Stats and their importance

Stat priorities

While gearing up, you’ll want to make sure you have adequate regen to cope with encounters, and may want to prioritise spirit for a while. Once you get used to encounters, you’ll likely be able to afford to ease up on Spirit and focus more on Haste.

Remember though, your first priority is to make sure you have enough haste for the first extra tick on Rejuvenation, which will improve your healing and efficiency – more ticks squeezed into your HoTs means less direct healing required, and less mana expended. So while you should always be prioritising Intellect, make sure you are aiming towards that first extra tick breakpoint (see below). However, as always, in the very early days (doing heroics the first few times, with lower gear), it’s okay to go with Spirit a little more in order for you to not OOM in fights.

The basic priority is:

For raiding, you need to get to the 916 Haste breakpoint (preferably a few more points to be sure), then see if you can reach the 2005 breakpoint also. If you can, reforge for that point. If you can’t, then you should reforge all but ~920 of your Haste off, in favour of Mastery. The reason for this is that from 917 to 2004, your HoTs won’t gain any benefit, so if you are primarily healing with HoTs, then stacking Haste between breakpoints is quite wasteful. As always, this will depend heavily on your assignment, encounter, and raid size; if you are assigned to tank healing and won’t be doing very much on the raid, you may wish to strike a balance between Haste and Mastery.

For dungeons, however, a lot of your healing can rely on fast direct heals – saving people with quick Regrowths, Nourishes, and Healing Touches, when your HoTs won’t save them. If you mainly do 5 man dungeons, I would recommend that you don’t reforge off your Haste down to 916/1601, as you will notice that your direct heals become quite slow and sluggish.

Haste levels

Haste has the potential to reduce our GCD to 1.0s, but it also makes our HoTs tick faster. At particular milestones, it will squeeze an extra tick into the HoT duration. For example, instead of 5 ticks of Rejuvenation, you can have 6 ticks squeezed into the duration. The breakpoints for haste are:

So at 12.5%, Rejuvenation will have 5 ticks; at 37.5% it will squeeze in a 6th tick. Assuming you have at least one of the classes to provide a 5% haste buff in your raid (Moonkin Form, Shadowform, Wrath of Air), the number to aim for, to receive the 5th tick, is 916 haste.

Warlocks also have Dark Intent, which is a fantastic buff for resto druids to have (due to the HoT nature of our healing), and gives us 3% extra haste. However, it’s best not to count on having this 3% when calculating your haste breakpoints, because you may not always be given the buff, and this would leave you short of the haste milestones. On the other hand, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll have either a Moonkin, a Shadow Priest or a Shaman, and in that case you can count 5% haste in your calcuations.

An easy way to work out what you need is to see where your current haste sits inside these break points, and see what the next break point will get you; if it’s worth reaching for, then you can reforge/gem appropriately. Here’s what you get, in terms of extra HoTs, for various values of haste.

At the very least you should aim for ~920/~1610 haste, which will grant you an extra tick of Rejuv (our most-often used spell), plus an extra tick of Tranquility, which is even more attractive now that in 4.1 our Tranquility cooldown has been reduced to 3 minutes. If you are smack on 916/1062 and can’t get 917/1063, that’s ok – but if you can get to 917/1063, you’ll get some extra bonus healing out of Tranquility. At the absolute least though, you need 916 (1603 unbuffed).

Important breakpoints for you to aim for

If you’re looking for detailed math and breakpoint tables, including the effect of temporary buffs like Nature’s Grace, head over to The Inconspicuous Bear.

To make it as simple as possible though, just follow these basic guidelines:

Which statement best describes you?	Aim for	And you’ll get
I only run dungeons and I can’t rely on having a Moonkin, Shadow Priest or Shaman with me. (I won’t have a 5% haste buff)	1603
	2745	and
I run dungeons and raids and always have a Moonkin, Shadow Priest, or Shaman with me. (I will have a 5% haste buff)	917
	2005	and
I run dungeons and raids and I have a Moonkin, Shadow Priest or Shaman, plus our warlock gives me Dark Intent. (I will have a 5% haste buff and a 3% haste buff)	518
	1573	and

*Note: there seem to be some funky rounding issues with HoT/DoT haste, so if you want to be certain that you’re getting your extra ticks, you may want to go a few points over the above numbers, to be safe Also, the Rejuvenation (and Tranquility, since it’s so close to the Rejuv breakpoints) and Wild Growth/Efflorescence breakpoints are the only ones that are worth deliberately reaching for – you should think of the others (Regrowth and Lifebloom) as nice little bonuses, but they are not worth pushing for between Rejuv and Wild Growth/Efflorescence breakpoints.

