Aye. Even if that 10% was a direct heal, and not a HoT, I’d still think it was rather useless.
Time to find a nice Ferocity pet. My wife is not going to like this at all (she has two spirit cats).
If BM doesn’t want Elegon as a spirit beast I will gladly take him.
Okay. After spending hours crunching numbers, it looks like retail is using something similar to 2.34 * AGI * Vers% at max level. That is a VERY ROUGH guess; I couldn’t find the exact equation no matter what I did. At max level in SL, it’s closer to 0.67 * AGI * Vers%.
The ticks are 2/3 of the original (non-crit heal). They don’t crit, even though the original heal can. This is the same in BfA and SL.
My heals on myself in BfA (naked and 21k health) hit for 2,652 + 5*1768 for a total of 11,492. (54.7% of my total health)
My heals on myself in SL (fully geared and 23.3k health) hit for 665 + 5*439 for a total of 2,869 (12.3% of my total health).
My heals on myself in BfA (Fully geared and 544k health) hit for 28,882 + 5*19,255 for a total of 125k (23% of my total health).
You are right. It is WAY LOWER.
I filed a bug report in Beta. Hopefully this is unintentional.
Edit: I gathered this information from the combat log with a bunch of different gear.
3 Likes
Yep.
On live we can see things like:
Boss spawns crap on the floor for everyone to run out of. You know it ticks fairly hard so the healers will struggle to keep everyone alive. In such cases, you can use Spirit Mend and actually notice how it helps with keeping you alive, even if you don’t have Turtle up or Exhil., unless you stay in it for too long that is.
That is exactly how an ability such as this should work.
In SL, you can pop that Spirit Mend all you want, it won’t do much of anything either way.
Am I right when I say that these values are based on your character when it doesn’t have Aspect of the Beast chosen as a talent? As you’ve probably noticed, Spirit Mend doesn’t scale well with gear but 23% seems very low.
Yep, sadly.
Crossing fingers.
I can understand that it was too powerful at the start of BfA when it healed for half your health pool and you only had about 20seconds of downtime in between each use. But since it scales so horribly with gear, I find those initial numbers to be less of a problem.
And it certainly wouldn’t warrant such a massive nerf as what was done to it. In high end raiding, sure, the tenacity effects aren’t worthless but Spirit Mend was basically THE reason for why you picked a tenacity pet in PvE. Without that heal, you just won’t.
Yes. I should have mentioned that. I was trying to eliminate as many variables as possible. so I wasn’t specced into Ascpect of the Beast. I also removed my neck for the calculations and remove any Vers corruptions.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the exact equation. AGI seemed to scale healing from 1.8 to 2.4, and I don’t think it’s linear. There are several equations on the internet, but they all seem inaccurate. Even SimulationCraft and wowhead has this formula for retail, but they don’t seem to line up with what’s actually happening:
${$m1+(($RAP0.6)31.0504)} plus an additional ${$m2+(($RAP0.6)21.0504)}
Of course, I don’t know what $m1 is supposed to be. It would have to be a positive number for retail and a negative number for beta from what I’m seeing.
Extended stats and SimulationCraft show this to translate 1 for 1 to Attack Power (wowhead shows it calculated differently)
Famdom shows this for RAP:
(Char.Level x 2) + Agility - 10
Famdom shows this for MAP:
Strength + Agility + (Char.Level x 2) - 20
Ranged Attack Power didn’t add up, but neither did MAP. or SIMC. Here are the results from all three methods of calculating Attack Power.
| Retail | Retail | Beta | |
|---|---|---|---|
| iLevel (without Neck) | 444 | 326 | 160 |
| Health Pool | 428,600 | 331,000 | 25,100 |
| (Char.Level x 2) + Agility - 10 | |||
| Level | 120 | 120 | 60 |
| AGI | 10810 | 7861 | 935 |
| AP (Ranged) | 11040 | 8091 | 1045 |
| Versatility Adj | 6.11% | 1.29% | 8.25% |
| Calculated Heal (RAP) | 22149 | 15495 | 2139 |
| Actual Heal (Tick 1) | 27200 | 20325 | 732 |
| Difference | 5051 | 4830 | -1407 |
| Actual Heal Total w/ hot | 117867 | 88075 | 3172 |
| % of HP Healed Total | 27.50% | 26.61% | 12.64% |
| Strength + Agility + (Char.Level x 2) - 20 | |||
| Level | 120 | 120 | 60 |
| Strength | 1497 | 1497 | 453 |
| AGI | 10810 | 7861 | 935 |
| AP (Melee) | 12527 | 9578 | 1488 |
| Versatility Adj | 6.11% | 1.29% | 8.25% |
| Calculated Heal (MAP) | 25132 | 18343 | 3045 |
| Actual Heal (Tick 1) | 27200 | 20325 | 732 |
| Difference (MAP) | 2068 | 1982 | -2313 |
| Actual Heal Total w/ hot | 117867 | 88075 | 3172 |
| % of HP Healed Total | 27.50% | 26.61% | 12.64% |
| AP = AGI | |||
| Level | 120 | 120 | 60 |
| AGI | 10180 | 8317 | 935 |
| AP | 10810 | 7861 | 935 |
| Versatility Adj | 6.11% | 1.29% | 8.25% |
| Calculated Heal (RAP) | 21687 | 15055 | 1914 |
| Actual Heal (Tick 1) | 27200 | 20325 | 732 |
| Difference (RAP) | 5513 | 5270 | -1182 |
| Actual Heal Total w/ hot | 117867 | 88075 | 3172 |
| % of HP Healed Total | 27.50% | 26.61% | 12.64% |
Two sets of gear in retail (both without a neck, Vers corruptions, or Aspect of the Beast) plus one set of gear at 160 in Beta. You can see the difference between calculated heal and actual heal vary quite a bit, but the Beta heal is A LOT LESS than the retail heal when I use the same formulas for AP.
3 Likes
I can’t say that I know for sure what it means either.
On wowhead, in the changelog for Spirit Mend shows the equation like this:
[0 + ((RAP * 0.6) * 3 * 1.0504)] plus an additional [0 + ((RAP * 0.6) * 2 * 1.0504)] over 10 seconds.
This as of patch 8.1.5, build 29701, march 2019.
If we instead look at the latest one which is for patch 9.0.1, build 33978(not live), it shows as this:
[0 + ((RAP * 0.6) * 1)] plus an additional [0 + ((RAP * 0.6) * .66 * (5)] over 10 seconds.
As for the “$m1”, it shows a value of 0 both on live as well as on beta. It was changed to 0 from the value 1 going from Legion to BfA. If you look at far older builds, you can see that the value was substantially higher than it is now(for MoP and prior).
If I were to guess I’d say that the first number represents a constant which is unaffected by things such as RAP or vers etc. Meaning that Spirit Mend would heal for that value + what’s calculated from your RAP and vers and so on. Whereas today, Spirit Mend heals are based solely on the latter. But I might be wrong there.
From earlier builds, you can also see that Spirit Mend scaled extremely poorly with gear. And from what I can tell, it was just bad in general.
I don’t personally recall the effectiveness of the ability prior to Legion so, maybe someone else can back this up/correct us.
Anyway, from the above, it’s safe to say that Spirit Mend is much worse in SL compared to BfA.
That is a 66% nerf if it’s correct. It almost looks like a mistake. I used to tutor Calculus, and I could see an Algebra student making this mistake pretty easily.
Well, in my test yesterday the conclusion was 65-66% (I wrote 65 in my reply earlier) so that seems to match the in-game numbers on PTR exactly.
Whether it’s a mistake, I can’t tell. Considering the changes made, I would assume that they are intentional but yeah…
I’m no expert on math or equations but they changed the way it’s being calculated, not just the values. Why?
Or what does the “(5)” stand for? Compared to what was there before.
Edit: correction, the (5) I assume is there to point to the 5 ticks of the HoT.
Elegon is an eight year old model. Not exactly what I meant by “new”.
I can’t speak for the SL version, but for the calculation in the BFA version, I have a couple things to note.
First, the AP% it says it uses for the duration of the DoT, it actually does per tick. Maybe look to see if they ‘fixed’ this in SL?
Second, it heals for a decent chunk more than the calculation says it should. Even when accounting for the above, the aspect of the beast bonus, and versatility. I have no idea where the extra healing is coming from, if the listed modifiers are just wrong or what.
This isn’t new information. Spirit Mend’s tooltip and healing got reduced in SL months ago. Both the direct heal and the HoT were reduced by ~68.5% (removal of the 3x multiplier on initial cast, 2x multiplier for HoT tick turned into 2/3rds multipler, and removal of the 1.0504 multiplier from both).
The only reason people didn’t notice is because they added the 5x multiplier to the HoT in the tooltip, but that’s just a bugfix. As Woodhaus noted above, the current value indicated in the tooltip as healed over the entire HoT is in fact the amount healed per tick of the HoT (you can test this on live, cast it on yourself, the HoT will tick 5 times, each for ~2/3rds as much as the initial heal). So adding the 5x multiplier to the HoT is just correcting that inaccuracy, not buffing the ability.
I pointed all of this out to Adreaver back in like April, iirc.
Not really. My tooltip on live says it heals for 26,519 initial, plus 17,679 per tick. It actually heals for 35,329 + 23,553 per tick, which is 33.22% more than the tooltip. I have Aspect of the Beast slotted, so that’s 30%. Not sure where the other 3.22% is coming from, but it’s pretty darn close.
Swapping out Aspect of the Beast, it heals for 27,176 + 18,117 per tick, which is only 2.5% high.
I have 11042 agility, and my weapon deals 497.3 DPS, so my effective AP is 497.3*6 + 11042 = 14025.8. The AP coefficient for the initial hit is 0.6 * 3 * 1.0504 = 1.89072. 14025.8 * 1.89072 = 26518.86, which perfectly matches the 26,519 I have in my tooltip.
So the healing (nearly) matches the tooltip, and the tooltip matches the expected value given my AP.
But yes, this is a nerf. It’s also almost certainly a justified nerf. Spirit Mend right now heals for 153,094 healing (with AotB), on my HP pool of 530,297, so 28.9% of my HP. That’s effectively equivalent to Exhilaration, except on 1/6th the cooldown, no GCD, and freely targetable on raid members. Spirit Mend is why Spirit Beasts are considered the only rational option for BM in raids (and outside of lust, M+).
However, this hardly makes them “useless”. The heal is still appreciable, and it’s still free, off the GCD, and freely targetable. Spirit Beasts are also still Tenacity for the DR cooldown. What makes them arguably useless in SL is the conversion of the purge to a hilariously terrible pet self-cleanse.
Then again, in a raid, it’s unlikely that the snare, MS, or pet defensives will ever have an impact in a raid either, so I suspect Spirit Beasts will still be a bit of a go-to for BM in raids. They just won’t be The Only Option like they are now.
1 Like
It looks like the updated the beta tooltip since yesterday to reflect the way it actually works in Beta. As far as I can tell, it’s always been wrong in BfA. This seems to indicate that it’s intentional.
Maybe they don’t want us using Spirit Beasts - even though that’s the most noticeable trait of BM Hunters. /shakes head
Yep, I believe it was first reported with the initial class changes for us back in alpha.
The thing is, yes, for BfA Spirit Beasts were generally considered the go-to pet for BM because of said heal. In short, it was just that valuable both for yourself as well as for your team members.
Spirit Mend made up for 6-10k HPS on certain encounters where there was a lot of incoming damage.
But Spirit Mend itself wasn’t really the problem. It’s not exactly as if Hunters are brokenly good in PvE or PvP because of the heal. The problem is more the fact that many other pets simply have inferior abilities which competes with that of Spirit Mend.
