You should never put a druid on raid healing, there are very few fights where I would be comfortable doing so. If a druid is viable for raid healing one of two critera need to be met:

1. Raid damage is not spikey and is not likely to outright kill someone. (Morogrim fx)
or
2. Raid damage is predictable and/or controllable.

There are not many fights that support these criterias. Morogrim is a great example, Magtheridon to some extent as well.

Naj'entus seems to be, but I'd argue relying on druid raid healing is not good enough because the raid damage is completely unpredictable and in combination with a spine has the potential to kill people if not healed quickly.
Teron, a lot of raid damage flying around but in combination with incinerate it again pushes the need for urgency. Only one tank though, so you can provide some secondary raid healing.
Gurtogg has timed, non spike, raid healing. Druids can do very well on bloodboil healing.
Reliquary of Souls has spiked, controllable and consistent damage in p2 which lends itself well to lifebloom. P3 is the same, although not controllable.

I'm aware that it's a bit out of your raiding experience, sorry for that. In conclusion, most of the time a druid is much better used on tanks. They bring something unique to the table concernig MT healing and that is consistent and reliable healing, effectively providing a buffer to the MT. Your job as a ToL druid is not to keep someone alive, but provide a buffer that makes it easier for others to keep them alive. You'll realize that once you see the limited tools you have for this purpose, swiftmend or ns once and you're back to crossing your fingers that someone else will pull the tank away from the brink of death.

I disagree..

Wow Web Stats

Check heals on that.. says Archimonde try 2 but was actually a kill. That is raid healing while mostly keeping a 3 tick rolling lifebloom up on the MT (obviously it's not going to be up the entire time with fears/bad flame positioning/air bursts). Most of my healing came from raid healing. Being in the MT group (no shadow priest ftl) I'll eat 2 innervates in that fight but as you can see druids can be effective raid healers as well. Once you become accustomed to a fight and know who will take damage and how much druids can be just as effective on raid healing as most other healers (chain heals needs nerfing plx). With mods like Grid where you can see someone getting targeted before they actually take any damage you can get a regrowth casting before they even take 1 damage. Focus proc (gdamn they are nerfing it) also lets me save a few people from death as well.

Yes but this isn't "raid healing" per se, but more healing the MT whilst topping the Archimonde meters because too many people got DF (which is the only time when I top the meters on this fight aswell due to decurse duty in our raid makeup).

I have a feeling you ought to read the rest of my post. There is no spike damage at Archimonde, it is not going to outright kill someone and it is often predictable. On top of that the fight really doesn't require much healing at all, just that there is a high availability of heals.

What kills people at Archimonde is usually the raid being complete tards, i.e. not being able to get heals to people or them running around in a doomfire as it was a fire hydrant on a scorching summers day. You're just not going to save that, no matter the healing class.

You have to weigh the benefits of putting a druid on the raid versus on the MT and in the vast majority of cases it is just much better to put them on the MT. You even said you were healing the MT on Archimonde, but due to the wondrous nature of HoTs you can do some raid healing at the same time.

Edit: Machia, did you know that your guild website crashes Firefox if you do not allow it to run JavaScript?

Your WWS is incomplete - damage is missing and as a direct correlation, alot of healing is probably missing in your log.

You took 70k worth of doomfire damage (roughly 30% of your healing done), and healed yourself through most of it - my last kill I took 0, and no-one in my range took doomfire - the extent of my raid healing was airburst (and fall damage lol) and the occasional curse tick.

The fact is - healing meters on archimonde mean about zero. The more people in your range that get doomfire the higher your healing output will be, the less doomfires in your area the more healing output you can put on the tank.

Damage is missing because I died when he hit 10% and I was out of range, heals aren't going out at that time. Taking damage while being a MT healer is going to happen, unless you are getting a fearward every fear. Sure I can take 0 damage, if I want to go stand at the zone in and get 0 healing done. Heal meters don't mean about zero, they mean people got healed, what kind of ass backwards mentality is that? I'm not saying there isn't a correlation between people taking doomfire damage and the amount of healing going out, but what you're saying is that completely invalidates healing done and that is incorrect.

You are making assumptions.. ones that happen to be incorrect. One is you are assuming I healed the damage that I took myself, another is that the WWS is missing healing. Depending on who needs healing and where I will run through doomfire to get them healed/decursed. I have 0 issues with mana on that fight (2 innervates). Also what relevance does your post have to do with the nature of this thread?

