I'm looking for a bit of advice from a resto druid with some experience of solo healing in a 4 dps 5s team. The setup I've been running a bit this season usually consists of:
Shadow Priest
UA Warlock
Elemental Shaman
Rogue
Resto Druid

Sometimes we've subbed in a mage for the shaman and/or another UA lock for the rogue. I'm probably the weakest geared of the bunch with just 300 resil, 1500 heal and 10k hp unbuffed. The others are in full merciless + honor gear and arena weapons.

Here's the thing. Our strategy was to pick one dps (usually warrior) and nuke him hard while ccing his healers - if we were successful we'd win 99% of the time. If we failed and the game started to drag on we'd usually end up losing. There were two setups that we had real trouble beating: 3 healer 2 dps teams and 2 healer 3 dps gib teams (e.g 2345). The problem I kept on having was that our spriest would invariably be focus fired and beyond applying hot's regrowth, sm and ns ht, and cycloning one of their dps, there really wasn't any way I could put out enough HpS to keep him alive. What to do in this situation? There were times when I found myself looking for the HT key because that's what I'd do in a PvE situation if I needed more burst healing - this isn't an option when you don't have it talented though.

So really I'm just looking for suggestions as to what to do as a solo healer when you can't keep up with the incoming burst. Is triple stacking LB worthwhile? As I understood it this worked out less HpS than a single stack. Should i consider cycloning the opposing warrior/rogue even if it's the focus target, just to remove the healing debuff on my priest and allow me to catch up? Really any advice would be welcome.

The Druid on my team says it's worth it to triple-stack LB on the team member most likely to get burned (such as the spriest) ahead of time. It's reasonably cheap to maintain, and it gives you an edge should they choose to burn the expected target.

Since you're a 4-DPS team, do you stack +heal gems instead of STA?

Never sub out the Ele shaman, sub out the spriest. If you have a mage, then your strategy changes from blowing up the warrior to blowing up something else and CCing the warrior (alternate DRs between druid/mage)

fully stacking your hots before someone takes damage is an extremely viable tactic. if you wait until someone starts taking damage to heal, you'll fall behind. time is everything!

subbing a mage could be viable. you just spam cc until they trinket then blow someone up as soon as DR fades and they eat a full duration.

No I don't really stack healing gems, mostly stamina. But this is something I've been considering, especially with the 2.3 spellpower change. Triple stacking LB pre-emptively sounds like a good idea though, thanks for the tip.

Indeed when we sub out the elemental shaman we usually lose more often, as the way we play relies on burst and offensive dispelling.It's also nice to have 2 backup healers. Having a mage cc'ing defensively seems counter-productive as polymorph invariably gets dispelled quickly which means the mage would have to spend most of his time controlling the warrior - it would basically turn into a 4v4 (3 dps 1 healer vs 2 dps 2 healer) which puts us at a disadvantage. The way we usually go is I try and focus on cc'ing defensively and keeping my team alive while they focus on cc'ing offensively to burst someone down. Not sure this is the best way of going about things though.

Incidentally going back a couple of pages, Biomojos Team's looks to me like a 1 healer 4 dps gib team rather than a 2 healer 3 dps cc team... that priest is 100% shadow unless he happens to have full merciless healing gear too.

yeah, biosafety picked up both sets and he went shadow because we don't really do 5s anymore.

Anyway, why not just focus the warrior, then? if you force him in d-stance or just kill him outright, the mage doesn't have to control him. Also, like sadris says, you need the shaman for bloodlust and burst. Drop the priest if you really want a mage.

Rank 1 moonfire the totems.

Try to outlast until rogue's cooldowns are blown then abuse roots.

Constantly nuke their grounding totem and have your hunter drop frost traps. A shaman should not be able to outlast your mana pool unless you're letting the rogue sit on the hunter and destroy him. You have plenty of CC between the two of you to shut down one of them. One thing you should really be aware of though, is that a solo hunter cannot hope to down a resto shaman. At least not until he gets the MS shot. You will have to hold your cyclones for the shaman for when the rogue has already blown his cooldowns and you can get him to a point where the Hunter can blow him up.

Also, the pet should not be the one taking out totems. It should be on the shaman applying poisons so your hunter can mana drain him. You should be the one dropping his totems.

Make a macro:
/target Grounding
/cast Moonfire(Rank 1)

Unless someone's named themselves "Grounding" it will work like a charm. If there is no grounding totem up, it will nuke whatever you have targeted, so you can use this one macro for nuking all totems.

after reading almoust all sides i still have some questsions: (srry 4 my bad english btw)

me (new 70) and my friend (new 70 warri) want to start to play some arena. our equip is horrible and we know that we will losse often. our goul is 1600-1700 first.

now here my question: as my buddy is equiped bad he cant dish out a lot of dmg. would it eventuly be better if i would spec balance like that:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

instead of restro? i would still be able to heal and i could help him with dmg through the treants.


are there any videos of succesfull playing balance druids with an warri partner?
ive read A LOT of suggestions and help for restro builds but almoust NOTHING about balance. are there any good tipps?

thx and again srry 4 my bad english

With 2.3 and 33% +heal transfering into spell damage this is an option to the common 8/11/42 build.

However since you just hit 70 and your equip isn't good you will often lose due to that, even if you don't make any mistakes at all. Besides of that you won't have that much +heal so you don't get much +spell damage out of it.

With better equip it's often viable to go a little bit "hybrid" or even full hybrid. But for begining you need to do something like "all-in or nothing".

