Being Hasty – Patch 3.3, Haste, and T10
For a while now I’ve been trying to synthesize and kind of digest all the information coming out in relation to haste, the changes to GotEM in patch 3.3 notes, and just recently the new resto druid T10 stats. I’ve been attempting to make all these things make sense to me especially in relation to how this will affect my raid healing style or “rotation.”
I feel that currently I’m a huge fan of crit rating. This is mostly because I’ve been running with 4-piece T9 (allows rejuv tick to crit) and because we normally have a moonkin and an elemental shaman in the raid, meaning that my soft haste cap is 359. So as soon as I reached 359 haste, I started looking for gear with crit rather than haste. Unforunately for me, things are changing soon…
Patch 3.3
- Gift of the Earthmother: Redesigned. This talent now increases spell haste by 2/4/6/8/10% and reduces the base global cooldown of Lifebloom by 2/4/6/8/10% instead of its previous effects.
The current talent reads: reduces the base global cooldown of your Rejuvenation, Lifebloom and Wild Growth spells by 4/8/12/16/20%.
A lot has already been written regarding these changes, so I’m going to link a few websites just to try and give a more broad view.
Okay, so thankfully someone better at WoW math than me, Cuddlekin over at the EJ forums, has posted up some absolutely beautiful numbers. So…..dum da dum…Fireworks!
Soft Haste Cap:
- 735 haste rating with 3/3 Celestial Focus, Wrath of Air Totem, and Moonkin Aura/Swift Retribution Aura
- 856 haste rating with 3/3 Celestial Focus and Wrath of Air Totem only
- 856 haste rating with Wrath of Air Totem and Moonkin Aura/Swift Retribution Aura, no points in Celestial Focus
- 936 haste rating with 3/3 Celestial Focus and Moonkin Aura/Swift Retribution Aura only
- 1063 haste rating with 3/3 Celestial Focus only, no outside buffs
My reaction….eeeeeeek, that’s a lot of haste! Especially since I think I’m only sitting at about 500 haste right now. As you can see from the above numbers, Celestial Focus will be a very valuable talent, almost necessary depending on the kinds of raids you run (10s vs. 25s) and your group composition.
For me personally, I run mostly 25-man raids and we always take into consideration group composition. This means that I know there will always be an elemental shaman and a retribution paladin in our raid. Hence, if I pick up the Celestial Focus talents, I will only have to bump up my haste to 756. However, I know there are a great number of resto druids that mostly run 10 mans or even just heroics. I would definitely recommend those druids pick up the talents in Celestial Focus because I find it very hard to believe that many people will have access to gear that can grant them over 900 haste rating. In addition, Lissanna of Restokin makes a superb point when she states “keep in mind that the difference between a 1 second cooldown and a 1.1 second cooldown isn’t that much for people who are just healing 5-mans or are starting to get into raiding, so hitting this cap isn’t super important (or even possible) unless you are at the point where you have access to the ToC and Icecrown Citadel raid gear you need to hit that cap in the first place.”
Ok, now that I’ve outlined the haste changes a bit and what it means for resto druid haste requirements, I think that it would also be worthwhile to take a look at some of the gear available and come up with some possible talent specs. So here we go.
Haste Gear! – Rolling HoTs has a great list put together already
I had a little fun at this new website I came across today, www.chardev.org. I decided to test it out and was basically trying to tweak my gear/gems to see how much haste I could come up with. It’s much easier than doing math imo 🙂 I wanted to see how much haste I could amass with my current gear and the possible upgrades that I have access to while raiding. If you click on character planner up at the top option bar, the website let’s you pick out pieces of gear, gem them, enchant them, and calculates your total stats just like the game would if you had put the pieces on. So, I tried out my own gear plus a few pieces that I plan to hopefully upgrade in the near future. Here’s is the result.
My personal most-viable talent spec: 18/0/53. Now, a couple points about this spec: 1) I do not pick up revitalize, 2) mana is generally a non-issue so I do not put more than 1 point into tranquil spirit, 3) I do not put a point into nature’s swiftness – if I have to use that on a tank instead of a swiftmend, either I’m not doing my job or the holy paladins aren’t doing theirs, 4) I’ve decided to drop living seed – I’ve found the talent to still be rather lackluster and it amounts to a tiny percentage of my total healing, 5) I pop the last 2 points into natural perfection for the 2% crit, it at least gives a boost to my total crit. I can go more in-depth about talent specs, but I feel like talent specs are very personalized to what your specific raiding situation is. Each resto druid has certain priorities based upon what kind of raids they heal, how often they do so, their gear level, and what gear is available to them.
