While keeping up 3 stacks of lifebloom is the most efficient way to heal, it is not a style that requires treeform.
As a dreamstate druid, I find that I perform best when assigned to the MT. I keep up three stacks of lifebloom, and pre-cast healing touch. On really spiky fights, I pre-cast rank 13, otherwise I downrank. This allows me to perform two essential components of MT healing: topping off (through lifebloom ticks), and responding to spikes with the game's chunkiest heal - rank 13 healing touch. If the MT has been spiked down, in addition to letting my healing touch cast, I neglect a lifebloom refresh to cast another HT, thereby letting the lifebloom "bloom", healing for an additional 1500+.
Lately I've been trying to fit a rejuvenation into the rotation, but I still need to get the pacing and timing right.
By being dreamstate specced, not only do you miss out on swiftmend (which is a ridiculous amount cheaper mana-wise than HT, whether you're tree specced or not) but you also miss out on ~20% more +healing on hots. If you're tree-specced, it's even better because you're 20% more mana efficient.
We've gone from 2 druids healers, one tree-specced but not using it (he preferred HT spam with hots in between) and one dream-state specced (who then switched to swiftmend/balance a while after), to have two tree-druids. It's certainly different as a tank when you get 4 hots on you (or even 6 if regrowth goes on) and knowing that they'll flow no matter if people are silenced, to getting silenced, having a hot tick or two because people were keeping it up in between things and so it didn't happen to be on, and then waiting for a ~5-6k heal from someone.
The difference on hot's between being dreamstate and not is something like ~30% total from rejuve, and ~15% total on lifebloom, along with 50% more crit on regrowth, and 20% less mana cost on everything, and having swiftmend there for rejuve too. It's certainly a significant difference from being dreamstate specced and using hots.
I've found that tree form works best in everything up to ssc. We down Void Reaver but a tree druid wouldn't really shine during that fight.
Assuming you have decent gear as in lots of Karazhan loot and a piece or two of tier 4, you have enough +healing to have over 600 hp/s with just 3 lifebloom stacks. Along with this, you should have enough mp/5 to be able to refresh lifebloom every 5-6 forever if you don't cast much else.
I also have the use heroic trinket that i can pop while i cast lifebloom and if i don't let it fall off, i can push 3 lifebloom stacks to over 750 hp/s.
Combe this with a rejuv every once in a while and swiftmending when the tank takes a spike and you win. This is not saying much, but i have an easy time topping the heal meters for a raid night with just these few things i do.
IMO, ToL healing is pretty much pigeonholed into tank spike insurance. FoL + LB3 + Reju + timed GHeals, with swiftmend ready. I don't really see any unique niche for dreamstate, because if you are going to do timed big heals, it might as well be the holy priest. The other priests are most likely shadow.
ToL is not great for raid healing. Resto shamans can chain heal multiple members by the time you struggle through GCDs and whack-a-mole to spread slow HoTs.
I have done some brief studies from different fights on WWS, basically a fight results in ~300 incoming heals on MT. If there is a ToL with 500 spi you get 125 extra per heal or 300 * 125 = 37.500 extra healing from the aura on the MT. Total healing in a boss fight is around 1.5 MHP which makes the buff equal 2.5% of the total healing which is about the same a Shadow priest brings.
Do not matter how much you play, you will never get the carrot.
IMO, ToL healing is pretty much pigeonholed into tank spike insurance. FoL + LB3 + Reju + timed GHeals, with swiftmend ready. I don't really see any unique niche for dreamstate, because if you are going to do timed big heals, it might as well be the holy priest. The other priests are most likely shadow.
ToL is not great for raid healing. Resto shamans can chain heal multiple members by the time you struggle through GCDs and whack-a-mole to spread slow HoTs.
With a single ToL in the raid, and yes I know most of the elite guilds just use one, I would agree with you. With 2 ToLs on the MT though I'd argue that they absolutely become your primary MT healers. Between trinketed lifebloom stacks and the occasional swiftmend, you're covering a very large percent of the incoming damage.
