Okay, so I saw a post pop up on WoW insider about the legendary weapon, based on a blog post written by a paladin.  First I want to say, yes it would be fine for paladins. Second, I want to say that it’s just as good for any other healing class. Even the paladin blogger agrees that the decision should be based on who in the guild deserves it the most, without taking class into consideration. However, it’s just not stated that well in the post because it’s buried under “but X class could use it better”

However,I’m not sure why the WoWinsider article is claiming that it’s a paladin weapon above other classes.  I won’t rank classes like that, and my conclusion has always been that every class is just as deserving. I won’t rank them. The act of ranking druids as being the worst to give the legendary to does a disservice to ALL the druids whose guilds decided that a druid was most deserving (Also, I’m not personally receiving one, but it’s going to one of the other druid healers in my new guild), and is really just not an okay thing to do – especially for an item where we haven’t even really seen the final stats & how it interacts with their healing abilities.

Okay, so you buy the “lets all just be equal and get along” argument, but why would a druid “deserve” the weapon if other classes say druids are the worst?

First, lets look at the proc:

Well, GC already said the proc should be good for druids, too.
The proc is probably better than you guys are assuming (even for druids). I’m not going to spoil it though.

If it buffs the healer instead of the target, then I don’t see why it would need to be limited to a single-target tank healer. If the shield would absorb magical damage as much as physical damage, then the heals could shield multiple targets (your melee damage that keeps dieing to all that dang AOE damage) for a decent amount of healing as a priest, shaman, or even druid. Even then, priests, shaman, and druids CAN be MT/OT healers without any real major problems.

The numbers that the paladin posted look big, but the shield proc mechanic isn’t likely to save your raid, regardless of which healer has it. You are just as likely to kill a boss regardless of which person in your raid has that weapon. In fact, you have to kill a lot of Ulduar bosses before you even get the weapon. So, it’s really not going to matter which person can “utilize” it the best, really. If the shield stacks over time, then any amount of healing will do a big shield on the tank.

Another argument comes down to comparing stats (ignoring the proc!).

Another claim is that druids would basically lose some spirit, crit, and int by picking up the legendary + an offhand compared to picking up The Lifebinder staff (and then WOWinsider says that the crit is bad, even though we’d get more crit from the staff). However, I’ve already given up all the regen stats on the Naxx weapons to pick up more spellpower. I care about spell power on my weapon more than I care about the other stats on my weapon slot. With spirit being even more devalued, I’ll happily give up spirit on my weapon slot to get more spell power. A lot of druids sacrifice those stats already for more spellpower on their weapon.  So, the stat argument really doesn’t hold up in my eyes. I wouldn’t have the staff in the first place, I’d have whatever 1-hander & off-hand gave me the highest spell power – unless for some reason I could find a staff with more spell power than my 1-hander + offhand item. So, in this case, the legendary would win for me. I can give up a little bit of base stats to have 56 more spell power? Yes please!

They also argue that crit isn’t a good stat for druids, which other druids have already proven wrong. Crit and haste are both good stats for druids. Any druid using the legindary mace will probably be doing more tank healing than raid healing, anyway, right? Nourish-spam with Nature’s Grace & Living seed procs (with supportive HOTs) is actually awesome for tank healing, which would be a playstyle very supportive of both crit and haste.

How much CAN you heal for in 15 seconds?

People across the board have really not taken into account how much a resto druid can heal a tank for in that 15 seconds. I see everyone continuously underestimating how much the shield would benefit a druid, especially if all the HOT ticks count towards the shield proc (which GC hinted it would do). Also, if you have enough haste, you can drop all your HOTs and nourish basically down to the 1 second GCD most of the time, without too much of a problem. So, you can (theoretically) get off 14 or 15 different casts of various spells during that 15 seconds.

In this case, you would want the extra haste you get off the Legendary weapon that is going to get your Nourish GCD as close to 1 second as possible, along with the crit that procs Nature’s Grace (for even more haste). We got a boost to nourish crit heals on single-targets with HoTs in 3.1, likely so that the mace’s proc would benefit us just as much – since we can work out really great tank healing builds. We can also use it for raid healing & putting smaller shields on a lot of the raid…

At the moment, I’m not going to fill in number of how much I could heal for in 15 seconds here. However, you could work it out yourself. How much can you heal for in 15 seconds? If you work out your numbers, you are welcome to send your results to: lissanna70 <at> gmail <dot> com

In fact, I’ll take numbers or supportive information from any healing class, and I’d be perfectly happy to keep posting that all healing classes should be weighted equal for who should get the mace. I’ll be writing part 2 of this post (where I actually work out the math on how much I can heal on my druid for in 15 seconds) sometime later this week or this weekend (I have to finish my finals before I can spend a few hours doing number crunching).

