#0 - April 22, 2009, 3:53 p.m.
*UPDATE* Innervate has been changed to give back 450% of base mana per cast. Thus the only thing SPIRIT does for us is 15% of it turns into Spell Power. 85% of it does NOTHING, ZERO, ZILCH. REMOVE SPIRIT NOW!
First of all, lets talk about Spirit. The nerf to spirit mana regen really hurt druid and priest healers. But I can see why it had to be done. They were using all their mana, then taking a 10-15 second break while others picked up the slack, and refilled their mana bar to full by doing nothing.
I'm wondering why spirit was added to the balance T8 pieces though. The only thing spirit does for balance druids is 15% of it turns into spell power.
Think of it this way for you melee. Lets say a piece has 100 agility. Only 15 of that agility coverted to AP which would be around 30 AP. Other than the AP coversion, the 100 agility would only give you dodge rating. Useful for a dps class? Yeah dodging an attack or two if you pulled aggro might be useful on a fight.. but generally it's trash. Do you see how spirit is for us now?
Last night in Ulduar, we killed Hodir and the T8.5 vanq piece dropped which I won. After the raid, I went to Dalaran to turn in my token and get my new shiny breastpiece. Without looking at Atlasloot to see the stats, I was very happy about this because I like the look of T8 over T7. Plus I thought it would be more or better stats.
After receiving my chestpiece, I compared it to the T7.5 chest I currently have:
T7.5 Chest (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=40469)
578 Armor
+75 Stamina
+70 Intellect
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 61 (1.33% @ L80).
Equip: Improves haste rating by 61 (1.86% @ L80).
Equip: Increases spell power by 99.
T8.5 Chest (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=46194)
591 Armor
+85 Stamina
+86 Intellect
+60 Spirit
Equip: Improves haste rating by 75 (2.29% @ L80).
Equip: Increases spell power by 115.
So basically T8.5 gives me an extra 25 spell damage (factoring in 15% spirit), 14 haste, and 16 Int. I'm not counting stamina because it's not a primary stat for dps.
Keeping the T7.5, I gain 61 crit rating (1.33%)
So from a pure dps point of view, does 25 spell damage and 14 haste > 61 crit rating? Not a real upgrade really. The T8.5 chest doesn't really stand out from T7.5. Not like the T5 did from T4. Or T6 did from T5.
WE TRADED 61 CRIT RATING FOR 60 SPIRIT! This is the bottom line. The druid pvp sets are itemized correctly. Restore has spirit and no crit. Boomkin has crit and no spirit. So why is boomkin T8 itemized like restore pvp gear?
Right now the chest is sitting in my bank, partly because the stats don't offer a real upgrade, but mostly because it will break my T7.5 4pc bonus. Which brings me to my other point.....
The T8 4pc bonus. I think we all agree the 2pc bonus is good. Very good in fact. It's worth breaking the T7 4pc bonus over. But that's where it ends. The T8 4pc bonus is very bad. Wowhead has it listed as a 3 minute cooldown on the proc. Not sure if anyone has 4pc already and has tested it so it could be wrong. So lets say it's wrong and there really is no cooldown.
Because of the global cooldown, you really are not saving that much time with this proc. The global cooldown is 1.5 seconds. With 500 haste (which most boomkins should have at Ulduar gear level), it drops down to around 1.3 seconds. Lets say you get a proc off this set bonus. So you go ahead and cast the instant cast starfire. Now you get a 1.3 second global cooldown. It's the same cooldown you would have got if you cast starfire normally. But if you cast it normally, it would be tied in to the cast time thus you wouldn't even see it.
So this instant starfire goes off. You get 1.3-1.5 seconds of global cooldown where you can't do anything but look stupid to your raid. Do you see the problem with this? It's not really a free spell. You're only shaving off around 0.5 seconds to a max 1 second of dps time with this proc. If wowhead is right and it's a 3 minute cooldown, then honestly how can you not say this bonus is FUBAR? The T7 2pc bonus of +10% insect swarm damage trumps it. Even offset pieces in Ulduar will give more DPS overall than using 4pc T8.
Why should balance druids be forced to only use 2pc T8 to maximize their DPS while other classes don't have to? The tier pieces should be the pinnacle of their gear level with offset pieces helping out until they get tier pieces. Not the other way around.
Edit: Hhaazzyy posted a nice graph of our T8 compared to the other DPS casters:
http://i230.photobucket.com/albums/ee285/hhaazzeeyy/balancemath2.jpg?t=1240853569
