I have recently retired my main hunter, and taken up a druid. I have experience in the past playing a druid back in MC and early BWL and am a decent healer, but it has been awhile.

I was wondering what are the key things I should know as a raiding druid. I am looking for things less like "lol heelz" and more like "rank x healing touch is the most mana efficient heal with high +healing".
Also if there are any healerdruid mods in general I should grab.

Thanks in advance :D

Recomended mods:
Decursive
HealPoints
ItemRack / Wardrobe (switch gear set on the fly)
Ctraid
Whispercast

Not so useful in a raid but still great:
Druidbar (shows manabar regardless of form)
Selfcast


"rank 4 healing touch is the most mana efficient heal with high +healing". But generally I find that whatever rank heals for aound 800-1000 hp to be about right. You're not overhealing too much, and you're not healing so little as to be useless.

Key rules:
1) Find out who has improved MOTW. If you dont, buy them seeds. If you do, split up groups.
2) No poofters
3) Don't look at any healing / dps tracker while in the raid.
4) There is no rule 4
5) No poofters.
6) Don't fall asleep.
7) Know when to go windowed mode and fire up a movie on VLC ( MC / BWL ). Know when NOT to.
8) No poofters.

Spamming rank 4 with lots of +healing can be efficient but against anyone whose damage is spiky I feel like I'm throwing a hot dog down a hallway when the spike comes. (And overhealing if it doesn't.) I like to queue up rank 10 and cancel it at 1.5s if the tank looks okay. It's not perfect but it does an okay job of fighting Unbalancing Strike.

Build up your + heal, and use whatever healing touch still gives you optimal HP/S for the encounter. Most fights I use HealR2 as a priest, which is like HWR4 or 5 or something. But for Emps - or other super spiky mobs - I go up quite a few levels - usually Gheal R2 most of the time for emps.

use whatever rank YOU feel comfortable with, yes you may get OMFGROFLEFFICIENCY at uber low ranks - but if you don't feel that you are truly helping the encounter, then scale up a bunch of ranks, and learn2cancel more. Your overheal may bite for that specific encounter - but you know what? The tank didn't die - and at the end of the raid, thats all that matters.

Personally I use rank 4, 7 and 11 for healing. Covers the spectrum nicely, but results may vary dependent on gear. I'm at +828 healing, regardless these heals should give you a nice spread for healing done. It's important that you can fit your heals to the situation, there's no point in spamming rank 4 when the target is probably going to need a rank 7 for example.

Being a druid healer is often about anticipating damage and how much it is going to be, a reactive druid is a bad druid - try to be as proactive as possible. Mostly useable on tanks though, during trash cleaning and such you will curse shamans/paladins/priests and their fast heals :)

The name of the game for a druid though is endurance healing, they do it like no other class in my experience. It's important to pick your gear for the task though, ~800 healing and then slap on as much mana/5 as you can get. 8 / 8 Stormrage is looking really nice with next patch if you want to use swiftmend.

Btw, a little hi-jack, using HealPoints to check how good mana/5 is - how does that work? Do you add 5 to mana regen / 5 in both casting and normal categories? Or just casting?

Swiftmend heals for 12 seconds of Rejuvenation. I don't think it takes the 8/8 Stormrage bonus into account. Might it get the additional +healing contribution granted by the extra Rejuvenation tick? A good question, but one I'll never answer for myself. Salamander Scale Pants forever, I guess. I hate you, Rag.

Yeah, everything that I've heard about Swiftmend says that it's only the 12 seconds.

I keep ranks HT 4, 7, 11 on my bars, and that's pretty much all I use. Regrowth is a horrible mana whore, avoid using it. When you see a tank spike it's pretty reactionary most times to want to Regrowth them, but just use a rank 4 HT instead - it's less than a second longer cast, heals for a little less, and takes ~600 less mana, and other people will be reacting to the spike too.