Spirit Mend did exactly what it should now in BfA. It has the potential to save your life for example when taking frequent ticks of incoming damage. It has an impact where it feels good to use it.
In SL? An ability which heals for 10% over 10 seconds(at the start of the expansion and less as it continues) is NEVER going to save your life in threatening situations. You will use it because it’s still better than nothing, but it becomes more like an on-the-go food you don’t have to sit and eat in between pulling mobs while leveling.
The devs said many years ago that they prefer to not nerf a particular element but rather bring others up to equal level to the element in question. They should heed to their own statement here.
I would prefer if they look at it like I said above. Abilities should have an impact. It’s not as if Hunters have a lot of healing abilities. Pet’s and what utility they bring, should matter. It shouldn’t be a button which you feel apathy for when you use it.
The tooltip is wrong. You can look the combat log to see that.
Not at all true. The reason they are the defacto standard isn’t the heal. It’s because the Spec Identity of BM Hunters is a Spirit Beast.
I’ve never chosen a Spirit Beast for any reason other than Spirit Shock. When I pull out Skarr for Lust, I feel like I should be in another spec, because that’s the pet my old RSV spec used to run around with. Spirit Beasts are part of the BM Hunter identity.
Strangely enough, before I started looking at tooltips and combatlogs, I’ve always felt that Spirit Mend was weak. I hardly ever “felt it.” I see now that I underestimated it, but I’m sure I won’t notice 10% of my health over 10 seconds.
Either way, I don’t really care. I didn’t feel it much before. I certainly won’t feel it if I press it now.
I’m tired of watching a class design team, who obviously does not play Hunter in any capacity. Maybe that’s intentional because they’re afraid personal feeling will get in the way of good design, but it’s clear they are designing from the outside looking in, and it breaks my heart to see it.
They’ve not said that at all. In fact, if anything, it’s the opposite. They’ve noted that nerfs do not feel good, and that all else being equal, buffing underperformers is better than nerfing overperformers. But they also noted that all else isn’t equal. It’s far easier, for example, to nerf 1-2 specs than buff the other 34, especially when buffing those 34 then means going through and readjusting encounter difficulty and open-world difficulty, etc.
It’s the same sort of power creep we see in Diablo, where characters are now doing literally hundreds of times as much damage as a couple years ago, and individual set bonuses are now 30+ times as strong as they used to be.
Nerfing overperformers, if they are out of line with the goal state being balanced towards, is the proper way to do that. Yes, it feels bad, but it’s also a much easier mark to hit (and lord knows WoW balance is bad enough without a “never nerf” mantra being added).
Spirit Mend is still a very strong ability, to the point where Spirit Beasts will still likely be the preferred raid pets for BM. Will it save your life? Maybe, maybe not. But it’s not there to save your life. That’s what Exhilaration is for.
Clearly you didn’t read my post, since I associated the tooltip values with the combat log values, too.
Trite, and quite false. Clefthoof are the rule for soloing, and there’s nothing “spec identity” about that. Spirit Beasts are chosen because they are mechanically superior. Raiders don’t care one wit about spec identity in that regard.
However, you’re partially right, the purge is another big vote for the Spirit Beast. But that purge is also largely useless in raids. And if you weren’t bringing the Spirit Beast for its heal, you clearly were not using it as much as you should.
It’s a pet heal. It should be in a similar category for sustain strength as the leech from your pet being ferocity. Our burst heal is Exhilaration.
I’m frankly just tired of pets being tuned so there’s only 1-2 options in any given content. Spirit Beasts are currently the only option for BM, and that’s entirely due to their mechanical strength. 30s CD raid-targetable Exhilaration, purge, and auxiliary defensive is hard to pass up.
Basically, I’m not really surprised it was nerfed, nor am I particularly torn up about it.
2 Likes
I must be tired, because I don’t know how I missed that. I think I’m tired of numbers and scanned over the math too quickly. Sorry about that.
I agree with you here. For me it was just a math exercise - which was fun at first.
