I am coasting through this thread because one of my 3s partners will probably be a restokin. That 24 / 44 spec interests me Yes, but I am curious about some elements of it. I understand that Tree of Life moves at full speed now, thereby effectively removing any reason to not use it, but I can only see one big reason to be in tree form, and that is the 20% mana reduction on HoT's. The 6% (and additional +4%) additional healing is solid, but it is dwarfed by other talented modifiers. So, question is, why not Dreamstate?

Also, would you mind explaining Brambles over Nature's Grace?

It seems to me that a case could be made for a more intellect-heavy build, one seeking a few more crits on healing touches, and therefore shorter starfires. Maybe like this?

Nature's Grace: offensively wise, before resilience, we're looking at 13+4% critical rate with resto gear. This boils down to 14% moonfire and 4% otherwise post resilience crit rate, which is practically irrelevant. Regrowth leaves us at roughly 53% crit rate, however the very nature of this spell is such that when you're casting it you're better off getting a faster crowd control rather then offensive cast. Nature's Grace as a 3 point talent is not really meant for resto druids to use.

I also assume you do not mean actually using healing touch and you meant to say regrowth -- HT, even when fully talented is half as mana efficient as HoTs, and the very nature of it makes it quite unreliable to actually heal someone with it. The flexibility to hot before high damage is coming through and use the time during which damage is being applied to reposition, crowd control or DPS is the biggest strength for druids and priests.

On dreamstate: I will be going into arena with roughly 1100 spirit and 2000 spelldamage. The value of dreamstate is about 100 mp5 at my gear level, however with 10 second lifebloom the amount of time I can spend outside of 5sr to regen mana is very high. This, of course, is subject to change once I am wearing less PvE gear and arena metagame is more evolved, but at this point the value of imp ToL is higher then of mp5.

On the spec in general: I have taken every practical healing efficiency talent to provide high HPS healing. Taking ToL is worth about 3500 armor and 150 healing for 3 talent points for when you're in ToL. While I do not want to spend time sitting in ToL form healing things, I expect I might have to against some teams, and the extra 10% total healing along with 150+healing might be worth it. The main defining point of this spec is that I am able to apply quite strong DPS pressure, on the level of roughly 1300 dps at all out spam. Hence, I am able to play a very defensive game with ToL, and I am able to switch and assist on kills quite well.

On Brambles: My thorns hit for almost 200 damage without brambles. At almost 350 damage returned per hit, this damage can add up over time. The daze during barkskin can be useful as well -- I haven't played with it more so but it seems quite a bit better then 3% stronger hots.

Also, this build is not a restokin build, as it does not have moonkin form. I might try replacing ToL with moonkin, but again we're only looking at 50% physical mitigation with current gear and I don't see myself favoring that.

Changing the subject a bit away from talents. I was wondering what meta gems people were planning on using? While browsing wowhead I came across possibly two:

[Tireless Skyflare Diamond]
[Insightful Earthsiege Diamond]

They were some others such as stam + armour or stam + stun reduction but I felt the listed two were the best. I'd probably end up going with [Insightful Earthsiege Diamond] and get speed enchant on boots but I was wondering what the more professional pvpers thoughts were?

Right now, stun resist is probably the best - later in the season, mana restore for sure.

Have any of you guys tried 3s as resto? Either I die in a cheap shot/stun of any sort, or my partner(s) die in 3seconds~ pretty depresing

That's basically a universal problem for everyone at the moment. On that note, I've seen a few druids running with something like this spec. Basically you trade pretty significant healing power (but retain Swiftmend) for big survivability gains: 30% less damage when stunned, +12% armor, , and -6% chance to be crit. You also get feral charge for escape. It seems to be the general "low resilience and please patch the game" build that might be successful in the short term. Any thoughts?

I have the same problem myself, getting gibbed as soon as i pop out of stealth to heal. Often i find myself stunned within 5sec forcing me to trinket->bearform and thats basicly it. Last night i was running with my pve gear on (more or less best in slot) and im thinking about crafting the blue gear with resilience for more survival, the question is: Will it be worth it? Ill be sacrificing a big chunk of my spellpower and mana pool.

I use parts of the pvp crafted blue set and its alright. I would say get it made and see how it goes. From a 2s perspective you will need as much stamina and resilience to prolong your death against the rogue. Your spellpower and mana pool isn't much use to your team when you are dead. I've noticed personally that it is getting better for me to survive against them with around 17.5k health and around 430 resilience(Up from 15k and 300).

