Thanks for Linking Oxylos' thread Ulfgar - it's the best thesis on ToL I've read. To comment on the above poster - we use two ToL druids on the two Solarian tanks after about 40% or so and use the rolling lifebloom technique. It's incredibly effective and Oxylos' post explains it in complete detail.

I honestly have been a little hesitant to switch to full time tank healing but our BT raid tonight completely changed my mind. Our first couple Najentus pulls I had some trouble keeping my mage group alive using typical HoT's in tree form. Then on like our 7th pull we decided to switch our two tree druids to MT healing and use the rolling LB. It was absolutely incredible how smoothly the tank stayed up. Not only were we able to MT heal with just two druids, but we also were able to toss out LB's in b/w cycles on the raid. Next was Supremus and we used basically the same strat - but this time we were able to keep up the MT and the Hateful Strike taking Tank with just two healers.

All of this still drives my original point home - Why put the haste rating on all the Druid gear in BT? It's terrible stat allocation.

It is possible to maintain 4 lifebloom stacks at a time, and let me tell you it is incredibly easy to blow everyone else out of the water on trash pulls that require multiple tanks. You have to be constantly spamming lifebloom and selecting your next target on the fly, but if you are really lazy you could come up with a single cast sequence macro (not sure if this is possible), or multiple "/target Tank X; /cast Lifebloom" macros that you activate in succession, to automatically do the targeting for you.

There are also a number of boss encounters where keeping multiple lifebloom stacks rolling is handy at some point of the fight. You may not be saving any tank individually, but the sheer amount of HPS you put out really takes a lot of the strain off the other healers.

I went to Hyjal for the first time yesterday and I've never been more thankful that I'm tree specced. Keeping up three tanks at a time with regrowths and lifeblooms is awesome and quite effecient

Just want to chime in to say two things in addition to thanks for appreciating my post. First, while I suppose I can't blame the assumption, my post is on the US forums not the EU forums. And secondly yes, healing optimally as a tree IS difficult, you are spinning plates as it were all night long, and hey if you don't have confidence in yourself or simply lack the ability then so be it. The end result is if you can succeed in it your results will be visible and you will be a great asset to your raid instead of a liability. If you're working you're way through higher end instances "its too hard" simply isn't an excuse.

Though yes, latency is an issue. A poster pointed out that its possible to keep up 4 lifebloom stacks and this is true...if your ping is below 250ms. If its not, then you simply don't have the time. I wrote the article without that edge in mind as I know some people unfortunately do have lag to contend with, but naturally theres extremes that can take it further.

Thanks again for the plug.

Personally I love being a druid healer. The potential of your HoTs is sensational. Like many others have mentioned, 3 stacks of lifebloom on three tanks (along with other heals you are casting) is a ridiculous amount of effective healing. My lifebloom ticks for 697 fully stacked so that's 2091 hps with a base mana cost of 176 per cast. Insane potential for healing and for durability - with a decent amount of mp5 gear/buffs, you can keep that up for a very long time.

Great places to see this in action is on Magtheridon trash, or the trash on the Lurker platforms. If you're not topping the meters as a druid in those situations then you're doing something wrong.

For actual boss encounters however the situation is different. As stated earlier in the thread, HoTs are fairly ineffective on the MT, and are generally used as a 'buffer' for other healers, if used at all. In my guild the druids are almost always assigned to heal the raid and the pallies are put on the tanks.
Good example - tonight at Archimonde we had 3 Pally healers constantly spamming the MT whilst the rest of the healers were pretty much at liberty to heal the MT or the people around them. Now since Archimonde hits like a train, myself and the other resto druid in the raid were keeping HoTs on the MT, to give the Pallies a bit of breathing space; but my primary concern at least was hotting the people receiving damage over time debuffs.
HoTs are SO good in those situations. Whack 2 HoTs on em and move on. Simple as that. A Pally or Shaman wanting to effectively heal a 12 second DoT that deals, say, 6000 damage is either gonna have to wait until the DoT has done enough damage for them to heal up, or spam low rank heals on the targets - Both of which are more dangerous/time consuming/mana inefficient than what a druid can do.