The thing about the Dreamstate build is, although it's supper efficient due to huge amounts of mp5, there isn't really a need for mp5 past a certain point. You only need enough regen to cover the mana you're using in a fight. The more mana you use the higher your regen needs to be. So if you're spamming Regrowth the whole time you're going to need a ton of regen to keep going, but if you're using Rejuv and rolling Lifeblooms then you need much less.
People with Dreamstate builds talk about having 180-200 mp5 unbuffed so they could heal forever even if their HoTs aren't as powerful as a Tree druid. However, I've found that I only need around 160 mp5 unbuffed to heal "forever" in Tree form. So basically, I last as long as a Dreamstate druid, but my heals are more powerful. Although, I'm not arguing against people who use a Dreamstate build for the use of Balance talents. My own build is part Balance. I just think that going Dreamstate purely for healing is a waste.
I think that for TBC Blizzard turned Healing Touch from our staple healing spell into a utility spell. It's there for us to use with NS or to toss up when we have the time to cast it, not really for chain casting anymore. Pre-expansion I used to chain cast HT rank 4 over and over while keeping Rejuv up, but now, even if I have time to cast HT I'm still better off just throwing up a Lifebloom most likely.
I've found that tree form works best in everything up to ssc. We down Void Reaver but a tree druid wouldn't really shine during that fight.
Just stay out of tree and heal on VR. You have to burn some mana pots, but you should be getting plenty of those for the TK instances. I'm usually 2nd on the fight in healing done behind the shaman that is casting chain heal on the rogues. Basically, I rotate HoTs on the tanks, rogues, and the rest of the raid when they don't get out of the way of the orbs in time. I'm of the opinion that ToL is useful if your guild has a glut (or at least enough) holy priests and paladins. If your raid doesn't have the people to cover the chunk heal roles, or already has a tree then maybe HT/Dreamstate will work better in your situation. I'm in love with being a ToL druid until I play arena matches. Then, well, I wish I was a paladin. The problem with ToL isn't in PvE, it's in PvP. HT/Dreamstate will have more tools (from the extra balance talents) to keep themselves alive and CC more effectively.
I am currently leveling a druid, planning to be restoration at 70. However I will play him fairly casually, and won't have access at raiding, I was wondering what kind of +healing values I should attain to be viable as a tree in 5-men (normal & heroic), healing mainly by hotting ?
I would guess around 1k is doable in blue questrewards? That should be enough as tree for heroics. The beauty of 5man is that you can totally disregard mana regen, as there currently is no 5man encounter that would take your total mana pool plus innervate plus pots. After a fight you can drink anyway without serious problems.
Spirit is still a killer stat for 5man because you not only gain regen (which is still nice ofcourse) but 1/4 of your spirit is direct +healing with the ToL Aura. This thread mostly covers concerns for raid encounters where you while fully potted have to hold up as much healing as you can for 15mins or burst healing situations after 5min of constant healing.
Id suggest to get some -threat trinket tho, the "fade" from those are quiet useful in 5mans.
By the time you reach heroics, you should have all the good blues and then you can upgrade to badge and reputation rewards (CE offhand, shatar mainhand, KoT bracers etc).
If you want to get as far as you can on your resto druid, you can go tailor and craft the Primal Mooncloth set+boe items. That set is enough for anything up to the end of BT maybe. Might be a bit much for a casually played alt tho.
Thanks a lot for these informations, I know how to gear up properly with the three other healing classes, but a tree druid has such a unique healing style I was wondering how appropriate this knowledge is.
You could just be a 'selfish tree' and screw spirit in favor of Heal and MP5, its a flat 20% cost reduction on spells that way, and the amount of MP5/Healing you will get from bypassing spirit on most items will far overcome the gain from ToL aura.
My goal is to keep around 400~ unbuffed minimum and aim for as much healing as posible while keeping MP5 around 175~, I doubt you need nearly as much MP5 for non-raiding thou, just think about spirit before you bother with it
Basically max out your +heal with whatever you have available, with only 100 mp/5 while casting unbuffed I can pretty much solo heal heroics and only use a handful of waters. Regular instances I can go through the whole place without drinking once, just use innervate when you drop below 25% and you are good to go. Keep the lifeblooms rolling out to anyone who takes damage and you have to have a really bad tank/group/pull for anyone to actually die.