Also a tip someone told against rogues that I have still yet to try in arenas but is true in BGs. If you know a rogue is going to come after you (Your in a 2s but only see one enemy and no druid buffs/auras and no Arcane Intellect suggesting invisibility) its probably better to just go ToL (even better if you have the armour talent) and just pre hot yourself and abolish poison. The rogue will eventually find you so why not let him start to attack you when you're better handled for it and can heal through the stuns he is trying to burst you down in.

That's a good point Mygore... My question is this: will they have a major balance change where they nerf melee DPS? It seems that most people get completely obliterated by rogues right now, and it's almost universal. Or will they buff healers in general in survivability terms?

This has been part of my strategy against rogues even back as far as s3 and was why I opted for ToL instead of insect swarm back then.

It's important to note that ToL is a must for this strategy because rogues cannot sap elementals. If you don't have ToL don't even bother trying because any competent rogue will just sap you and let your HoT's fall off before they start their stunlock.

Armor values in general went up a pathetic amount in WOTLK, especially for cloth/leather casters. Compared to the sharp rise in DPS of physical weapons there is currently no way to mitigate that armor difference even with resilience. The sacrifices a 'squishy' healer has to make by trying to go 600+ resilience just to stand a chance of surviving the initial few seconds of a game are huge and to be fair make very little difference. I'm not saying it doesn't help but with the way things are at the moment it's really tough with all the rogue's and DK's tearing things up.

Just an example on the armor:
Here is the new S5 healer leather chest [Deadly Gladiator's Kodohide Robes] (578 armor)
Here is T7 healer leather chest [Valorous Dreamwalker Robe] (also 578 armor)
Here is the old S4 healer leather chest [Brutal Gladiator's Kodohide Tunic] (541 armour)


So, 10 levels and an expansion later and your rewarded with a grand total of an extra 37 armor compared with the old S4....


Onto the weapons:
Best Rogue dagger [Sinister Revenge] (171.1 DPS) (not unique, have seen rogues rape face with x2)
S5 Shanker [Deadly Gladiator's Shanker] (156.4 DPS)
S4 Shanker [Brutal Gladiator's Shanker] (107.8 DPS)

So whilst in some cases physical dps weapons rise by almost 1/3 of pre WOTLK ones and in some cases more, armour values have changed very little. By adding a few extra thousand health in 'PvP' gear does not close the disparity in the rise of weapons v's armor in my book.

Great if your a Holy Paladin with the armor mitigation of a prot warrior you may actually stand a chance, not so great for everyone else.

I'm not sure who first cited this, but I remember having read this article in one of the threads here: Resto4Life� Blog Archive � Direct Healing in Wrath

The graphs show the rates at which various direct healing spells scale given SP. I hope this helps.

[Druid] The Resto PVP Thread Might be a better place to look but what do I know

One more thing to take into account when determining the value of Nourish vs. Glyphed HT is the T7 & T7.5 4 piece set bonus:

(4) Set: Your Nourish heals an additional 5% for each of your heal over time effects present on the target.

If you are like me, you'll typically have a full stack of LB's and a Rejuv on a target and depending on the situation perhaps even a Regrowth. With this set bonus, having all 3 of the HoT's will give a 15% boost to your Nourish, fairly significant given the comparison.

This gave the answer to my question in much more detail than I could have hoped for. Thanks alot!

//Zarc

Edit: To the above poster. Yes, I can see Nourish is efficient with 4 x T7. However, I am looking for information regarding a PvP Arena enviroment not a raid enviroment. So I will, unfortunetly, not have the 4 x T7 bonus.

However, on the positive side, according to that article, "Direct Healing in Wrath", Regrowth, in addition to its HoT, seems to be the most efficient spam heal... (gonna read the article more carefully later, but this was my first interpriation). And as far as I can recall the PvP Arena sets have a set bonus reducing the cast time of it. Nice.

I have been running something similar to that build for the last few weeks and i can say that the survivability is MORE than worth the loss in healing. It is a call back to the old addenum of "you cant heal from the floor". Anecdotal observations put me at somewhere between 50-66% hp after a full CS->KS rotation now with just barkskin in caster. Which is a HUGE improvement from the instant trinket or death option i had a few weeks ago.

