Fieryeel

Do idol swapping work for resto druids?

For example, can I have a cycle like this?

#showtooltip Lifebloom
/cast Lifebloom
/equip Idol of the Emerald Queen

#showtooltip Rejuvenation
/cast Rejuvenation
/equip Harold's Rejuvenating Broach

#showtooltip Regrowth
/cast Regrowth
/equip Idol of the Crescent Goddess

As far as I know, Moonkins have a cycle for Moonfire, Wrath and Starfire, and they have triple idols for that purpose. Could resto druids have the same idol cycle?

 

lairpie

In short, no. You can swap in combat and all, but the reason it works for balance druids is the moonfire idol buff actually applies when the moonfire lands, so in the fraction of a second where your computer is telling the server you moonfired, and the server says ok, the idol gets equipped and then its on in time to give you the buff. Idol of terror works the same way. And starfire and wrath, because they have casting times have time to equip the idol during the cast.

If you really wanted to get hardcore, you could setup a macro such that each spell you cast, you would hit shift, ctrl, or neither to equip the idol for the spell you were casting next. So if you were hitting a rejuv, and knew you were about to lifebloom you could hit alt-rejuv and have it set so that alt-rejuv casts rejuv and puts on the lifebloom idol. I've thought about it, i tried it out, and decided it seemed like a huge amount of additional focus required to heal for very little benefit. Also, even without haste, instants where i also swap a weapon or idol definitely feel longer than ones where i don't. I use caster weapon swap to give my group spell surge, and i can definitely notice the GCD taking longer when I swap a weapon. Only probably .1 seconds, if that, but if you add that onto all 4 casts in a cycle, that's eating into your lifebloom cushion quite a lot.

Haste further makes it unfeasible as haste does not lower the GCD from swapping weapons that I know of.

Brewmaster of WBC (5,9,1/6)

 

Tetz

35 percent regrowth healing vs 15 percent regrowth healing.

How would that effect your healing meter increase or decrease?


Many different views on this but i feel using regrowth and lifebloom (not wasting mana on rejuv) would benefit you 100 times better than just using lifebloom and rejuv. I base this on the sunwell attempts that i have done (not as a MT healer because i was not assigned to that).

Any comments plz

It got heated up in IRC so i thought i would post here.

If you need a WWS just holla.

 

Dynalisia

Might need a little bit more reheating within this thread to make it eatable for people that weren't on IRC just now I think. I do know what you're talking about, but a bit more meat on the premise of it would make it easier to respond to your post.

 

Tetz

My biggest question is.. Is regrowth due to all its changes now viable in sunwell more than 30 percent of ur healing (dont care about ur assignment). Because i dont get SP or mana pot and i just use my innervate and i still dont run out of mana. Is regrowth worth it? Guess ill start with that.

 

lairpie

Regrowth was always worth it if you could spare the mana for it. The only change is that now you can spare the mana for it virtually all the time. All the hate for regrowth has always been for people that used it to the exclusion of other spells. When it comes down to it, there's only so many people in a given fight that you know are going to take enough damage to get a stack of lifeblooms.

The main issue druids have always faced is quickly assessing whether you can help raid heal a given person taking damage, whether you need to (or if someone else already is), and whether doing so will cause more risk to the tanks by letting your hots drop than is worth it, when there's a pretty good chance someone else will get them. Successfully answering this question every 1.5-2 seconds is the difference between druids that are successful healers, maybe even integral to their guild's raids, and amazing druids. Unfortunately, there's not much of a way to do an objective determination based on wws or anything of that sort, but I think with a bit of looking at their WWS stuff, a bit of reading what they write, you can to a large part figure out who they are. Anyone can keep hots up on tanks. Don't get me wrong, a druid that that's literally all they do can still be doing amazing on healing meters, they can still be a very useful person to have, but their missing a big last jump to the next tier of usefulness.

This is something I've been looking at a lot lately in our attempts to recruit another resto druid as one of ours has had to tone back raiding because of work. I've come to the conclusion that their are rather distinct tiers of resto druids. The druid we lost never did quite the healing I did, but he did the little things that can't quite be quantified but make a huge difference. That regrowth on a sp as their mind-control broke that landed right as the mob hit them; things like that. We've found a lot of druids that i would say are all distinctly second tier. They put hots up on the tanks, they keep them up most of the time, they generally do what they're told, but you look back at the wws deathlog and you see that each time the tank died, their hots happened to have cleared right before that. You never see that swiftmend other than yours there when the tank takes a hard hit. You look and see they didn't use NS the whole night. The biggest problem is there's nothing you can tell them that I've come up with to get them to see how they could have done something better. Maybe with time they will, or maybe something you say will trip some switch, but for the time being, but you can't just be "use swiftmend more" or "don't let your hots drop off the tank."