I'm really confused by your statements about VR. I've found my tree to pretty much destroy the other healers on this fight in particular, and on fights where movement is required in general (or like Mag where movement happens to you). This week's VR I was literally 200k above the next healer in line and had to comfort my pally friend who was annoyed with how much she had to move. Hard to FoL spam while moving.
There are several things which are obviously key to good tree healing. One of the statements above struck me as odd:
ToL is not great for raid healing. Resto shamans can chain heal multiple members by the time you struggle through GCDs and whack-a-mole to spread slow HoTs.
Ok, chain heal is hax because you don't need to have any idea who your heal will hit past it's primary target. That's a whole bunch of spam ability in one button. But... I hardly think I'm playing whack-a-mole, and lifebloom is anything but slow -- it's the same fast heal as a trinketed healing stream but bigger at a 3 stack. Smart preventive healing comes with experience.
On Void Reaver for example I keep all hots on the current tank and keep a few on the OTs who are trying to build threat. I run out when I'm getting bombed, and I hot people near me if they get an inadvertant ball. On Morogrim I know to keep heals on the single MT and when murlocs are inc I start spreading RJs to the mages and warlocks and switch my heals to the pally with RF on who is trying to get threat up. I swiftmend either mages taking burst dmg, the MT. or the pally. Or I maybe throw some hots on the various raid members (OTs, graves, etc).
Tree healing is all about being able to *anticipate* damage. I'd rather spend my 176 mana for a lifebloom when I see the red aggro dot in grid than wait until they're -2k.
I used these two fights as examples b/c I have pretty pictures for them this week:
As Eluned's photobucket links are down I'll link our tree's latest Lootreaver meter.
Any place where he can heal multiple tanks, he crushes all others on effective healing. I only hope there's places to use this type of healing in Hyjal and BT. Also, spell haste is bad. Why waste itemization points on that over raw healing power? BT healing loot doesn't seem very 'Green'.
Is Drake.. a resto shaman? If he is, how is he not first on VR?
I usually put out a ton of healing, but with a resto shaman chain healing the melee during the pounding they get way out in front on healing done real fast. Here's ours from last week:
If you search for more from that boss you can look at some of the EJ ones. You'll notice the shaman(s) are almost always at the top on VR. They don't have a tree (that I've found in their parses) to compare though.
Well there arent many targets for him to heal. Aside from 2 prot warriors, 2 ferals and a fury warrior, we might bring 1 rogue to a raid. The fights in SSC and TK arent melee friendly, so we dont bring them.
In this case, Bust was healing 4/5 melee in the raid.
Well there arent many targets for him to heal. Aside from 2 prot warriors, 2 ferals and a fury warrior, we might bring 1 rogue to a raid. The fights in SSC and TK arent melee friendly, so we dont bring them.
This used to be the case, but is no longer true. Leotheras, Hydross, Lurker, Morogrim (especially), FLK -- all have vital roles for melee. You're doing yourself an injustice by not giving them a chance. Very few casters can maintain 1200 dps on a single target for 8 minutes straight, and be able to keep going for another 8 if needed. Good rogues can.
Back on topic:
We bring a single healing druid to our raids currently, and I'm getting the feeling I'm not using him effectively. He's not a bad player, but it just feels like there's nothing for him to do. I almost always put him on MT duty, since our paladins and shaman do FoL/CH top-ups on the raid, with me assisting using CoH. His effective healing is incredibly low in comparison to our other healers (sometimes as low as 50%), with good overheal % (as low as 10-15%).
Here's a couple of WWS parses: his name is Xyton. Anyone have any suggestions for me to bring to him? He's been with us a long time, and I don't want to have to replace him due to "poor" performance (there's some pressure this way, as he is seen as a weak healer -- I'll take the blame if it's my fault for giving him the wrong jobs).
