Druid: Tree Druid Stats
 

I've talked to many people about what stats to focus on.

Pre-BC I was all about Mana/5.

Post-BC while 5 manning I was about max plus healing (I could get up to 1500 buffed, and my rejuv nearly ticked for 800)

Now I've been playing around with spirit.

So the pro's and con's I see are:

Mana/5: You have lots of mana regen during casting, but because you are focusing on this you are losing +healing for your own hots, and the extra healing gained from spirit for all other heals on your group, because there is rarely a case where you find gear with mana/5 and abundant spirit.

Healing: Your focusing on healing, so you can tick for 800 which is great and probably puts you a bit higher on the healing meters, however no one else is entirely benefiting from your tree form aura as much, and chances are you don't have a lot of mana 5. Also, possibly in heroics you are pulling aggro a lot from just hots.

Spirit: Your healing is nerfed a bit, your combat mana/5 is nerfed not as much as you'd think, but if you even stop for 5 sec you can gain quite a bit of mana back and you still have some good combat mana/5. The main point is however, because you have about 600 or so spirit buffed you give everyone in the party +150 from all heals. That means if you are in the Main Tank group, every other pally/priest/shammy is getting a nice bonus which overall helps the raid. Of course...you don't get credit for this on the healing meters.

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I'm overall more happy with spirit than the others. It helps in various situations. Fully buffed I get about 700/tick from rejuv, and maybe 100 or so mana/5 (I still have a lot of gear on my list)

However, the hard part is FINDING spirit gear that doesn't kill other stats in the process. Not to mention some of the gear I see in SSC/TK is healing focused and doesn't have a lot of spirit.

Is there anyone else that can input on what they feel is the best stats wise for a tree druid?

This is why my forays into Resto lately have been extremely brief. On its face, Tree encourages loading up on Spirit to take advantage of the bonuses the form offers. However, I've found the playstyle in practice to be exceedingly spammy; I don't spend very much time at all outside the 5-second rule, badly diminishing a large part of the returns I get from having so much Spirit (i.e. mana regen).

Based on the proposed changes to Lifebloom, I reckon you should look for a reasonably even distribution of +heal and Spirit on your healing gear after the patch. No matter what, mp5 is definitely the lowest priority stat of the three if you plan on spending the majority of your time in Tree. Personally, if I return to healing full time, I plan to go 27/0/34 or similar and focus on +heal and mp5. Big, efficient HTs and rolling Lifebloom stacks seem incredibly powerful on paper. As presently constituted, Tree just isn't attractive enough for me to sacrifice the utility of those 20-odd points in Balance.

Cliffs Notes version:
+heal is good for everything, as throughput tends to be paramount in most of the encounters I've experienced in TBC.
Spirit is good for full Resto/Tree builds, though it could stand to be revisited in the context of a HoT spamming playstyle.
mp5 is good for HT builds. I know you theoretically have more time outside the 5-second rule to take advantage of Spirit with an HT build, but I like to cycle in some HoTs between my HT bombs, so I lean towards mp5 over Spirit for Balance/Resto hybrids. Plus, mp5 helps your Balance side more when you're contributing some DPS during trash clears or less healing intensive boss fights.

EDIT: Fix your profile before you get hollered at. Your current character name isn't a valid WoW handle.

I would have to agree with Runny. If you want to be a tree, maximizing your healing per second is going to be the most important thing. Spirit stacking just doesnt seem worthwhile considering how little time you'll spend outside the 5 second rule and the low returns it gives to your healing compared with straight +heal.

Healing does kind of come with the gear. Healing is a good thing to focus on, but spirit is very effect even while casting. Healing also comes from that spirit as well (since I'm usually in the MT group I actually find myself outside of the 5 sec rule depending on the situation.

Going HT build to me isn't quite as worth it. if you are going to go healing, go all the way on what we were intended to do. if you are going to spam HT, might as well roll a holy priest because they still do it faster.

Though, I appreciate the comments.

I had a bit of trouble reading your post and I'm a bit confused as to the reasoning you provide.
First off you seem to make the point that +healing comes with gear and thus you dont need to focus on it. That same thing could be said for any of the stats you listed and has nothing to do with the relative viability of the stats.

You then make the broad generalization that +healing is good, but spirit is good even while casting (I'm assuming you were talking about mana regen at that point). I'm going to have to disagree with that. Using the values from wowwiki (hopefully they are up to date and my math doesn't suck, please correct me if I'm wrong - http://www.wowwiki.com/Spirit) mana gained per tic outside the 5 second rule= Spirit/4.5 + 15 thus mp5= 0.55(spirit) + 37.5. Now using the example of going from 600 to 500 spirit (100 spirit difference)-- So with 600 spirit outside the 5sec rule you get 367.5 mp/5, but only 55 mp/5 inside. As opposed to 500 spirit which has values of 312.5 and 47. So at the cost of sacrificing other stats to get an extra 100 spirit, you gain 8 mana/5 inside the 5 second rule.... hardly very effective imo. Also I'm confused as to what being in the main tank group has to do with being outside the 5-sec rule?. Do you ONLY refresh lifebloom or something? Because unlike HT, hots arent something you can cancel cast, and in my experience constant HoTing leaves me inside the 5 sec rule almost exclusively. You of course do have the option of dropping out of tree form to heal the main tank, but then you may as well not be in the MT group.