The point is, you posted a wws parse. There are no assumptions then (apart from maybe missing heals, but due to the nature of this fight you are almost certainly going to miss some damage/healing, but most of the time not much from a single log parse). You healed the MT for 72k and you healed yourself for 60k, no one here is denying that druids can top that fight but as I and the person you quoted said: druids usually top that perticular fight due to DF which your wws parse just underlined.

I read stuff like this and it makes me mad. What you should say is "Whitemane" should never be on raid healing. Plenty of Druids do very well raid healing on a variety of fights and everytime I see blanket statements like this pointing out bosses where it isn't usefull or feasible I just imagine druids like you who are trapped in one style of healing.

Guess what, Lifebloom is great. We all get it. But it is also overused on bosses where it is not neccessary and defended because even when its pointless it produces huge numbers on the healing meter. There are bosses where it is the best healing method, but there are plenty where it isn't and if its the only way you know how to heal at this stage of the game you are a handicapped druid.

I have raid healed at one time or another on probably every boss in TBC and I have rolled lifeblooms a fair occasion as well. Class is just one small aspect of what determines a healer's duties and in the end its the quickest thinker that keeps people alive, not the guy with the spell he read would work best.

Blanket statements are easy to read and easy to follow.
1) By using druids on the MT rolling lifeblooms, you'll get good efficiency out of them no matter what fight you do although they may be very slightly less effective on some fights than others.
2) By using druids raid healing, it's entirely subjective as to the fights where that is useful, and the person needs to know how to raid heal in conjunction with the rest of the healers (i.e. other healers not overwriting HoT's most of the time).

The easy answer is the first part. The difficult answer that has to be thought through for every fight is the second part. When you're making a post in a general capacity, using the word "never" is a bit strong (e.g. "You should never put a druid on raid healing"), but gets the point across better than otherwise. If you actually read the rest of his post, he goes on to say that druids are very good raid healers on a number of fights, but generally where damage taken is fairly predictable rather than on spiky ones.

In case you didn't read the rest of his post:
Yes, it's a generalisation, but it's a relatively true one. That isn't to say that a druid shouldn't look for situations where they will be better used on different jobs, but just that assuming a druid is always MT healing isn't a bad thing to assume in general.

Using everything that you have available is the way to go along with making sure you know what's going on. Sticking to what someone told you just because "he said so" but actually looking at it as a window to further advancement/analysis rather than just a free handout is what needs to happen. As long as everyone grasps that point (which I'm pretty sure a lot of people don't, after multiple threads about gear choices/etc in the theorycrafting forums) then it's all fine. The prior posts should be clearer in their meaning though.

The truth is, Tree druids are just not as effective raid healers as other classes.

This is looking at it with totally analytical view - this has nothing to do with "skill" or healing style.

In any situation where raid healing is urgent and demanding, (e.g. illidari council) your hots will not save the raid from dying. In these situations where you need to use regrowth or healing touch.

Regrowth is inefficient (the hot portion is practically useless in a random single target damage situation), it's heal output way too random and low.

Healing touch, slow, requires you to dump your 41 point talent.

It's not that we are lazy, or we don't want to raid heal, or we suck at it. The fact is if you want to get the most healing out of your druid and the raid (i.e. be smart) you will not assign druids to raid heal in such situations.

It really depends on the encounter for raid healing is all.

Naj'entus, aside from melee which usually get knocked about fairly rough the hots tend to get mostly wasted as a result your healing is not that effective, rolling a LB on the MT aswell as raid healing works good though.

Teron for example you could if you wanted, compete with a Resto Shaman and pull it off somewhat, this is mainly because your hots are quite likely to tick several times whoever it's put on because of the nature of the encounter.

Gurtogg, you can keep a Bloodboil group up easily by single casting Lifebloom on 5 players in a row constantly, however you can also roll Lifeblooms on the 2-3 tanks - both work.

Essence of Souls... again you have a steady supply of constant damage on your raid which means your hots are really effective, and the tanks damage is more spikey than constant so your healing there is not as useful.

Council... everything is mostly 4k bursts and as a result your heals are just not quick enough, however I tend to (as the rogue tank healer) focus on tossing RG out on people who get Deadly Poison and then SM it if needed to keep them alive.

Illidan.. not that much healing is really required, P2 raid damage is in 3k bursts, P1/P3/P5 you can hot the dots while rolling LB on tanks, P4 is again just raid wide bursts...


