Patterns...

I think this is really the key point. The power of sustaining an ultra-buffed stack of any HoT/DoT is well established (rolling ignites in vanilla, scorpid poison currently) but if it weren't for the 1 sec ticks a Lifebloom stack would just be a cheap, refreshable Rejuv. The HoT-as-buffer idea that has been around forever was good theory but 3 sec ticks meant the reality was that an FoL-spamming pally provided a smoother stream of healing. Lifebloom (at least the 2.1 version) is really a brilliantly designed mechanic in that it finally allows a HoT healer to do something that a direct healer can't, rather than doing the same thing more cheaply.

 

dukes

The way it's designed also means that even on silencing bosses, there's that constant stream coming in, and has the bonus effect that if it was close to running out (which may just be because you were keeping 3-4 lifeblooms up) then it gives a bonus heal tick for a significant amount (1500+) which is something a paladin just can't do. Add natures swiftness and swiftmend on top, and for bosses which silence, a resto druid is probably the most important healer in the raid.

 

Jelloshots

the bulk of their healing is based around a spell that was not incredibly powerful or efficient in 2.0. my worry is that even small modifications to this single spell could produce significant ramifications, and some things, such as the reduction of lifebloom's bonus coefficients, could change druid healing for the worse.

 

Nurru

Our healing these days seems to consist of 1 Holy Priest, 3 Paladins, 1 Resto Shaman, 3 Druids. This changes from encounter to encounter, but that's the general setup in BT/Hyjal for us thus far.

On a unrelated note, I feel sorry for Priests who want to heal these days. I wonder how many raids just have 1 token Holy Priest.

< Aislinana> Why would it be my job to sleep with vontre? Don't I have standards?

 

Pyxis

I think for the most part our MT healers are using 1.5s heals because they just don't need to use the bigger heals. On a single target fight my lifebloom is doing around 900hps as shown above and rejuv is adding another 300hps or so. The other druid is doing about the same so between us we're putting around 1200hps on a single target fight. That can go up even more if I'm using regrowth for the additional HoT. Additionally on a single target fight I'm swiftmending the rejuv on the last tick as often as I can.

So between the two trees we're comfortably putting 2500 hps on the MT. So if the tank takes a spike, basically our paladins are throwing a quick heal on the tank and then going back to doing a little raid healing until he takes another spike. On Mother Shahraz we generally have 2 trees healing all of the tanks and then add another 2 direct healers to the MT with the rest of the healers on the raid. We use a 4 camp method on her so when the raid healers don't have much to do they may throw a heal on one of the OTs here and there after a spike but overall the 2 trees are enough to cover all the OT healing.

Oh, and I'm a she, not a he.

 

Trouble

A resto druid is a valuable addition to a healing team. They perform both tank healing and raid healing quite admirably. We've been using one since day one and have always been impressed. He usually comes near the top of the meters or tops them, and that's before including the final tick of lifebloom which is not attributed to him. If you go into the logs and look at the total from the final tick I would venture to say he's probably always the number one healer except in special circumstances.

The fact is that lifebloom combined with the other abilities puts out more HPS than any other healing class can no matter what they do. While putting out this massive HPS it also remains extremely efficient, and tree druids have extra skills to enhance their mana regen. All combined it makes a powerhouse of a healer, it's just harder to recognize because it's the form of a steady waterfall of heals rather than bursts like everyone else.

 

Caligula

We bring 3 some nights. It's hard to leave people out of a raid because they don't bring quite as much utility as other classes when they've been playing their characters, with their friends, for 2+ years. Prayer of mending is, however, an amazing spell and probably the holy priests saving grace in the same ways that lifebloom is a great heal for druids.

 

Eir

I use 1.5s heals because I'm a dirty Protection Paladin in healing gear. :P

I'm sure the composition of the rest of our healing core colors our perception of Lifebloom. As it is, we don't run with as many geared Holy Paladins as most other guilds at this stage in the game. Throughout the course of TBC we've lost some really good healers through natural attrition, changes in living situation, or just simple game burnout. I wouldn't recommend other guilds kill Illidan with 3 Kara geared apps, an Enchancement Shaman, and a Protection Paladin healing, but I really feel that Lifebloom contributed greatly to our ability to do so.

I don't disagree with guilds who shared Nihilum's earlier view that certain specs were pretty suboptimal for raids. I think my own Protection Paladin spec is still pretty lacking for high end raiding. What I'm most curious about is whether guilds who earlier shied away from Resto Druids have changed their minds and whether Lifebloom can now take its spot in the greater min/max equation.

