Hi everyone!

Today I have a bunch of tips for how you can squeeze as much out of your Innervates as possible.

How Innervate works

First, it’s important to understand how Innervate works.

Innervate
Causes the target to regenerate mana equal to 20% of the casting Druid’s maximum mana pool over 10 sec.

Innervate has changed multiple times over the course of the last few years. It has been based on the target’s spirit, the caster’s spirit, the caster’s base mana; the current version is based on the casting druid’s maximum mana pool.

That means that it doesn’t matter who you toss your Innervate to, whether it’s onto yourself or onto a friend, the target will always receive 20% of whatever your maximum mana is.

So if you have a mana pool of 100,000 mana, your Innervates will land for 20,000.

It also means that buffs and effects that increase your mana pool (either as a static buff or a temporary buff) will also increase the size of your Innervates. So if you have a buffed mana pool of 110,000 mana, your Innervates will now land for 22,000 instead of 20,000. So your Innervates while you solo or do 5mans without an Int buff will be smaller than your Innervates in raids. And if you forget to put Mark of the Wild on yourself, your Innervates will be smaller, because Mark of the Wild gives you Intellect, which buffs your mana pool.

In the case of temporary buffs from enchants and procs, if you can time these strategically and use your Innervate while your mana pool is temporarily increased, then you will receive more from your Innervate, even if you are casting on another player. This means buffed Innervates for yourself, or buffed Innervates for them.

And, if you’re using Glyph of Innervate, which you almost certainly will be, then anytime you give your Innervate away, then your half share Innervate will also be buffed.

Items that increase your mana pool

So, keeping all of this in mind, let’s explore some of the items that could temporarily increase your mana pool, and allow you to get more from your Innervates.

Examples

Enchant Weapon – Power Torrent – random proc
Lightweave Embroidery – random proc (Tailors only)
Synapse Springs – on use effect (Engineers only)
Electrospark Heart Starter – on use effect
Hymn of Hope – priest cooldown

I wouldn’t advise you to use that trinket, as a static Intellect trinket is usually best – but I wanted to include it as an example of an item that will temporarily increase your mana pool (and therefore your Innervate).

Now, while we’re not all tailors or engineers, if you’re a tailor or an engineer, then you should be making good use of these procs/effects to maximise your Innervates. If you’re a tailor AND an engineer, then in theory you could get all three of the above (Power Torrent, springs and embroidery) to line up for over 1500 extra Intellect, which means 22,500 more mana temporarily, which is an extra 4500 mana on top of your normal Innervate. This is equal to 125mp5 if you are using Innervate on cooldown.

Even if you’re only doing it with Power Torrent, you’ll have 500 Int or 7500 mana, which is 1500 extra from Innervate, or 42mp5. Nothing to sneeze at.

TLDR: Try to use your Innervate when you get one of these procs, or use your Use items and then Innervate.

Innervate swapping is what smart druids do

By using Glyph of Innervate and giving your Innervate away to another raid member, you are giving 30% of your mana pool to your raid (20% to your friend, and 10% to you). This is worth more, logically, than simply Innervating yourself for 20% mana. 30% > 20%. So in raids, you should be giving your Innervate away, even if it means that you have to be more conservative with your own mana in able to do it. Just remember – 30% to the raid is more value than 20% to yourself only.

However, if you have another resto druid in the raid, you can make a pact to swap Innervates, which means that you give 20% of your mana to your friend, and receive 10%, and your friend gives 20% of theirs and receives 10%.

If you have 100,000 mana and your friend has 120,000 mana, you would receive 34,000 from one swap, and he would receive 32,000 mana. If you were Innervating yourselves and not each other, it would be 20,000 and 24,000 mana respectively. So by teaming up, you’re getting 14,000 extra mana, and your friend is getting 8,000 extra mana. That’s ~390mp5 extra for you, and ~220mp5 for your friend (all hypothetical numbers of course).

TLDR: Setting up an Innervate swap with another druid friend will give you both a substantial regen boost.

Using Power Auras to maximise Innervates

This is the cool part.

You could wait for your buffs to show Power Torrent, and you could watch your raid frames to see when your friend’s mana bar seems low enough to Innervate. Or, you could set up a Power Aura to tell you – set and forget! You can even set it up to play an alarm, so you don’t even have to look for an aura – when the alarm sounds, you Innervate. It’s so handy!

I’ll give you some exports to play with. For simplicity, I haven’t made them look fancy, they are just simple auras; you will need to change how they look, the positioning, the sound effects, etc. The sound effect that I have used is a default sound that comes with Power Auras, called “phone”. If this doesn’t suit, go into the Sound tab and choose a different sound. You can also download or create your own wav files and assign them to your auras.

Innervate ready
This really speaks for itself; I use an aura like this to say “hey Keeva, your Innervate is ready to use. Use it!” Simply having the icon light up is not enough to prompt me; I need an aura (and preferably, an audible alarm) to nudge me. When things are hectic in a raid, you tend not to watch your Innervate cooldown, so having something flash on your screen, or ring in your ears, will remind you to use those Innervates on cooldown.