The druids i've decided are 3rd tier druids, are pretty much just bad. They just don't grasp how to align the spells in their spell book with the damage the raid is taking. I was doing a pug maulgar the other day to help some friends that wanted some alt gear or something, and the guild that was running it asked me to do healing assignments as they knew I did them for our guild. I setup some healers for the various tanks and then told the other druid "just do what druids do" by which I had sorta meant "put some lifeblooms on the mt and any other tank that looked like they needed, and then kinda, fill in the gaps." So she responded "use hots to top off the raid?" I paused for a second, decided it wasn't worth it, and just said sure. In the end, it didn't matter because she died somehow right away anyway, but having been fairly spoiled up to that point having worked with the same druids all the time, I was kinda struck that one of the main healers for this other guild felt "what druids do" was "top people off with lifebloom." Oh, and she's dreamstate, and doesn't use IS or HT. I uh, just don't know what she can be spending the dreamstate mana on by just spamming lifeblooms.

The first tier druids, in a lot of ways, don't seem that different from second tier, but oh you can tell the difference when you're used to playing with first tier druids and then get a second tier one instead. I'm sure the possibility exists to be like a 1.5 tier, but I've never really seen it. Being aware of where people are positioned, and getting a good general feeling for the other healers in your raid and what they're going to do is essential. No healer is an island, and if all you ever do is the same thing another healer does, you're not useful. Seeing the patterns of damage coming in, healing going out, and using your different abilities to make those curves match instead of blindly using the same abilities all the time makes a huge difference. In one of our first archimonde kills someone asked me why I was using tree form when I had to decurse, and I said I only dropped it to decurse when someone else wasn't going to get it, but I didn't mean, like, I wait 3 seconds to see if someone else gets it, I just keep track of where the decursers are and if the people with the curse are close to one of the mages I trust to actually remove it. The rest of the time I rather like my too slow to get feared into a fire unless I'm right next to it form. Little things like that, make a big difference. Sure, the mana from be being in tree form doesn't matter, but that lifebloom I knew i could refresh in time and count on the mage to get the curse instead of letting my lifebloom drop, might.

I kinda got on a tangent, but knowing what spells you need to use to make the overall raid healing output match up with the damage coming in, and combining reacting to damage, with predicting it, make all the difference in the world. There's no way to really say how much of each spell you should be casting, as it wildly varies based on fight, and based on what the other healers in your raid are doing. I've had fights where I didn't touch regrowth, and fights where it was 50% of my healing. I've done the same fight, with the same assignment but with different other healers, and completely changed what spells i was using based on what i felt they would do. Early on in raiding we didn't have any resto shaman, which shifted a lot more of the burden of healing melee damage onto me. I was using regrowth a ton even before the mana boosts and had socketed extensively with regen and geared for it. A few buffs to regen and 2 consistent resto shaman later I stopped needing to regrowth the melee hardly ever and started shifting my gear towards a lot more +healing rather than regen and started focusing a lot more on just tanks and ranged (where chain heal is a bit less effective). There's no right or wrong answer here without knowing what all the other healers are doing.

Brewmaster of WBC (5,9,1/6)

 

Tetz

all i got to say is <3 lairpie period.

lol

Very well written.

 

Ribeye

Lol Lairpie. Ya know all this time, reading this thread and responding I had sort of begun to think of you as the anti-me as far as healing went. You are of course knowledgeable and a great druid, but your style always seemed counter to mine in that you performed the role of druid as a raid leader might expect it to be played, perhaps even how the designers of our class expect it to be played. But now I see we really aren't that different. In a given fight we might heal completely different but I'm willing to bet we'd produce about the same numbers, just arrive at them a completely different way.

Since I changed guilds recently, I have begun to change my perspective a little bit on druid healing as well. In my old guild, the shamans were not quite as strong as people in threads like this always referred to, and so I was forced to become a certain type of healer to make up for that weakness. On the other hand, our paladins were always extremely strong, and so maybe it was "growing up" with this guild that made me the oddity I am, and yet I think it made me a stronger healer over all.

