues to be "chained" by crits, giving you a continuous stream of ridiculously quick heals.
Of course this chain isn't guaranteed to continue - there's going to be a time where you don't crit for a while, and the haste proc will drop off. But I've found that it procs quite often, and is really, really helpful (for reference, I've got 17.18% crit unbuffed).
So should you take Nature's Grace? Or, rather - when should you NOT take Nature's Grace? I don't think you should take it if you already have a lot of haste - I'm taking 400 or 450+ here. Also, keep in mind your raid composition. There are certain classes and specs that will give you increased haste. Do you have a Boomkin who consistantly raids with you? Improved Moonkin Aura will help your haste. How bout a ret paladin? They'll have the talent Swift Retribution. Also, shaman can put down a Wrath of Air totem - and then add Heroism or Bloodlust in there, and bam, you've got like instant cast Nourishes (I kid. No, you won't have insta-cast Nourishes. But yes, you will be casting really quickly). However, remember that even if you can get your Nourishes down to like, 0.7 second casts, you still have the 1 sec. global cooldown hard line to wait out.
But if you don't have a buttload of haste, and you don't have a moonkin or shaman who raids regularly with you, then yes, take Nature's Grace! As a reference point, I've got 363 haste, and we DO have a boomkin who raids with us, and shaman as well, and I still have Nature's Grace and love it. The only time my Nourish breaks under the 1 sec cast time mark is if heroism is up - and even that's fine, because I can rock out Regrowth and not have it clip the GCD (assuming I have enough mana to spam Regrowth).
My point is, I love Nature's Grace. I have saved *many* a raider with it. Try it out, see if you like it. I think you will.
Revitalize: This is an overall 'help the raid' type ability. It used to only work with Rejuv, but now it works with Rejuv AND Wild Growth. This is nice, because it spreads out it's proc rate over many people at once. Got a rogue spamming button number 4 to get off a a Mutilate? Revitalize procs, and they'll be able to hit that 0.8 seconds sooner than usual. Got a caster DPSer with a 20k mana pool desperately wanding until they regen more mana? Revitalize gives them an instant 200 mana.
So. Is it worth it? Should you take it? For an extremely in-depth analysis of Revitalize, check out Kae's post from Dreambound here. She put a lot of work into it, and it's a really amazing read. Basically, it turns out that yes, it is pretty useful if you use a lot of Rejuvs and WGs. It can proc off of each individual tick. It will even proc on people who have hots ticking on them but are at full health - there doesn't need to be actual healing done for it to go off. Kae mentions in her article that her husband (a DK) will even ask for a rejuv before a pull goes live, simply for the chance to get some runic power. Neat stuff!
After all is said and done, I've decided on Natural Perfection, Nature's Grace, and Living Seed. However, I think that Revitalize should be taken into consideration as well. If you have multiple resto druids in the raid, it would be nice for at least one of them to take Revitalize for it's resource regening ability. What talents do you all have?
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Monday, June 8, 2009
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10 remarks:
I find myself prioritizing Living Seed. The talent essentially adds 33% healing to crits (so from 150% to 200%), except it does it in a way such that the extra healing is more likely to be effective. Getting a 15k swiftmend followed by a 5k living seed puts a big grin on my face--and all for the low low cost of 513 mana. I think virtually all trees should have 3/3 in this talent.
Revitalize has undergone a lot of tweaks, which has seen it go from worthless to golden to worthless to pretty good. Apparently recently it's been triggering at 15% on each tick of each WG effect (instead of the 3% it was running at previous) which makes the mana and energy returns pretty significant. The additional benefit from rejuvenation is gravy, as well.
I think it's pretty good at the moment, and I have 3/3 in it, and would recommend running it.
NG is more of an iffy choice. The 3.1 changes to this talent made it weaker for resto, as we can't "sit" on a charge for up to 15 seconds anymore--we get a 3 second window to put out 1-3 casted spells with extra haste, that's all. The haste is nice, but we aren't necessarily chaining nourishes or regrowths when it triggers, and most of our spells are already haste-capped through Gift of the Earthmother.
It's a sure bet for any tank healing, but definitely a bit lame for raid healing, so it depends on what role your raid has you playing.
I view Natures Perfection as more of a PvP talent, and mostly a waste of points in a PvE build. I came to this conclusion after looking at healing distributions on various fights--the vast majority of my healing (80%+) comes from sources that are incapable of critting. If each point in this talent is adding 100% (50% + living seed) to 20% of my heals 1% of the time is only a 0.2% increase :( I run 0/3 in this for PvE.
With my current build -- 3 Revit, 3 Seed, 3 NG -- I had 1 spare point. I actually sat on this spare point for about a week debating where to put it--Tranquil Spirit, or NP? I actually ended up putting it in improved barkskin, because there is a LOT of predictable raid damage in Ulduar, so raising my mitigation to 25% is a real benefit; if I barkskin through 20k damage in a single fight, I've "healed" an extra 1k damage through prevention. But, more importantly, when the raid is taking tons of damage, I have the health buffer to focus on critical players rather than be at critical health myself.
