Balance spec is good damage, as well, if you prefer playing a caster. The beauty of hybrid classes is that you don't need to roll a new character if you want to play a different role.

Our resto druid tops the healing meters in nearly every fight. They are far from worthless, especially since raid wide damage gets thrown around in almost every fight.

If they can stay in tree.

How can you possibly call that mindless rant a "great read"? There are no real arguments backed up by facts anywhere in there and even his own guildmates basically tell him to "shut up and get sober already" in the thread.

Yes, druids lack decent group synergy and raidwide buffs(tree aura and motw are not really that good), however druids make up for it by simply having the highest healing output and efficiency of any class. When you're doing double the effective healing of the next healer in the raid, then there is no way you can call the class not worthy of a raid spot.

Also, you're comparing apples and oranges in your post. Chainheal is for raid healing, hots are for tank healing. Unless Blizzard decides to release an instance with Aran as every boss, there is absolutely nothing wrong with druid healing.

I have yet to see a fight which forces me out of tree for the entire fight in TBC.

Then compare oranges to oranges...the fixed Lifebloom is excellent, and Swiftmend is a godsend in terms of reacting to spikes, but FoL/HL spam (unless your Paladins are in some freakish lockstep where their casts aren't staggered) can do the same job, and they come attached to a healer with another raidwide blessing, situational BoP, and the ability to become invincible. It's easy to say what a Druid brings to the table is better than nothing...of course Lifebloom ticks and Swiftmends will help...but pointing out that they're helpful isn't the same as saying they're discernibly better than just having another person bombing away with normal heals (or a tougher measure still: that they're enough better to justify giving up the raid utility a Paladin would bring to the table).

It's not that Druids aren't viable; it's that they aren't optimal. The problem is, in the context of a guild where you can have any raid makeup you like sub-optimal is worthless.

There...I beat the horse too. It's still dead.



At any rate...back on topic...to the "the beauty of Druid is you can respec Feral/Balance as needed" folks...

Healing is just...well...different from other playstyles. It's reactive, flexible, and some people just really dig it. This is especially true for Druid healers since their healing has (in my opinion) always been the most reactive and the most flexible. So while another spec might yield more raid invites, it doesn't necessarily mean it'll make you happier. I agree with them that you ought to pick one of these specs and see how it suits you, but if you don't dig it I'd say head right back to your comfy tree or dreamstate/HT spec. Some folks are just healers, and if that's you there's no sense in playing your character to not enjoy it.

What are you talking about? The entire post is a fact. Its the top druid in the world not getting to raid, having to sit outside becuase he has NO buffs to the raid. You want facts? Druids have no massive buffs for teh raid in ANY form. Unless they can out heal paladins and shamans to some amazing degree, they will always be secondary, becuase both of those classes bring amazing utility to the raid, and still kick ass at healing. Druids do not have potent heals, because their heals get "eaten" by other heals. Hots on an MT should mostly be over healing. If your other healers are worth shit, they are over writing those hots constantly. The only argument ever brought up to me to defend tree druids is that hots are for healing up the team. Which is why I compare them to chain heal. I think the entire idea of having a class based around hots is retarded, because they just get over written, and are pretty shitty.

What makes this fellow the "top druid in the world?" Is it because he's in the guild with the best PvE progression? He can still be a poor source of information. I also saw a thread in that forum where Ahoq (the lone hunter in all of Nihilum's raids) explains his shot rotation and then gets taken to task because the rotation is awful and clips autoshots like crazy. The regular raiders in Nihilum could be good because they can communicate, or multi-task, or just stay alert for twelve hours straight in front of a computer screen. But clearly they are not all good sources for theorycraft or class balance discussion.

"If your other healers are worth shit, they are over writing those hots constantly." What if every tank in the raid just rushed the main boss target and tried to generate as much threat as he could? Because you're suggesting that healers should take the same attitude towards healing the raid, which is silly. A smart healing team can coordinate healing assignments, while a bunch of meter-readers will snipe each other's healing targets. I give more credibility to the healer who can take responsibility for his assigned healing while letting his fellow healers do their jobs, rather than the one playing whack-a-mole on Grid.

