Thursday 13 September 2007

Improved Tranquility


Whilst reading the forums lately, I've seen a general attitude of negativity and disdain to this talent. As druids have no aggro dump (trinkets excepted), I feel this talent is essential for 5 mans and heroic instances; even in raiding its saved many a tricky situation (for example the pyroblast at Aran in Karazhan) and I feel its more than worth the two points used to get the talent.

Firstly lets talk about threat mechanics for the druid class. Healing causes 0.5 threat for each point healed to EACH mob engaged whilst the druid is in combat. With the Subtlety talent (-20% threat on all spells) this is reduced to 0.4 threat per health point healed.



Taking a working example from a recent Karazhan log, we can see that my tranquility ticks for 2026, and theres 4 ticks for the duration of the spell. This means potentially 2026 * 4(ticks to get the full duration) * 5 (party members) = 40,520 health restored, having a situation where all party members actually require full healing is unlikely. Its more likely that only half of the party is being beat upon, so changing the party members to 2, gives us a total of 16k health healed, 16,000 * 0.4 (threat modifier) giving a total of 6400 threat divided amongst all NPCs that are aware of the character.

Obviously if you have three or less mobs aware of you, then having a 2000 threat hardstart on the tank could be a death sentence if you are in a heroic for example. Even taking the Timelapse Shard as an reasonably obtainable epic threat reducing trinket, it only permanently reduces agro by -901 threat every two minutes. As you can see this doesn't entirely cover the approximate 2100 threat generated by tranquility. Improved Tranquility however negates this situation, and as panic buttons for druids go, this is as good as it gets.

Personally as mentioned above I've found that Improved Tranquility has been very useful in many situations including raiding. Its saved a few wipes, by bringing the group back from the point of death to a more mangeable situation.

Whilst I can see where the druids who think its the tanks job to manage all threat issues are coming from (even if it is generated by copious amounts of healing), at the end of the day this game is about cooperation and if you can work with your tank to make a situation more manageable then you should do so.

Improved Tranquility is worth taking a second look at.

NB. Many thanks go out to Karthis for the correction on healing threat.

7 comments:

Magna said...

Improved Tranquility definitely isn't useless, nor are talent points hard to scrounge up for resto druids the way they are for other classes. The problem is that when you move on from 5 mans, where tranquility is a really awesome party saver where the threat aggro is definitely almost necessary, to mainly raiding you'll seldom need it. I can't think of a single situation past Karazhan where popping tranquility would mean death for the druid.

Karthis said...

A minor quibble. You say:

"Its more likely that only half of the party is being beat upon, so changing the party members to 2, gives us a total of 16k health healed, 16,000 * 0.4 (threat modifier) giving a total of 6400 threat on each mob for you."

That is 6400 threat DIVIDED BETWEEN ALL MOBS EVENLY. Threat from healing is spread out amongst all of the mobs that have you on your threat list.

Aftereight said...

Magna: I do see your point, especially when you progress further and further away from 5 mans and Karazhan. Its always good to get the perspective of a druid massively ahead of me in raiding :)

Karthis: Please accept my thanks for the correction, I took great pleasure in informing my other half (our guilds maintankadin) that he was wrong. Its also nice to know that I'm also not quite so doomed if I did cast tranquility in a situation where a lot of mobs might be causing a problem.

Karthis said...

No problem =) I've done too much research into the threat mechanics lately, and am still suffering the after-effects.

One thing I wonder about though: does over-healing cause threat? I would assume not, but I have no proof of that at this time.

Magna said...

Overhealing does not produce threat.

erica van ostrand said...

I'm glad I have it. I don't use Tranq every time it's up but I can say every time that it gets used, it usually saves a wipe. 60K healing for no extra threat? Can't possibly be a bad thing no matter what the circumstance. And it only costs two points.

Baila said...

we DO have an aggro dump. cower isn't great but sometimes its enuf to get u off the top o the charts. i'm thinking that with 2.3s /cancelform it'll become more useful.