Import string:

Version:4.2; g:0.4196; icon:Spell_Nature_Lightning; buffname:Innervate; r:0.1686; bufftype:15; texture:16; alpha:0.27; isResting:0; sound:21; anim2:1; finish:0; timer.h:1.61; timer.enabled:true; timer.cents:false; timer.y:29; timer.x:88

Mana at <80%
Another simple one; you only want to use Innervate on yourself when your mana is low enough to get full benefit. Using Innervate on cooldown is the goal, but if you use it when you’re not missing much mana, then some of it will be wasted.

By using this small aura together with the Innervate aura, you’ll see that Innervate is ready AND you have the appropriate mana deficit.

Import string:

Version:4.2; bufftype:9; texture:70; alpha:0.33; isResting:0; threshold:80

Mana at <80% AND Innervate ready
This is taking things a step further, using conditionals to really prompt you to do something about the fact that you haven’t used your Innervate.

To add a conditional, you need to find the number of the aura that the new aura will check. So in this case, you will need to find your Innervate aura in Power Auras and hover over it to see what number it is. If it is #23 you will need to add the correct number next to Exact Name or this aura won’t work properly!

Import string:

Import the string as in the aura above, but add the conditional. Change the colour to red to give it a sense of urgency.

Temporary Intellect buff aura
This just shows you when your random Int effect is active, and how long remains. Change the name of the buff as required (remember that the name of the proc may not be the name of the item; you can either look it up on Wowhead, or trigger the item in-game and check what the buff is called).

Wait for both your Innervate aura to be up AND your Intellect aura – and then use your Innervate.

You may prefer to use a more subtle graphic for your Power Torrent (etc) because it will be up a lot, and you may find this distracting. You’ll need to find a happy medium between being obvious enough for you to be encouraged to use it, without being distracting or cluttering up your view.

(You may also want to create an aura to tell you when your Use items (such as Synapse Springs or trinkets) are ready to be used again, especially if they are on a shorter cooldown than Innervate’s 3 minutes, so that you can use them between Innervates.)

And, of course, you will probably want a separate aura for Hymn of Hope to differentiate between your usual Int buffs and Hymn.

Import string:

Version:4.2; buffname:Synapse Springs; texture:7; alpha:0.26; isResting:0; timer.h:1.85; timer.enabled:true; timer.cents:false; timer.y:49

The super awesome Innervate swap arrangement aura

I’m so excited about this one because it’s so simple, but just so clever (if I do say so myself).

I tried swapping Innervates by keeping an eye on my buddy’s mana bar and Innervating him as necessary.

The problem with that strategy, though, was that it required me to watch his mana bar, when really my priority was watching people’s health bars. I didn’t want to neglect his mana bar (and miss the chance to Innervate early and often), but watching it like a hawk was distracting me from what my true job was. So I needed to find a way for Power Auras to just tell me when to Innervate him, so that I could essentially ignore the issue until it was time to hit the button.

Here’s what I came up with. It’s an aura that, when you have your buddy as your Focus target, will check that:

  • your Innervate cooldown is ready, AND
  • your buddy’s mana has fallen below 70%.

So if any time that your buddy’s mana falls under 70%, AND your Innervate is good to go, you’ll get the icon pop up and the alarm sound (remember, you can change this alarm to anything you like).

Import string:

Version:4.2; b:0; g:0.0039; icon:Spell_fire_meteorstorm; x:154; bufftype:9; focus:true; texture:53; alpha:0.58; sound:21; threshold:70; size:0.94; y:-41

NOTE: Check that the conditional has your Innervate number in there, or it won’t work.

To test that it’s working, set your friend as your Focus target, then ask them to strip off all of their armor and put it back on again (which will take them to low mana).

You could also get super tricky and add in an additional conditional for your Power Torrent buff (and if you are an Engineer, you could also add a conditional that your gloves cooldown is ready). This would basically be an aura that says “Ok, your Innervate is ready to go, your friend has dropped under 70% mana, and you just got a Power Torrent proc – quick, Innervate your friend NOW!”

The fact that it looks for your Innervate to be ready means that you won’t constantly have a low mana warning showing on your screen (because late in fights, your friend will almost definitely be under 70% mana). That is distracting. By adding in that conditional to check that your Innervate is ready, the ONLY time this aura will show is when your buddy’s mana is low AND your Innervate is ready to go.

You can afford to make this one big and obnoxious because in practice it should only be up for a few seconds before you act on it. However, by assigning an alarm, you don’t even have to watch for the aura – you can wait for the alarm to remind you! It really couldn’t be more simple.

Honestly, the hardest part is remembering to re-target your friend as your Focus!

Obviously you can mix and match these auras, or simply use them as inspiration for your own. The important thing is that you have something that notifies you of your Intellect procs and Innervate cooldown – and if you’re swapping Innervates, a Focus aura is just fantastic.

Enjoy! :)

Edit: it seems that when exporting auras, some things like conditionals do not transfer to the exported code. If any of the above exports don’t work for you, check that the blank line next to Exact Name has the correct number in it. Since they’re generally looking to see if your Innervate is on cooldown, you just need to hover over your Innervate aura, see what the number is, and enter that number into the blank space next to Exact Name. Do this for any aura that you have that relies on Innervate being ready to use before it will show.



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