Reachie

I recently switched my main from a Protection Warrior (OT) to Restoration Druid (Tree!) and I'm absolutely loving it. I'm just looking for some feed-back from the community on a few key issues I'm noticing when healing in a raid setting in TBC and post 2.1 (Last time I healed as a druid was early Naxxramas, I took a break and played a Undead warrior on another server for a couple of months)

My guild is currently on Vashj (first set of attempts last night, 3/4 cores down, making amazing progress so far) as we just killed Leotheras a few nights ago, and 1 shot every boss (minus Morogrim for stupid reason this week. Our progression has really launched forward, and we seem to me "rolling" so to speak.

I haven't healed a lot (3 weeks now on my druid) but I've been doing a ton of reading about tree druids (or lack there of) and I'm just wondering for other tree druids / healers / raid leaders with and without tree druids. How do you go about having them set up in terms of healing and what are their primary healing duties? I'm usually assigned to the MT group (having 661 spirit fully buff is a nice chunk of +healing to our tanks) and here are my main issues right now healing.

1: HOTs - I love HOTs, that's why I love healing on as a tree druid because my HOTs (mainly lifeblood and rejuvenation) cost basically nothing to cast, and heal for an amazing amount. My issue here is, on a fight like Morogrim (where I'm assigned solely to heal our MT) where it basically consists of me keeping regrowth/rejuv/3 stacks of lifebloom up on him at all times (where I swiftmend when he gets crushed, or hit/frost breath and NS/regrowth for emergency situations) and I'm noticing (healing meters anyways) that I'm dead last or close to it on a fight like that. I was looking over my combat log, and realized that around 75% of my HOT ticks weren't ticking at ALL meaning our tank would get hit hard and then be healed to full BEFORE any of my HOTs ticked (maybe 1 tick of life bloom, but thats it)

Now a fight like Fathomlord (where I solo heal our warrior tanking the frost bitch) my healing is so far past everyones it's amazing. Considering every single HOT is ticking for the full amount, the numbers (850 rejuvenation, 400 regrowths, and 620 life blooms) make me realize just how powerful a tree druid can be. I'm wondering, what do you guys do on fights like Morogrim where I'm having trouble getting a lot of healing (I know healing meters aren't perfect, but I enjoy using them as a tool for effort.

2: Healing Touch: I hardly ever use this spell simply because of the cast time is too long. With priests being able to flash heal, and druids (mainly using regrowth, as mana inefficient as it is) casting a healing touch in that time a priest can cast two flash heals. I've tried the always casting / canceling but it just doesn't seem as efficient as keeping the HOTs up.

3: Mana issue: Maybe since I'm not group with a shadow priest, this might be irrelevant if I am, but compared to our other tree druid, I always use my innervate on myself, where he always uses his on a priest.

In closing, maybe it's just the way our raid heals, but does anyone else see any improvements / concerns with the way I heal (or our raid heals) that might be able to improve the efficiency of not just myself, but the rest of the healers as well?

(Our healers consist of 2 restoration druids, 2 holy paladins, 3 holy priests, and 1 restoration shaman)

Edit: Has anyone thought about putting the 9 healing / 4 spirit gems instead of 9 healing / 2mp5 (just for tree benefit?) What are thoughts on that as well?

 

Jeht

It seems to me that a Tree is largely wasted on a MT, as are HOTs in general. When one character is basically having heals chained on it the entire fight, with the intention being to keep that character at 100% at all times, it's not surprising that most HOTs fizzle away without really doing anything.

I've never done the fight you're talking about, but maybe some other people are taking period damage? Melee DPS, casters, something like that. You'd probably be more useful healing them. If not, this is a situation where you maybe want to shift out of tree and just start chaining big heals.

 

Reachie

Right. On fights where there is AOE damage to melee or the raid is where trees really shine, the problem with shifting out (for me) is its so mana inefficent to chain cast (while canceling) HT, but I guess I could try that next time.

 

Jeht

I don't believe you should shift in and out. I'm saying decide before the pull what's more useful:

1. Big resto specced "true" heals
2. Tree form buff and super efficient HOTs.

Then tree it up (or not) accordingly.

edit: I misread your post. You just have to practice. Chain casting heals is basically a prerequisite for raid healing at this point.