Now that my new guild has very strong shaman raid healers, I can see why it would be easy to slip into a pick 3 lb target druid and just spam that, but thats not who I am, and the guild already has one druid that is very good at that. In fact, I would argue, that no guild needs 2 druids that heal exactly the same way because if they do, they are simply splitting healing done on the meters by dropping LBs on all the same targets when it really isn't neccessary.

Which brings me to the point of this post, and something we haven't talked about in this thread as of yet. Druid synnergy. We all know that two resto druids tends to be the standard template for a 25 man raid force these days. Now of course there are certain fights where both druids stacking hots on the MT is a good decision, but I would argue that those fights are a rarity, so how best do both druids define their role within a raid, and is it even something that can really be thought out in advance? Lairpie mentioned that most of what his companion druid did was intangible, and I would argue that maybe that intangibility was being strong in spots where he was weak, and vice versa. Is the synnergy of two druids even worth mentioning, or do you just heal around the other druid and hope it happens?

For my part, I think the standard LB rolling druid *is* an important part of a guild and yet I realize that I will never be that druid. That makes it easy for me to be me and do tons of raid healing and proactive healing, and yes, spam regrowth.

 

Zidders

I'm the other tree in Treasons guild, and I must say Treeson is amazing.. But how do you talk with that who only understands the hunter class and will not listen to reason?

 

lairpie

@Ribeye
Yeah, you're pretty much the first druid that didn't agree with me on everything that I didn't think was just retarded. That's part of why I had been asking about other druids posting wws links a while ago is I was trying to see what was different in your raids healing setups that made healing like you do viable. And yeah, the difference in what roles the other classes were filling seemed to be the big difference. While I personally like our setup a bit better in terms of playing to the strengths of our class setup, a setup that plays better to the strengths of individual people in a given raid would often be better.

Partially since I do most of the healing setup, and partially because since BWL or so druids have been one of the most consistent classes our strategies for healing have always been very druid centric. I've made it a point to raid as a priest and a paladin quite a bit at 60 and a little bit at 70 to better make sure I knew the strengths of each class (somehow i didn't think I needed to actually play a shaman to grasp the ever complicated role they have in pve healing, haha) and I think that's put me in a position to work out strategies a lot better than someone who hasn't played a druid could.

I know a lot of our healing setup was modeled after Forgotten Aspects as they were one of the better guilds i could find that like us had 2 resto druids standard with druids that weren't stupid. I'd been looking to their WWS stuff for a while to try and see how Pyxis and their other druid whose name escapes me would do things, and then mimicking a lot of that within our guild. Helped us get to where we were able to run 6 healers, once in awhile 7 until BT. Then when their paladins made one of the first big posts I had seen about running 2 druids as a standard setup and it became a lot more common, I had to laugh.

More recently, with the overabundance of mana I've had I actually looked to your wws stuff for more ways to effectively use the free GCDs I do have and effectively burn some mana into people. From that we've shifted more of our paladin healing to being on the tanks for any fight with raid damage that I'm confident the shaman and I can get w/o their help and w/o my hots dropping. In your post about what you do in a given fight really the only fights where you and I do vastly different things are sharahz, council, illidan. We've been running 2 resto shaman and a CoH priest most of the time lately so I've actually gone back to being more focused on tanks again for any fight where there's more than 1.

Think however this week I'm going to try not bothering with healing the off tanks for sharahz and just let our other druid / brain heal bounces get them and try and help out more with raid healing and put a paly that would normally just be raid healing on the tank. We've found that just a lifebloom stack and a rejuv from each druid an 1 dedicated healer was plenty for keeping up the mt with lifeblooms doing all the healing on the off tanks. The leaves (with our recent 2 of each class setup) 2 palys, 2 shaman and a coh priest free to raid heal. Its worked out pretty well for us so far, however our normal 23-38 priest has become our normal enh shaman and we're not quite ready to rely on our new priest to solo heal the tank other than hots, so, looking to try something else out.

That's a pretty commonly asked question and no one's really come up with a good answer to it that I've ever seen. Using druids effectively requires the rest of the guild to have a lot of faith in them. Healing from hots just doesn't seem as real to many people and letting go of the idea of being able to just count healers on a tank the same way doesn't sit well with people. Around the game, there are tons of guilds that see druids as almost useless including many that have them, and guilds that have been trying to recruit good resto druids for ever to try and get that magical double lifebloom stack that all but guarantees the tank will live long enough to get that next holy light or greater heal.