No, I'm sorry that post is certainly not a fact but only reflects that particular druid's opinion and though it has some good points, some of the arguments are way too simplistic and deceptive. Secondly, just because a person from class X is part of Nihilum, that does not necessarily make him "top X in the world". Last but not least we couldn't care less if person Z has to sit outside because presumably he brings nothing to the raid. That is the ruling of a single guild and no matter how far it has progressed, it shouldn't be taken as the "Word of Allah".

By "massive" buffs I would guess that you are referring to blessings and/or totems. This is a design issue connected with raiding groups being scaled down to 25 slots and it's not druid specific. Holy priests were affected in a similar manner.

Again I do not see a druid specific issue here but rather a raid synergy issue. Hots should be applied where they are mostly beneficial on any particular encounter and while its true that hots on an Main Tank are mostly over healing (due to the nature of other healing styles), they can surely make things easier and in certain cases even prevent deaths. Azgalor is a good example on this, when you get an unlucky silence.


Like I said earlier, hots can be beneficial whether they are used for group/MT healing or whatever as long as they are timed properly. Chain heal is a great "fire and forget" spell and combined with hots can achieve some serious results.

Druid healing is seriously fine. It may not be optimal for specific encounter styles but it can get the job done and at the end of the day, it all comes down to the person behind the character. It's the lack of overall utility when compared to the rest of the healing classes that creates unrest (and rightfully so, to a certain degree) but that goes beyond the role of a healing druid.

Finally, for the love of God, can we stop bringing meters into such discussions ? Unlike damage meters, healing ones are in most cases, entirely subjective, they don't take into consideration assignments (multitasking in general) and even fail to properly count effects (such as lifebloom or let's say Prayer of Mending) that would bring them closer to an actual real world situation.

I think the whole hots vs direct heals issue is a red herring tbh.

It doesn't matter if someone's heals get overwritten. Tanks don't die because they take 300 000 damage over a 5 minute fight and the healers could only heal 299 000. They die because damage spikes and that is the reason for taking 7 healers when judged on sheer throughput you could probably take 3. A certain amount of redundancy is assumed.

Suppose you have a 15 000 life tank. He's on full with 7 healers alertly waiting for him to take damage. He gets hit for 12 000, 7 guys start casting their 2.0 cast time heals in response and 1.5 s later he gets hit for 4000 and dies just half a second before all those heals land. Variety is great for healing, you don't want all your healers healing in the same way.

So the issue isn't whether hots suck (they don't - all hots or all direct heals would suck).

I also think Tree Druids are pretty mobile. They are the only healer which can be fully effective while moving, in fact you can heal with autorun on perfectly effectively. In fights where everyone has to move somewhere quickly or die it's often the healers who get indecisive about "let me just finish this cast, then I'll move" who die.

Swiftmend and NS make Resto Druids wonderful for reactive healing against very hard hitting bosses. When my guild was taking on Broodlord in BWL last year I was watching the tanks with Swiftmend and NS ready and getting an instant in as soon as they spiked low against that hard-hitting boss. My healing meter contribution was probably lousy but I feel I played an important role in winning that fight. I deliberately didn't spam heals because I didn't want to heal at all except for an instant landing a split second after a spike, anything that could take my reflexes and global cooldown away from that goal was not wanted.

The issue is simply that with a Feral in the raid the tree druid is just a healer who can't bless/totem.

Why take more than one Druid when Shammies add huge value up to 5 of them and Paladins add huge value up to three or four? One Druid is nice for GOTW, innervate and combat ress. The tree aura is ok but I think it scales worse than other buffs. +100 to tank heals is a big boost when you start Kara but when it scales up to +150 or so with high raid gear it's not all that when your T6 healers have +2000 heal anyway.

Holy Priest clearly merit a spot for Improved Divine Spirit, it's really good. It's ironic that so many Holy Priests want it moved lower down the Discipline tree so they can take it as well as their 41 point Holy talent when what that might mean is that optimising guilds simply ask a Shadow Priest to get it and don't take Holy Priests.

