Patch Notes for 4.0.6 and How They Affect You (EDITED: 01/12/2011)

Patch 4.0.6 is now being tested on the Player Test Realms and they bring a lot of changes to pretty much everyone in the game. I am going to cover the General Changes and the Druid Specific ones and what they mean to us. This article may be updated in the future if more Notes are added so check the header to see if it has been update since 01/08/2011.

P.v.P

• Bloodlust, Heroism, Time Warp and Ancient Hysteria can no longer be cast while in Arenas.

I'm pretty sure that this is a bug that they just now realized and are going to reverse but why wait until a Patch to implement it? It will probably be another week or two (or more...) until they actually make the Patch go live and now that they have it in Public Patch Notes anyone who reads them will exploit it if they didn't know about it already? Although, this doesn't impact Druids specifically it may make you change who you are Arena-ing with if you only chose them for the Heroism/Bloodlust/Time Warp/Ancient Hysteria.

Races

• The night elf racial trait Shadowmeld can now be used while shapeshifted.

This really shouldn't impact a lot of Resto Druids since we are almost never in form while Healing however it is going to be very useful in world PvP when you're in Flight Form and someone decides they feel like ganking you.

• The tauren racial trait War Stomp can now be used while shapeshifted.

This is HUGE for Tauren because it is something people have been asking for for a LONG time. Before if you wanted to use War Stomp it would break you out of Bear, Cat and Boomkin. This would make a tank loose all of his rage and most of his threat, a cat loose all of it's Energy and a Boomkin would loose valuable DPS time because he would need to stop casting, hit the spell, go back into form and wait for GCD period on his spells to wear off to start casting again. This affect will probably be used a lot by Bears because it is another AoE in the arsenal or for pretty much any druid that is trying to make a quick get away from a mob.

• The worgen racial trait Darkflight now has a 2-minute cooldown, down from 3, and is no longer on the global cooldown. In addition, the movement speed bonus now stacks with existing bonuses, but cannot be activated while Sprint or Dash is active (and they cannot be activated while Darkflight is active).

This is pretty much a Feral Druids PvP wet dream (or Rogue). This means that Dash is no longer on the same cooldown as Darkflight. So you can pop Dash and then Darkflight immediately after Dash's duration ends AND they lessoned the cooldowns. I can already hear the bitching on the forums for this.

Druids

• Barkskin is no longer dispellable.

Um, thank you!? I honestly had no idea that Barkskin was dispellable and even though it's pretty much a PvP only change it's still awesome to know that it's getting fixed.

• Healing Touch is now trained at level 78, up from level 3.

Um... I honestly don't get this change. 78 is PRETTY high up there to give us our Holy Light/Heal/Healing Wave equivalent... As an 85 this won't matter but still.

• Mount Up: This guild perk now applies to Flight Form and Swift Flight Form as well
• Yay! This bug was bothering me for a long time because I honestly don't use my flying mounts at all on my Druid because I have an instant cast form that I can pick herbs in!
  
• Nourish is now trained at level 8, down from level 78.

Nourish is pretty much replacing Healing Touch while leveling. At a low level it won't matter very much but as you get up there I'm sure a lot of druids are going to be asking where is my BIG healing spell when the tank is low.

• Omen of Clarity can no longer trigger from helpful spells (aka heals), unless the Restoration talent Malfurion's Gift is chosen.

If you didn't have Malfurion's Gift as a talent before now, you might as well get it. Now your Clearcasting (Which allows your next cast to cost no mana) will not proc from healing spells at all. But this also means that the only thing that it can proc on now is Lifebloom which is going to force Druids to start using it. 3 Stacks of Lifebloom for ALL tanks now! But also Omen of Clarity says attacks. Which means our melee swings are going to have the ability to proc Omen as well. We're going the way of the Paladin my friends and get ready to see a lot of Druid Healers asking to be in melee range.

• Rejuvenation is now trained at level 3, down from level 8. In addition, its mana cost has been reduced from 26% to 16%.

If you're a level capped Druid the first part won't matter much but the second part is HUGE! 10% reduction in mana cost for our Rejuvenation.  My Rejuvenation right now is 4,554 mana. 10% of that is 455.4. Which means Rejuvenation after 4.0.6 will only cost 4,098 mana. This is HUGE since personally Rejuvenation is the spell I go to for raid healing.