 

Nitz

On a fight like Morogrim where you are assigned to heal only one tank, you have something like 8+ healers spamming heals on him, HoTs are the least efficient heals you can cast on him. I'd prefer to let Rejuvenation roll for the occasional Swiftmend and either cast/cancel HT on the main tank or do raid healing duty via HoTs.

 

DecimusGarona

As a tree druid, your hots provide the MT with an extra guaranteed HP buffer. While you may not top the healing meters on an extreme single tank burst fight, your HoTs can always be counted on to provide the tank with 1000+ hp before the next hit lands, with swiftmend as a guaranteed burst heal when needed. If you have access to them, you may also wish to replace a couple of your blues with 2 piece moonglade, to at least provide the tank with a utility +2% dodge buff.

If you really want to top the healing charts, stack +heal as much as possible. Put +18 heal gems in every socket, and aim for the highest +healing items you can find for every slot. Tree has built in mana efficiency, you don't really need a lot of MP/5 to sustain lifebloom/rejuvenation on a single target. You may actually need to chug mana pots more often if you focus entirely on +heal gear, but this is what will get you to the top of the +heal meter.

As a side note, it looks like you could definitely use some gear upgrades. I'm guessing that coming back to your druid after spending so much time on your warrior, you have fallen behind a bit in gear progression, and are just now catching up by picking up the loot that nobody else wants. I don't know what system your guild uses to distribute loot, but chances are if it is a DKP system of sorts then you are going to be pretty much screwed for a while as you try to catch up to people who have been around since the start of TBC raiding.

 

Reachie

Thanks for the advice!

Yeah, I had 3/5 t4, and full epics on my warrior (only switched because of lack of healing, and was a little bored with OTing, so I figured I'd switch) We use a officers discretion based looting system, with a "top 5 items you would like" thread on our forums where people post their top 5 items, and why.

I've tried running instance for moonglade (as you can see im in mostly cloth) due to it not dropping, and the priest set WAS dropping :P (was in 4/5 priest set before upgrading chest, and some other items. In terms of +18 healing gems, I wasn't really thinking of doing that, do you down rank your HOTs ever?

Again, thanks for the reply

 

DecimusGarona

No I don't downrank my HoTs, if the fight is excessively long and mana intensive I may have to chain chug super mana potions after my first innervate, but beyond that I can usually get by with just an innervate for most bosses. If the fight is going to last more than 7-8 minutes, I would strongly suggest not drinking a mana potion until after your first innervate, so that you can get a second innervate out before the end. Unfortunately I don't have any experience in SSC yet, so I can't really give you any specific advice in there.

Also the closest thing to "downranking" that I do is to just use lifebloom when running low on mana. I've only had to do this a couple of times though, it usually isn't an issue unless I have to use regrowth a lot. Keeping a 3 stack lifebloom on the tank is indefinitely sustainable in a low mana situation.

 

Melkortopia

My guild is right where you guys are. The only boss we havn't killed in SSC is Vashj. The only two bosses we havn't killed in TK are Kael'Thas and Solarian.

A few facts: I'm 5/0/56, with around 1650 +healing, 130 mp5 while casting (fully buffed) - or something around there.

I, too, do horribly on Morogrim. That's definately not a fight where HoT druid healing shines. We draw a ton of aggro on the little mobs, so HoTing up the raid right after an earthquake is not a good idea. Our heals are too slow to save more than 2 people on the watery graves.

The only thing we're good at, really, is making sure that the tank survives a spike. I usually just keep up rejuv, in case I need to swiftmend it and cast/stopcast HT10 on the tank. If the tank gets hit for a BIG spike, I'm there with a clutch NS+HT13. If the tank takes a big hit during the earthquake, though, and I'm the one to heal it, I'll get aggro on the murlocs and die.

However, the good thing is that Morogrim fights are few. For every other 25-man boss fight, there's a ton of AoE damage getting thrown around that we can heal - or there are multiple tanks up that we can HoT at once.

By the way, I pretty much always use my innervate on myself. Priests have waaay better mana regeneration, assuming they play smart (i.e., use inner focus/clearcasting to stay out of the FSR, intelligently use greater heal) and pop mana potions/use flasks. The only mana regeneration ability the druids have is innervate. Give us clearcasting and I'll start innervating preists :P

 

DeadSpace4

I find that MT healing as a tree can work well if you are assigned to heal the MT with ONE other healer. One thing I've noticed recently is that many healers just cross heal anyone who is low and this really kills the effectivness of our HoTs. This was more of a problem before 2.1 because Pallys had almost unlimited mana.

