Critical Condition: trees and crit rating in 3.1

Last night in Naxxramas Cowl of the Perished dropped off of Maexxna.  I, looking forward to dual specs and my plans to reduce Northrend to tiny bits when not raid healing, rolled on it for my Boomkin offspec set.  Another druid in my guild who was currently feral also rolled on this for offspec.  I won the roll and then was whispered by him, asking how I could justify this piece as an offspec.  I was a little surprised by the question, and replied, “it has crit on it.”  He then pointed out a number of druid spells that can and do crit.  My brilliant, on the fly response in between grabbing badges and the next trash pull was, “trees don’t stack crit.”  Inspired, I know.

This exchange, coupled with a comment by Running Elk on my post about Ulduar non-tier loot drops suggesting crit might become more important for restos after patch 3.1  set me to thinking more about crit and its role for Resto druids.

The first thing I did was pour over old posts on Resto4life looking for this post which explains well why crit is more of a boomkin stat than a resto stat in WOLK.  I had remembered reading it and wanted to refresh my memory to make sure that I remembered correctly the analysis there.  In essence, the section of the post referring to crit suggests that it is more favorable for Boomkins because crit affects 80% of their DPS spells, increasing their damage and casting speed, as well as refunding mana.  True, some resto healing spells do crit, including Regrowth, Healing Touch, and Nourish.  However, as Phae explains,

HoTs still can’t crit, and the 50% additional crit from Improved Regrowth actually makes spell crit less desirable to Restoration Druids, not more. To understand why, imagine you have 0 crit chance and pick up gear that gives you 10% crit chance. Your net improvement would be 1.1/1.0 or 10%. Now imagine you have 50% crit chance and pick up gear that gives you an additional 10% crit chance. Your net improvement is 1.6/1.5 or 6%, a substantially lower improvement. For the sake of clarity, this assumes you get exactly double the benefit from a crit, which is actually close due to Living Seed but not exact.

So as WOLK opened its doors, although crit had some positive qualities for a healing druid, it was certainly not among the “go to” stats to stack.  We were able to maintain our tried and true list:  spirit, int, spell power, mp5.  However, the times, they are a’changin’.

Here’s what Running Elk had to say about the status of crit for us following the changes to lifebloom and mana regen post 3.1:

Crit is going to become a more important stat with the nerfs to lifebloom and regrowth and the rise of Nourish as a direct-heal option.

This comment has given me much to think about over the last couple of days.  I think that much will depend on the individual druid and how they handle the changes coming down the pike, assuming that the current changes on the PTR go live.  If druids choose to move away from lifebloom, if they put more of their stock in, say, Healing Touch, Nourish, and Regrowth, with efforts to buff these spells as much as possible, I can see an argument that crit would possibly turn into a stat worth stacking. 

However, what are the chances of a druid turning to these three spells in this way?  Not great, I think.  Let’s have a look.

Post 3.1 Nourish heals for an additional 20% if you have a Rejuvenation, Regrowth, Lifebloom, or Wild Growth on the target.  This means that to maximize the spell, you have to roll out the HoTs, so this spell doesn’t work as a stand alone justification to trade stats beneficial to HoTs in your gear item budgets.  In addition, if you want to turn to Nourish as your go to direct healing spell, you’d want to buff it as much as possible, right?  Maybe with a glyph?  Guess what?  The upcoming Glyph of Nourish “heals for an additional 6% for each of your heal over time effects on the target.”  Nourish is at its least effective as a stand alone spell.  Because it should be used in tandem with as many HoTs as you can keep up on your target, and because this means that you will want to keep these spells at their strongest, too, you may not want to gimp your HoTs ostensibly to improve your Nourish by stacking crit. 

Regrowth is another one of our spells that crits.  However, Regrowth, as explained by Phaelia above, also is not a good spell to use as justification for stacking crit if you are talented into Improved Regrowth.  I’m assuming that if you are going to build your gear around a stat to buff a particular spell, you will also be talenting into the best iteration of that spell possible. 

Healing Touch is a possible candidate, but the thing takes so long to cast your raid will be decorating you with Christmas ornaments by the time it goes off.  If you trade one of your valuable glyph spaces for Glyph of Lifebloom to compensate, your cast time goes down, but so does the amount healed… by half.  Stacking crit might get you back close to what this spell should usually land for when it does crit.  Result?  Meh.  And who wants to spam Healing Touch, glyphed or otherwise?  Visit the Pally forums to get a sense of how wildly fun one button healing is.

In addition, in looking at tons of leather and cloth caster gear coming up in 3.1 over the last week, a pattern has emerged clearly.  When the gear has haste, it doesn’t have crit.  When the gear has crit, it doesn’t have haste.  What spells in our arsenal would benefit most from haste?  You guessed it.  Nourish, Healing Touch, Regrowth.  So, although you might be improving these spells in one way by stacking crit, you’d be nerfing other possible positive effects on them in terms of their cast time and your global cooldown.

Overall, it seems to me that stacking crit is not going to be overly helpful for the majority of healing trees post 3.1.  While it may bring up the HPM and HPS of a handful of spells for us, we would sacrifice buffs to our bread and butter, our HoTs, for not a huge return.

Now, I’m no theory crafter, and I haven’t tested a thing on the PTR, so please feel free to poke holes in my argument here.  I’m really interested in what other druids have to say about this assessment.  But from this chair, at this moment, I say Cowl of the Perished is a boomkin drop.  Period.

Edit:  Averna at Nerf this Druid has a great post on haste vs. crit post 3.1 that sets me straight on a couple of things about crit.  Even in her assessment, though, haste comes out on top, if only by a smidge =)  Thanks, Averna!

Similar Posts:

• Tree Mail: I need to stack what???
• Hell-Bent for Leather – Resto stat stacking in 3.1
• Embracing Empowered Touch for 3.2
• A New Day! Reprioritizing Lifebloom
• Field Report: First Analysis of Druid Healing post-3.1