Raiding as a Tree - Page 14

Ribeye · 02/04/08, 9:06 PM

I have had this argument so many times before about my choice of healing style and my choice of gearing and my choice of contributing to my guild that I'll just recommend you search my prior comments on the subject and be done with it. I think my guild's WWS reports back up the kind of healer I am. Long story short, don't trap yourself into thinking a druid is a +heal stacking lifebloom bot.

Playered · 02/04/08, 10:48 PM

The problem I see with the mass +healing theory is more concerning future content, as you have no real options left to 'push it harder' should it be required.

If you can have minimal regen and rely on potions to sustain yourself, rolling 4x LB constantly through a duration of 6-10mins, then your right and really you have no use of improvement from mana regeneration at all ever again *I think*.

Rolling 4LBs is 704/7sec - 503MP5 (upkeep cost) unless I am mistaken?

Mana potions are 100MP5~
Base regen is around 150MP5~ (if someone has a link to a T6 level resto with stacked healing it can be better estimated)
BoW is around 50MP5~
Oil + Mageblood = 30MP5
Divine Spirit, BoK, and Fish Sticks give you 115~ spirit which makes 20~MP5 (my in-game display is acting wierd, its roughly 1MP5 per 6 spirit *this time*)
100 + 150 + 50 + 30 + 20 = 350 MP5

So you have a shortfall of 150MP5 = 1800 mana per min.

So at exactly 6mins on a fight you will need a 10800 pool to endure a constant 4x LB without interuptions (which you should have).

Note I have not used Innervate (6500 mana~ assuming 465~ spirit fully buffed at near minimum base spirit), which would add on 3.8mins of endurance for you bringing it up to a 10min fight - however you are not needing this and giving it to a SP for a larger raid benefit.
SP, Mana Spring (and Tide), Spellsurge, Drums are all being excluded but can easily be worked out/added in.

So here you are pushing between 3600-4000 (900-1000 ticks) HPS at a drain of 150 MP5 (or 1800 mana per min) in a mostly ideal situation. