We were talking about Caterwaul's feral / resto specs via email, but I think it's worth having this in public (since that's what gets the hits, right?)
Eric said:
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#0ZxGGscrzceoccuqkbA0u
this is what I was thinking about for bear, to get more rage from enrage.
So Phil said:
That's close to where I'm leaning - with http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#0ZxGGscrzceRcczikbA0u:0zncMz
For resto, I'm thinking http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#0VG0zZZf0IufuxwuAcsVo even though it's not as nourish-centric as I could get, and I don't know that living seed is effective enough to find a way to keep either. Still, might be a little better than my current build if only for the haste.
So Eric says:
Two questions - how useful is improved leader of the pack? The healing from it is good for soloing, but isn't really noticeable. Or wasn't when I last thought about it - 6 sec cooldown is a long enough time that it won't save your bacon very much. Better than nothing, I suppose, especially since with swipe spam you're guaranteed to proc it every time it's off cd. Or is it for the mana regen while you're in forms? King of the Jungle is a hard talent to pass up - 15% bonus
damage right at the start of the pull is pretty solid, since that's when you're establishing aggro. It's also a significant boost to catform DPS.
On the resto side, I'm not so sure about Revitalize. It's a really handy talent for the rest of the party, but I'm not sure it's worth reducing your healing throughput to get. Hard to say - at only 15% proc rate you'd expect to see around 0.4 energy/sec as a rogue if there was 100% uptime on you. 0.8 if you had rejuv and wild growth. But you regen 10 energy/sec, or usually around 14 or 15 really, once you factor in talents and stuff. So overall, it's not a really compelling way to spend three points. I've definitely noticed the energy procs when they happen on Jill, and they're nice, but they're relatively rare. I have yet to tank any real endgame situations, though, and the bonus rage on the tank might well be worth the price of admission. Most DK tanks have plenty of runic power.
Are you getting the glyph of rapid rejuvination? That might be the reason druids are stacking haste now, if your haste means your rejuv ticks faster, that's just more HPS flat-out. Especially since rejuv lasts so long to begin with.
Then again, I'm not keeping current on all things druid. The interesting thing seems to be (upon perusing EJ and some other forums) that druids don't really have a "one true spec" cookie cutter. There's a lot of different options for them, situational to gear, content, raid makeup, etc. Which makes them pretty interesting, actually.
To which Phil replies:
The rapid rejuv + haste trick is nice, but really the reason endgame druids are going gaga for haste (and are so pissed about the nerf to GotEM doubling the haste cap) is that the perception is that for a main tank raid healer, getting your nourish cast time and the gcd down to 1 second is vital. Personally, not being in that role, and being more of a group healer as a result, I don't have the need or desire to go 18 into balance for more haste and skip a lot of great group healing tanlents, plus rework my gems and enchants to get an effective haste of 800-something, but at the same time, a faster gcd means i can refresh my rejuvs quicker and faster nourish casts mean I can get them off faster and go on to other things. I think getting a balance between the HoT and flash heal sides of the coin is probably the way to go.
I think I'll end up moving a point from empowered touch (-10% bonus heal bonus to nourish) over to the one that adds 5%/point to nourish's crit rate, that 200ish spellpower probably isn't as good as a visible difference in the rate of +3000ish heals I get off, especially for a spell that's used to stop death - for a rolling hot the other scenario might be better, but nourish crit is going to save lives.
I might actually drop the glyph of rapid rejuvenation, to be honest, as my haste goes up. I'm pushing some pretty big rejuv numbers as it is and the glyph ticks the same number of times in a shorter duration, which means more frequent refresh, which means more mana burn and fewer free gcds for other heals. Adding some time to the rejuv duration would give me a chance to do more spot-heals and wild growth refreshes between rejuv refreshes. I might go back to the glyph of innervate which is a pretty substantial bonus that'll really help in places like HoR.
I think that revitalize is more useful with my healing style than it might be with other trees out there because I do tend to keep rejuv going on a lot of people, and in boss fights or splash trash, it's on everyone all the time, and I toss wild growth around a lot, either in addition to rejuv or instead of on trash pulls I'm not worried about because I try to give that revitalize proc chance cheaply if possible (though, the radius of wild growth can be an issue depending on party composition and the fight in question). If I was not as aggressive with party HoTs, it'd be a more questionable use of 3 points, especially since that style would need to improve nourish a lot, but I think that it's a situationally valid buy - like the 3% crit pvp talent, it just fits what I'm doing.
As far as enrage goes - I've noticed that when I'm able to get the show on the road and chain pull, the skill isn't off cooldown when the next fight starts and I have rage banked anyway, so KotJ doesn't come into play because I'm not using enrage. Plus, the easiest way to get to KotJ is to drop constant damage from something like naturalist, and I'd rather be more steady. In the end, I really think my feral spec is pretty good (it's a cookie cutter, afterall) and it's my technique that needs work. I could respec to compensate for that shortcoming, but sacrifice some potency when I'm running correctly to get there, or I could L2P and not have the problem to begin with. I think if I took the time to do nothing more than shift-to-pull, mark targets consistently, and to tell teh dps to let me get a couple of swipes in before they started dpsing a few times each run I'd be cured.
Or, I could stick to my original plan and only tank for guild-heavy groups, because we're not idiots.
Prompting Eric to quip on his way to the grocery store:
Also-also, we should copy-paste this discussion (the spec part at least) onto the blog. It's the kind of meaty back-and-forth that people might like to read about class mechanics.
