cata mastery: restoFollow

The latest update on the mastery has this

* Restoration - Increases the potency of your heal over time spells by up to 20% based on the current health level of your target (lower health targets are healed for more). Healing increased further by mastery rating.

At first I didn't like this, but when I thought about it from the perspective of the planned healing changes in cata I think this is pretty nice to be honest. In an aura fight it's of course massive, especially with cata's focus being on filling and emptying health pools rather then people being alive or dead. It does mean that even with fast incoming damage, the rate of health decay slows as it approaches death, which gives people more time to react.

It's a very passive ability, which is sort of too bad, but it does make it easier to balance. It would be interesting to see a fight where at a certain HP% a druids hots would essentially stop incoming damage, and so due to mana constraints being introduced again in cata you might not want to keep the whole raid at 100%.

Seeing as I've gotten into the beta, I'll try to run some tests and give you guys actual numbers. It might be slightly challenging as I don't think mods are allowed yet.

Edited, Aug 2nd 2010 11:24pm by Xsarus

It doesn't really make any difference to the math. An increase from a low point or a decrease from a high point in the end works out to exactly the same situation. It would confuse people though, and I don't think blizz would ever implement anything that actually decreased healing.

You know, this made me think. A really really cool effect would be if higher health people were healed for less, and you got a benefit from that in returned mana. That would be pretty sweet.

Edited, Aug 3rd 2010 10:03am by Xsarus

I found the thought of it interesting at least. Since they were trying to do something like it with the RJ glyph. It was always one of those things that looked attractive, until you really thought about how much time people spent with low health. That time has been low in wrath, and that tended to push the numbers away from favoring it. Ya, I imagine that could be quite powerful in Cata if they've done a good job of balancing health pools. I'll be watching for it to be one of those things that gets nerfed to 15%.


Edited, Aug 3rd 2010 9:51am by someproteinguy

It's important to note that it isn't just Druids that won't be downranking, it's everyone, because spell ranks no longer exist.

It's paced so you pretty much get a talent one level, a single ability the next. The flow is slightly different for each class / spec, but that's the gist of it.
Every level or so, the damage, healing, or whatever, goes up a little bit on each ability. Ever play Lord of the Rings Online? It's similar to that system (Dunno if other MMOs use a similar system, I can never play them long enough to find out).
It works out to be a lot smoother. No more worrying about dinging in an instance and suddenly using WAY too much mana for the amount of a spell healed, or your ability not doing as much threat / damage per mana anymore. It is sort of disappointing, though, to go back to town to get one ability.

Mage armors are getting rearranged too so in that specific instance it's a nonissue. As I recall they're trying to better segment those kind of abilities so that each one has a clear use and doesn't just go through a minor or cosmetic 'upgrade' over its predecessor.

They actually claim to be bringing back the 'epicness' of epics. For one thing, the old Dungeon sets are making a comeback (as blues). We could assume that those drop off heroics BC style.
Of course, only time will tell if they actually pull it off.

Hopefully Blizzard introduces more instances like ToC and FoS, PoS, and HoR. In TBC, gearing up new recruits by re-running Kara/Gruul/Mag when we were in TK/SSC was a pain. Then again for BT/Hyjal. In WotLK, newbs could at least get ToC 10-level gear from running heroics and be geared for ToC 10/25.

Plus they added an ArP trinket that wasn't a ***** to get to FoS. :)

I ran Forge of Souls heroic every day for a solid month, saw it drop five times and had it taken from right under my nose each time. My Druid still doesn't have it and he's got 62 FoS heroics under his belt now.

If it makes you feel better I never did get that darn snowflake. Thank goodness for badge trinkets.