 

• CureFC

This is not significantly different from other classes, however. If coefficients were lowered on Chain Heal it would dramatically affect shaman in the same manner you're talking about Lifebloom affecting druids. The possibility of a change certainly exists, but I don't think it's cause for ignoring or not utilizing the impressive capabilities of a lifebloom rolling druid currently.

 

Kaber

I personally get 156-175 per tick depending on which gear set I'm using, when 3 stacked I average just over 500 healing per second (this is my half-geared druid alt that I only raid with when needed as a tank or healer). Voof, our dedicated Resto Druid, rolls with a lot more than I do, and has the spirit/mp5 to never run himself out of mana.

Voof - WWS

Voof - WWS

Note the "max" for his stack of lifeblooms per tick is 650-700. He usually keeps a 3 stack rolling on the tanks, and throws HoTs around the raid as needed.

Note that his gear is focused entirely on +spirit over +healing, so analyzing his armory you will find he has far less +healing than most of our healers, while he is usually top 3 for healing, and almost always first on tank'n'spanks where chain heal and circle of healing don't beat out his effective heal. He has also been having lots of computer/latency issues lately with a 500-800ms ping, so I'm fairly surprised he's keeping himself that high on the healing meters.

The Armory

You can also check Oceie in that WWS, but he has been back in the game for all of about 3 weeks since leaving 1 month after TBC, so his gear and raid healing are not up to par yet.

 

Jelloshots

the difference with lifebloom is that it introduced a unique mechanism: a stackable heal. It's true that changes to chain heal, pom, paladin heals could be detrimental as well, but I'm less worried about something like a coefficient modifier for chain heal than I am 2.1 lifebloom, the most wickedly efficient and powerful heal ever achieved without significant downranking. this doesn't stop us from using trees at all, but it also doesn't make me keen on leveling my sixty-something druid to check out resto in TBC.

 

Shelendil

We have two trees at all times. They're on raid healing more than I would like because we typically only have one priest and one shaman, but when they are on the tanks the difference is very noticeable. Their spells have consistent high output with little mana wasted and are the perfect compliment to paladin tank healing.

 

◊ Lord BEEF

Couple corrections:

The coefficient wasn't really changed on lifebloom, it was more of a bug fix/design change. Pre 2.1 it simply didn't get ANY +healing on additional stacks, so if your original lifebloom healed for 150 a tick, adding a second just brought you to around 194 or so, and triple stacking it took you to 237. Thus stacking it was pointless as it just meant you were spending mana to delay the final bloom of 1200 or whatever.

The change was to make it accept +healing on additional stacks. Thus a one stack of 150 would result in a three stack of 450 that you could keep going, and the final healing portion was just a nice side effect that happened if you chose not to refresh the buff.

Even without +heal trinkets, it became a very powerful and useful spell. The QQ from the nihilum druid was simply their lack of understand of it and how to use a resto druid. The whine was not before the change, they simply hadn't adapted.


When you add trinkets it gets insane and I could see this part of it being nerfed eventually. Essentially with a couple of click trinkets for +heal, a well geared druid can be at 2200+ healing when they start rolling and can keep this going for a long time as the spell costs so little mana. If you go balls out with trinkets, are healing targets with tree aura, and use amplify magic you can break 900 per second with a lifebloom. From tree form the spell costs 176 mana.

With perfect timing it'll tick six times before you refresh it for a total of 5400 health done. If you rotate between four tanks this is 3600 health per second total output (hard to fully utilize outside of Hyjal trash, but still). With a mana cost of 176, this gives your lifebloom a THIRTY health restored per one point of mana ratio under optimal scenarios.

Because of the insane efficiency I feel a shadow priest is somewhat wasted on a resto druid when compared to giving it to other healers.

Finally a note on overhealing: Because hots on full health targets don't actually tick, the WWS and other meters don't show the real overhealing. If they did, you'd probably see resto druids with about 75-80% overhealing. The 'raw healing' including overheal would be disgustingly high.

edit: One more final thing, I do find it amusing that the healers that pre-tbc were expected to perform the worst (druids and shamans) now often do the most healing. The illumination nerf undoubtedly was a factor in this

Check out my friend's bitchin' Lord of the Rings Art

 

Pyxis

One of these days I'm going to rip apart a WWS and figure out how much theoretical healing I did on a fight including all that overheal and yes, I too suspect that it will be a fairly obscene number.

