Giddy about Innervate

I can hear the laments now, "A post about innervate on a blog called Divine Plea? What the deuce?". Four posts in and I'm already deviating from paladins and guild running, all to talk about this (soon to be better) wonderful druid spell.

Patch 3.1.2

When I first saw the patch notes, I approached with a careful eye towards any upcoming paladinesque changes. After my recent post about how paladin healing was fine, ret and prot are in good places as well - PvP may be a little different, I was afraid that an incoming change would screw with my place of zen.

Much to my delight however, I've seen nothing at all about paladins. Then I stumbled across this little gem.

Innervate: This ability has been redesigned to grant 450% of the casting Druid's base mana pool to the target over 20 seconds.

Oh really...now this is interesting after all.

What it used to be

Right now Innervate works off base spirit regen. Specifically you gain five times your normal regen from spirit, plus you regain mana as if you were outside the FSR. Using the formula from wowwiki, I can estimate my regen to be approxamately 2700 mana. The priest standing next to me however would gain close to 9000 mana. The same spell gives him half of his mana bar back, and barely makes a dent in mine.

How the worm has turned

Innervate now returns a flat 450% of the casting druid's BASE mana, which has hidden implications that I didn't realize until I was writing this. Base mana never changes. Every druid has a base mana of 3496, which means even if I catch an innervate from a feral druid, I'll still get 15,732 mana back over the duration. This. Is. Huge. You can read GC's response here.

No longer will the paladin be the very last choice to recieve an innervate. No longer will my druids cringe when they cast it upon me and fail to see my mana bar move.

Not that I'll get an innervate anyway.

With the paladin mana regen working like it is, I'm lucky enough that unless I need a battle rez, I shouldn't ever have to depend on an innervate. It's nice to know that the option is there though.

See. It really was about paladins after all.