June 23, 2009 – 1:43 am
Posted by: honriyallo
3.2 approaches! Sort of. The PTR itself isn’t up yet (at least, not as I write this), but nonetheless, 3.2 approaches on little cat feet.
I’m going to examine the 3.2 PTR patch notes line by relevant line, just because there are several changes that impact Druids while not being class-specific. If you want a quick summary without being massively spoiled, Balance is getting a huge and welcome change to the functionality of Eclipse, Cats are getting bonked by the nerfbat, and PvP-Restos are really getting bonked by the nerfbat. Bears, well…not much is going to happen to bears this patch, which is a little demoralizing given the improvements being made to Pally tanks, but that’s OK. We still have our, uh, amazing Tier 8 set bonuses and…um…the best — sort of — tanking cooldowns in, uh, the…uh…
…Oh, screw it, just stack the hell out of stamina and pray to the gods of RNG if your guild’s dumb enough to try Ulduar on hard-mode. Congratulations; you have now done all you can possibly do to prepare yourself for modern tanking.
Sad lolbare is sad. But cough syrup for everybody! Is nise! Now let’s take a look:
New druid art for cat and bear forms has been added. There are now five unique color schemes for each form and faction. Changing hair color (Night Elves) or skin tone (Tauren) via the barbershop will change the look of one’s cat and bear forms.
We’ve already covered this, but if you’ve been holed up in a cave somewhere since Wrath hit, you’ll find the new Tauren bear form here, the new Night Elf bear form here, the new Tauren cat form here, and the new Night Elf cat form here, with a Shifting Perspectives column devoted to the new art here.
Long story short, I will be permanently retiring the I hate Tauren cat form tag as of the release date for 3.2. I will do it with a song in my heart, a spring in my step, a gleam in my eye, and a carbonated malt beverage in my hand. Also, as soon as the 3.2 PTR goes live, I am going to try to make my first ingame video to show everyone what the new forms look like in motion, so stay tuned.
Mana Regeneration: All items that provide “X mana per five seconds” have had the amount of mana they regenerate increased by approximately 25%.
So something like Unraveling Strands of Sanity is going to go from 19 mp5 to around 24-25 mp5 if my math’s right. I’m not sure is whether this bonus also applies to trinkets with mp5 procs like Spark of Life, so I’ll schlep it along when the PTR goes up and see what happens.
While an mp5 bonus may sound like a great deal, it’s actually happening because of this –
Replenishment: This buff now grants 1% of the target’s maximum mana over 5 seconds instead of 0.25% per second. This applies to all 5 sources of Replenishment (Vampiric Touch, Judgments of the Wise, Hunting Party, Enduring Winter Frostbolts, and Soul Leech).
I was all set to go into the usual Righteous Indignation routine over this until I had a somewhat disturbing epiphany.
Longtime readers of Shifting Perspectives will know that 3.1 and my computer haven’t gotten along very well, so I haven’t seen much of Ulduar on the live realms. Recently I’ve edged back into raiding as much as my gasping hardware will allow, and I’ve been coming to raids as Resto in order to cover for the scheduling difficulties of our two usual tree druids. Now, while my Resto gear isn’t awful, it’s far from being exemplary, and I’m two months behind the gear progression of everyone else in the guild. Moreover, while I’ve healed all of the game’s existing raid content outside of Ulduar and consider myself to be a competent healer, I am no great virtuoso. An experienced Resto at my level of gear would trounce me on the healing meters with less overheal, better mana efficiency, and better healing output — and that’s exactly what both of our usual Resto Druids can do.
So I will say this concerning mana regeneration in raids; I popped into a hard-mode Iron Council in Ulduar-25, which is a truly unenjoyable healing experience wherein you will almost never stop frantically spamming everything in your arsenal, and still managed not to go OOM (or even close to it) in my clownish ensemble of Tier 7/heroic/blue gear.
So I am forced to the conclusion that either: A). I’m a friggin’ genius at playing a tree, or: B). mana regeneration is still too good. For the sake of my withering self-esteem, I could choose to believe A, but rational observers would conclude that B is more likely. It is still exceptionally rare for me to encounter complaints among Druid players concerning either Balance or Resto mana efficiency.
B it is. Nerfing Replenishment reduces mana efficiency in raids without impacting caster soloability, so you shouldn’t see a difference while you’re out grinding — and honestly, the change from 0.25% maximum mana per second to 0.20% per second is not exactly a disaster in the making.
Flight Form: Can now be learned at level 60. Flight speed increased to 150%.
Travel Form: Can now be learned at level 16.
This is the result of Blizzard tinkering with earlier and/or better mount mechanics to help nudge the leveling process along, so it made sense to bump Druid travel bonuses forward a bit.
Balance of Power: Now reduces all spell damage taken by 3/6%, rather than reducing the chance to be hit by spells by 2/4%.