There are many other things that bother me about the class design. Whether I heal for 10% or 30% is meh compared to the other things they’ve done that make me sick to my stomach.
Spirit Mend is my smallest concern insofar as it doesn’t force me to use pets that are not spirit beasts. I’m invested in mine so much that I farmed Loque-Nahak TWICE in beta for my Template Character so they would match. It’s important to me when I play BM.
They used to have a class that used non-spirit beasts exclusively, but they removed that. That used to be my class. So here we are - again - arguing for more play styles in an single spec. Pisses me off that this is still happening.
This is kinda what I said.
I just did not mention why they said it.
To be fair, I was talking about a specific element. Not entire specs.
But yeah, sure it is.
Still, nerfing something which in itself isn’t brokenly good, just because they can’t be bothered to bring the rest up to par?
How is that a good decision?
That’s my point.
Spirit Mend as it is in BfA(especially in the later stages of the expansion) isn’t overperforming, when in comparison to more than just other specific pet abilities.
Healing for 10% of your total health over 10 seconds, at the start of the expansion and even less later on as health pools tend to scale proportionally faster than the potency of such abilities…
No, it won’t still be a very strong ability. You can argue that it can still compete with other pet abilities but that’s far from being “a strong ability”, in context.
It really depends on why we play and how we play.
So basically, not really good at all.
Leech for BM in raids is fairly useless based on where the most of our damage comes from(thus where the healing goes).
Sure, it adds up over time, but the miniscule numbers on a per-action basis might as well not be there.
It is even in BfA.
Exhil heals for 30% instantly.
Spirit Mend heals for roughly 30% over 10 seconds.
Again, not the fault of Spirit Mend(Spirit Beasts in general) but it lies with othe rpets and their inferior abilities/effects.
I sort of agree. There are many things that needs to be addressed.
But making more bad decisions isn’t the right course to take.
1 Like
Just because you want to use your Spirit Beast doesn’t make it good design to force you to. If I had my way, pets would be transmog skins over a completely customizeable utility and damage system. I’d rather it be that you can use whichever pet you like the look of, completely separate from the mechanical aspects like utility and damage and spec and such.
How would you bring every other type of pet “up to par”? Spirit Mend is still exemplary and unique. You’d have to come up with something similar to that for every pet, or at least every exotic pet.
For example? Spirit Mend is unique amongst hunter pets. There are very few pet abilities, or exotic abilities, that can have as much impact as Spirit Mend does (btw, I’m excluding family abilities and spec abilities, since those are a separate system that Spirit Beasts are already part of with additional abilities)
No hardcore raider worth worth his salt would take an inferior pet just for “spec identity”. Sure, casual players can do that. But in actual progression raiding, Spirit Beasts were used purely and entirely because of their mechanical strength, and not at all for any silly notions of “spec identity”.
Ya, exactly. 1/6th the CD, no GCD, and freely targetable on raid members, just in exchange for the heal being over 10s. That’s huge. Even at 10% it’s substantial.
Again, how would you “bring the others up to par”? How would you craft abilities that could compete with Spirit Mend at 30%?
Yep, most likely.
It’s about what we want out of pets. To me, “Exotic” means more than just a different look/aesthetics.
I wasn’t talking exclusively about hardcore raiders.
It’s very good yes.
But it’s not broken when taken in context with game mechanics. It only becomes “broken” when compared to other pets/abilities.
10% over 10 seconds with 20 sec downtime. Sure it adds up. But it means that we will lose the ability to “save” ourselves in certain situations. You can’t always rely solely on Exhil, or even Turtle, due to their longer CDs.
It would depend on the pet. But you could add in other types of heals or DRs, pets that can affect Turtle or even Exhil. Etc. Etc.
The term Spirit Bond, despite being moved to SV, still connects to the fantasy of BM after all.
Again, I’m not saying that Spirit Mend isn’t very good now in BfA.
I’m just saying that the ability alone(even coupled with Spirit Shock) doesn’t make BM as a spec, brokenly good.