What I generally do is stack my lifeblooms on the tank and then start cross healing DPS that isn't in immediate danger of dying. Often this allows my HoTs to really be used to their full advantage. I count in my head when the MT lifebloom stack is getting close and then throw another one back on him to refresh it and keep it rolling. I find that staying mobile helps too. Even when assigned to MT heal you can run a few paces, throw out some more heals, and quickly (slowly) move back to MT position.

As was mentioned before AoE fights really allow tree druids to shine as they can quickly HoT a bunch of people and have a ton of healing all rolling out at once. Single target, direct damage fights are not as good for us, but hey, you can't be on top of the meters all the time.

That being said, I am often on the top of the meters now that tree form has been fixed and I really do enjoy tree form again.

One last thing though, if the other healers in your raids use the "wack-a-mole" style of healing, where they just heal whoever and not their assigned targets/groups, your HoTs will definately get healed over more. It might just take a quick note by you saying "Hey guys, I got the rogues and mages" and see if that gets you anywhere.

 

Solstice

Up until recently my guild has been running with 1 resto druid, who was also ToL and usually assigned to the MT. While I didn't notice any real problems with this it always seemed to me like a ToL druid would be better off raid healing, for the simple fact that HoT's are generally more effective on targets receiving non-periodic damage.

A couple of weeks ago though we took on a new druid, who's specced 27/0/34. In my opinion this is a superior spec to ToL for MT healing. His mana efficiency is almost as good as a paladin and 1.5 second heals aren't something we've found we've needed when it comes to keeping a warrior up. We keep the ToL druid in the MT group anyway most of the time for aura, but have him on raid healing. Both frequently top meters in terms of efficiency and effective healed.

What it comes down to is what other healers you usually run with. Paladins and priests tend to make the best MT healers while Druids and Shamans tend to make the best raid healers. But it also depends alot on who your most competent healers are as you'd really want these assigned to the MT. My advice would be that if you're finding yourself on MT healing most of the time then go with a balance/resto spec and itemise accordingly, particularly if you raid with another ToL druid.

 

DecimusGarona

I would strongly recommend downloading DoTimer if you plan on tree healing, this mod is invaluable to keeping track of who you have HoTed and when you need to refresh your lifebloom stack(s).

Edit for linkage: http://www-en.curse-gaming.com/downloads/details/3260/

 

Anedris

I think the "HoTs are useless on the MT because 5 other healers are overwriting them" is something of a false perception. The MT is (assuming a non-trivial encounter) in constant danger of dying to a spike and is therefore overhealed. So HoTs are excellent - it's more healing landing at another interval and therefore increases the chance that the tank will receive healing between hits (and thus live). Just as the tank may be topped off and the HoT be wasted, so too might the HoT top the tank off and the holy light be wasted. But overhealing in some form is intended as a safeguard.

HoTs are also obvious good in any encounter where healers might be temporarily incapacitated (hi Gruul).

I would agree that without clear healing assignments any attempted raid healing with HoTs is going to get overridden. With clear assignments this need not be the case, however.

 

Reachie

Clear assignments it is =)

Here's a good example of what we are capable of.

Here is our first kill on Al'ar a couple nights ago (hell of a fun fight, now that the charge/1shot bug is fixed should be much easier)

Phase 1 - In was assigned to heal the tanks (as every healer is) in phase 2 I was solo-healing our paladian / warrior who were tanking all the adds.

http://www.lossendil.com/wws/?report...&s=14271-15267

I'm Snow, the most stunning number to me is the amount of overheal (only 14% seems incredibly low)

I've been reading a lot of hate on resto druids, and that we just arn't capable of healing as efficently and effectivly as paladians/shamans and even priests (been reading the holy priest thread, we run 3 holy priests, not 1 :|)

Any comments further on tree issues / concerns?

 

Kapoue

I don't think a tree druid is useless on fights like Morogrim, where everyone is spamming the MT with flask heals. Yes, your lifebloom will only tick for once or twice everytime the MT gets hit, but that means 1200 healing. Considering Morogrim hits for 4103 on our MT, that means your dot and one or two other healer's heal are gonna be enough to top him off while the other 3 healers are gonna cancel/overheal. That's not bad at all. It ensures constant and reliable healing and that is what we are expecting from a tree druid.