Per Ghostcrawler, Blizzard didn’t like the RNG feel of this component of the talent (which otherwise increases the Druid’s chance to hit with all spells by 4% — and I assume that portion will stay the same), and the change will also affect Shadow and Holy damage that can be caused by Death Knight and Paladin melee attacks. This will make you slightly easier to heal while raiding, but the general effect will be felt most versus caster enemies in PvP. Actually, between this and the Owlkin Frenzy change (see next), I get the feeling that Blizzard is really trying to shore up moonkin arena performance which, after a strong early start (helped in no small way by what was then an amazing talented stun proc from Starfall), has stuttered badly.
The thread just linked will reappear in our discussion of the Lifebloom nerf, so keep reading.
Owlkin Frenzy: Now also restores 2% base mana every 2 seconds for the duration (10 seconds) in addition to its current effects.
Owlkin Frenzy tends to be a hit-or-miss raid talent. I see a number of PvE builds that incorporate it in order to get a boost from the common-as-dirt raid damage that’s especially prevalent on hard-mode encounters, but it’s not among the first talents in any high-DPS lineup. The mp5 bonus is (at least currently) superfluous for raiding given that most moonkin can easily afford to blow potion cooldowns on Wild Magic rather than a mana pot. So if you’re using Owlkin Frenzy already, the change is nice, but not sufficiently good on its own to move OF to a first-pick PvE talent.
This will, however, shine in PvP, and Owlkin Frenzy finds its best use there anyway. The change is probably inspired partly by the Innervate change (discussed below), as moonkin are much more vulnerable to going OOM during a match than their Restoration counterparts. My guess is that Blizzard is trying to avoid punishing Balance for changes made that will weaken Restoration’s seemingly-limitless mana supply in arena.
Eclipse: The Starfire and Wrath buffs from this talent are now on separate 30 second cooldowns. In addition, it is not possible to have both buffs active simultaneously.
This is a big change. As a matter of fact, it’s so big that I will be devoting this week’s Shifting Perspectives to it. This wrecks all of the arguments surrounding the lunar/solar rotation deal, has some fairly important implications for how a moonkin should choose gear, and it also has the potential to smooth out moonkin DPS somewhat unless Blizzard monkeys around with the proc rate in order to compensate for the likelihood of its being active twice as often (possible, but not likely given Blizzard’s efforts to improve moonkin damage).
I could write a lot more and actually did before I realized it was rapidly turning into an article all on its own (hence the upcoming “Shifting”) but the TL;DR version: if you don’t have Eclipse, get Eclipse. If you do have Eclipse, it’ll be getting the hell of a lot better, and you’re going to want to take a close look at your gear and stats before 3.2 hits. A high-DPS rotation will obligate you to switch Starfire and Wrath frequently in order to benefit from as many Eclipse procs as often as possible, and the two spells do not prioritize +haste and +crit in the same way (nor, with present itemization, does each benefit from a single idol).
Innervate: Duration reduced to 10 seconds, and cooldown reduced to 3 minutes. This means each use of Innervate will give half as much mana as before, but it will be available twice as often.
This is actually a good solution to the problems posed by Resto mana efficiency in arena, because most matches are not lengthy affairs (or at least, not ideally so). Additionally, it should have little to no effect on PvE gameplay as long as people are smart enough to blow Innervate earlier than they would normally. The only type of PvE encounter likely to be affected are short-duration fights with high raid damage. Stokin’ the Furnace comes to mind, but if Innervate doesn’t cut it you can always use a mana pot.
That said, I have to wonder what effect this is really going to have. Resto Druids have always encountered the most success in 2v2 arena, and 2v2 will cease to exist as a means of gear progression in 3.2. We aren’t really designed to outheal the burst in 5v5, and Druid teams have historically been weak to the ubiquitous Rogue-Mage-Priest of 3v3. Resto Druid representation is basically halved in 3v3, then halved again in 5v5, Balance is a very distant second as a viable arena spec, and Feral is barely on the map in any bracket. Commenters have noted that Feral’s encountered some 2’s success in combination with a Disc Priest — and a well-geared Feral is very difficult to kill. However, in the absence of an MS effect, matches tend to be pretty long, which is made possible because the Feral can…Innervate the Priest. Round and round we go.
The sum total of this is that Innervate’s being nerfed at the same time that Resto’s most forgiving bracket is going bye-bye, and Balance/Feral continue to maintain dismal arena records. Quoth the Magic 8 ball, “Outlook not good.”
Glyph of Innervate: Duration reduced to 10 seconds.
This dovetails into the duration change of the new Innervate, so no surprise here.
Improved Barkskin: No longer provides dispel resistance to all effects on the druid, but now reduces the chance your Barkskin is dispelled by an additional 35/70%.
Improved Barkskin was most often used in conjunction with 3/3 Subtlety to provide near-total dispel immunity for 12 seconds while the Druid Innervated, which accounts for the number (and volume) of forum complaints concerning the need to force a Druid to go through 2+ mana bars in any given match. Not a great situation for anyone concerned, as nobody enjoys games that keep dragging on.
Between this and the change discussed above, Innervate is going to be significantly more vulnerable on top of granting less mana even if it lasts the full duration. This would be less worrisome if 3v3 and 5v5 weren’t completely choked with Priests and Mages.
Lifebloom: The final heal that occurs when this spell blooms has been reduced by 20% on the base and on the spell power coefficient.
I suspect the Magic 8 ball cannily skipped ahead to this portion of the patch notes. Pro tip: never believe a small plastic orb that insists it’s clairvoyant.
Lifebloom nerfs are familiar territory by now, but Ghostcrawler said something I found to be pretty revealing in what was actually a thread dedicated to Moonkin concerns. He observes that the change to resilience’s functionality has actually buffed healing power in matches; a decently-geared player will simply be taking less damage than they are right now, so heals don’t have to heal for as much in order to return said player to full. Consequently, he writes, the Lifebloom change “will either not be felt at all or will be a slight buff relative to the amount of damage you take.”
It is, don’t get me wrong, a PvE nerf, but Lifebloom is still typically stacked and then rolled on tanks in PvE content; the bloom is just an incidental bonus to the per-second tick. I will miss seeing a raid-buffed 14-16K 3-stack crit on those occasions where you have (or want) to let it bloom, but it would probably have been overpowered for arena given the resilience change. But once you start adding it all up – the Innervate change, the Improved Barkskin nerf, and most especially the axing of 2v2 as a progression route — things start looking fairly grim for Druids. Unless we start magically getting amazing in 3v3 and 5v5, I expect the class to stumble a bit in Season 7, unless the resilience change really does have a massive impact on the burst potential of the larger brackets.
Empowered Touch: Now also increases the amount of bonus healing effects for Nourish by 10/20%.
Empowered Touch is usually ignored in PvE Resto builds; Healing Touch is rarely used outside of the standard Nature’s Swiftness macro, and the talent just isn’t that compelling as a result. Adding a Nourish component makes this talent a LOT better, to the point where EJ commenters took especial notice of its potential as a beefy raid and tank heal, all the more so if you choose to glyph it and have taken 3/3 Living Seed.
Trees are such excellent (bordering on overpowered, I admit) raid healers right now that I’m a little surprised Blizzard is doing so much to boost our tank-healing capacity by way of Nourish, but I half-wonder if this is yet another change prompted by arena and the need for fast healing.
Mangle: Ranks 4 and 5 base points reduced by about 11%. Scaling from attack power unchanged.
Rake: Ranks 6 and 7 base points on initial and periodic damage reduced by about 7%. Scaling from attack power unchanged.
Rip: Ranks 8 and 9 base points and points per combo point reduced by about 6%. Scaling from attack power unchanged.
Don’t panic.
Cat damage is an issue the Druid community’s been following for a while. There are certain Ulduar fights where melee DPS, particularly melee DPS with AoE capacity (read: Swipe), does exceptionally well, and that left the developers in an ambivalent place over whether a demanding melee spec was genuinely overpowered or just situationally so.
My personal experience with my guild’s WWS logs and the records available on WoW Meter Online make it fairly obvious that ferals have the advantage conferred by being melee on “good melee fights,” and that’s enough to override any advantage conferred by being a pure, albeit ranged, DPS on said fights. It is not enough to override the advantage conferred by being a pure melee DPS on the same encounter: a well-played Rogue will always beat a well-played feral, period. Nor does said advantage extend to “good ranged fights,” where pure ranged DPS reassume their usual slot at the top of the meters. The crux of the issue has less to do with Cats themselves than it does to do with how encounter design has resulted in such a wide gulf between melee and ranged performance on different fights, regardless of whether the DPS in question is hybrid or pure. If you’re one of those people who thinks that hybrid DPS should always be worse than pure DPS regardless of the circumstances, it needs to be said that it’s virtually impossible to cook up a fight where you can tax hybrid melee without screwing over pure melee, or tax hybrid ranged without screwing over pure ranged.
The numbers look scary, but to be frank, this isn’t actually that big a big nerf. Commenters on EJ are pegging it as a 2% DPS loss on average, with Verdan (perhaps correctly) describing it as “a paper nerf to shut people up.” Also I have to wonder if anyone on-staff at Blizzard has been reading Parliament of Whores, because –
Swipe (Cat): Percent of weapon damage done reduced from 260% to 250%.
Shred: Ranks 8 and 9 base points reduced by about 10%. Scaling from attack power unchanged.
O’Rourke’s Circumcision Principle: You can take 10% off the top of anything.
Savage Defense: The animation for gaining this buff will no longer make the bear stand upright.
Whose house?
RUN’S HOUSE.
I said, whose house?
RUN’S HOUSE.
WHOSE HOUSE? SAY WHAT? MARTIIIIIIIIN, MARTIIIIIIIN.
Druids will now be able to see their mana bars when shape-shifted.
This has long been a perk integrated into several mods like Pitbull — and was, for a time, even the sole point of the mod Druid Bar — so I’m pleased to see it become part of the default UI.
Rage potions can now be used by druids.
For that moment in the middle of the night where you wake up, eyes glazed, drenched in the sweat of nightmares, terrified into the realization that, “My God! I don’t have a sufficiently useless way to waste my valuable potion cooldown!
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