Also this last patch actually buffed this particular spec in that you gain extra armor now and after dropping natural shapeshifter it costs me 20% LESS mana to shift into bear/cat to charge away than before 0_o. Combined with the fix to survival instincts and it becomes VERY hard to die in anything short of a 3-5+ person focus on you. As well as you pick up the improved cat speed and stealth talents so it becomes very hard to catch you in stealth....

In short for me the utility and survival aspects of this spec MORE than make up for the loss in raw healing. offhand in full pvp gear i have 1750 + healing when self buffed and about 1970 in tree in full pve gear or about a 200 healing deficit from full pve gear to pure survival gear. Its a trade off easily made IMO.

Replenish sucks, you should pick up Natural Perfection ( how could you not ). Pick up Nurturing Instinct, it's a good amount of heal and Primal Tenacity. All IMO, but a 33/38 build is much superior to your build, which has some pretty useless talents.

i agree with natural perfection and nurturing instinct but ive heard that primal tenacity isnt worth the loss of 20% on hots if your in full pvp gear

Given the power of rogues and ret paladins in the metagame, I'm not sure why you'd pass on the 30% less damage while stunned. That's life or death in every HoJ/KS.

I have been using something like this build for 2s and 3s. For 2s I don't really need WG, but since I tend to not respec for PVE I tend to run this usually out of laziness. I realize the build is 1 point short, I usually put that into Replenish strictly due to PVE, but for PVP have been considering throwing it into Brambles.

I have not played since the patch and then arenas were disabled.

A few side comments:
- With TOL talents I have absolutely no problems with rogues until I start to get into longer games. I previously had times where when entering a 5th or 6th stunlock where I've run into trouble - mend, ns, barkskin, and my trinket were all on CD and my HP was not quite topped going into it, etc. I run at roughly 700 resilience, 1800 sp (out of tree), 4% hit (before patch, will push this a bit higher since we can overcome racial resistance now).
- I realize the survivability factor improves with a split feral spec like Arkenphal linked a few posts above, my main issue with 2s is that I play a comp that is very easily countered by a lot of teams (resto druid / enhancement shaman). My partner can be quite squishy and we have no consistent peel. We lose a majority of our games either because we are waiting for his SR to come up so that he can put out damage (and in that time I've been severely outmana'd by a Resto Shaman or Holy Paladin), or because the other team chained interrupts on me to the point where I was nearing 10 seconds of never being able to cast (double torrents + strangulate or torrent/strangulate/imp cs, etc etc). I am very much looking forward to seeing how the Silence DR affects me in those particular comps.
- Overall I find my survivability to be decent, though it feels like I have to expend a fair amount of mana to achieve it compared to Holy Paladins/Resto Shamans.

In general, I am still bothered that NGrasp breaks Tree form since it is a passive buff. I'd like to be able to CC in TOL, but I really don't see that ever happening. Games that require us to be out of tree are very hard (Warlock/Melee DPS). I am hoping to see a bit more survivability added either via increased gains from resilience and/or greater survivability in deep restoration. Replenish seems like a good spot for them to add something more beneficial as many have pointed out that for such a deep talent it's pretty subpar (even for PVE).

On the Rogue stunlock subject. If you ask me it's a resilience issue. I currently have 890 Resilience and I can outlast a Rogue with ease by just casting barkskin and using my trinket + rejuvenation + abolish poison.

The trick is to time this, a kidney shot takes 5 second to be finished. The rogue will try to stun you again when it's about to end. Check your debuffs and when you get a new stun debuff (read up on them if you don't know the icon) quickly trink, use the heal/poison combo. And maybe get a cyclone in or put some distance between you and the Rogue.

The poison is REALLY important. In the end. That's what's gonna kill you. Wound and Mind numbing poison on you basically shuts down all greater heals (He can easily kick all your nourishes). And with HoT's alone its hard to outlast his damage when you're healing effects have only 50% their usual strength.

A well placed Bash and then cyclone when you trink can also save your life. Remember that a good Rogue can always blind you and return to stealth to give it another go, so use the seconds you get wisely and efficiently.

Edit: I walk around in a pretty "basic" 14/0/57 full healing build. Taking nothing from the Feral tree to ensure survivability.

You're replying to posts that are like half a year old. You probably want to move to the treetank thread.