Make a macro for your battle rez to inform people who you're rezzing. Don't wait until you're asked to innervate someone (assuming you have it), just hit up a healer if you see them low. Innervating dps in BWL is also fun!

Oh, and one more - you want to save NS until it's absolutely necessary to use. For example, on Emps, say your lock tank isn't able to move out of the way of a bug, and he gets hit with the explosion plus a shadow bolt, and he's down to 3k or so. Good time to use NS? No, because a shadow bolt won't hit for 3k. I tend to use NS almost exclusively on Unbalancing Strike + melee crit spikes, so I usually always save it for that. You don't want to see someone at less than half health and go "OMG NS HEAL", you have to know when is best to use it, because it can definitely save raids sometimes.

healpoints is quite a nice start. some stuff i dont agree with (values the leather belt off twin emps higher than SR belt) but overall helps you out nicely to balance your gear. loads of people on my server are all into +heal, sitting there at 900 heal with 0 regen. bad mistake.

" It's important to pick your gear for the task though, ~800 healing and then slap on as much mana/5 as you can get."

same way i feel. personally i feel ~850 is the magic mark. rank4 hits for around 1.1k then, rest can be put into regen. i personally like to keep rank3 (600-700hp) on my bars as well to patch off random damage taken.

regrowth is worst spell ever (though becoming rather sexy with swiftmend imo), i only use it in situations where you would want the extra hot basically (casting on offtank before chromaggus TL hits)

know the cast times of your heals. with mods these days telling you when and what spell is casting you can often land your 3 second heal right after your target takes damage.

and of course, dont forget your OMG SHIT NS+HT macro.

Casting regen is how much mana you regen inside the 5 sec rule (i.e. for the 5 seconds following a completed spellcast).
Normal regen is how much mana you regen when you haven't casted any spells the last 5 seconds.

Spirit, mana/5 and %regen while casting gear/talents are taked into account.

Errr, yeah - that I knew. I'm just complaining that the interface is unintuitive when wanting to adjust for mana/5s on items, I don't know if I should add them for both or not. Just not reading your reply as an answer to my question, could be me :(

Btw - something I would really like with HealPoints, modify tooltips on items to show the change in HealPoints should one equip the item in question - sort of like SellValue or something like that. Would be extremely neat ;)

SM has been verified as only working with 12 seconds of rejuv. 8/8 SR is not a waste however as you can now wait a tick longer at the tail end of the spell before using SM, thus netting you greater efficiency.

You get a longer window for ondemand healing and, best of all, you get to be lazy. Win.

Make a Nature's Swiftness macro:

/cast Nature's Swiftness
/script SpellStopCasting();
/cast Healing Touch(Rank 10)

Or 11 if you've got it. Since nature's swiftness doesn't invoke the global cooldown, you can chain it to anything by using the SpellStopCasting() function. Then you've got one button to NS heal with 1 press whenever you need it. For some reason it only works if you're not moving... but it's still extremely nice.

HT Rank 4 is common, because it's .5 sec faster than others, and still gets the +healing bonus it should. Ranks 1-3 get an extra modifier on top of the cast time since they're obtained before level 20. Once you hit around 500 healing rank 4 can be worth using situationally. As your +healing goes above that, it becomes more valuable. Experiment with 7 and 8 or 9 too, and you can find one you're happy with that works with both your +healing, your regen, and your mana pool. Ideally, you want to be able to cast the whole fight, cancel your heal if they don't need it, and always have enough mana for the unexpected, and the rank you use to do that is a factor of your gear, the damage people take, and the amount of healing done by others with you. It's not really something anyone can tell you specifically what to do.

As for regrowth, I found it really helpful if multiple people were taking lots of damage in a short amount of time, like our mages on tech packs or clearing the supression room, and probably the trail to fankriss. If you stack that with a rejuv, you have about 12 seconds where you can focus all your healing onto someone else, sometimes more, and those fights are short enough that mana doesn't become an issue.