Yes, single tank fights are not where trees excel, you're not gonna get 25% of the total healing done on morogrim as you do on Void Reaver (http://www.lossendil.com/wws/?report=6agmx1l34m4ro) but you can manage to get the top spot if you play well.

Also, you only really need one druid with massive amount of spirit. If you are 2 druids stacking spirit, one's aura is lost giving +healing to the shadow priest . I stack mostly +healing since our other tree druid has 650 spirit.

Finally, +healing trinkets like the one from badges are godly for rolling lifeblooms. If you start your trinket, stack 3 lifeblooms and keep them rolling, it'll count as if you have the +300 healing permanently. Hard to do on fight where you have to dodge things but it's still a nice boost you can keep up for 1 min or 2.

 

Xantcha

A tree druid's overheal will always seem very small, as well as our total raw heals.

This is because how blizzard's combat log works, hots on a player at 100% will NOT display in the combat log, so any hot ticks which are 100% overheal will not show up as overheal in your healing stats.

 

DecimusGarona

This is probably one of the best kept secrets of tree healing, I kept a godly 850 tick lifebloom going on the tank for half of gruul last week and finished with almost double the effective healing of the next person on the heal meters (20% vs. 11%). Eventually I lost the stack to a reverberation, but it was great while it lasted. That was with only 1700 heal, a 1k tick lifebloom is well within the reaches of gear that is currently available to guilds that are working on BT and Hyjal.

 

Igniter

Then I strongly suggest you try doing graves. The people can wait the few seconds for the Hots to tick. Also a tree is nice on the MT since so much of raid heals are taken by shaman/poh, and you can only spare 3 healers at the most for the MT.

 

• Tecton

Morogrim, as suggested by Igniter, is a fight for a tree druid to really excel, if you're given an appropriate job to do. Covering graves is perfect, the only limiting factor is really healing aggro from the murlocs.

 

Xantcha

I find graves horrible for druid healers.

Throughout the fight you will often get earthquake into grave before people can be topped off, and those people will die if not healed while graved, it's just not possible for druid to heal that much in the short timespan.

I don't find that druids do too badly in this fight, what I do is usually keep hots on the MT, and when murlocs come keep hots on both tanks. After murlocs are down, just hots running on the tank while lifebloom the raid.

I only lost to a chain-heal spamming super geared pot guzzling shaman in terms of effective healing.

 

Maynard

Hey, I'm in a similar position having changed main from hunter to druid about a month ago, I'm a PvP/PvE spec (8/12/41) tree too, and my guild is working on Morogrim at the moment having downed Hydross and all prior instances. I'm no expert, but my two cents:

I personally don't bother trying to keep Regrowth on a tank. I use NS+Regrowth for emergency heals, or simply Regrowth if a full lifebloom stack and rejuv are on and the tank needs a heal. Using regrowth when the tank is full is wasteful to me, especially since you only need a Rejuvenation for swiftmending.

My experience raid healing (which is typically just tossing HoTs inbetween maintaining lifebloom and rejuv on the tank) is that, at least with my guild, it is wasteful. Theoretically it could work as healing is often non-urgent post-earthquake for classes that aren't likely to be beat on by any murlocs. The reality is that most of my guild doesn't have grid configured to show Juv on a target, so anything I heal is quite likely to be hit by a chain-heal happy shaman or flashing priest/paladin.

However, I have made myself useful during the murloc phase by first hotting up the tank when it occurs, shifting out of tree and using rank 1 hurricane on the murlocs, then if the tank is stable, using HT to top up raid members. As I'm not keeping regrowth on the tank I find I have plenty of mana to spare, and my gear isn't fantastic either.

Haven't had any experience grave healing, so I cannot comment there.

I don't use meters, but I feel useful playing like this. Hope that helps.

 

Cheroba

While normally, I might have Igniter's back on this...this time he's wrong. The resto druid is now mainly a MT healer instead of a raid healer. A paladin or Shaman are going to be able to top off the raid a lot more efficiently than a druid, especially if it needs to be done quickly.