Talent Specializations


Restoration

• Empowered Touch now also affects Regrowth.

Empowered Touch: Increases Healing done by your Nourish and Healing Touch Spells by 10%., and refreshes the duration of your Lifebloom on the target. This talent will now include Regrowth as well which means a 10% healing increase. I tend to not use Regrowth that much anymore since the mana cost has sky rocketed and if you spam it you go OOM pretty quick. It was pretty much only spammed if the tank was getting really low and Swiftmend was on Cooldown and I didn't have Clearcasting active. This 10% healing increase will hopefully help with me not having to cast it so many times so I can save mana when the tank is dipping dangerously low.

• Nature's Bounty no longer affects Swiftmend, but now has a new effect. When the druid has Rejuvenation on 3 or more targets, the cast time of Nourish is reduced by 10/20/30%.

Nature's Bounty: Increases Regrowth's critical strike chance by 60%, and you have a 100% chance when you critically hit with Healing Touch or Nourish to shorten the remaining cooldown of your Swiftmend by 0.5 seconds. So the talent will take away the 0.5 second reduction of the remaining cooldown of Swiftmend. I honestly never saw a HUGE difference but I never paid much attention to it much. But I really like the second addition to this talent. If you're raiding this means a free 30% reduction speed in your Nourish since you should have at least 3 Rejuvenations rolling on at least someone. My Nourish runs at a 2.22 second cast time. With a 10%/20%/30% decrease this shortens my Nourish to 2.00/1.77/1.55 second cast time. This is HUGE because I usually am spamming Nourish on tanks like a Flash Heal in randoms when they are taking consistent damage. Being able to do them more quickly is going to be really helpful.

Glyphs

• Glyph of Regrowth now causes the heal-over-time effect to refresh itself on targets at or below 50% health, up from 25%.

Eh, I really don't see this as being a super big help. It will keep refreshing itself if the target is below 50% health but Regrowths HoT is very dismal. It's a 6 second HoT that does not heal for very much.  This is not going to make me want to switch to this Glyph and will stick with Glyph of Rejuvenation, Glyph of Swiftmend and Glyph of Lifebloom.


Bug fixes

• Many bugs... handled them!

I love it when they use jokes from that guy. Never stops being funny.


January 12th, 2011 Changes


Restoration

• Symbiosis (Mastery) benefit from mastery has been increased by approximately 16%.

Blizzard has been struggling with Mastery for classes for a long time. They had a good idea and it works for some of the classes but for Boomkins and Resto Druids I know it's not very useful. For Boomkins Mastery only affects damage when you're in an Eclipse state. And since you're not in an Eclipse state half of the time you're DPSing people would rather stack stats that help their DPS out 100% of the time. And for Resto Druids Mastery is the stat we never want to choose right behind Critical Strike rating. So a buff to Mastery for Resto druids is a welcome change. I feel bad reforging all the mastery I have on armor since Blizzard seems to put it on everything and want us to use it.

• Tree of Life no longer grants immunity from Polymorph. In addition, its duration has been reduced to 25 seconds, down from 30 seconds.

I'm fine with this change. I don't PvP much (even though I'm trying to get into it with my new server being World PvP) so I never really noticed not being polymorphed. Although in every other form I am unpolymorhpable why not this one... And the 5 second decrease in duration seems about good. I have noticed a lot in 25 mans that I pop Tree Form when a lot of damage is being dolled out. Once I pop my Tranquility and spam insta-Regrowth/Lifebloom as many people as possible I find myself standing there for a little while until I am popped back out. 30 seconds is kind of long because I can heal up the raid to full with the help of 4 to 6 other healers in less time during the pop all cooldowns phase.

• Wild Growth healing has been increased by 30% , and the cooldown has been decreased to 8 seconds, down from 10 seconds.

Oh my god, yes! I personally spam Wild Growth every time it's up. It's a pretty moderately mana efficient spell (4,729 so about as much as one of my Rejuvenations) that coats 6 members with a small HoT. This is really useful for slight raid damage that doesn't warrant 6 people getting their own Rejuvenations to get them back up to full. But it doesn't pack a ton of punch. To see that it is getting not only a buff in healing, but that the time I can use it down to 1 second after it finishes down from 3 seconds is absolutely amazing. Really happy to hear it.

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