Assuming you spec resto, you will want to try out furor if you haven't already. Instant cast cowers are amazing, and have saved my ass many times.

From my (fairly limited) experience on my druid, Furor is at least as good as TM, regardless of spec, and it's in an incredibly easy place to put points into it. For healing, Bear/Bash and Cat/Cower are both great, and you can do some stupid things with it when feral.

PvP derailment, but you haven't lived until you've used furor, imp. enrage and the wolfshead helm to do stupidly fun things like feral charge->enrage+maul midcharge (applied instantly)->bash->shift->jump strafe->shift->shred->shift->NS+root->starfire+moonfire. Granted it burns cooldowns just for a convenience factor but it's still a very sexy thing to see in motion. For style points you can throw some engineering items in there as well.

Anyway, the above posts pretty much cover druid raiding. Your staple healing spell will generally be slower than what others mashing so it's mostly a finesse game in syncing your cast times to those of others so you can reduce overhealing. Worming HT in through flash heals, LHWs, etc without burning mana is something of an acquired art but does provide some encounter variety beyond generic boss design. Mostly though you play the usual whackamole healthbar game, waiting until bosses are on farm mode so you can safely innervate hunters for some amusing drama dinner theater.

or pseudo-adrenaline rush with the bwl trinket...

Meh, for boss fights Regrowth is pretty worthless, although swiftmend is HOT, but for trash pulls I often find myself spamming it like crazy just for fun. As long as your not worried too much about needing mana if a pull goes bad you can use regrowth like a short heal. You'll just be buggin your mages for water more often.

This post contains many good druid game play hints. You guys rock.

edit: There are also some nice healing tips stickied at the top of the druid forum on the WOW site. Those forums aren't always worthless, just most of the time. Check it out. The sticky titled In-Depth Druid Guide! [Math] is a nice place for some good info.

If you aren't going to get Stormrage then pick up and enchant the Leggings of Immersion from Skeram. They're significantly better than Salamander Scale and shouldn't be hard to grab.

I would have to disagree on that one, salamander pants are better healer leggings. I don't nuke often, maybe a bit during Sartura but that's it.

Go to my profile and check my trash healing set. With an enchanted creeping vine helm and some wasphide gauntlets, I'd hit +800 easy.

I'm not sure I agree with 800 being some magic number though. Saying, "Wow, I'm awesome! I have +850 healing!" is nothing but dickwaving if you don't have similar mana/5 AND feral sets to go with it. Besides, all that +healing means crap on fights that last more than a minute or two. I say don't kill yourself and just loot any good upgrades that make you a better, all-around druid, without worrying about what Random_Blizzard_Forum_Druid#117 says about baselines.

Yeah, pretty much. Go for a good balance of +heal and mana/5, recognizing that as a druid +heal is really, really good for you because so many of your spells take full advantage of it (doubly so for rejuv+swiftmend) and that more +heal means more mana efficiency. The pieces you want are really pretty obvious at the end of the day: Stormrage is good. Staff of Rampant Growth, Augur Staff, Deviate Growth Cap, Wasphide Gauntlets, Emps Belt, Rejuv Gem, Shard of the Scale, etc. Druid +heal and mp5 leather has always been fairly well-itemized so you have some good options.

ARGH, I forgot that Salamdar Scale had Mp5 on them. Yea, they're better than Immersion.

~800 is the number of +healing I like, because it means my rank 4 and rank 7 heals are at some numerical values I find useful when I heal. I haven't seen any math that suggests any optimal value, so I guess it's a matter of feeling. That feeling should be based on what you can usually land on tanks without overhealing, but +800 is in my experience a good value.

Of course there is no point in forsaking all stats in favor of +healing, that would be downright stupid. I think my gear is around 1 mana/5s per 13-14 healing at the moment.

Something I'm considering, breaking my 8/8 by getting a pair of genesis boots - they actually seem superior to stormrage boots in general.