There is currently a semi-raging debate going on in the Restoration Glyphs thread over at EJ regarding the usefulness of the Glyph of Rejuvenation. More specifically, the statement has been made that this is theglyph to use in your third glyph spot if you are working hard modes in Ulduar (with the assumption being made that you were using Glyph of Wild Growth and Glyph of Swiftmend in your other two glyph spots).
Of course, anytime anyone states that “you must do this” it is going to spark some discussion from people who will naturally disagree. Now, I will admit that one of the guys in the thread advocating the rejuv glyph is a little pompous, but if you can get past his elitism he did actually raise some very interesting points.
Interesting enough to get me thinking about the Glyph of Rejuvenation. Interesting enough for me to reglyph last night to see for myself what I thought of it during our first attempts with Heroic: I could say that cache was rare.
Now, to be clear, this is not a general post about Resto glyphs. If you are looking for some discussion on that, there are other people that have more than adequately covered the topic, and I would urge you to check out those resources if you need some guidance on glyphing. This post is specifically dealing with the viability and usefulness of the Glyph of Rejuvenation in a raid setting.
Prior to last night, in addition to the glyph of swiftmend and glyph of wild growth, I was utilizing the glyph of nourish to fill my three major glyph spots. I’ll be honest, nourish makes up so little of my overall healing in a 25 man raid night that I really didn’t think the glyph was worth the spot anymore and had been toying with changing it back to the innervate glyph before this rejuv debate spawned. Generally speaking, the consensus was that the rejuv glyph was thought to be a fairly poor choice of a glyph spot for a raiding druid. This was in large part because the glyph requires your target to be below 50% life for the glyph to do anything, and it was pretty rare for a target in a raid to 1) be that low on life for any period of time, and 2) if your tank was sitting that low for any period of time, there was a bigger problem than a little extra healing from a glyph could do.
So, what has changed to make this potentially a more desireable glyph? The answer is simple. Hard Modes.
What is it about hard modes that would change either of the things you mentioned above that made rejuv a less desirable option for raiders? So far with my experience, hard modes come in a few flavors:
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The DPS threshold is so high, that you need to reduce the number of healers you bring to meet the required mark. This means that there are fewer heals going out, thus increasing each healers burden, and increasing the chance that there will frequently be members of the raid that will be at or below 50% life with enough regularity to make the glyph useful.
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The constant damage to the raid is increased to such a point that there will regularly be members of the raid that will be at or below 50% life.
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A combination of both of the above. (Hodir, the fight I tested the glyph on last night is a good example of this).
We did 7 attempts on Hard Mode Hodir last night, with our last “attempt” being a regular kill (past the 3 minute timer). I think our best attempt for the night was around 30ish% at the 3 minute mark. For this fight we ran 5 healers, although some guilds do it with as few as 3-4. Our group had two holy paladins, one resto shaman, one holy priest and one resto druid. As you know Hodir tosses out a lot of AE raid damage during the fight, and even with 5 healers we still lost people (including the tank a time or two) every pull, and while some of that was a result of people doing boneheaded things, sometimes it was 100% from a lack of heals hitting a raid member at a crucial time.
I used this time last night to give the old Glyph of Rejuvenation a whirl in place of my Glyph of Nourish. In my tests from last night’s 7 attempts with Hodir the glyph accounted for anywhere from 1.6% to 4.6% of my total healing, with the average attempts seeing somewhere around 3% of my healing coming from the glyph. That’s nothing to scoff at! I’ve included our full parses from last night below the snapshots if you would like to look at them.
World of Logs Report
WoW Meter Online Log
In those attempts, there were most definitely times where most of the raid hovered in the 50% health range or even lower during frozen blows and the glyph got a chance to work quite a bit and I think was useful. I also almost never cast nourish during the fight, so the loss of the increased heal from nourish was not noticed. In all honesty, the glyph actually provided more healing than I generally output using nourish in any average fight, that is to say that nourish is often less than 3-4% of my overall healing breakdown. While I do think that the glyph provided me with a decent amount of healing, if I was a bigger nourish user my opinion very well may have been different as I may have valued that extra 6% to my nourish over the 3ish% of healing provided by the nourish glyph.
So, the glyph did more healing than your nourish usage? That seems pretty cut and dry! That means that rejuv should be in and nourish out, right?
No.
The choice to glyph rejuv is a bit more complicated than that! Here are a few things to think about if you are considering glyphing rejuv:
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Are you doing normal modes or hard modes in Ulduar?
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You will recall that I said the thing that made rejuv a more viable glyph was hard modes. If you are still working through the normal modes of the bosses, you are probably running with your full healing team and/or you are not seeing the extra damage to the raid that the hard modes are adding. In normal modes, there really are better glyphing options than the rejuv glyph. It is unlikely that you will get much benefit from the rejuv glyph outside of hard modes. As such, if you aren’t running the hard modes, I would not recommend this glyph.
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What is your healing assignment? Are you usually assigned to heal the raid or the tank?
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The rejuv glyph, in my opinion, is a raid healing glyph. If you aren’t tossing out a lot of rejuvs on multiple people, you really aren’t going to get a lot of mileage from this glyph. If your primary healing assignment is tank healing, I would not recommend this glyph, and I personally would probably stay with the nourish glyph as it’s going to give me more throughput.
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What is your healing style? Do you use a lot of rejuvenation?
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If rejuvenation is not making up a significant portion of your healing, this probably isn’t going to be a valuable glyph for you. 60% of my healing comes from rejuv (inclusive of my set bonus) while a minimal amount of my healing came from nourish. For me, it made some sense to glyph to improve rejuv because we are starting hard modes where the glyph will actually be useful. This will not be the case for everyone!
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What are your other glyphing options, and will they do more for you than the rejuv glyph?