 

civatateo

My guild has always had an abnormally high number of druids in it (right now we have 6 raiding druids, 3 feral and 3 resto). I never really bought into the anti-druid sentiment that was floating around raiding communities a few months ago, but with the illumination nerf and the lifebloom change, I think it's difficult for anyone to complain about a druid's healing usefulness in a raid environment. There are some fights where having more than one resto druid makes a noticable difference. A few exmaples off the top of my head:

- MT healing on Azgalor. Having two sets of druid HoTs on the MT pretty much trivializes healing concerns with silence.
- Melee healing on RoS phase 2. Keeping HoTs stacked on the melee provides a consistent source of healing that works quite well with their relatively consistent DPS output (lifeblooms ticks are simply insane with the +healing buff in that phase), and it frees up the shaman to focus on chain-healing the ranged DPS who generally take damage in bursts.
- MT/raid healing on Archimonde. HoT stacks are great on the MT for fears, and they're also an very easy way to deal with anyone who gets a Doomfire debuff. A druid also brings an extra decurse.
- Tank healing on Gurtogg, especially if you use 3 tanks. Two HoT stacks on all three tanks saves other healers mana to use for spamming the Fel Rage'd target in P2, while also cleaning up residual DoT damage going in to P2. Druids are also effective bloodboil healers if you're short a shaman.

I personally haven't seen the last 3 bosses of BT so I can't comment on them, but any fight that involves a subset of the raid, especially tanks, taking relatively consistent damage seems to be druid friendly. The key terms are subset and consistent damage, since these conditions allow HoTs to be fully applied and tick to full extent. An example of a druid unfriendly fight would be Naj'entus, where druid healing simply isn't fast enough to deal with the burst damage after a shield break and where chainheals will often heal a target before HoTs get a chance to.

All that being said, every paladin still brings a blessing and every shaman still brings bloodlust and a set of totems, so you have to figure out what should take precedence for a given encounter. For some fights you really don't need a 3rd blessing or the extra DPS from another shaman's group buffs, so bringing a resto druid along instead can sometimes be a better option. Guilds that have integrated elemental and enhancement shaman into their raiding core (or ret pallys, like Blood Legion) may have an easier time making this decision than others who have not.

 

Pyxis

Naj'entus is a great druid fight, we put 2 druids on the MT leaving the rest of the healers for raid healing. Our MT druids also do a significant amount of raid healing. My rotation looks something like LB on the MT, Rejuv on MT, LB on raid, LB on MT, 2 x LB on raid. Rinse and repeat from there throwing in a couple of swiftmends on the MT after the shield is popped.

 

Ceress

So here's a question: If for some weird reason you had a priest with Power Infusion in your raid, would a lifebloom stack that started out while Power Infused keep the 20% heal bonus after power infusion goes down? Or, say, if you start a stack up on RoS phase II when you have the 100% healing done bonus, does that 100% increased Lifebloom stack carry over into Essence of Anger once you lose the Aura of Desire, or does it revert to regular healing levels and only keep the trinket/TOL aura/amplify healing?

 

Pyxis

I believe I kept the PI benefit on the stack as long as I maintained it. Of course it often meant casting a stack on the MT a full minute before the fight so the PI cooldown would be up more quickly in the fight.

 

HaklePrime

I have heard tales of guilds using the Dementia buff from the Shahraz trash, and maintaining the rolling stacks into the fight.

I'm sure a few scans of WWS would find some pretty crazy Lifebloom numbers that indicate tactics like that, and the ones you brought up.

 

civatateo

Well we typically keep 2 pallys on the MT since they'll go OOM relatively fast raidhealing (assuming no BoL on the raid), although I suppose with good DPS this might not be an issue. Furthermore, I'm referring more to healing in a effective sense as opposed to net healing done (a la heal meters). Almost every death on Naj'entus is due to someone not getting healed up fast enough after a shield break, something which is difficult for a resto druid to do unless he preemptively puts up a set of HoTs on an assigned group of people (which might actually be a good idea, as long as that group is standing in the same general area of the room and the shaman prioritize their chain heals to other areas). Also, if you think of raid healing inbetween shields, HoTs are generally not very effective since the damage on one individual raid member is not consistent enough to justify letting them tick as opposed to swiftmending them immediately. However, if it works for you then I suppose its viable, although in my experience, healing inadequencies on Naj'entus don't really become apparent unless you're running with a low number of resto shaman, as 3 shaman spamming chain heal can take care of the vast majority of raid healing.

 

Xav

This thread is pretty interesting and enlightening.

We use one resto druid pretty much always, and he does basically always top the meters for the pretty obvious reasons.

However, meters and effective healing aren't generally what cause me to want more of a specific class. But after reading most of this thread and seeing the true strengths of Lifebloom and the advantages it has (a constant flow of healing coming in), I definitely want to reevaluate how we delegate our resto druid.