Which caused Phil to post all this in our guild forums. But it's also good here.
Eric said:
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#0ZxGGscrzceoccuqkbA0u
this is what I was thinking about for bear, to get more rage from enrage.
So Phil said:
That's close to where I'm leaning - with http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#0ZxGGscrzceRcczikbA0u:0zncMz
For resto, I'm thinking http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#0VG0zZZf0IufuxwuAcsVo even though it's not as nourish-centric as I could get, and I don't know that living seed is effective enough to find a way to keep either. Still, might be a little better than my current build if only for the haste.
So Eric says:
Two questions - how useful is improved leader of the pack? The healing from it is good for soloing, but isn't really noticeable. Or wasn't when I last thought about it - 6 sec cooldown is a long enough time that it won't save your bacon very much. Better than nothing, I suppose, especially since with swipe spam you're guaranteed to proc it every time it's off cd. Or is it for the mana regen while you're in forms? King of the Jungle is a hard talent to pass up - 15% bonus
damage right at the start of the pull is pretty solid, since that's when you're establishing aggro. It's also a significant boost to catform DPS.
On the resto side, I'm not so sure about Revitalize. It's a really handy talent for the rest of the party, but I'm not sure it's worth reducing your healing throughput to get. Hard to say - at only 15% proc rate you'd expect to see around 0.4 energy/sec as a rogue if there was 100% uptime on you. 0.8 if you had rejuv and wild growth. But you regen 10 energy/sec, or usually around 14 or 15 really, once you factor in talents and stuff. So overall, it's not a really compelling way to spend three points. I've definitely noticed the energy procs when they happen on Jill, and they're nice, but they're relatively rare. I have yet to tank any real endgame situations, though, and the bonus rage on the tank might well be worth the price of admission. Most DK tanks have plenty of runic power.
Are you getting the glyph of rapid rejuvination? That might be the reason druids are stacking haste now, if your haste means your rejuv ticks faster, that's just more HPS flat-out. Especially since rejuv lasts so long to begin with.
Then again, I'm not keeping current on all things druid. The interesting thing seems to be (upon perusing EJ and some other forums) that druids don't really have a "one true spec" cookie cutter. There's a lot of different options for them, situational to gear, content, raid makeup, etc. Which makes them pretty interesting, actually.
To which Phil replies:
The rapid rejuv + haste trick is nice, but really the reason endgame druids are going gaga for haste (and are so pissed about the nerf to GotEM doubling the haste cap) is that the perception is that for a main tank raid healer, getting your nourish cast time and the gcd down to 1 second is vital. Personally, not being in that role, and being more of a group healer as a result, I don't have the need or desire to go 18 into balance for more haste and skip a lot of great group healing tanlents, plus rework my gems and enchants to get an effective haste of 800-something, but at the same time, a faster gcd means i can refresh my rejuvs quicker and faster nourish casts mean I can get them off faster and go on to other things. I think getting a balance between the HoT and flash heal sides of the coin is probably the way to go.
I think I'll end up moving a point from empowered touch (-10% bonus heal bonus to nourish) over to the one that adds 5%/point to nourish's crit rate, that 200ish spellpower probably isn't as good as a visible difference in the rate of +3000ish heals I get off, especially for a spell that's used to stop death - for a rolling hot the other scenario might be better, but nourish crit is going to save lives.
I might actually drop the glyph of rapid rejuvenation, to be honest, as my haste goes up. I'm pushing some pretty big rejuv numbers as it is and the glyph ticks the same number of times in a shorter duration, which means more frequent refresh, which means more mana burn and fewer free gcds for other heals. Adding some time to the rejuv duration would give me a chance to do more spot-heals and wild growth refreshes between rejuv refreshes. I might go back to the glyph of innervate which is a pretty substantial bonus that'll really help in places like HoR.
I think that revitalize is more useful with my healing style than it might be with other trees out there because I do tend to keep rejuv going on a lot of people, and in boss fights or splash trash, it's on everyone all the time, and I toss wild growth around a lot, either in addition to rejuv or instead of on trash pulls I'm not worried about because I try to give that revitalize proc chance cheaply if possible (though, the radius of wild growth can be an issue depending on party composition and the fight in question). If I was not as aggressive with party HoTs, it'd be a more questionable use of 3 points, especially since that style would need to improve nourish a lot, but I think that it's a situationally valid buy - like the 3% crit pvp talent, it just fits what I'm doing.
As far as enrage goes - I've noticed that when I'm able to get the show on the road and chain pull, the skill isn't off cooldown when the next fight starts and I have rage banked anyway, so KotJ doesn't come into play because I'm not using enrage. Plus, the easiest way to get to KotJ is to drop constant damage from something like naturalist, and I'd rather be more steady. In the end, I really think my feral spec is pretty good (it's a cookie cutter, afterall) and it's my technique that needs work. I could respec to compensate for that shortcoming, but sacrifice some potency when I'm running correctly to get there, or I could L2P and not have the problem to begin with. I think if I took the time to do nothing more than shift-to-pull, mark targets consistently, and to tell teh dps to let me get a couple of swipes in before they started dpsing a few times each run I'd be cured.
Or, I could stick to my original plan and only tank for guild-heavy groups, because we're not idiots.
Prompting Eric to quip on his way to the grocery store:
Also-also, we should copy-paste this discussion (the spec part at least) onto the blog. It's the kind of meaty back-and-forth that people might like to read about class mechanics.
Which caused Phil to post all this in our guild forums. But it's also good here.
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