Monday Musings: Is Nature’s Bounty Worth It Edition

Be Warned, this is a fairly long Monday Musings! I’ve been so busy that I’ve not been posting with the frequency that I normally do, so I have a million things floating around in my head to get out!

On 4.0.6 Resto Druid Specs, or Is Nature’s Bounty Worth It…

For the sake of science I decided to try out a spec with Nature’s Bounty in it for this week’s raids. Here is what I went with. I will admit that while I really liked it on Heroic Chimaeron, I found it lack luster in a lot of other places, especially on Nefarion where I thought it would really shine in phase 2. This leaves me questioning if it was worth the loss of points from Furor to pick it up.

I’ve also seen a lot of other specs floating around out there, some drop LS and Efflorescence, some drop a point or two in GotEM, some drop Nature’s Cure and Nature’s Swiftness. And even considering all of those other options to find the points for Nature’s Bounty – I’m still not sure that it’s worth it. Personally, I just can’t give up my cleanses or Nature’s Swiftness. I get that some folks are comfortable with that decision, I am not.

The most common arguments that I hear for dropping other things to pick up Nature’s Bounty are that the other talents just aren’t competitive with Nature’s Bounty. In this light, a lot of people seem to be giving up efflorescence to pick it up, stating the efflorescence just doesn’t heal enough for 3 talent points into it. So I decided to look at my numbers for the past few raids that I’ve had Nature’s Bounty in my spec to see exactly what benefit it provides and how it performs
comparatively.

Even though I’m including my Regrowth numbers – they are a bit misleading as I would have still cast those regrowths, just now perhaps I had more crits from them. So when you see the regrowth numbers, take them with a grain of salt because they don’t really accurately reflect the healing I’m attributing to them. Really, all that is gained are a few more crits – so when trying to evaluate them for Nature’s Bounty’s vs. Efflorescence purposes the values are somewhat inflated.

If we look at my Heroic Chimaeron kill – where I felt that I got the most bang for my buck with Nature’s Bounty and really tried to weave nourishes in, Efflorescence accounted for 5.3% (361,226) of my healing – where nourish accounted for a whopping 2.8% (192,413) of my healing. Let’s go ahead and throw in Living Seed at 1.1% since I have to waste points there to get to Efflorescence. And we can look at my Regrowth crits (I had 34 of them) since presumably they’d be higher – bringing Regrowth to account for 3.00% of my overall healing done. When all is said and done – Living Seed + Efflorescence accounted for 6.4% of my overall healing and Regrowth + Nourish was only 5.8% of my healing. And that was with my really trying to give Nourish a fair shake.

Now, I know you are thinking that Chimaeron is a “perfect” fight for Efflorescence, and boosts the numbers. And that’s a “best” scenario. And I hear you. So let’s look at my Atremedes normal kill then. Efflorescence was 5.4% of my overall healing, regrwoth was 3.2%, living seed came in at 1.6% and nourish was a weak .8%. Again this puts Efflorescence + the lackluster living seed at 7% of my total healing and regrowth and nourish at only 4%. Although to be fair, with all the movement in this encounter nourish isn’t really super stealer, even with its 1.5 second cast time.

Ok, I hear what you are thinking now “but all of those encounters have SO much raid damage that efflorescence really shines”. I agree! So I thought “ok, let me find an encounter without a lot of raid damage”. And you know what? THEY DON’T EXIST! You know what else? This is even truer in Heroic Mode! There wasn’t a single encounter where there weren’t times that the raid is taking heavy damage.

In the interest of being thorough, however, let’s look at two more: Nefarian and Cho’Gall.

Nefarian – the one encounter where I really, really wanted to love Nature’s Bounty and Nourish: Efflorescence 6.1%, Living Seed 1.3%, Regrowth 3.4% and Nourish 4.3%. Efflorescence + living seed come out to 7.4% and Regrowth + Nourish come out to 7.7%.

Cho’Gall – Efflorescence 3.8%, Regrowth 3.2%, Nourish 3.0%, Living Seed 1.3%. Efflorescence + Living Seed come out to 5.1% and Regrowth + Nourish 6.2%.

Now, that the numbers are out there, let me also go ahead and state that every single encounter I was absolutely sucking fumes at the end. Gasping for more mana. Sometimes before I should have been.

My conclusion after a week of raiding with Nature’s Bounty? I do not think it was worth the points I gave up in Furor to get there. I also do not think that it’s better than Efflorescence. In fact, I think I’d even go as far as to say that, at least for 25 man raiding, it’s worse.

Has anyone else that has run any numbers with it that has any thoughts?

