Partouf’s Log

I’ve been worried for some time now to replace the Spark of Hope trinket. Not just because of the +100 spirit for mana regen (35mp5 in my case), but in particular for the -42 mana per spell cast.

A large part of the druid restoration spec is to cast hots raid-wide, and lots of them. Since this trinket reduces the mana cost with 42, with every so much casts, you get a free cast where without the trinket you could not.

However, since I no longer had another item to buy from frost emblems, except for offspecs, I decided to actually calculate what I would gain or loose with replacing Spark of Hope with Purified Lunar Dust.

The differences, obviously, +100 spirit and -42 mana per cast, against 179 spellpower and chance to gain 304 mp5 for 15 seconds.

I’ll negate my first calculation in favor of getting the numbers from comments on wowhead that say you’ll effectively get an 76 mp5 average during ‘a’ fight. (assuming ~1ppm: 15 seconds  / 60 seconds = 0.25, 0.25*304=76)

To get the numbers from Spark of Hope, I turned to a log from World of Logs to get the number of casts. I copied the number of hits and crits of regrowth, ht and nourish of a Marrowgar fight, together 65. And then the number of ticks of rejuvenation divided by 18 and Lifebloom by 8 (both not entirely accurate), which is 48. Together an estimate of 113 casts in a 3:40 fight (220 seconds).

For the mp5 over time; 220/5=44 times regen

Mana gained by Spark of Hope: 35 * 44 + 42 * 48 =1540 + 2016 = 3556

Mana gained by Purified Lunar Dust: 76 * 44 = 3344

Difference: 212 mana

So you can imagine, I’m not entirely convinced if Spark of Hope should be replaced. However, the extra spellpower Purified Lunar Dust is beneficial to every spellcast as well, and should of course not be overlooked. But I can’t exactly measure that and put that somewhere in this calculation, as I cannot predict how much less I will have to heal because of it. Is it together at least 1 cast so I won’t notice the 212 mana difference? Or what about the fact that Spark of Hope prevents you from having to wait for mana regeneration, which may be important depending on the type of fight and circumstances.

In any case, I will definitely give Purified Lunar Dust an honest chance to prove itself. Should I conclude I cannot adjust to the shift of stats, or come to fights where I have to cast more often than usual, I will rethink and adjust accordingly per fight.

… which doesn’t help.

There’s only 1 I can actually remember to use.

Van Randomness

*cough*Critter – still in alpha testing phase with just a working title*cough*

To get it back working again, I removed the DBM announcement and only use the timer at the moment – and added a few potions and gems for WotLK.

ManaWarning

I’ve been talking to a friend of mine on Draenor in another guild. He doesn’t raid much himself, but there’s always interesting stories going around. So, his guild has been raiding semi-hardcore, and they cleared the first bit of Icecrown Citadel the first evening it got online.

My friend started telling that a Resto Druid in their guild got shoven off from the regular raid group because another Resto with lesser gear performed better than the first one. I think that says a lot about how much it matters how you actually play your druid, and I think I’ve been talking about that ingame quite a lot as well for various reasons. It’s not that people don’t know it, it’s more to convince myself perhaps that I’m doing pretty ok. But even more perhaps to try and spread awareness of that, not that I expect anyone who doesn’t get it to visit blogs like this to figure out what the rest of the druid/healer community thinks or is doing.

So here it is; when it comes to healing, gear matters less than playstyle. I’m not gonna say “skills” here, because when it comes to skills I’m pretty clumsy myself. It’s more about knowing to look beyond certain boundaries you or others may have set around you. Knowing that even though there are other healers around, you should heal like you’re the only one there – within limits. You don’t have an infinite manapool, but especially when it comes to druids, you have the ability to heal “everyone”. I’m not saying you should heal everyone up to 100% and keep it there, but you can help other healers out by hotting up a few people when you see fit and your tanks healthbar allows it.

There’s an easy indication even without special meters to know who knows how to heal in a raid: the contents of the mana-bar. If you’re a healer and you’re putting out a lot of healing, sometimes even struggling, and you see another healer with a full mana bar – there’s something wrong (and no, you cannot regenerate mana That fast). Despite the role or assignment that healer has, his focus should be always to help the raid survive and progress as a whole. And I have to admit, I have seen this thing happening in a few raids in Ulduar and Naxxramas. Which is frustrating to say the least.

Another sign to indicate something’s wrong, which happened to me as well a few times, is that your HPS or healing done in Recount is recorded higher than your usual average output, and the others registered as considerably less. Now, this doesn’t mean of course that your usual output is all you can do, you can do that high HPS number you see if needed – but it shouldn’t be happening. Healers should be around the same average numbers, which would indicate they all had a share in the survival of the raid, and not just 1 of them.

I know that when it comes to resto druids, we all have our different styles in playing our role, and if I were to say you should do this or that; I would be completely wrong in most cases.

But suppose you were a resto druid that’s afraid of being thrown out of the raid team (because you want to see and experience content, not because you’re addicted to purple pixels) – I can perhaps ask you to seek out what more there is You could do for your raid with the current gear you have on you. What things can you squeeze into your way of healing that might benefit the raid, what other tools would be useful for that; talents, glyphs, addons, actionbar layout, hotkeys? And if all fails you could investigate what kind of gear and stats you should be aiming for.

Before I figure out what to do with this space, I wanted to do a quick update on what’s been going on.

I’m guessing just like everyone else the big part of things happening was when 3.3 hit Live, which was last week. By doing a string of random heroics, you can gather up quite a bunch of emblems to gear up some more with 232 and a little bit of 245, and the new heroics in icecrown with 232 gear – if those actually drops that is. I’ve been fairly lucky, I had a couple of drops, including one so I could upgrade my weapon and offhand, which make the most difference in terms of spellpower most of the time. And well, another couple of things. But it also had to include buying Crusader Orbs in order to let a (better than me) leatherworker make a nice wristslot item – which is a hard slot to fill.

In any case, more improvements to make, more emblems to collect, and soon ridiculous tradeoffs because Blizzard decided it was fun to put spellcrit on resto items.

I finally reached a collection of 50 non-combat pets that got me rewarded with a nice little Stinker – after 1 year of seeing people getting it before me. At least I was the fastest to get the /love critter achievement in the guild, I guess.

Meanwhile as a guild we’re trying out Icecrown Citadel, next to TotC and a little bit of Ulduar. Although I admit I haven’t been on much raids lately for various reasons, but I’m glad I was still able to keep my gear a bit up despite that.

So that’s the short version…

Since it’s becoming ludicrous to maintain the ever growing contents of my bank and bags of my main character (and the bankcharacter is equally stuffed), I decided to make a random screenshot and make it official:

Van WoW

Dropping [Cover of the Keepers], our first Auriaya kill required the healers to squeeze every bit of mana out of them.

Taking a little nap in the afternoon…

Taking a tour through the Crystalsong Forest – though the tourguide was quite grumpy…