In the end, what really matters is rewarding a person in your guild that has been the most dedicated and long-term healer, who is likely to stay with your guild for a long time (which is why I wouldn’t even want the “responsibility” of getting one). Passing up someone who is personally deserving of the weapon, in favor of the “best class” to receive the weapon is just going to hurt a guild more than they benefit from the marginal differences between the healing specs.

Also, as soon as people decide to only give it to one of the healing specs at the exclusion of all others, the developers could decide to change the stats and totally mess up the min-maxers who decided it based on what they thought the stats were going to be. If you give it to the healer in your guild who deserves it the most, completely ignoring what class they are, then you can’t be disappointed if the stats change a little bit one way or the other over time.

UPDATE: Due to the plagiarism and identity theft claims against Ferarro’s blog posts, I’m disabling all links to that blog that were in this article, especially since all the relevant posts have already been deleted from that site.

Haste & moonkin

Graylo posted on his blog about haste for moonkin. He came to the same conclusions that I’ve seen posted around since PTR testing for 3.1, so it’s good to see a numerical validation of what I’ve been telling people on the WoW druid forums already… His post concluded that 400 haste rating was an ideal amount if you are using a solar rotation (with full raid buffs), since this is the number where wrath would clip the global cooldown.

For a lunar rotation, you can use as much haste as you want without any problems, since we can’t accumulate enough for starfire to clip the GCD – and the amount of time that wrath will clip the GCD in a lunar rotation will generally be low.

Haste & Healing trees

If you are a healer using nourish a lot, since it is the same cast time as wrath is for moonkin (only you don’t have the 3% extra that moonkin do), you would need a little more than 15% haste to get nourish casts that start clipping the GCD with full raid buffs (including imp moonkin aura, shaman totems, & Nature’s Grace procs). This would put you around 500 haste rating (and you could have more haste than that if you were missing those raid buffs, and more than that for any cast when you aren’t under the effects of Nature’s Grace). So, resto druids should be able to pick up a fair amount of haste before nourish clips the GCD in most situations.

For regrowth, it would take even more haste to clip the 1 second GCD cap, so if you are using regrowth a lot, you can pretty much pick up any amount of haste on gear and not worry about it clipping at our current gear level. For HOTs with the Gift of the Earth Mother talent, calculations taken before raid buffs or Nature’s Grace concluded that 505 was the amount of haste for HOTs to stop receiving a benefit, according to posts on the plus heal forums.

Dreambound Druid also worked out a whole chart for how haste interacts with our healing spells, if you want to see a graph with pretty numbers for a bunch of our spells. I think it is just based on haste without taking into account raid buffs (shaman totems, imp moonkin form haste that reduces healing cast times if you have a moonkin in the raid, etc).

In March, Averna at Nerf this Druid wrote out advice & math for thinking about crit versus haste on healing gear. Averna comes to the conclusion that haste is still slightly better for resto druids than crit, since our HOTs can’t crit, but their GCDs can be lowered with haste.

In my own gear choices, I pretty much just stick with going for whatever gear has the best item level – with more spell power, int, & spirit. I like trying to get a healthy amount of both haste and crit, though my haste rating right now is a lot lower than I would like it to be, since all my Naxx gear I picked up had crit and no haste on it.

Graylo concluded for moonkin that gemming for haste & eating haste food wasn’t a good use of resources. I’m going to have to second this, and add that it’s probably not that great of an idea for healing druids, either. Something with spell power is going to give both moonkin & tree druids more than putting pure-haste gems in your gear. Spell power food, fish feasts, or mana/5 food is going to be better for resto druids than haste food, in general.

The most annoying debuff in the game is the Unquenchable Flames from the Ignis trash in Ulduar.

Nothing else I’ve healed through in the game has bugged me quite as much as this debuff.

Overall, healing Ulduar is fun… but Unquenchable flames is not fun! Why?

First, you can’t stop casting to drink between trash pulls very easily. With the nerf to spirit’s out of casting regen, stopping to drink is not as minor of a deal as it used to be.

Second, if you res someone and don’t top them off fast enough, they could die again. It’s been known to target the person we were resing and kill them. Which is annoying because then they have another repair bill and require another res.

Third, it can take a LONG time before it can be cleansed in the water. It just bounces around and does a ton of damage to people for a long time. It is annoying mostly because it takes us a while to get through trash, and it’s a large chunk of time when you can only have limited drinking and you have to be constantly vigilant. It also makes the rest of the trash pulls harder, and the Ignis trash is really hard enough without it.

It’s not impossible to heal through, it just drives me crazy.