All stacking abilities definately maintain the original amount as long as the stack remains constantly refreshed. Hunters with Scorpid Poison saw the exact same thing with their DPS (which is being nerfed in 2.2, so I would expect a similar nerf to Lifebloom at some point), where a hunter blowing all of his trinkets and Bestial Wrath for the first application of poison would maintain that incredibly high first tick through an entire fight.

Blizzard has it figured this way:
1: Initial Value x1
2: Initial Value x2
3: Initial Value x3
etc (up to 5 for the poison). Each reapplication simply refreshes the stack rather than adding the current value.

What they could have done rather than nerfing the poison, and subsequently I believe we will see a nerf with LB sometime in the near future, is this:

1: Initial Value
2: Current value + initial value
3: Current + 2nd + 1st
etc...
Then each subsequent appication would knock off the first value. I assume this second version is much more difficult to program and takes up a lot more CPU cycles, which is probably why they went with the first model.

I'm willing to bet you can dump trinkets, and have other classes burn timers for you to get your stack up and ticking for a ridiculous amount the entire fight. The trick is to make sure you are on top of refreshing it at all times and never miss a beat.

We've noticed a huge increase in effectiveness of druid healing (meaning, less wiping, not silly healing charts) by having 2 resto druids in the raid as opposed to one for a number of reasons:

1. A lot of fights you just can't get everyone you're going to want to heal into 1 group without losing things like blood pact, totems. This is even more true if you have a druid tanking at some points and therefore need to have a warrior for commanding shout keeping a place in the group.

2. If you're a resto druid in a group where you're in tree form solely for the mana savings, not the aura, you can keep a second set of gear optimized completely for your own healing output, not for increasing your aura. Doing this you drop your own spirit for mp5, and then innervate the tree in the MT group. With an extra innervate to play with, the MT tree can drop much more mp5 in favor of spirit and +healing. Doing this, while requiring you to have some extra gear, can greatly increase the combined healing of 2 trees compared to both balancing spirit, mp5, and +healing.

3. Swiftmend becomes more efficient when you have 2 healing druids as you're more likely to mend a rejuv that was close to expiring. The game will automatically take the one with less healing left to do, so you're wasting less of the remaining healing.

4. With 2 swiftmends, there's less chance you'll regret using it because you need it later as the other druid can cover it then. This allows swiftmend to be used at the slightest thought that an emergency might be coming, instead of waiting for it to happen.

5. Lifebloom doesn't lag out. Even on the best of servers I'm sure there are little hiccups from time to time. Those preventing a heal from landing could be the difference in a fight. Lifebloom rolls on. Even if your server lags for 2-3 seconds, you're going to get all the lifebloom and rejuv ticks still hitting the tank, maybe even a bloom to help compensate for the paladin heals that aren't hitting, and 2 druids spamming their swiftmend or ns keys hoping there's still a tank to heal.

While I agree that this makeup is generally the most desired, I think the assumption that three blessings are necessary and optimal for every fight is an incorrect one. For instance, I don't think BoS is necessary for casters on Azgalor due to silence, and melee on Azgalor can get away with 2 blessings if they're wearing FR gear. In this circumstance, I think that bringing a resto druid instead of that extra pally is quite advantageous for the reasons that I mentioned earlier.

Inspired by this topic we tried out Treeform Lifebloom spam tonight and our druid had 0 problems keeping add tank on Al'ar up and soakers on Solarian. He did the same amount of healing as our best geared paladin, but with an overheal % of only 15%. He also never ran oom and the aura in the tank group was a nice buff for other healers.

Worth having at least 1 tree druid imo, now we'll just wait for Blizzard to nerf this :p

Tree aura is "fairly nice" but not really worth adjusting group makeup for and thus not really worth stacking spirit for. I don't end up in the tank group all that often due to other auras and group effects being more valuable.

I'm obviously biased but the only thing that I could see needing a nerf is lifebloom keeping the effects of +heal trinkets (zandalarian hero charm probably shouldn't be one of the best trinkets at 70, still regretting DE'ing mine).

Theres still alot to druid healing without just the clicky trinkets and rolling LB's, if they remove the trinkets effect to stay persistantly then its not going to ruin the reason for bringing druids.


The effect isnt that far off a pala spamming FoL on the MT, it bugs me that they cant revert the ToL aura to the party buff, giving an actual reason for having a druid over another healer per say, other than the fact their performance is slightly better.