But for both Holy Priests and Resto Druids the crunch they are facing is that the other guy heals just as well while bringing significant buffs.

For most guilds however they are short of healers anyway and a Resto Druid with tree aura, combat ress, innervate and comparable healing to any other healer is in a much better position than many specs (eg Prot Pallies, Survival Hunters, Subtlety Rogues).

Finally with regard to the OP you said that both your guild and your server have too many healers. Have you considered a server transfer? Hope it works out for you and all the best with the new baby!

Because I'm a sucker for a derail...

Survival is getting a pretty nice surge of support in 25 mans (SURVIVAL Raiding in 2.1). It's one of those specs where you only need the first one, but that one guy provides a decent raidwide buff if you have a jones for those sorts of things. The same way some people get all hot and bothered when they hear that properly geared Retadins with a WF totem do competitive damage, because it means they have easy mode judgements and the crit debuff.

I'd even say Survival Hunters are better off right now than Holy Priests and Resto Druids because their raid utility scales with gear (armor reduction is a percentage based physical DPS buff) rather than against it (as you described the tree buff above, and Imp DS suffers the same fate since few casters load up on Spirit at the same rate as they scale their +dmg/+heal).

I'd suggest changing away from healing spec, possibly even the class. There are no short-term solutions to excess of spec or class other than someone changing to another spec/class. That said: the druid situation pertaining healing isn't nearly as grim as some people are making it out to be ever since the lifebloom change.

For Nihilum those combat resses might not be that great, but for most of us they really are very neat. That extra margin you get can save a lot of time on practise attempts or even make the kill attempt.

With good gear at hyjal/BT level you are looking at about 240-250 healing per lifebloom stack, without amplify magic. With amplify and ToL aura you should get all the way up to 900 for triple stacked. You'll close in on 1100 if you can double trinket it. 900-1100 HPS is nothing to sneer at when you can maintain it while moving around and still use 3 out of 4 heals on someone other than the tank. Or 2 out of 4 on someone other than 2 tanks. Or then you can heal at up to 4000 HPS almost indefinitely in circumstances with 4 tanks (Kael P2 comes to mind). Your heals won't stop the moment you get stunned, feared or silenced - they'll keep on ticking at least for some time. No matter how eager the swarm is you can still keep up that offtank (and help on tank) as long as you roll your previous lifebloom (debuff which gives -75% healing done, does not affect existing HOT stacks so you can just keep on rolling lifebloom and profit).

That said, it's rather hard. I still mess my stacks and orders up regularly, lose stacks, lose trinketed stacks etc. You need a lot of practice to do it at the level required for it to be really effective. So if you are constricted on raiding time, gear acquisition etc. I'd suggest simply rerolling for now. A nice mage is fast & easy to set up.

I don't understand why you would want to reroll for a guild that you're not a "core" member of. If you enjoy restoration Druid style then my suggestion would be to find a guild that needs a healer instead of spending weeks of your time for a phantom raid spot that may not be there when you're ready.

At one point in time I was very much a "core" member of the guild, but in Feb, I'd found out my fiancee was preggers and I stepped away from the game for a bit to focus on real life issues that went with buying our house, changing my career path a little, and overall a refocus on myself.

This took several months, which in turn left me out of Kara for quite a while and behind the curve. We have 4 successful Kara groups now, and I've specced out of Resto and into Feral to make at least an acceptable offtank at the moment. With minor upgrades to my gear I've poked around 21k armor, 28% dodge and 425 DEF/Resiliance. Sadly it's what they seem to use me for mostly is off-tanking, though I'd really enjoy being able to DPS, as I have a bit more focused gear on that.

With a lack of some playtime, I split my newbie Mage onto a separate account and several people in my guild want to help out by either powerleveling or even playing the Mage some so that I can still make raids with my Druid and help out some. We're a bit thin on tanks with 4 Kara groups going and then having to trim down quite a bit for SSC/TK. Our first VR kill was last week and we're planning on making some serious attempts on SSC bosses this week.

Sadly I'd still like my T4 gloves/head from Kara, but I think we're making it a little more of a "guild pug" since we don't have a huge raiding force on the weekends.