As for bringing multiples and their true use, I'm not real sure there's much of a benefit of bringing more than 1, still, over another class. The strengths of each healing class are basically like this;

Paladin: Single target healing throughput (MT heal), great raid buffs, decent group buffs
Priest: Single target healing throughput, aoe healing on any fight where it's applicable, limited raid/group buffs.
Shaman: Extremely efficient directed AOE healing, fantastic group/raid buffs.
Druid: Extremely efficient single target healing, decent raid buffs

So if I had a choice, I'd still want to bring 3 paladins, a holy priest, a resto druid, and 2-3 resto shamans. (On a typical fight, any fight that calls for more would just be an additional paladin and the rest would be more shamans)

Since the way we were/are using some paladins on Shahraz currently is to spam FoL to give the MT a constant health buffer, replacing one with a resto druid would basically cause us to be able to drop a healer. (We have 2 paladins spam FoL atm). Or put that paladin on raid healing duty with Flash which is obviously the most efficient thing a paladin could do, rather than the druid! But additional druids, for what I'd use them for in a raid now, wouldn't provide much benefit besides a battle rez or innervate, both of which are iffy to want to bring them exclusively for over say another blessing or Heroism/Lust/Totems/Tides.

What I've garnered from this thread that I'm going to try out the next raid week is definitely switching the resto druid's assignment in our raids and seeing how much easier the healing is on the burst target (typically the MT).

 

◊ Noressa

We've found, and reading other experienced druid insights as well, having 2 resto druids is invaluable. Our paladins and shamans are almost always raid healing and are healing faster then the resto druids. Not to say druids weren't doing healing, though. Between the 3 resto druids we usually have on (I'd personally drop it to 2 if I could), we provide more then enough of a blanket that other classes don't even have to look at the tanks and can get the raid back into healthy levels while knowing tank healing is covered. Granted, we're still in TK (working Kael now), but I can't see that changing. Especially not while following Pyxis and the other druids here in EJ. Reviewing WWS has only reinforced this for me, as trees cover MT healing, usually with the support of a paladin as needed. The rest of the raid healing is split up with shamans, priests and paladins, the occasional LB shows up for the raid. Maybe it's just selective reading on my part, but Illidan killing guilds using trees in this way shows me trees are far from useless.

Original Post by Boogsy: Now by benefactor, I am guessing that I am in fact, benefiting from the wealth of knowledge here. Or perhaps it is just benefiting from the Benefactor's Bar....a wonderful place for which I am just exploring.....and preparing to be attacked perhaps a few times
RIP Boogsy

 

Pyxis

I'd argue that one advantage that a druid has is the ability to extend their single target healing to up to 4 targets (3 reliably) without losing any efficiency on the first. Basically I can keep Lifebloom stacks and rejuv up on 3 tanks as easily as I can on one tank.


I'd agree with as many extra shaman as you could squeeze in for bloodlust, but the 4th blessing is pretty underwhelming and quite frankly we've found that paladins are just falling further and further behind the other classes in BT in terms of pure healing.

Instead of just doing that, try bringing 2 ToLs for Shahraz then assign them to heal tanks. They provide a pretty comfortable cushion on the MT, I don't think ours has really ever dipped to scary levels except for when one or both druids were ported. The best part is that those 2 druids will also provide essentially all the healing you'll need on the OTs as well. So our tank healing is 2 ToLs (MT + OTs) and 2 direct healers (MT) and we're set. All the other healers are on raid healing although during down time they'll throw a heal on one of the tanks if they dip.

We noticed a big difference in overall stability by switching up standard paladin and druid roles in our raid.

 

Althir

This is not how "empowered" (Empowered G heal, Fireball, whatever) effects work. The talent adds directly to the coefficient. So, instead of:

((PlusHealing * Empowered) * Coefficient))

You have:

((PlusHealing) * (Coefficient + Empowered))

Using an example of Greater Heal with 1800 + healing (I'm a priest, after all):

((1800) * (.857 + .20)) -------------> (1800) * (1.057)

Everything else looks right though.

 

Xav

Well that would require us to have two resto druids, so... yeah Just changing the one we raid with I could already see making a difference if we used it properly.

As for the 4th paladin blessing, on any fight where there's quite a bit of raid damage, and a paladin(s) will be raid healing or healing anyone but tanks/themselves, Blessing of Light is very, very large. It allows us to downrank HL as a raidheal if needed, and ups the overall efficiency of our heals significantly. It's paladin-only of course but depending on the fight and the roles of them in that raid it helps everyone stay alive a lot better!