On Raiding

We have started our push into Hard Mode raiding and so far I will say that the hard modes, even the easiest of them, are very challenging. The previous week we had spent some time with Hard Mode Halfus, and pre-4.0.6 had gotten him down to roughly 9%. 4.0.6 came and changed the mechanics of the encounter, and in my opinion made it significantly more manageable and predictable, and we saw him dead within two pulls.

We then moved on to Chimaeron – who was also very, very challenging. However, we plugged through it, tweaking things here and there and managed to snag a kill in a night’s worth of work with him. It was far from clean, and like many first kill very exciting – with just two or three people standing as we eeked out the very last bits of his life. Indicating that our strategy still needs some tweaking to make the kill comfortably repeatable. But all in all I found it a very fun encounter, and I’m looking forward to a second kill on it this week.

We have picked out our third hard mode, and are batting about what we think we should go after next as there are a number of encounters that are fairly equal in the number of kills seen. We are trying to sort through one that will play to our strengths as a guild, and make a good decision.

All in all, I am pretty pleased with how we’ve been doing overall.

On Raid Performance

One of the things we decided to do this expansion is to put a larger emphasis on the micro aspect of raiding – being individual performance. After each raid, we post up our World of Logs, and we ask each member to look at them and offer us feedback on their performance, both where they felt they did well and where they felt they had room for improvement.

Brade and I then also look at other aspects of the raid as a whole and offer feedback. Things such as “deaths” – and look at why they happen and ask how they could have been avoided. We look at who utilized performance potions with Bloodlust. We look at how many healers needed to use mana potions – and then if it’s less than 100% of them ask why. Too many healers? Forgot? I’m an OP paladin pre-nerf and laugh at your mana troubles, etc.

We also take our lowest DPS (usually the bottom 5) and assist with breaking down their performance, putting their numbers in comparebot and asking them to tell us where the discrepancies are, and asking them to tell us where they can improve. We also look at our healers as well – and seek similar feedback.

While this has been a very time consuming process – as we move into more farmed content and people become more comfortable with WoL, Comparebot and knowing what to look for the time burden has decreased somewhat. Not only that, but I think that the results have been undeniable. Where many of our parses would look like a ladder – we are now seeing more DPS being competitive at the top of the meters and it’s not always the same person dominating, and as a result our overall raid damage has come up significantly.

I am going to go ahead and state that I feel it’s one of the best things that we’ve done this expansion. As we get further into the raid content, we often have feedback on the evening’s performance before we even get the chance to get through our analysis. We’ve been able to turn it more to having a conversation with each raider – and less Brade and I digging through parses for hours on end. And as a result people who felt they knew their class inside and out are learning new tricks to up their performance, and we are seeing that happen.

We still have a couple of folks struggling, but even in their struggles continuing to improve. All in all, I’m really happy with how well the project has gone to date and have immensely enjoyed watching the guild improve with every raid.

On Bugged Potions

So if you are an alchemist you may want to take note of the incredibly cheap Mysterious Potion. Right now, if you are making use out of an alchemists stone those suckers are restoring an obscene amount of mana. To give you an example of exactly how obscene, last night on our Conclave of Wind kill I got a return of 39,465 and on our Nef kill I got a return of 37,506. The smallest return that I saw for the night was ~24,000.

Now, I have no clue if this is intended or if this is a bug. I strongly speculate that it’s the later, however there has been some heated discussion that it is not a bug but an incentive, or perk, for alchemists. Regardless, until Blizzard fixes it (assuming it’s a bug) this little pots are hands down your best return of mana if you are an alchemist utilizing the new alchemist’s stone.

On Vashj’ir

I’ve been questing out here on my warrior. And much to my shock and surprise…I really like the zone. No, really, I do! I was very surprised to find that I truly have been enjoying the underwater wonderland that Blizzard created. From the story lines to the beautiful music of the zone I’m having a blast.

On Alts

I still find that I’m lacking motivation to do a whole lot with my alts once they reach level 85. I enjoy getting them to 85, but once I’m there I find I’m in a bit of a “now what” phase. I am having a hard time to motivate myself to do a gear grind with them – and I’m not entirely sure why. I usually love instancing. I can’t help but wonder if it’s because I don’t see a “future” for them. Perhaps if I start up an alt run this stagnation that I feel will dissipate some and I’ll continue to see a future for my alts post level 85.

I think that’s about all I have for this Valentine’s Day Monday! If you have any experiences or thoughts, about anything, that you’d like to share – or even just need to get your own brain dump out – I’d love to hear them! If not, then I wish that Cupid sends you many arrows this year, and that you don’t make yourself sick on all that chocolate!