Brewmaster of WBC (5,9,1/6)

 

malthrin

How are you guys planning to meet your meta gem requirements as you transition into Sunwell gear? I'm currently using Belt+Boots, but we just got Brutallus down (5 weeks after our first Illidan, woohoo) which means that T6 belt and soon boots will be available to me. Obviously these are amazing pieces, but I'm not sure how I am going to juggle gems around to keep IED active. Any thoughts?

 

Kalaghan

Hey, I was wondering if you'd be able to link me to that post, or any other good one summarizing the argument for 2 resto druids in a raid. My guild just lost a 'tier 3' resto druid, leaving me as our only one. And while my raid spot is guaranteed and I generally always perform well, I really think a second druid would be beneficial. Unfortunately, I think a lot of people will perceive it as forcing my opinion on them or bias or whatever else if I go into great detail about why 2 druids is good, and how the synergy between them is beneficial. I just feel like I have to force feed them too much information in order to make my point and it won't go over well. They're already soured on the idea of 2 resto druids because of the one we just let go, and we do have a fairly strong healing core to begin with so they're not inclined to tweak it. I think my arguments would be a lot better received if I could just reference a post already out there (unfortunately, I think they might still fall on deaf ears, but it doesn't hurt to try).

 

david0925

Personally speaking I'd just regem 2 blue/yellow sockets with Seaspray emeralds and stock pure +healing on everything else (unless there's a desirable socket bonus somewhere with blue socket, then you can use 11healing/2mp5, 10 spirit, or 9healing/4(5)spirit gems)

Although I raid primary as feral. In Stackwell Plateau when I raided as resto (keeping Fairie Fire up, lifebloom the crap out of people, spot heal with some regrowth) , even in humanoid form I don't have any mana problem at all without chain potting, so mp5 is really a waste to us right now, imo. +healing effect also triples from the 3 stacks of lifebloom.

Maniq is my hero

 

Kalaghan

Oh, and on another unrelated note, I recently had to choose a meta-gem (went from the CE rep one, to Gruul's, to ZA, to T6, so I'd somehow managed to never use a meta-gem in like 8 months of raiding). I decided to go with IED because I realized as long as I'm matching some blue sockets (I tend to do the 0 or 1 non-red socket go for +heal socket bonus theory), I would have to go for IED to be consistent in my itemization priorities. That said, I find I'm in a bit of a grey area for mana. In many fights I can get by just fine without my innervate, however I still do need it at times.

With 2.4, our innervates have become far more useful to some damage dealing classes. Namely, there's a fellow druid (feral) who proposed the idea that innervates might be best used on arcane mages . Now, I have to basically guarantee them my innervate before the fight or else they're done for since they change cast priorities to be less mana effecient. I don't think I can guarantee giving away my innervate unless I invest very substantially in regen over +heal. Has anyone been doing this, or looked at doing this? Is the status quo to use your own innervate still, and is it fair to say that's justified? My instinct is that the healing lost from re-gemming would be more significant than the damage gained from someone else getting my innervate, but I'd like to see some discussion on it if it's worthwhile (I hope I didn't just miss this when 2.4 came out somehow). What are others doing with their innervates, and has anyone experimented with this?

 

malthrin

Yes, I'm definitely in the +healing camp. I guess I was a little vague with my question, I was wondering which items people were planning to gem to meet the meta requirements and assuming spinels/rubies everywhere else. I like your idea about Seasprays; I can use one for the socket bonus on the pants, one in the bracers, and that's done with.

On the other hand.. basically, value the meta at 30mp5. Bracing is 26 heal + 2 more red sockets = 70 healing. Maybe it's time to think about letting go of IED?

 

◊ Noressa

Since I'm moving more towards a haste set that includes minimum 250 haste, I'll probably end up gemming forceful seasprays for the blue requirement. I've let go trying to do all +heal, since healing with haste is proving to be more effective for me. I can't afford to lose that amount of mana/5 with the regen loss I get adding haste.

 

malthrin

What fights do you actually feel like you need your Innervate on? I typically Innervate myself on Kalecgos, and sometimes Shahraz, but that's about it. Most other fights, either a couple mana potions or just having full spirit buffs up (Draenic Wisdom, Fishsticks, Kreeg's Stout) is plenty.

I typically give my Innervate to a Shadow Priest when they ask for it. On Brutallus last night we chained Innervates on our only mage (fire).

 

Likas

We usually have a shadow priest with all of our arcane mages.

With respect to regemming, my guess is you are better off replacing a trinket slot with the [Bangle of Endless Blessings] and that should provide you more mana at a less cost to +heal than regemming. Of course, this depends on your level of gear. For example, if you use [Battlemaster's Perseverance], that is the equivalent of 4 epic gem slots or 5 rare gem slots. If you re-gem with spirit, you could gain 40-50 spirit. However, if you replace the trinket instead, you would gain approx. 22 spirit from the use effect alone (assuming you macro it to be used whenever the cooldown is up). However, the real value is in the proc, which I believe is 1 ppm. If so, then it will be up approximately 25% of the time which would effectively increase your total spirit by 25%.

 

• giansm

Hey, this is what I did for our early Maulgar and Gruul kills! Although at the time, lifebloom still didn't get a +healing bonus for anything past the first application so it didn't really occur to me to roll it. And I didn't have enough mana regeneration to cast more than a few regrowths, so it seemed like a good idea to just top the raid off with hots and let the other healers focus on the tanks. Raid-wide damage on Gruul is pretty well suited to hots anyway, since it's mostly from Shatter and when one hits it's safe to take your time to get everyone healed up, since it will be a while before they take any more damage.

But yes, I agree with everything you say regarding Regrowth and working with other healers. Regrowth has always been a good spell for raid healing, even though it's not the more efficient thing in the world and takes two seconds to cast. I think your phrase "kinda fill in the gaps" fits pretty well with what druids are good at. The other healing classes are at their peak performance when focusing entirely on raid healing or tank healing, but we aren't really performing to our maximum potential unless we are doing both. Certainly we can focus entirely on one or the other, and sometimes it's necessary, but we are unique among all healing classes in that we can put out significant healing on the tank and anyone in the raid at the same time (shamans can heal tank and melee with chain heal, and priests can heal clumped groups, but we can do anyone).

I find that in practice it helps to have a sense of what other healers are going to do, for example I know that certain healers in my guild gravitate to the tank, some peel off to heal the raid whenever they get a chance, and so on. If you know what the other healers are likely to do, you can cover what they aren't doing. For example, on Illidan I usually just heal the tank without doing much of anything to the raid, since I know that as soon as someone gets Flames or Parasites a priest will break off and heal it. On Kalecgos what I do depends heavily on what other healers are in the same realm as me: it could be focusing on the tank, it could be splitting between the tank and raid, or it could be purely raid healing. On Anetheron I stay on the tank unless the shaman near me is sleeping or swarmed, in which case I heal the raid too.

One effect of this is that my position on the healing meters depends more on what other healers are in the raid than anything else. A good example is that normally on Anetheron I'm third on the meters and just heal the tank and healers near me that are swarmed, because that's all I need to do and I'd rather be safe and stay on the tank if I know the raid is covered. A few weeks ago our regular shamans weren't there and we had a weak one subbing in, as well as a new and inexperienced resto druid, so tank and raid healing were both worse than normal. I ended up doing 56% of the tank's healing and almost a quarter of our raid's total healing with seven total healers. About 60% of my healing done was on the tank (2/3 of it lifebloom, 1/3 other spells) and 30% of my healing done was Regrowth on the raid. The other 10% was random non-regrowth raid hots. This was pre-2.4 (Regrowth's always been a good spell, like lairpie said). That parse also had three swiftmends and one NS+HT on the tank, all with zero overhealing (was pretty scary).

Well, it's a different story if you have some convenient gear with decent socket bonuses. For example if you have [Boots of the Divine Light] and [Life-step Belt], you can use two Luminous and two Royal gems to meet the IED requirements. Relative to Bracing you lose 26 (from the meta) + 44 (from not using four red gems) but you gain 14 from socket bonuses. You gain about 4 mp5 from the added intellect and another 4 from the Royal gems. That's trading about 35-38 mp5 for 56 healing, which is pretty damn aggressive and a little too aggressive for me, especially if I'm trying to have my innervate available for other people.

 

malthrin

Well, the context of my question was that I'm going to be replacing those pieces with T6 within the next couple of months and Sunwell gear isn't nearly as easy to fit IED requirements into while hitting some nice socket bonuses - particularly with just a single yellow socket in T6 chest. Still, Noressa made a good point in that as I acquire more haste my mana expenditure will increase, which makes two haste Seasprays an elegant solution. Probably in T6 bracers and the Kalecgos pants, to meet socket bonuses.