#0 - Nov. 9, 2010, 5:02 p.m.
Q u o t e:
Leader of the Pack now causes you to heal for 4% of your total health and gain 4% of your maximum mana. Down from 8%.
The nerf to health regen was expected and deserved given the similar reductions in warrior and DK healing. The problem is that the mana regen nerf was not really needed.
Ferals work with just slightly over base mana, and with how expensive spells are, this will severely limite the use of any non feral abilities for feral druids.
Some examples to illustrate:
Rejuvenation: 26% base mana
Regrowth: 35% base mana
Healing touch: 30% base mana
edit: any spell cast via predator's swiftness is now free, a chance which i missed. while this does help with allowing us to use healing touch a bit and has a significant mana save for cyclones, it still does not affect how slow the regen is relative to rejuv, shifting, etc.
LotP has a 6 second ICD. in a pvp environment, getting one proc every 6 seconds is obviously flat out impossible. 1 proc every 10 seconds is usually what this ends up being in practice.
the net result is that feral is now limited to a single healing spell per 60-90 seconds in pvp environments BEFORE you factor in the 5% mana cost to shift or the costs of cyclones, roots, abolishes, etc. the net result of this is that ferals will be more or less locked out of healing abilities all together and have to be extremely limited in use of any other non feral utility or risk being dead in the water. even if we use zero out of form abilities, with this nerf to lotp the break even point for just shifting is 1 shift every 10 seconds or so.
there are numerous differences between feral and enhance and ret, but they are our closest analogues in being hybrid melee. even considering the fact that they use mana for dps abilities, their access to healing and the speed at which they are able to replenish their mana pools totally blows feral away even when using mana cost dps abilities.
is this intended? is feral supposed to be the only hybrid dps without any access to healing? are we supposed to have a timer in any pvp engagement counting down til we hard OOM and are unable to access 3/4 of our utility toolbox with no reliable way to replenish our resources?
i hope this is not the design intent. ways to fix this without boosting our passive self healing back up include-
1. cut the hp regen and icd in half from current beta values while not changing the mana regen. this would return the mana regen to pre nerf levels while retaining the passive healing nerf.
2. allow lotp to proc from crits recieved.
3. allow lotp to proc from hits or crits- removing the RNG aspect and effectively increasing the power of the mana regen.
4. some combination of 1,2, and 3.
5. talented mana reductions attatched to deep feral talents or as a tree passive.
6. talented boost to innervate to make it useful when self cast for the feral.
thanks for the discussion.
