More resto druid changes in 3.3 have been announced.

Rebirth: The cooldown on this spell has been lowered from 20 minutes down to 10 minutes. Cannot be used in Arenas.

Obviously a good change, and I’m sure anyone who has done any of the CC heroic modes will agree that waiting ~16 minutes for your combat rez to come back up after a wipe or even a successful kill was starting to get pretty dumb.  I would have preferred they had done something similar to Bloodlust’s debuff mechanic for combat rez.  For example it has a 3 minute timer but places a 10 minute debuff on the druid when he/she casts it that prevents it being cast.  That way if you wipe then it’s always available for the next fight – however reducing the cooldown to 10 mins is a decent compromise.

Item – Druid T10 Restoration Relic (Rejuvenation) – The periodic healing from your Rejuvenation spell grants 32 spell power for 15 sec. Stacks up to 8 times.

Then you have this tier 10 resto druid idol and two things struck me.  Firstly it’s pretty boring how we’ve been pigeon-holed into always having a rejuvenation based idol.  Ok I get it rejuv is awesome but this idol could just have easily only procced from wild growth (and therefore stacked instantly to 8 practically every time you cast wild growth, although they’d probably have to up the spellpower for it to be worth it.  But the main issue here is that there is almost no difference between this idol and the current tier 9 idol.  In fact the new idol will just take longer to ramp up to full spellpower at the start – and gives you hardly any extra.

The current idol procs instantly for 234 spellpower and has 100% uptime if you have at least 2 rejuvs running. The new idol procs 256 spellpower in 32 spellpower segments with 100% proc chance per segment per tick of rejuv.  It just seems to me the difference isn’t very pronounced, sure people will go for the t10 idol but probably not as a ‘first piece must have item’ like the t9 one was, as you’re only gaining 22 spellpower.

Personally I’ve never liked the whole relic procs idea that came in with t9.  It seems very lazy design to simply give classes a major stat boost for something they’re already doing in their rotations / general healing.  How much better would the t10 have been if they upped the spellpower a bit, to say 280, lasts 20 seconds – and made it a flat proc from something other than rejuv – for example swiftmend.  Suddenly you actually have to work a little tiny bit for your idol proc rather than just getting spellpower bonuses for doing what you were going to do anyway.

Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation – Your haste now reduces the time between the periodic healing ticks of your Rejuvenation spell.
Gift of the Earthmother now increases your total spell haste by 2/4/6/8/10%

I’ve put these two together because they are clearly part of the same issue.  If rejuv ticks are to be hasted, then of course the 359 haste softcap has to be moved and the only way to really do this is to nerf GotEM, so that’s what they’re doing.  This nerf only makes sense if the idea of hasted rejuvs is going to go live – which they already mentioned it might not – so I’d fully expect to see this change to GotEM removed if hasting does indeed not go live.

Of course I’m talking about a haste softcap as it exists on live today, but even if GotEM wasn’t nerfed the ’softcap’ would no longer really be a true cap.  As it is right now any and all haste you have past 359 is essentially worthless on *most* fights.  However with Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation haste would suddenly be worth taking past 359 – arguably not worth more than crit currently because of the t9 bonus but then t10 doesn’t have that bonus so we’re going to ignore that for now.  But by nerfing the amount of haste your instant spells gain from GotEM by 10%, if you want to hit a 1.0 sec gcd for instants now you require ~856 haste which is a pretty big increase over the old 359.  Of course due to item inflation in 3.3 the top level gear is going to have insane amounts of haste on it and crit goes back to being a lot less useful once you replace your t9 set for t10.  This change might even force some druids back into 3/3 Celestial Focus in order to reduce the needed haste back down to a more obtainable ~736 (with 3/3). I personally think the GotEM change is a good one, although technically a nerf, at least now when you get your brand spanking new gear you wont be as annoyed to find out it’s covered in haste as you were in 3.2 – since you’re actually going to want to have that haste.

What I really don’t like though is the idea of hasted rejuvenation.  The whole concept seems to be flawed, based around the rather giddy idea that most other blogs have on the subject, that ticks wont be nerfed once hasting comes in.  Of course they will be, if suddenly your rejuv is ticking, say, 15% faster than it used to – do you really think Blizzard will let you just keep that?  They’ve already made it clear that they think rejuv is overpowered so I doubt it will take that long for them to nerf the tick amounts down to compensate for the increased tick speed.  And then what are we left with? A spell that essentially does the same healing it did before but now requires a lot of haste stacking to maintain it, sure it will now scale with haste but all that means is that those of us at the very top of the gear chain will have a slight benefit.  Those in the middle will have no benefit and those at the bottom will have a nerf.

I’m not going as far as to say it’s a completely bad idea, as who knows what fights the future brings who’s mechanics will probably favour the new shiny fast rejuv, I see it as more of an unnecessary change.  Certainly the change to GotEM makes it more attractive, but still an obvious crutch to hold up what in the long run will probably turn out to be a bad mechanic.