Saying this, on ie; Kaz'Rogal its fun just having 2x rolling LB's on the MT and letting everyone else twiddle their thumbs and occasionally do a quick heal on the melee :P

I've been the only resto druid in my guild for a while now. I'd like to think that the enthusiasm with which a current resto-druid application received says it all about the guild's acceptance of Lifebloom. A little history: Firstly, we are not a "progress-focussed" guild - we've killed Maulgar a few times and Gruul once, shortly after our first full clear of Karazhan.

Until we started trying Maulgar, I was - stubbornly - hanging on to the same spec I'd had since 70. 33/0/28, 2 out 3 Dreamstate and Moonkin form. I levelled as a slightly more balance-orientated version of the spec, healed through Karazhan with it and was fairly opposed to the idea of treeform. Partly because I was enjoying the non-raiding potential of a moonkin (My fiancée was playing a mage. Moonkin buff seemed like a better idea than going feral while levelling to 70).

As a Dreamstate healer throwing mainly HT around, I was doing... OK. I could solo-heal Heroics without too much difficulty and at the same time I could put the feathers on and solo the rift trash in Black Morass. As a healer in Karazhan, though - not so good. I was getting outhealed by our shaman / paladin healer contingent, who were all chasing our sole holy Priest - who's awesome and demolishes everyone else with ease.

I still wasn't sure about tree of life - slow movement, no NS-HT panicbutton, no remove curse or poison? Sounds iffy. I'd picked up on the initial doubts about Treeform before it came out and stuck with them. Eventually, though, I got fed up with being the lowest-ranked healer on the meters feeling I was under-contributing, and listening to our raidleader muttering about "getting a proper healer spec" and decided I'd try a full-resto respec for the next Maulgar attempt. I wandered back over here to brush up on Druid healing theory, and found that I should have been paying more attention, a lot of the druid discussion at EJ was singing the praises of Trees and rolling lifebloom stacks. I respecced, hoping the +Int I'd worked into my Dreamstate-orientated healer gear wouldn't be too much of a handicap.

And - somewhat to my surprise, I'm loving it. I'm struggling to keep four lifebloom stacks running at once but my effective healing is so much higher. I've had paladin healers complain that I make them feel redundant on karazhan trash and I'm not looking back. Our feral and prot-warrior main tanks are really appreciating the lifebloom heals ticking away.

While I think that people saying that resto druids can decurse and depoison just as well as DS druids are being sort of misleading, you really can NS-HT just as well as resto. There's no global cooldown on coming out of tree form so you just click this macro really fast:

/cancelform
/cast Nature's Swiftness
/cast Healing Touch


Then once you're stabilized, go back to tree form. The extra mana to shift back into tree form after using NS once per 3 minutes at most, is fairly little and well worth it. Having to either shift out every time there's a curse/poison then go back in, burning a lot of mana, or just stay out of Tree form the whole fight and spending 20% more mana on heals on the other hand is a lot worse.

Good use of a Macro. I've tried to do that manually on my alt sometimes but it's mostly ended up a bit too slow.

We've never given second thought to keeping our 2 Resto Druids with TBC and while they were somewhat underpowered in the beginning, they came along nicely with better gear and some changes. What I don't understand is why decurse and abolish poison is still denied for Tree Form... it would be perfectly suited to those in between refreshing HoTs, and generally this delegates decursing to mages. Also, sometimes abolish poison is much more effective than the Paladins' single Cleanse.

Matholwch, that's an interesting story, as we're at roughly the same point of progression.

I'm still using a 34/0/27 spec for Kara, and it's going quite well. Middle of the pack in gear, and performing first or second on the meters (though I despise healing meters). I used to run 27/0/34, but was having issues with longer boss fights and mana.

Some observations:
-I get stupid regen, now. Finishing longer fights with an untouched stack of potions and innervate tossed on DPS classes is a new experience. It's gotten to the point where I'm dropping out of the shadow priest group on longer fights if we're looking to up damage. I'm not sure how to trade all my regen for healing potential (switch out bangle? back to moonglow/swiftmend?), but it might be warranted, soon.
-Trash healing is just plain hell. Slow HTs work poorly on weak-damage fights; HoTs can be overwritten with quick heals.
-Trash DPS is nifty. Throwing on my boomkin gear and pewpewing on trash is the best thing I could have done for my raid enjoyment. Instead of having X healers for (X-1.5) healers worth of trash, we have more damage and fewer frazzled healers stepping on each others' toes.
-Our tree does really well on weaker-hitting trash, but seems to fall behind on single-target boss fights.

Since you've done both dreamstate and ToL recently, do you mind if I ask you a few questions?
-How do you heal heroics in ToL? I've tried switching over a few times and it was extremely frustrating. Stacking HoTs burned through mana very quickly, and throughput really suffered on intense encounters. I could drop out of ToL and spam HT, but the HTs were more expensive and that negates any of the benefits of ToL spec. I'm wary to try ToL in raids without being able to handle heroic-type spike damage.
-How did DS work on Maulgar and Gruul? Did you have difficulty weaving HTs between quicker heals?

Thanks.

Why shift out at all for NS. I NS, max regrow, SM for the same effect. Considering I'm specced full tree and have no points in HT maximization it works jsut as well.

And on the topic of decursing/depoisoning....let the mages and shamans do it...

This is not entirely true. I always heal heroics in casterform, and use mainly HT on the tanks. Yes, it is less mana efficient than a DS spec, but having powerful hots, Swiftmend and improved Regrowth really helps dealing with "omg everyone is taking dmg" situations. This is extremely frustrating if you only have a slow Healing Touch at your disposal. I found healing with full resto spec out of ToL a LOT easier than healing with a DS spec. There seems to be this common misconception where people think that once you are full resto, you should be in ToL at all times, and that keeping Lifebloom rolling is only possible in ToL. Healing in casterform with full resto spec is not a crime you know.

To get on topic, I recently switched from a Karazhan/Gruul-farming guild to a pretty hardcore raiding guild that is now progressing in MH/BT. Before I didn't use ToL a lot as I liked the flexibility I had out of ToL with using HT and such (and mana wasn't exactly a problem in these instances). Now that mana is becoming more of an issue, I switched to the ToL healing style and I can only say that Lifebloom is great. With 2-3 tanks taking a lot of damage (Hyal trash anyone?) it becomes really easy to top healing meters, even without the best gear possible. However, it also can become quite boring at times, when all you need to do is keep Lifebloom rolling; sometimes I feel like a glorified healing stream totem. That being said, it can still be quite challenging to not let Lifebloom fall off while trying to do other stuff in between (e.g. raidhealing). I think since the Lifebloom change in 2.1 has been a justification for resto druids to deserve at least 1 raid spot and guilds not giving resto druids a chance should definitely reconsider.

The problem I see with this is the mechanics behind stacking effects. I do not believe blizzard is actually capable of coding Lifebloom to function in the way you describe, based on the way they went about nerfing Scorpid Poison (the only comparable stacking effect I know of). I agree that is what needs to happen, but I do not think they are going to be able to pull it off and will instead go the easier route of nerfing the coefficients on Lifebloom.

Fully buffed I have 834 spirit. 1500+ healing. 203 in combat regen, with 600+ out of combat.

My lifeblooms stack at 204, 408, and 612, with a bloom of 1200-1300, crits of 1900+. Lifebloom is the #1 spell I caste. The only time I dont equip the idol is when it's a very healing intensive fight, then I use the idol from epic flight quest.

Our tank group, most of the time, has 2 tanks (2 warrior or warrior/feral), pally, warlock, and tree. Most fights nowadays require an offtank, but if the offtank that night is the feral he's sometimes with the rogue group. The one resto shaman we take the GM perfers to use him in the rogue group. We've debated alot in guild about whether the druid/pally/shaman should have the 5th spot in the tank group. Me personally I think a tree with extremely high spirit is more valuable then a 1k ac buff from a pally with 2set t5 bonus + talent. But I most definately think the Shaman should be in the tank group over the pally or the tree, but GM disagrees... but anyhow.

At the end of the day, this is hte order your healers should be in, if they are not then someone is slacking:
1) Resto Shaman
2) Tree Druid
3) Disc Priest
4) HT Druid, Pallies

Do NOT think for a second healing meters tell you how good someone is. Only if thier placement in the meters is not where it's suppose to be relatively to other classes.

Now for heroics I have a "regen" suit, and never go into treeform unless there's a shadow priest.

Our raid usually takes 2 resto druids (and a feral for 3 rezes, and 1 extra innervate), 1 disc, 1 resto shaman, 2-3 pallies. Normally I'd say you should only take 1 resto druid (+the feral), but in our case our 2 resto druids (braging here) are 2 of our best healers.

So the idea healing makeup for a 25 man is:
1 resto druid
1 disc priest
1 resto shaman
3 pallies

and the odd 7th you need for healing intensive encounters can be any class.

The best thing I love about lifebloom is that, unlike rejuv, I just can just play hit the mole without worrying "did that rogue's rejuv end yet?", cuase if I had just giving him lifeblom, i just gave him 2 lifeblooms. That, by far, is what I love most about lifebloom.

Because the couple hundred mana that it takes to get back into tree form later is well worth the difference in healing between even a crit regrowth and a healing touch. One thing I've noticed is that whenever someone talks about dropping tol to NS-HT, the response is always, "well i just NS-Rg, then Sm and Rg + Sm is about even with HT" and then often something about not having the HT talents.

1. Emp touch is worth it for 2 points. For one, you can't get anything that cool with those 2 points anyway, and a boost to the output of an oft raid saving heal is pretty nice. Its a lot like putting 2 points in imp shield wall (or whatever the talent that ups shield wall's duration by like, 4 seconds) is for a warrior. Tranquil spirit and naturalist i completely agree are a waste. The mana cost / casting time for something you only do on occasion / make instant anyway is a pretty weak use of 10 points.

2. 90% of the time i want to NS someone, i used swiftmend just before that. Nearly every time i NS someone its: big hit -> swiftmend -> big hit again -> NS - > big hit. NS doesn't stop people from getting 1 shot, it stops them from dying from 2-3 big hits in a row either because they ran out of shield block charges or its a big white hit -> special attack -> big white hit close together.

3. If i have swiftmend up, I, and nearly every druid I'd assume, use it right after NS-HT just like you'd use it right after NS-Rg, so you can't really use the argument that you'd Rg -> Sm for the same HP as my HT, when we're both using Sm.

The problem wtih deshifting to NS + High Rank HT is that,
a) the person who needs this is close to death already.
b) by teh time you 1) deshift, 2) hit NS, 3) tell your clique mod to do a max rank healing touch on the target, he's probably gonna be dead.
c) NS + regrowth takes half the time, and you can follow it up by a swiftmend.

my max rank HT is around 5k with no crit, my regrowth crits all the time due to talent and is usualy 3k. Add in the SM it's 5k as well.

Heroics and healing.

I'll start with a confession, I haven't done many heroics recently. Unforunately, August has been a very quiet month for the guild with people on holiday - we've not actually managed to field a 25man raid this month, and we've dropped back to one Kara team per reset until more people are active. Partly as a result, I've been less active outside our raiding nights.

I went into one of the "easy" Heroics - Slavepens, I think - shortly after my respec to full tree. It should have been the ideal party for tree'd-up Lifebloom healing. Feral druid tank, so Imp LotP crit-heals, and a shadowpriest, so Vampiric Embrace. I figured that stacking HoTs with that assistance wouldn't be a problem...

I hated it. I'd had a blast as the Maulgar-tank's pet tree, I'd felt very comfortable healing through the first night of Karazhan on a new reset the night after. But I felt completely out of my depth in that Heroic, pushing myself to the limit just to not lose the tank on trash. I'm a coward - I've done every Heroic since in casterform, mostly with HTs. It just feels a lot more comfortable for me, and I've not really noticed the loss of the cheaper HTs and Dreamstate mana/5. I can see the loss of +Heal from Int when I look at the character sheet, but I can't say I've felt it while healing. And as Norfair says, you can keep a lifebloom stack rolling in casterform and throw HT's around it.

As far as DS at Gruul goes, tricky one to answer. We use healer assignments. As a Dreamstate healer (and the only resto-druid present), I was getting signed off as the mage-tank healer every week - about 3 nights all told, before I specced tree. Just me. It didn't work very well - the massive damagespikes between spellsteals were a complete nightmare to cope with. That said, we were still learning at this point, and something else usually went wrong before I'd drop the ball and lose the mage. For some reason, me getting eaten by Felhounds was a popular one.