Really raid healing is most optimal for us when there is a low-moderate amount of semi-constant damage on the raid (aka dots ), we just cant cut it when that damage is mostly spikey.

The way we have the room setup makes it not possible to roll on those 3... however we have never really had any huge problems despite not using Druids directly on the Gathios tank. The only problems that have been noted was the Gathios tank dying to burst damage because one of his healers (who tend to be on the anti-spike duty) decided to be complacent and move onto some raid healing to spice things up.

I honestly dont know if moving the two Druids onto Gathios primarily and moving say 1-2 paladins onto the Rogue and Priest tank will make any significant change (with the exception of some amazing unlucky combo of AoE spots where the Gathios healers are spread out over) on a pretty stable fight.

I'll admit that personally I enjoy raid healing more than tank healing and as a result my task on Rogue->Raid->* suits me well compared to the tedium of endless tank duty


The other key reason was trying to keep as many people out of the Gathios clump as possible, to reduce the cluster damage from there being too many people in the same area.

And to be fair we've never really optimized our Druids to the fullest potential as a staple within the guild except where its really obviously the best solution to do so (yes, dont berate me on thats the situation for every encounter :P).
It didn't help that we had no stable Shamans in the guild for the majority of TBC raiding which ment raid healing had to be covered by alternative means.

The best fight IMO for a Tree Druid to really shine is Illidari Council on either, the pally, or the priest, here's a WWS Parse of our last kill, and you can see me healing out MT mostly (600k healing on him) something that isn't even close to that high on any other fight (our first illidan tries I was usually higher then our MT on healing due to our DPS learning how to do phase 2, and me rolling 3x lifeblooms + regrowth/rejuv on both of the flames of azzanoth tanks at all times (talk about green numbers :P)

Wow Web Stats

Something that we still don't take 100% advantage off, is doing rolling blooms on 3-4 tanks, there's a WWS somewhere around here where I had 30%+ of the raids healing through hyjal (putting 3x lifebloom on 4 tanks tanking infernals, or healing our gargoyle tanking warlock)

Anyways, embracing the lifebloom is absolutly great, but as posters above have said, it's not always so great (numbers wise) as opposed to other fights, however it always gives that buffer, and emergency heals (swifmend + ns if needed) which can save the raid.

Well, i think the best fight for a tree was Solarian prePatch. Keeping the 2 Soakers up with Hots was just very easy and absolutely efficient at the same time. Another fight i like as a druid is Kael. I solo heal the Capernian tank (warlock) without problems and can throw hots on raidmembers passing by. Generally said, besides being the best buffer on the MT a druid with Lifebloom is probably the most efficient healer out there. So as soon as the damage is highly predictable (see Kael above) and LB/Rej/Swiftmend are sufficient, there is no other healer who can sustain these sort of hps over such a long time.

I'll attempt to get the tree in my raids to lifebloom more often (she uses rejuv more than bloom), but I'm of the notion that the generally accepted premise is accurate: Tank healing focus with assisting of the raid on occasions (and depending on the fight).

Reju can be seen on the healing meters, maybe this is the problem? Because otherwise there is no reason (apart from an incoming swiftmend) imho to use reju over lifebloom when raid healing, at least not nearly exclusivly. When I just use bloom to raidheal my healing stats drop ALOT this doesn't mean I heal for less (acctually it's alot more usually) but the meters show that my personal healing isn't pushing that much, this could be the issue. Remember when lifebloom runs out the "bloom" part is counted towards that persons healing.

Looks like trinketed LBs may have just been hit by the nerf bat in 2.3.2. No blue confirmation as of yet.

WoW Forums -> [Bug?] Trinketed Lifebloom

Can't say it isn't warranted...seems like unintended behavior to me. Fun as it is

My suspicion is that even losing silly trinket-blooms, resto druids will still be outstanding healers and contributors to any raid (pvp would be largely unaffected, I'd think, due to the impossibility of consistently rolling lifeblooms fighting players).

I just need to find more tanky friends so that I can respec my druid back to resto...so much more fun than tanking for me (I know, I'm weird).

One of druids had fun at Shahraz - he managed to get the dementia debuff from one of the big trash mobs before Shahraz and kept the lifebloom ticking for nearly 2k on our MT till Shahraz was down. It makes the spike damage from Shahraz somewhat trivial.