I think your next point was that you get the benefit of +healing with the aura (offsetting the sacrifice of other +healing). The problem with this is that it is only for those in your group, and with the HoT build being more of a dps/spot-heal centric build the majority of the time you won't really be getting the benefit (if you are in the MT group, you are not in the dps group).

I honestly can't see how to justify spirit as the focal stat. You yourself mention that it's biggest benefit is the aura. Using my previous example of adding 100+ sprit you would in fact only gain an additional +25 healing.. not worthless for sure, but hardly something to strive for. I could see maybe arguing to keep an extra set of +spirit gear (if your only purpose is to provide the aura at the expense of your viability), but as a general healing set it is too costly. Not to even mention that many choose not to use druids in the MT group (pally, warlock, MT, OT, shaman being one such popular example), thus your aura would be largely wasted.

On a side note about the 27/0/34 build, just because it has the most efficient HT, does not mean that you suddenly have your HoTs removed from your bar. Personally, I prefer the build for its versatility (I can't stand being in a primary healing form unable to use half my support abilities). That argument has been had ad nauseum on multiple threads, however, so I'll leave it at that. To each his/her own, I certainly won't be rolling a holy priest though because of my preference for a non-tree healing build.

This is what I meant being in the MT group. I am primarily told to heal the MT/OT so they both get the benefit from my healing.

mp/5 to me, is useful, but to focus entirely on it (or even any stat regardless) can hurt depending on the gear choice.

There is also another benefit of spirit, and thats if you cast innervate you get a full bar very quickly.

Also, what I meant by "healing comes with the gear" is that healing is a stat almost on every piece of healing gear. However, mana/5 or spirit is something that sometimes has to be sought out. I'm not saying I'm ignoring healing, but I'm not concentrating 1500+healing while sacrificing most other stats.

This of course might change in the future, however for now this seems to be the build that benefits the raid most. I'm probably going to mix and match based on what I come upon. But it is interesting to see what other people think.

I'm sorry for the vague post, next time I'll post a little more efficiently as at that time I was kinda working :)

27/0/34 build seems to be the most effective right now.

The ~100-120 +healing to group bonus is trivial in TBC when we're talking about +1500 of more +healing. Plus, in tree for, you can't de-poision, de-curse, "move", or really do anything. Also... most of our hots get healed over by Pallys anyway.

When rolling LB stacks come in the next patch, tree might be a better spec, but that has yet to be seen.

With the lifebloom buff I'm betting alota people will be goin heavy + heal again, I however am still a big fan of mana regen over + heal as a druid.

An advantage to spirit that no one has mentioned so far is innervate - remember it works of spirit, not mp5. If you find yourself keeping your innervate more often than not, then spirit may just be where it's at. If you find yourself stuck without it, mp5 and +heal could be more helpful.

While Spirit does help innervate, it seems like a bad idea to stack one stat in order to boost an ability with a 6 minute cooldown and a crappy aura that only affects 1/5 of your raid.

I've played with all the specs on my Druid and can saw without a doubt that Hybrid healing is the most effective right now. We actually just got into a huge fight in my other guild about this not two days ago. I set out to prove my point and respecced tree form for our Gruul/Mag night. Normally, in hybrid HT spec, I am 3-5th on the heal meters (2 Pally's always take the top spots). In tree form I was dead last; Shadow Priests beat me.

I don't have parsed logs or anything to show info because the experiment was purely for demonstration purposes to my own guild, but there was a significant drop in my healing. Most Pallys and Priests now a days uses the "wack-a-mole" healing style. Just drop heals on whoever goes low. That means our HoTs get healed over almost instantly and we just end up wasting mana because you get one tick of a HoT off. Most of the healing I did on my sole night in tree form was from the direct heal portion of Regrowth and the occasional Lifebloom that was allowed to tick out it's full duration.

4k Healing Touch vs. 823 Rejuve tick. Not really a choice there.

The other thing is that tree form is god awful for healing 5 mans. Its kinda hard to solo heal a tank getting spiked on a boss when you have no big direct healing spells. I used to just heal in caster form anyway, which is why I ended up switching in the first place.

This is not a problem with tree form, but rather a problem with the other healers in your guild. If a tree is assigned to keeping the raid topped off, the other healers need to trust the hots and believe that the tree is able to do his job unless he calls for help. "Whack-a-mole" healing isn't really helping anyone, it just means wasted mana and less focus on the MT. I tend to think that very focused MT healers add a lot to his survivability, since the constant casting and canceling on one target (rather than taking time out to whack moles) increases the odds of a heal landing right after damage is taken.

