Resto Druid T13 set bonuses
Come on, WoW devs … you should know better than to release important patch information in the middle of primetime on a Saturday night! Set bonus info vs. a brand new episode of Dr. Who? Why would you do that to me?!
“Restoration, 2P — After using Innervate, the mana cost of your healing spells is reduced by 25% for 15 sec.
Restoration, 4P — Your Rejuvenation and Regrowth spells have a 10% chance to Timeslip and have double the normal duration.”
(source)
The two piece bonuses are (as usual) the same across the four healing specs. It will be a nice boost to Innervate but … I mean are any of you still having mana issues at this point? Don’t get me wrong – I use mana much differently now than I did in WotLK, in that I actually acknowledge that I have a blue bar underneath that health bar. But at this point in the expansion, I really never find myself hurting for mana. A thoughput cooldown would be infinitely more interesting. It seems unlikely at this point that 2p tier 13 will be better than our 4p tier 12, but obviously this will depend upon whether mana become more of a concern in the Dragon Soul raid. Given the iLevel difference between our current gear and what drops from Dragon Soul, it’s possible that the increase in Intellect will be more than enough to make any of our current set bonuses irrelevant – but we won’t know this until we see the actual items, of course.
As for our 4 piece … I foresee even more overhealing in my future. I barely use Regrowth at the moment except when I have Clearcasting procs. Rejuvenation is still one of my top spells, but it already does a ton of overhealing in nearly every fight. Both of these will be somewhat helpful for keeping HoTs on my tanks longer without worrying about refreshing, and it’s really only for tank healing that I could see myself wanting this.
Set bonuses are, of course, subject to change and did change for resto druids on our tier 12 sets from what was originally described. What are your initial thoughts to our set bonus? Do you find yourself being more optimistic than I am?
Tree Heals Go Woosh 
The 4-piece bonus is not good, I agree that it is somehow useful for tank healing but other than that it’s just useless overhealing.
The 2-piece bonus is not bad although unspectacular, I like that there is some sort of extra mana regen available (if you don’t need the mana you can always strat reforging spirit).
But yeah, overall I’m not impressed.
With all the tank bonuses having some sort of raid-wide cooldown, I think it’s pretty obvious that we’re going to see a lot of predictable spikes in raid damage in the Dragon Soul. I guess that might make a difference with our 4p bonus being helpful for raid healing? But, again, using Rejuv for raid healing is already my primary source of overhealing, so I’m still having trouble really backing this one.
I’ve slowly been reforging away most of the spirit on my gear since 4.2, and I still haven’t experienced any serious issues with mana. If, as I said above, there is a ton of spikey raid damage in Dragon Soul, then maybe mana return bonuses will be at more of a premium.
Lots of “maybes” here until we see the encounters on the PTR.
Hmmm, surely the timeslip will allow for massive swiftmends? and there for much better aoe raid healing with efforlescence (excuse the spelling) … or am i getting this mechanic wrong?
I don’t see why swiftmend or efflorescence would be affected by Timeslip. As I read the mechanic, all it does in increase the duration of the rejuv and regrowth HoTs, it does nothing to increase the amount that they heal. So, sure you might need to refresh rejuv less often, but with the amount of raid healing going out in Dragon Soul I find myself keeping rejuv up on multliple targets most of the time and using Swiftmend on cooldown anyway.