July 17th raid: Wow Web Stats
( Lurker: melee and cross healing; Hydross: MT heals; Leo: MT heals; FLK: healing the hunter tank together with a boomkin, who is the other druid showing up on the meters)
Suggestions for Xyton? Suggestions for me as to how to use him most effectively? If the answer really is "be in tree, and keep HoTs up on 1-2 targets, with occasional Swiftmends and Lifeblooms on the raid" ... I'll do it. If I can be shown that having him smooth out spikes is worth a raid slot, even if effective heal is crap-all ... that's worth it to me.
Edit: he's currently Moonglow/Swiftmend: The Armory
Last edited by constantius : 07/20/07 at 10:56 AM.
Personally, I am a ToL druid and one of those who is slightly biased against Dreamstate druids. I feel that if a druid is putting 30+ points into balance, that is 30+ points missing from the restoration tree, missing raid-vital healing talents. I just really strongly doubt a Dreamstate druid has the capabilities of a tree.
So, take this from that perspective. Tree druids are great at raid healing and main tank healing; although for fights like Hydross where there is alot of spike damage, they may get delegated to solely keeping hots up on the MT and the rest of their time spent either healing the add tanks, water tombs, and any other raid damage.
HoTs definitely smooth out spike damage, and will probably save wipes from time to time.
The biggest problem in my own guild's raids is people not trusting the HoTs to tick, as our pallys sometimes totally disregard the healing assignments and heal over my HoTs. Another one issue is raiders assuming the HoTs are always going to tick at small amounts. I wouldn't really call 1000 per tick for 4-5 ticks or more all that small.
Also, resto druids can shine in VR, if only because they're the only healer that can really heal while moving. I honestly can't imagine why they wouldn't shine in VR. However, I'm usually one of the tank healers, though i will throw HoTs around me if i have a couple extra seconds.
Barkskin plus no-threat-specced Tranquility is godly. I've been in a couple situations where everyone in the tank group was taking major damage and pretty much saved our raid from that one combination.
As a last thought, any tree druid without Grid set up to show where your HoTs are will probably not be as effective as one using Grid or a similar addon. I have grid to show me aggro in one corner of a person's box, lifebloom in another, rejuv in a 3rd, and regrowth in the 4th, with incoming heals' notification in the bottom middle. Seems to work great for me.
Tonight, if i remember, i will take several screenshots of SW_Stats of Overheal, Effective Heal, etc and post them here. We'll probably be doing Karathress and maybe start Leo. My stats below are unbuffed.
Last edited by Ailetha : 07/19/07 at 6:13 PM.
Reason: forgot one thought
Overall I agree with most folks that a 3-stack of lifebloom is just too powerful to pass up in most situations. It's great for smoothing out spikes and generally stabilizing tanks. When something happens that causes it to fall off I definitely feel it in the tank's health pretty immediately.
Generally on a boss pull I get a LB rolling then throw a rejuv on since it provides for the biggest swiftmend if I need it, then get LB up to 3 stacks. It's really liberating if you manage to get into a shadow priest group -- you can totally cast at will, have all three hots up constantly, swiftmend whenever you want and immediately get rejuv going again. If I don't get a shadowpriest, I generally forgo the regrowth and just keep a 3-stack lifebloom and rejuv going.
To me, the best part about healing as a druid is that we're pretty versatile. I can be very efficient and coast manawise by just keeping a lifebloom up on a tank and still do decent healing. I can step it up a little by adding other hots to the mix and get spike-damage recovery by having swiftmend available. And I can bomb a ton of hps by keeping a 3-stack lifebloom up and interspersing refreshes with HT9. Plus in max-heal mode I have both swiftmend and NS+HT13 at my disposal for emergencies.
We just had our first Illidan kill tonight and on the wws parse (link) I managed to top the meters with a good mix of heals. ToL using full hots on Phase 1 (single tank, spiky damage). Caster form 3xlifebloom + HT9/13 during Phase 2 (massive damage but not terribly spiky on a single tank). Then back to ToL for Phases 3&4 (spiky single target damage and broad "top off the raid" damage at the same time). So through the whole fight I ended up using a few different healing styles and it really felt like I exercised my whole library of abilities as a healing druid. Really satisfying, and reminded me why I love being a healing druid.
This used to be the case, but is no longer true. Leotheras, Hydross, Lurker, Morogrim (especially), FLK -- all have vital roles for melee. You're doing yourself an injustice by not giving them a chance. Very few casters can maintain 1200 dps on a single target for 8 minutes straight, and be able to keep going for another 8 if needed. Good rogues can.
In our exerience Leo is a cleave/bleedfest which leads to a lot of downtime for melee, Lurker requires any 15 people to stay alive long enough to kill the boss. The adds get sheeped and taken down 1 at a time anyhow. By the time we get to the 3rd melee add the casters are nuking it too. Morogrim is great for melee I agree, but the most important part of that fight is AoE.
With all the movement required in SSC and TK, ranged classes just dont have to move as much. I count my blessings that I am one of the lucky few melee. If I wasn't tanking I'd be "In your raid, lifebloomin' yer tanks!"
One thing to consider about lifebloom is that due to it's "rolling" nature, use effect trinkets are (if I may say so without being lynched) horribly overpowered. The Tree in my guild uses a ZHC and can keep 900 per tic lifeblooms going on 2 people pretty much indefinitely with a shadowpriest in his group. Adding Rejuv for the simple ability to swiftmend and he can almost solo heal a MT.
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.
It's important to remember that healing meters are an information tool and nothing more. By themselves they provide little useful information, it is all in how well they are interpreted.
Kinda reminds me of old raiding in EQ. We used to have someone on the raid whose only job was to keep the next tank targetted - this was so that if the MT died then the healers could just use /assist and immediately target the next tank to start heals asap. What this meant was that the targetting person provided absolutely no damage, healing or anything else to the raid. But he helped prevent a lot of wipes which wouldn't show up on any meters.
You are right that HoT's on the MT are pretty useless when everything is going smoothly as the MT should be getting plenty of heals. But when things get messy and healers die or get interrupted then those HoT's may be all or most of the healing the tank is getting. If they can keep him alive long enough for heals to resume then they have saved a wipe.
So on Morogrim I see the main benefit of HoTs as being for when the main healers get earthquaked, tombed or need to dodge adds. If your HoTs help prevent the tank die during these events then they are doing a great job. Far more important than if you were topping the healing meters.
You are right that HoT's on the MT are pretty useless when everything is going smoothly as the MT should be getting plenty of heals. But when things get messy and healers die or get interrupted then those HoT's may be all or most of the healing the tank is getting. If they can keep him alive long enough for heals to resume then they have saved a wipe.
So on Morogrim I see the main benefit of HoTs as being for when the main healers get earthquaked, tombed or need to dodge adds. If your HoTs help prevent the tank die during these events then they are doing a great job. Far more important than if you were topping the healing meters.
I feel like I'm repeating myself over and over saying this but I guess I'll keep it up until more people really get it.
Once your ToL druid reaches a certain gear level or when your raid runs with more than one ToL druid, they are more than capable of providing the lion's share of healing on the MT. We have had fights where both of our ToL druids have had 50% more healing than the paladin who was the third healer assigned to the MT. It's not that the paladin wasn't doing his job, it was just that with all of our HoTs ticking away on the MT, there was almost nothing left for him to heal. And no, I sadly don't have a WWS of that particular fight.
I've found that tree form works best in everything up to ssc. We down Void Reaver but a tree druid wouldn't really shine during that fight.
I disagree with this greatly. For VR, I am usually assigned to be the VR Assist healer, in which I am just constantly spamming premade macros that /assist Void reaver and then pumps out hots. at the same time, i am able to drop HoTs while running from orbs (being able to heal while moving is such a huge advantage to this fight). Allowing the lifebloom to stack on your three MTs (at least that's our strat) while being able to run and avoid mobs can keep most tanks up throughout the poundings and VR knock back transitions. Another advantage is the ability to land big heals with swiftmend on spike transitions or if another MT healer is silenced.
07/05/07, 12:56 AM
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