Greetz,

Jayded (Deathwing EU)

With the IWS change and the mp5 on gear buff, we should be much, much less mana-starved in intensive or long fights. Historically I (and I think most of us) have geared for either haste/mp5 or crit/mp5, as mp5 has been such a painfully vital stat. Perhaps now we’ll be free to gear much more towards haste/crit. This would allow us to focus a lot more on throughput than longevity, and the longevity could come by way of IWS and more mp5 on those items that still have it.

It’s far too early to tell, but I can see this being viable. Taking a look at my current loadout I’m pretty crit/haste focused already. I have reliable druids that have innervates going to waste, so I take full advantage of that and push for as much throughput as possible. I’ve found that by dropping some mp5 I’ve been able to get my haste back up to pretty decent levels while still maintaining outstanding crit numbers (nearly 36% unbuffed). If I dropped a couple more pieces of crit/mp5 gear and used haste/crit instead I’d be able to get CH down to very usable cast times without the 4 piece tier 8. I’d be mana starved, of course, but that may not be the case come 3.2.

tl;dr – I’m less angry and worried about the t9 bonuses now and more curious what’s in store for us. I like the idea of gearing for crit/haste and not having to focus so heavily on mp5. More throughput from gear and mana regen via talents is a good thing.

-Z

The 4-piece bonus for T9 is just crud. Well, not really “crud” so much by itself, but when you compare it to the 4-piece of T8, there’s no contest there at all. The T8 4-piece bonus is frickin bad to the bone. However, I can see what they are trying to do here with the T9 4-piece. It will definitely help us out with mana regen. I’ve been hoping that they would change the imp water shield so that Chain Heal could a return off of it… blizz has made (or will make) a good change here.

I agree with Zorash. I hope this 4-piece bonus is a place holder. I like socketing Intell and SP. I never socket haste, though i do seek after gear that has it.

But to answer your question Lodur, yeah I’m looking forward to healing T9 content. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that Blizz surprises us with something cooler than 5% crit on that 4-piece.

Currently I run 32%+ crit un-buffed. This means all of my heals have a 32% crit chance. I can only run this much crit because I don’t have to stack haste, thanks to the 4 piece t8 set bonus. Since CH is the only spell we need haste for, I can safely ignore it (for the most part) with this huge buff to the effective haste of that spell.

The t9 bonus will force me to stack haste heavily, instead of crit. I’ll lose 8-9% crit for all of my healing spells to gain the haste needed to make CH viable. I’ll gain 5% of that back, but only for one of my spells.

Basically, I’ll be losing 8-9% crit on all of my spells except CH, and 2-4% crit on CH, just to try and keep CH casting fast enough to not be worthless. This is a pretty nasty trade.

The only other option is to continue stacking crit like I am now and have CH take FOREVER to cast, making it even more situational than it currently is. This is likely the route I’ll take. Sure, it’ll hit hard when it hits (45%+crit raid buffed with t9 4 piece) but it’ll cast so slow that it will be beaten out by faster AoE heals even more than it currently is. It’s sad to think that I’ll likely nearly stop casting CH all together, but I just don’t see how it’s going to be feasible to gear appropriately for both CH usability and throughput with other spells. One demands high haste, the others get almost zero benefit from haste. It’s a choice of gearing for a single spell or all of my other spells.

I’d far, far prefer the same haste buff we have now, or a change to CH to let it cast faster if they’re taking that away.

-Z

Which is an observation based off of the tooltips I’ve been able to see which has put Rank 1 on the PTR at the same healing values that Rank 4 is now. It is possible it is just a tooltip bug, but I haven’t been able to play around with it yet.

Where did you see that? It’s not in the patch notes