Tier 10: (Sanctified) Lashweaver Garb – thanks MMO-Champion
Eh, what can I say? Just….Blizzard…c’mon, you’re killing us. Please, if you’re going to make changes that require us to stack insane amounts of haste…..put it on our freaking tier gear! Needless to say…Blizzard does not follow the same intelligent logic that the rest of us do…. so our tier gear has 2/5 pieces with haste on them, the legs and gloves. That, and both set bonuses are less-than-impressive: (2) the healing granted by your wild growth spell reduces 30% less over time and (4) each time your rejuvenation spell heals a target, it has a 2% chance to jump to a new target at full duration.
Tree Haelz 
Have you ever considered adding more videos to your blog posts to keep the readers more entertained? I mean I just read through the entire article of yours and it was quite good but since I’m more of a visual learner
Haha, hmm videos. I don’t know about many videos, I unfortunately don’t run fraps for raids. My blog is more for informational purposes, I find I have a difficult time writing about personal things, or more traditional “blog-type” posts related to WoW. Perhaps I should put in more screenshots from raids or make drawings to keep people entertained 😛 Thanks for the feedback!
Fîrewood
Hey Firewood,
Don’t take that first comment too much to heart – it’s generated by a marketing bot. It’s been showing up exactly the same on other blogs around the internet. The ‘poster’ in this case is a website selling levelling guides.
Your site has awesome information, and that’s enough to keep me plenty ‘entertained’! It ain’t broke, so don’t fix it!
Cheers,
Kriyet
Thank you for your explanation. You may have said the same thing as others have, but you managed to put in in a perspective that I can understand.
@Tree
I think you misunderstand the reason behind stacking haste post-patch 3.3. The reason we are all stacking haste is to reach a 1 second Global cooldown (gcd), not to decrease our nourish cast time. Prior to patch 3.3, resto druids needed only 359 haste rating in order to reach a 1 second gcd as long as there was an elemental shaman and a boomkin/ret paladin in the raid group. Therefore, haste was not a big priority and we were free to stack spellpower and then critical strike rating if you happened to have 4pc T9. Now, you may be wondering why a 1 second gcd is such a big deal. Well think of it this way: for the most part we cast only instant HoTs, this means that we want to be able to cast HoTs as often as possible. The normal non-hasted gcd is 1.5 seconds. Therefore, being at the soft haste cap is the difference between being able to cast 60 HoTs versus 40 HoTs in 60 seconds. In our case, the more HoTs the better. The entire purpose of having instant cast HoTs is to be able to continually cast them without waiting on our global cooldown. We are definitely not being pushed into a paladin-style healing and nourish is probably 5th on my most-used healing spell.
As for your second comment on the tier pieces and their set bonuses: Hell yes I would love to keep my 4pc T9 and allow my rejuv ticks to crit. However, I believe that it is more important for me to reach a 1 sec gcd so I can keep casting my HoTs every second. Unfortunately, I did not have the gear necessary to retain my 4pc T9 and still reach 735 haste. Therefore, I had to sacrifice that tier bonus. Fortunately, I’ve decided that I like the glyph of rapid rejuvenation and have been using that as my third glyph. The other resto druid in my guild has luckily been able to retain his 4pc T9 but frankly, there are very few boss fights in which he has been outhealing me due to his ability to allow rejuv to crit (the one exception being Heroic Twin Valk’yr).
Fîrewood
Maybe I’m a newb or too old school, but i just dont understand the need or desire to stack haste over crit. My healing usually consists of HoT’s on the tanks and rejuv/WG on the raid. I use nourish infrequently, usually to top off or get a fast heal to a player. By my thought process, a druids strength is in HoTs and AOE heals. I feel that trees are being pushed into a palidin type box where we rely on hasted nourish as a primary heal, which is the complete opposite end of the spectrum from HoTs. I would appreciate some help in understand this trend. Also, am i the only one that thinks that giving up 4k+ rejuv ticks in favor of 30% less reduction in WG is a bad idea?
I see you broke up your t9 4pc in order to use both the 258 chest and the emblem helm. I am considering doing this.
Do you really think the 3 points are put to better use in Empowered Touch/Tranquil Spirit vs. being put in Revitalize or Living Seed?
Yes, I broke up my t9 4-piece. I’m not super happy about it but I ended up having to do it even if I gemmed spellpower/haste gems. I just haven’t been able to pick up a couple of choice pieces of gear that I would like in order to maintain my t9 4-piece set.
You make a wonderful point about talent spec. I’ve been doing some testing lately, and I really like Revitalize. However, I think I will use my dual spec for both resto/resto and make 2 separate healing builds 1) tank healing (I heard we might be doing some of this with the 3.3 patch, and 2) raid healing. So here are two links to my proposed healing specs 1. Tank Healing and 2. Raid Healing.
Man, I’m going to have to redo all my gear! Good responses and good links to other blogs. All that information really helps!
fire get online we’re running 10 mans!