Here's a link to our last Morogrim kill... http://www.lossendil.com/wws/?report=wnkg1xla62f21

I'm not sure what your rotation is on your HoTs, but being efficient with those is pretty much the name of the game. Letting rejuv's get full cycles in, keeping the 3-stacks of lifebloom up at all times.

If you're planning on being a MT healer, then you should be stacking spirit. There's a point where +healing becomes less efficient than if you have high +spirit/mp5 to keep your mana pool going. The healing buff from tree is the reason to be in the raid, in my opinion. The only way that's viable is if you're balancing +healing with spirit stacking.

 

Xantcha

I agree that Shaman's are amazing raid healers, but I disagree that Paladin's are better.

Lifebloom is superior to FoL in single casts situations, and Holy Light is the most inefficient "large heal" available. FoL is great for spam on tanks, and 2 second HL are excellent for reacting to spikes.

I also disagree with stacking spirit, since Tree druids need to keep a stack of lifebloom going constantly, you'll never get out of the 5sr if your doing your job correctly. In this situation MP5 trumps spirit in every possible way (for mana regeneration), at a certain point since we can't uprank our HoTs - mana regeneration becomes useless after we can maintain our max - rank hots on a tank for the average fight length. If you've had a look, all the (non-set) leather healing gear in SSC/TK has no mp5, maybe an indication of that?

I don't believe stacking spirit it worthwhile, you give up alot of ability for that +50 heal.

 

artic

Under 2 circumstances imo, the druid is a powerful healer.

1.) If nobody else is over healing our hots
2.) Single or split healing 1-2 tanks who are taking constant damage

If your guild has a healing wack a mole style like ours, raid healing except in certain circumstances is a trial. The paladins and shaman will most likely blow your hot off before it can tick once or twice, and you'll find yourself resorting to mass spam regrowth or carefully timed healing touch.

Morogrim tomb healing is a situation where the healers hots for the most part can roll on their own. Bloom is really nice because you can prebloom everyone before the explosion and have the final heal at the end. You'll also have SM up every tomb and NS up if you need it. If two people go into the water in a bad way, you can pull them out. No other class has that kinda clutch power. Ya they still have to be ready to pot or stone some hp if quite a few people go in bad, but on the whole the druid does that job rather well. You can even sit and hot the pally tank from your spot at the base. You could have the tree on the tank but thats a matter of preference.

On the whole though our tree is tank healing. Stat wise you don't want to ignore spi, its really easy to get into a place with the current healing gear where you have many pieces lacking spirit. On the other hand, you need enough Mana/5 to keep you going full time constantly rolling bloom. Early off I find it better to get tier gear, and accessory's with spirit on them, since tier pieces have mixed stats it will not leave you gimped. Later on (BT, Hyjal) I am not so sure, as some of the T6 pieces hardly upgrade spirit at all, and you only really NEED so much mana 5. Your work load isn't that much harder on your mana from a slow period to a fast period of damage except you might pop out more regrowths between Blooms. You're always going to have hots rolling, so eventually your mana/5 needs are going to level off and become less of a need.

That leaves you with healing and spirit to push, which is heavy on some pieces, and you can slot them in as you balance out your mana/5 demands. Going all spirit is a waste if you cannot keep up the workload of hots, and the Royal Nighteyes are still by far the best gems to socket in. The end result is a bit of a balancing act in gear. I know some people go +8 spirit stones, or the shadow pearls in gear, but +4 spi isn't better than 3mana/5 imo. This isn't much of a problem though, since most of your heavy spirit gear... just doesn't have sockets...

Really though if we could just get a talent to convert our spirit to mana/5 so we could get some more personal use out of it, it would be huge. Till then it be nice at least to get some more upgraded version of classic spirit enchants like +spirit to boots.

 

Lunch

For Morogrim we have a shaman on Graves - Chain Heal + NS Chain Heal can heal up 3 low targets while you will lose one if you Rejuv SM + NS Regrowth. Furthermore for the typical situation where there is only one low target - LHW or even CH is much more efficient than Rejuv SM. Rejuv / Lifebloom without SM will not heal the target up before the grave bombs and regrowthing graves is just inefficient.

It seems the best Morogrim role I have found is just simply raid healing with lifebloom and Focusing on MT with HoT's. One lifebloom heals pretty much everyone in the raid to full after an earthquake and even if people get graved soon after an earthquake, the HoT makes the shaman's job that much easier.