So I am slightly confused why you are assigned to MT heal. Sure you can do the job, but a Priest or a Paladin would be better suited in terms of efficiency. Druids and Shamans rock for raid healing (Chain heal on melee ftw), and that is what I feel most comfortable (and most effective) doing. And by looking at the healing meters I'm benefitting the raid, even if I'm not healing the most important target.

The one thing that infuriates me about ToL is the fact we cant decurse/cleanse. Sure Blizzard, give us an improved Barkskin we can now use as a tree, but remove our second most important role as raid healers. Thankyou. It bugs the hell out of me having to shift in and out, especially when decursing, because let's face it, mages suck at that ^^

In my opinion, stay in ToL form and HoT to your heart's content. If you're good at it, you will be very effective and quite often top the healing meters. As for enchants and gems, mp5 is the way to go. The gear that drops in tier 5/6 instances has decent all round stats on it for the most part. +healing and mp5 gems are the best, +int and mp5 gems are also decent. Or the +4mp5 gems once you get to Black Temple/Hyjal. Yum!
Dont waste your time on 9 healing/4 spirit gems, you get enough spirit from the druid leather - your gems are far better spent on mp5.

Haste rating is a luxury. Don't go spending dkp on it; since there's only 2 resto druids in your raid you'll get it sooner or later regardless.

Hope this helped, good luck on Vashj/Solarian

Effective ToL druid healing is definitely one of the tougher jobs raid-wise to excell at. It is very much like a paladin, where there is a major difference between one that spams FoL for high healing numbers and a truly excellent paladin that bops, bubbles, lays down judgements, etc. Similarly, while anyone can put some hots on thier assignment and lay down a swiftmend here or there, a truly effective ToL has timers and rotations for lifebloom rolling, hot stacking, swiftmend, and NS/HT macros, and are huge assets to a raid.

In the end if you are looking at raw healing meters then ToL is not for you. Meters are VERY favorable to us efficiency-wise but very unfavorable to us raw healing wise. While our hots dont "overheal" per say it is also true a lot of our heals (and thusly mana) is wasted.

What we do bring is a highly-effective counter to burst dps, which a majority of raid bosses are from a tank perspective. Even with a palading spamming FoL there is still a window in there where the tank is not recieving heals, a window that hots close. It is very true that a good ToL puts out 1000-1500 hps, and while a lot of that is wasted, it is always there and WILL save your raid wipes.

I guess what i am saying is that those spreadsheets and analysis are far more than optimistic. What a ToL can provide is different from any other healer in the game-we do not run out of mana, and thus that tank is garunteed 1000 (at worst) hps through any encounter, and is the most non-reactive healing in the game. My heals tick whether the tank blocks a swing or gets windfuried for 8-10k on any given second, which both allows other healers to cancel heals during the damage troughs and gives them that extra second to cast a heal during damage peaks.

I've been considering respeccing my feral druid alt to resto with the change to lifebloom in 2.1, and was looking into how to rate gear. So far, my searching has proven insufficient to find a healing spreadsheet. I don't mind doing a little math myself, but its always more accurate with communal input to catch errors and debate accuracy. Plus, stat value shifts as gear changes so a spreadsheet to reflect that would be ideal. Before I take the plunge and pit my meager math and excel skills at something for an alt, does this exist somewhere already that I can't find?

This is true and while my guild is definitely not on the cutting edge of progression and therefore not facing the really rough and tough stuff - I have noticed that my HoTs take the edge off the heavy hitters (learning Maulgar for example). This 'buffer healing' is, in my opinion, the one big reason to take a ToL druid to your raids. It is a (relatively) unique asset the druids bring and the more I think about it the more I start to think it justifies a raid spot - although I'm probably not quite yet sold.

There isnt really anyway to fully evaluate how 'good' a healer truly is as it will totally depend on what job they've been given. A raid healing healer should always top out the heal meters and generally I find myself often putting some of our worst geared healers on raid healing because I cant trust that they'll always have mana when the MT needs it. Therefore saying that I top the healing meters (which I have done, go me) doesnt really prove anything. So therefore, whenever I think of the theorycraft behind how healing classes work I'm assuming that the players are all equally geared and skilled, and all equally capable of topping healing meters should they be given the right assignments. It comes down to what unique skills a healer brings.