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There are a lot of opinions on the weighting of the various glyphs, and a lot of different playstyles out there. When compairing your current glyph to the rejuv glyph ask yourself how much are you really getting out of it. If you are getting more from your current glyph than the rejuv glyph, then it is probably a better glyph for you than rejuv. However, be sure to look at the numbers when making this decision. Don’t just favor a glyph because you think it is working better than another glyph, be sure that you really are getting more from it by reviewing your parses and then coming to a conclusion. Just because awesome druid X had great luck with glyph xyz, that doesn’t mean that your raid composition/playstyle will render the same results.
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For the time being, I am going to stick with the rejuv glyph and continue to monitor my parses for its effectiveness. If it continues to prove worthwhile for me, I will keep it. If I get to the point where I find my nourishes are creeping back into my heals, I may opt to switch back. Or, in the event that some fights favor one, while other fights the other, I may just carry around a stack of each and switch them as needed!
What are your thoughts/experiences with the Glyph of Rejuvenation?
Falling Leaves and Wings 
I have been considering dropping Glyph of Innervate for Rejuv for my raid healing spec. I just kept telling myself it was a crazy idea and the rest of the forest would think I had jumped off the deep end. I’m not sure if I’m going to do it yet – I still need to dig through my parses – but I think it is only a matter of time until I make the switch.
Interesting post. I probably will not switch to it for 10-mans, since I do use nourish with relative frequency to assist in tank healing… but it’s cool to see such niches for a glyph uncovered!
Edited my own glyph post to point back to this 🙂
@Aertimus – I do think that it is going to end up proving itself a fairly valuable glyph for me. I also think that there is probably a threshold where it goes from almost worthless to quite good. Where that threshold is, I’m not really positive. I guess it’s the point in which your raid is regularly taking enough damage that the glyph gets to work?
@Kae – I would agree with your assesment that nourish is a stronger glyph in a 10 man raid setting, regardless of difficulty.
The dynamics of a 10 man raid are quite different from a 25 man setting and the strains placed on healers in each setting are vastly different. I often find when i’m healing in our 10 mans I’m more of a “jack of all trades” and heal whomever needs it (usually lending a helping hand on the tank) in the most efficient manner, which in turn does make nourish a much more valuable asset in my healing arsenal in that setting.
I swear we all get inside each other’s heads sometimes. I was going to do a glyph of Rejuv post 😛
..mostly focusing on the fact that it CAN be very good in some situations, but also nearly useless in others… and it bugs me that some people just use it blindly because “I use Rejuv all the time so it must be the best glyph to use amirite”.
Before my guild dissolved I was swapping Rejuv in for Mimiron. I could see it being useful in a few of the *normal* mode fights, and can only imagine that its use is increased in hard modes; if I found I was using it in the majority of fights, I would probably drop the Nourish glyph.
I switched to the Rejuvenation Glyph a few weeks ago after measuring the real impact of the Nourish glyph after putting together 4pc T8.
Back in the early days of 3.1 wearing 4pc T7, I was using nourish more often: with a 20% + 5%x2-3 buff, the spell landed quite hard, well worth the time spent casting it. However, after dropping T7 in favor of T8, my play style has shifted dramatically towards rolling massive amounts of Rejuvenation and using Swiftmend to patch up spike damage. I find myself using Nourish only a couple of times per boss encounter.
I really think the glyph is worth its weight in gold in the hard modes where high DPS requirements force raids to cut down to bare minimums on healing. On something like Hodir’s Frozen blows, where the raid is taking about 3k damage per 2 seconds after taking resistance into account, the glyph is active on anyone low on health restoring almost 4k per 3 seconds–meaning a single active rejuv on anyone in the raid is generally sufficient to keep them alive through the healing burn phase (after which they should not be taking any damage). The same can be said for XT’s Tantrum, where everyone is taking 11.5% of their hp per second for 10 seconds–blanketing everyone with a glyphed rejuv really extends raid lifespan in the “critical” zone, allowing the healing team plenty of time to land their spells.
@Keeva – I definately think that it has its place, and that it’s not going to be 100% useful 100% of the time. Actually, sometimes it will likely be 100% un-useful! 🙂 I anticiapte that there may be fights when I opt to swap glyphs.
And you should still write your post! I’d love to read your thoughts on it!
@Jurik – We’ve just started the hard modes in our 25 man, so my experience is somewhat limited thus far. However, if Hodir is any indication of what I’m to expect (and what I’ve read) I would agree with you that that the glyph will prove to be very valuable for most hardmode encounters.
I did it for 10 man last night. I mean heck why not – I can always go back. Rejuv with the glyph and 4pT8 was accounting for over 50% of my healing on some fights (specifically one’s we were doing/trying hardmode for – XT, Thorim, etc.) These are also fights when I was raid healing. I swap specs and I still have Glyph of Nourish when I need to tank heal.
Point is – WoW. Thats a lot of healing coming from essentially one spell.
Interesting! There is definitely a discrepancy between Naxx and hard-mode Ulda.
Naxx: No one ever got below 80% health (ok, maybe SOMETIMES. But rarely).
Ulduar: Iron council, killing Steelbreaker last: almost EVERYONE is hovering at around 40% health while my co-healer and I frantically panic and spam heals on everything and anything we can.
Heh – so yes, I can understand how glyph of rejuv would really be awesome in a lot of Ulduar hard mode situations.
Makes me want to consider getting this….
@Aertimus – Rejuvenation has become such a strong spell for us, I’m not sure if this was Blizzard’s intent or not =) I really do feel like I’m a rejuv bot sometimes. However, I’m glad you found the glyph useful!
@Averna – It certainly is worth picking up and trying if you are starting work on Hard Modes, I think. You will find that it was either helpful or not, and can then make your decision on keeping it from there.
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