The Altoholic

Today I’m going to take a look at two druid talents: Nurturing Instinct and Improved Leader of the Pack (you couldn’t have guessed, huh?). For those of you with no tooltip skills (lol lrn2tooltip newb), at 2/2 points, Nurturing Instinct (NI henceforth) improves your healing by 100% of your agility and increases healing done to you while in Cat form by 20%, and Improved Leader of the Pack (ILotP) applies a buff to you and your party members that causes healing equal to 4% of the character’s total health everytime they get a melee or ranged critical strike.

I am a huge fan of ILotP. My druid is level 45 as of now, and I have approximately 2000 self-buffed HP. With a critical strike percentage of about 23%, ILotP fires off all the time (the healing can only happen once every six seconds, which is probably fair, because I often see several strings of crits within a couple seconds; that would add up to quite a bit of healing!).

Nurturing Instinct used to suck. Really badly. It used to improve your healing by 25%/50% (per point) of your strength. Druids are pretty crit dependent*, and tend to stack agility over everything else. Now, however, NI improves your healing by agility, which is nice for soloing and off-healing a group when in your tanking or DPS gear. My question was whether or not (1) NI made your HoTs tick more if you cast it and then switch to Cat form, and (2) whether the healing from ILotP was affected by the 20% aura from NI. Time to pull out the old calculator!

When I did the test (last night) I had only one point in NI–that increases my healing by 50% of my agility and increases healing done to me by 10%. So, I popped Rejuvenation (Rank 7) and watched it tick. It hit for more than 97 because of the NI’s increase to healing by a percentage of agility, of course; I immediately switched to Cat form and watched it tick for an additional 10%. So healing from HoTs is calculated every tick and not at cast.

For my second trick test, I calculated what 4% of my HP was (it was around 78). I then proceeded to whack things until I got a crit and watched the green “86″ float up my screen. So NI does indeed affect the healing from ILotP, even though ILotP heals for a set percentage of buffed HP.

So, to recap:

1. The healing from HoTs is calculated at each tick, and if you switch to Cat form while affected by a HoT, NI will increase the healing done to you.
2. NI does indeed increase the healing done to you in Cat form from ILotP by 10%/20%, but not by 50%/100% of your agility (only the second part of the talent applies here).

This might actually make me consider grabbing up this talent. The bonus to healing would be nice for soloing and grinding, though definitely not required. The bonus to healing from agility doesn’t really help in instances, since I’ve got a healing set that doesn’t have any agility (except for the pieces of my DPS set I keep on to fill in the pieces that are missing in my healing set). The bonus to healing from ILotP is nice when soloing, but since it doesn’t work in Bear form, it’s not good for instances either.

What do you guys think? Worth it now, or not?

*The site at this link is a very nice druid site, and I especially love the information in this particular page. I highly recommend checking it out!

[Edit] It just occurred to me that this talent might be pretty nice for those who do the occasional battleground in their feral spec and gear (such as me)–I don’t do enough PvP to warrant spending the gold to respec for a BG to resto (especially at 45, when I have virtually no gold), which seems to be the druid PvP spec at the moment. Karthis over at Of Teeth and Claws (see the Blogroll) has a recent article entitled “Feral Healing FTW” where he discusses healing in a battleground as a feral druid, and it seems that this talent could supplement that quite nicely.