Reforging and gearing with haste in mind

You can reforge part of your Spirit, Crit, Mastery or Haste; at early levels of gear you will likely want to reforge to Spirit, and with better gear you will probably move to reforging to reach haste milestones. Just be wary of reforging off all of your spirit if your gear levels are a bit low and mana can be a problem. An OOM healer is a useless healer. See the Reforging page for more on this.

Remember that you can also opt for higher haste items, if only temporarily, to push to your breakpoints. For example, Relic of Norgannon instead of Relic of Eonar or Twilight’s Hammer instead of Andoros, Fist of the Dragon King.

Consider becoming an Alchemist for Vibrant Alchemist Stone – this will save you the equivalent of nearly five Quick Amberjewels, and is a great way to reach your breakpoints more easily.

Gemming haste

Many people ask whether it’s a good idea to gem for haste, including dropping some Intellect gems to be able to do this. The basic answer is: Yes. If you are close to reaching the WG and Efflorescence breakpoint, getting there will greatly increase your output, and it is absolutely worth it to exchange some Intellect. Most people don’t like dropping more than 100-200 Intellect to do this, but I can tell you that I personally dropped over 400 Intellect and still saw a massive improvement. So while it might feel a bit noobish to be rocking a bunch of Quick Amberjewels, if they push you over the WG/Efflorescence point, it is justified. See the Gems page for more info.

What do I do when I’m between haste breakpoints?

A question that is often asked is whether you should reforge away from haste when you are between haste breakpoints. For example, if you know that you have 1000 haste, but you need 2005 for your next extra HoT tick benefit, then should you reforge back down to 916, and stack something else until you can easily reach 2005?

Yes and no. First of all, now that we use our direct heals (with longer cast times) so much more, haste is very valuable to us. When you first reach 85 and start to gear your character, your haste will be very low. Your direct heals will feel slow and sluggish, and this can really impact on your performance in groups, because you can’t get Nourishes out quickly to fill in HP gaps, or HT out quickly to top someone up, and that means less time to toss other heals.. and so on.

So getting some haste under your belt is a priority.

916/1602 is the magic number that everyone should strive for, to get that first bonus tick of Rejuvenation. 916 if you are usually grouped with a Moonkin, Shaman, or Shadow Priest; 1602 if you can’t rely on that.

If you find that you *can’t* reach those points yet, don’t reforge your haste off for Mastery or Crit, reasoning that you’ll get bigger heals and more throughput. At this low amount of haste, you really want to keep the haste on there, even if you’re not reaching the breakpoint, because you really *need* your direct heals to be as fast as possible. When you’re starting out, it’s better to have a Nourish or HT land faster and get onto casting something else, than to have it slow but heal for a little more.

The exceptions are –

• If you are a fresh 85 and you’re having problems with mana early on, then you can prioritise reforging for Spirit over Haste (and Crit, and Mastery, of course), but it shouldn’t take you very long to be able to swap back to prioritising Haste. You want to reach 916 ASAP, but if you’re OOMing in dungeons and people are dying, then best to slap a bit more Spirit on your gear for a while.
• If you are raiding, then you can choose to reforge to Mastery while you wait to reach the next breakpoint. However, though this gives better theoretical output, your result will depend on your raid’s healer combo, assignments, size, and your play style. Some people prefer to stick with haste (or at the very least, not reforge off *all* haste to 916) to keep direct heals a bit faster. This is up to you – but you should be aware of the fact that Haste is very weak in between breakpoints.

Articles

Druid Haste Rating Breakpoints – The Inconspicuous Bear
Spirit/Intellect Relationship, evaluating gear choice (math involved) – Rank 4 Healing Touch
Spirit/Intellect Relationship 2, understanding up and side-grades – Rank 4 Healing Touch