When I specced tree, I got re-assigned to our top feral, who tanks the High King. So I've had two specs, and a different role in each. I'm not arrogant enough to believe that my respec was what made us "click" that Tuesday night and get our first Maulgar kill, though


As far as trash-healing goes: I enjoy Karazhan trash healing more as a tree than as DS - I keep Lifebloom stacks running on both tanks and occasionally toss off single blooms at DPS taking damage, to back the other healers up, as Dreamstate, I'd find myself overhealing like mad because the chainhealing shaman and fast-casting paladins were beating me to it every time. Trash DPS as a moonkin was nice - our mages loved it, but these days I'm more likely to be freeing up a bored paladin to whack things. We had a fresh Kara last night - Tree, Holy priest (triallist in blues) and holy paladin (mostly epics). The paladin swears he was only healing on bossfights because he didn't need to on trash.

I don't agree. There are very few idols for druids period and only 2 in the tier 5/6 instances that I can even think of. One reduces the mana cost of regrowth by 33 ([Idol of the Crescent Goddess]) and since regrowth is spell that's pretty far down on my healing choices in most situations, this idol is effectively worthless to me. The other is off of Supremus in BT ([Idol of the White Stag]) and is a feral idol.

So that leaves me with a Karazhan idol ([Idol of the Avian Heart] that increases the size of my healing touch spell, which is even further down my list than regrowth, or blue idols. Of those the only ones usable in ToL form are [Harold's Rejuvenating Broach] and the [Idol of the Emerald Queen] and [Idol of the Raven Goddess]. The only other idols that are remotely a possibility are the PvP idols ([Item not found!]) but they are both pretty worthless in a PvE environment where you are choosing not to let your Lifebloom actually bloom.

To respond to a couple posts.

NS Regrow plus a Swiftmend chaser does far more than most NS HT, especially if you are not specced for healing touch maximization and given the fact that regrow has a near 70pct crit rate compared to a very low rate on HT. I've seen SM's for as high as 6797 and that alone beats out your run of the mill non crit HT.

Secondly, on Heroic healing, its not an easy task. It takes time to become truly comfortable playing tree and the best way to speed that process is to put yourself in challenging situations and refuse to leave ToL. Once you get the mindset that you are a tree healer first you will surprise yourself with your ability to keep your group alive. Better gear doesn't hurt either.

a) ok, agreed
b and c) Um... that's just not true at all. There is no global cooldown to cancel tree form. There is no global cooldown to NS. Its one macro, and as the core of this thread is about using resto druids as the primary tank healer, he's already targeted. I can't express to you how fast i can spam click my 5 button when someone takes a big hit. There is no difference at all in how fast it is to NS-HT someone starting in tree form vs NS-Rg. It takes exactly your reaction time to NS-HT someone, and exactly 1.5 seconds later swiftmend them as it does to NS regrowth someone, and 1.5 seconds later swiftmend them. The only difference is i spend slightly more mana and heal for much much more in the same amount of time. And sometime after the emergency is over i have to get back into tree form. Oh, and if you have clique setup where it slows your ability to heal someone on the verge of death, you should probably change some settings.



It's not like we're using some OP blue instead of a selection of epic idols. Pyxis is right, there's literally nothing at all to use instead. If the [Idol of the Emerald Queen] was +2 healing on lifebloom we would still use it over every epic idol because the epic idols modify the mana cost of spells we hardly ever use.

If they broke the [Idol of the Emerald Queen] we would all go back to using a lvl 65ish nagrand quest reward blue or the +healing aura blue idol instead. No remotely competent resto druid would ever switch to the healing idols available for raids because they do not effect the heals resto druids actually use much. Its a fundamental design issue for idols / librams / relics that because they each only effect certain abilities, that you can't have a good buff for every ability at every item level. Well, you could, but man would the wow forums overflow with qq about how nearly every boss in every instance would have to have a druid idol on it's loot table.

With every spec imaginable, (NS-HT -> swiftmend) does more healing with crits, more healing on average, and more healing at a minimum than (NS-Regrowth -> swiftmend). Comparing Regrowth + swiftmend to HT without swiftmending afterwards makes no sense. There are only 2 reasons you'd not use swiftmend right after your NSed heal. 1 If was if it was down, which could be true for either of us. 2 If your tank didn't need it, which is an argument in the favor of NS-HT because it preserves your SM timer if the tank doesn't need more than the initial burst. There's just no sequence of events where using NS on regrowth provides more healing than using it on HT.


edited: run on sentence.

Yeah, and it's not unique in this regard. The best feral threat generation idol isn't even from the burning crusade >_< . Actually, is the ideal libram, totem, or idol for any raid spec actually from anything farther in progression than heroics and kara?