With my old main (druid) i recently started arena again, he wears full T2 (*cough*), wich might be similar or even worse than what a fresh lvl70 has (depending on what Q rewards you picked up and wich instance drops you got). Very easy to bring him down if you can catch up. So better play in a way they can't do this to you and that means for me 8/11/42, since there is not much room for offensive casts.

my 2 cents.

as a sidenote:
Nature's Focus isn't that necessary. You won't have time to cast long heals, but mostly instant casts only. Better place those points into Subtlety (to resist some dispells. It can be horrible without it against some teams with priests/shamans, even if you only use Lifebloom).

thx for the answer. here we go with a new question:^^

- can i use rank 1 roots in PvP as the duration is the same and i dont care bout the dmg?

There is the persistent rumor that rank 1 spells break earlier. Spoh said he uses max rank for that reason. However, there has been no solid proof of said behavior, so I use rank 1. Keep in mind though that if you use rank 1 roots you also should use rank 1 Nature's Grasp.

In general, it pays to keep rank 1 of all buffs on the hotbar as well as buffer for purges. And rank 1 moonfire is a must on an easily accessible binding.

Hello! This is a rogue invading your thread. Actually, I just picked up a new Resto Druid partner for a 2v2 team. Our gear is getting up there and I really want to work hard for Season 3. What advice do you have for a rogue who works with a druid? From a druid's perspective...

that was the answer i was looking for. i play a mage and there is the same rumor about sheep rank 1 breaking earlyer. i use it for over an year and i can say: false.

so i will check my spells and downrank them.

thank you again. and sorry for my bad english again.

Support your druid. Some people have this notion that a druid can kite 5 people around while keeping 10 topped off against 30 sources of damage. This is actually very far from the truth. Druids need a lot of hand holding. When a druid gets an opening he escapes and is generally gone for a long time. But you need to create that opening for him. Yes, a good druid can get away by himself most of the time. But then one time the warrior mace stuns at a bad time and the druid gets melted.

So, with a melee on the druid, your job is to land a timely CC so that the druid can slip out. In general you want to keep everyone slowed or stunned as much as possible so the druid can take the maximum advantage of his mobility.

Second, know when to switch targets. Cyclone prevents both healing and being healed. So a common strategy (after you prevented their DPS from harassing the druid) is to rotate CC between the healer and healed. So it is not uncommon for a druid to cyclone the target you are currently hitting. That is to be expected. The goal is to make the opposition fall behind on healing so you can finish one guy. That is pretty much the way you will beat warrior/healer, because you will lose a straight up slugfest against warrior/pally every time.

I played with a rogue before I sold out and went commercial by picking up a warrior partner. I actually had better results with the rogue than with the warrior - at least rogues tend to know they're squishy.

To me, it felt like this combo played the same as the warrior / druid combination just with a few subtle differences. The rogue seems to be less worried about double dps caster teams and I dont have to worry so much about him being burst down. This means I can stay in stealth longer and can be more offensive with my CC'ing. Against mana drain teams, the rogue was also quite handy as he was pretty good at harassing warlocks meaning again I had a less stressful time healing/CC'ing.

Our major weakness came against warrior / anything teams. It felt like a massive uphill battle to win against warrior / healer. We had a few wins which were probably mostly luck, but if you're able to find a healer that is a bit slack keeping their war up above 60% ish we could sometimes CC the healer (cyclone to DR / Feral charge + Bash / Blind / begin again) and get the warrior down but that was pretty rare. This would be harder now with blind / cyclone on the same DR (no idea what the justification was behind this, was rogue/druid really the powerhouse all along?)

I would suggest you try to concentrate on beating every caster team you come up against. If you come up against a warrior team, try your best but dont beat yourself up if you get smashed, the odds are against you imo.

(I'm not a great pvp'er, I capped out at about 1850 on bg9 - it's quite possible everything I've written is the exact opposite of truth).

Fear has no fixed damage threshold at which it breaks. A single dot tick can break it, and it can withstand taking a full nuke. The randomness is what many complain about.

Yeah threshold is probably not the best word, basically bigger damage means bigger chance of breaking, but no guarantees.

On my initial testing with the new heal->spellpower conversion, rank1 roots break almost all the time with starfire, whereas rank 7 has more resistance. That's my anecdote so you can test for yourself. But a nice discovery while testing is that with new spelldamage, roots itself actually does some nice chip damage (if it doesn't break!)

Roots is something like 10% of spell damage bonus per tick? So a 10 second root (hrmmm I probably could have phrased that better, but nevermind now) with ~600 spell damage will tick for about 100 damage, or 300 total (or is it 400? I'm assuming first tick is 3 seconds after cast). It's not baaaaaad, but I'm much more excited about 1250 damage from insect swarm every 12 seconds (again with ~600 damage).

With the changes to 1 button form changes, I am wondering how other people are binding their form changes.

Obviously shifting from one form to another is easy now, but how about shifting from say travel back to travel in one click? Is there a way to make a generic "Shift Travel Form" macro so that if you are in bear and hit it you will go to travel form AND if you are in travel form and hit it you will go to caster then back to travel form all in one click.

Also please post what you guys have binded to help you shift. Right now I only have each form binded (No macros, straight from spell book) and a /cancelform macro.

/cancelform
/cast <MY FORM>
for cat, travel, bear.

/cancelform
as a generic macro to go back to humanoid.

So far I've just made one macro to unshift, then shift to travel. I figure I can use this to break snares while being mobile.

I've also moved cyclone and roots to my bear bar so when I hit those keys I'll automatically shift out and begin cast