-Jurik
You'd NEVER guess it, but I have revitalize 3/3. ;)
Hubby-DK was demanding rejuvs repeatedly last night... he doesn't tank much, but when he does, he always wants a leg up on threat at the start! He was sitting there with the rejuv, talking to himself (half to me) while the others finished eating the fish feast, "come on... proc... YES!.... okay, proc again, more power! ... aww it's not gonna proc again... oh there it goes, whoot!" One rejuv procced revitalize on him 4 times before a boss pull last night (we were working on Sarth3D), it was glorious!
Aside that, I take NG and Living Seed; I don't pvp enough anymore to make Natural Perfection worth the points. I also take 2/2 imp HT, just cuz I like the nice big NS+HT numbers... heh.
Interesting - I always figured that if you were taking Nature's Grace and Living Seed, you practically had to have Natural Perfection for the extra crit. But I suppose that 3% crit is kind of a drop in the bucket compared to 25% crit to Regrowth and Nourish from Nature's Bounty. Although, every little bit you can get helps. The damage mitigating factor of the talent does scream PVP! but I think the crit can still be really useful in PvE.
Here are my opinions on the talents listed:
1. Revitalize - The best part about this talent is that it gets better the more druids you have in your group with it. We run with two restos usually and on most fights that means between 3.5->6k mana back for mana users. The non-mana guys like it too.
2. Living Seed - Pretty nice buffer when you use nourish/regrowth on the tanks or are trying out a glyph healing touch build (like me atm) on the raid.
3. Natural Perfection - as others have said for PvE its a pretty high talent cost for a very small gain.
4. Nature's Grace - Looking at my logs, this buff gets wasted most of the time. Only time it rocks is when we need to slam heal a single target.
As I mentioned above you may want to check out how a Glyphed HT build works with your healing style as well. Its basically a crazy fast GCD clipping spell that is on par with a Glyphed Nourish+1 HoT. Its major use is a non-cooldown super quick raid heal.
I have two healing specs, so it makes my choices easier to make.
I have a Raid Healing Spec: This has 3/3 revitalize (and 2/2 imp. tranq.) No NG, NP, or LS. I'm don't cast direct heals much (although Swiftmend would be helped by NP and LS. I like to be able to liberally use Tranq. and when I'm healing so many people I figure revitalize is bound to help someone.
Then I have a Tank Healing Spec: I love this spec. I also call this my OMGI'MAPALLYFLASHNOURISH Spec. In this spec I have 3/3 NG and 3/3 LS. Right now I have 1/3 Celestial Focus b/c I need the extra 1% haste to push nourish down to a 1sec cast with only a boomkin and wrath of air and 2/3 NP. Once I have enough haste to pull the point from CF I will.
I think NG, LS, and NP are deffinates if you spam nourish or regrowth a lot - whether you do it for tank healing or on top of WG's for raid healing. But if someone isn't using spells that crit that much, their raid may get more out of revitalize.
personally, from a dps standpoint, I like the sound of revitalize. hey, more free mana for me, I likies :)
in a raid situation, the damage reduction of NP is not a factor. NPCs and mobs can't crit with spells, and if you're getting whacked by their melee you're probably gonna die rather fast anyways.
I take living seed & nature's grace. I skip revitalize (the math on it just doesn't come out in it's favor the majority of times) & natural perfection (why take more crit if you are skipping living seed or nature's grace to get it? Our spells crit enough that I consider this too much of a PvP talent).
Just ball-parking here, but, I'm opting for throughput at the moment.
I don't have Revitalize, nor NP.
With the raid-setups lately, I was forced more into "pumping the numbers" so to speak, than creating a "bed of HoT-ness" for the other healers. :P
I went on a limb and took Celestial Focus, based on something a fellow druid had read on a weblog...
With GoE and NG "active", this build puts my nourish at 0.9s with totems and/or aura's, and the GCD at little over 1.0s (1.0s ofc for spells that are affected with GoE!) with less than 200 haste on gear and without the egg-trinket.
Because my gemming is pretty much focussed on regen (gems with Int or Spirit, and the 21int-meta), so far it really feels like a solid build.
Still getting wtfbbqroflpwned by shamans though... But that's just on Kologarn ^^
In my latest spec, I opted for both Revitalize and Nature's Grace.
I'm toying with Nature's Grace to see if I like it or not, as I've often not put points into it in my raiding spec. I have often opted out of this and put points into Natural Perfection instead. I am still a bit undecided on where I favor these 3 points.
However, I do think that the math for revitalize is fairly strong.
In addition to Kae's post on it and my experience with the talent, there are some really strong arguments and numbers up in the Druid forum over on EJ (in the Resto PvE Healing thread, I believe) that show just how strong that talent really is proving itself in Ulduar, and even moreso as you get to the hard modes.
I think that if everyone looked through their raiding parses to see how revitalize effected your raid throughout the night, it would prove to be a worthwhile talent to toss some points into.
But, that is just my 2 cents =)
Nature's Grace is actually on for 3 spells, since Nourish is generally <1.5s cast and you get the benefit even if NG expires while casting. So with a 50% proc rate you have a 50%*50%*50% chance of it falling off (0.5^3 = 12.5%) or 87.5% chance of keeping it up. Pretty nice.
In practical terms I do find it less useful than the previous iteration though. It's never up when you need it, and Nourish spam is inevitably interrupted with HOT refreshes. I still take it, with LS for the record.
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