On Gruul, we have me in tree form healing the raid, 3-5 healers on the MT, and 1 on the OT. I don't really put much stock in healing meters, since they don't tell the whole story, but I tend to end up first or second. Our 'who heals whom' wws section shows that the MT healers usually do 90-98% of their healing on the MT, OT healer does about 80% of his healing on the OT with the rest on the MT, and I do about 85-90% of my healing on non-tanks. You can see that we do have some cross-healing, but people generally stay on their assignments.

One suggestion I have is for the other healers in your guild to set up their raid frames to show druid hots -- in sRaidFrames you would do this by adding them to the buff filter. If they see someone is less than 3k hp down but has a rejuv or lifebloom on them, they know that person is being taken care of as long as they are not in immediate danger. I have mine set to show renew so I know not to heal over it.

I don't really belive that when you want to prove druids tree form as bad is the right person to be the tree as you (unconciously) will under perform. The best part of beeing treeform atm is that hots doesn't show on the overhealing meter :D

Well at the moment i am feral but 2 weeks before i was Tree speced i could always get 1-4 in Healmeter.

Healing as a Tree i think is the most difficult way of healing and needs someone who realy knows how to heal as a Tree becaus its a complete different thing from healing as priest/shaman/pala with fast heals or HT healing with slow but big heals.

the main healing comes from holding hots on the mt, swiftmend on low people an healing the Raidmember who got only less damage (1000-2000) with lifebloom(160mana).

Of course your raid has not to overheal too much, if it is obvious, that a person who got 1000-2000 damge will not get much damage in the next 1-6 sekonds they shouldn´t heal them.

In healequip i have about 1700+heal and 160mp5 because as Tree you won´t get out of the 5sec so i got more mp5 than spirit.

Someone prefers spirit instead of mp5 but i think even on a HT spec you wont often get out of the 5sec because in the most raids there is only 1 or max 2 Healing druids so you have to keep the Hots on the MT.

Dropping a Rejuv - Swiftmend combo for raid healing, is a huge waste of mana and just plain waste of a swiftmend cooldown.
Lifebloom currently does not work properly with meters, since the "bloom" actually registers as the target's healing (similar with Earthshield and ProM).
HoT's do not actually show up on the combat log if the target is at 100%, reducing the raw heals part of your damage meter.

But we all know, Healing Meters do not matter. When you drop that instant 3k swiftmend when the tank takes a huge burst hit, and his life is prolonged for those 2 seconds for those big heals to land, that is what matters.

I've been 34/0/27 for the longest time and recently respecced heavy resto 8/0/58, trying to adjust to the new healing style is really frustrating and it makes me want to respec badly. The problem with HoT's is that their effectiveness is heavy reliant on your other healers, if I just lifebloomed 4-5 targets and then a pally happily tops them to full before the HoTs get to properly tick mana is wasted, time is wasted, and the healing goes to the pally even though I was there first.

Going from Healing Touch to HoT heavy is very frustrating, I was very used to the instant feedback that HT supplied. I cast my HT, the target was healed, proceed to next target. Now I drop my HoTs, on several targets and pray they heal in time or someone just doesnt override those hots, and the heal meters tend to agree I'm just not that effective.

I don't even feel much more mana effecient than when I was in hybrid heal spec. I've lost out on about 50mp5 from dreamstate, that staying in treeform is usually not the best idea and casting lots of instant HoTs is as mana draining if not more than Healing Touch.

As a dreamstate druid, I felt like I was a poor imitation of a druid/paladin. Now, I just feel ineffective and gimmicky (swiftmend). Next patch with the implementation of some really powerful Lifebloom stacking we might find our niche as Main tank healers, but does it really compare to inspiration proccing priests/shamans or 2 second holy light paladins?

Sorry for ranting on. These are my feelings alone and I'm just frustrated with the state of Druid healing.

I agree with you here, I haven't tried the Dreamstate spec yet, but lately I have found myself casting Healing Touch most of the time. Knowing that paladins and priests have superior direct heals, it makes me feel like a second rated healer. The druid way of healing has been the use of HoTs (at least it seems that we should derive that from the way Blizzard designed the Restoration tree), but I don't like the HoT healing style at all.

On some fights, I've tried my HoTs and they are actually more powerful than I at first imagined. A Rejuvenation heals for about 3k in totaal, and is (I think) more efficient (with HoT spec) than my equivalent Healing Touch rank is. I tried Tree of Life form several times, but I find it lacking a lot in flexibility. There are times I just really need to pull a Healing Touch off, and shifting out and back in beats the entire purpose of going into ToL in the first place.

Also, the fact that ToL's aura is based on spirit is just silly. If anything, spirit would be the most "useless" healing stat in the entire form. I think going to max +healing and having a good amount of mp5 to keep your mana up until you can hit your precious Innervate button again would be the best if you like the ToL way of healing. I myself would rather jump back in time and re-roll as priest.