Yes, druids bring this 'buffer' healing and they probably also add +120-200 healing received to two MTs. They also bring a combat rez - and I'm assuming they'll use the innervate on themselves so I'll ignore that. Do they bring any other unique skills? MotW maybe - but I'm assuming you have at least one feral / oomkin druid to do that if need be. Essentially the 'buffer healing' is the one big tick in the druid portfolio. However, it is a pretty big and worthwhile tick to have.

But now think of what the negatives are. It *is* difficult to keep two fully stacked lifeblooms (with your +heal trinkets being used) and heal another person. It is definitely possible but that tree is going to be sweating by the end of it. Perhaps with a >100ms ping you could fit in two extra spells outside of your lifeblooms, but having never had a ping below 400ms (Ostraylia mayte) I cant really imagine what that would be like. Not only this, but as a tree we cant decurse which for me hasnt been a massive problem but I'm assuming encounters down the line will need some decursing. As well as this, we have a runspeed debuff (because the ToLs in PvP were overpowered I guess?). Us tree's are also suprisingly squishy. We're more saplings, really.

At the end of the day, yes, trees can be great healers. If you are a great player, with good gear and know how to play - you can excel at healing and do your job well. But then again, thats much the same for any class isnt it? Ret pallys / oomkins / ele shammys etc etc can all be raid assets if played by decent people. But what I think is the most important point is that a ToL player is working HARDER to be giving out the same performance as the pally / shammy / priest (perhaps not priests, but there's another thread about that) next to them. To me, that fact says there's something wrong with the ToL druid. This isnt a whine post, or at least not intended to be because my EJ posting experience is generally whinging about druids and I dont want to be 'that guy' - but while ToL druids can great I really think that is indicative more of the player than the class.

[Druid] Healing Spellsheet

I have to say that I was one of those people who was very disappointed with ToL originally, so much so that I went Dreamstate and was really impressed with it. Lately though we've been experimenting with shaking up raid healing roles a bit as we venture into Black Temple. I think the combination of 2 trees working together on a fight is where the real power of the spec becomes evident. 1 ToL is a healing buffer on an MT and generally it's a buffer we can live without, 2 ToLs on the other hand are completely capable of keeping up to 3 MTs fully healed on most fights.

We've basically reversed our standard healing assignments in terms of our ToLs. We used to use ToLs for general raid healing and throwing the occasional HoTs on the tanks and had our paladins generally focused on MT healing. For the first 2 bosses in BT we switched things up and had our two ToL druids as the only MT healers and put the rest of the healers on raid healing. We found that for Naj'entus we had no trouble at all keeping up the MT with dual lifebloom stacks and the occasional rejuv / swiftmend. What that means is that being conservative in terms of latency I could lifebloom the MT then lifebloom 2 people in the raid and have plenty of time to get back to the MT and refresh the lifebloom stack. Since I'm still using about 2/3 of my GCDs on raid healing I'm effectively able to do 2/3 of the healing I was doing on the raid while still keeping the MT up.

Our ToLs were already dominating the effective healing meters on most fights but in BT so far we've been a mile ahead. The only person close on Naj'entus was a PoHing priest. I do have to agree with Lunch here though, the gear with lots of +heal and +mp5 out of BT is looking very nice indeed but the spell haste gear seems like it will be completely wasted for us.

Okay I've officially decided that hots are godly in Hyjal. Got my first #1 in effective healing. Disclaimer: I had a shadow priest, I wouldn't have been able to get #1 without a shadow priest.

http://www.lossendil.com/wws/?report=d1ytbqrckdjhu

Run was start through a few tries at Archimonde.


I definitely agree that +healing is the best stat for us, though I think going for socket bonuses is the best strategy overall instead of just throwing rubies in everything.


Regrowth isn't nearly as ineffecient as many make it out to be. It gets me around 8.5 health per mana with my current gear while buffed in tree. This includes the hot which is often a lot of overheal but overheal is the name of the game these days. 8.5 health per mana is pretty comparable to holy light, greater heal, and healing touch. It's a lot better than flash heal and lesser healing wave.

It's only inefficient compared to the ridiculous 16+ health per mana on lifebloom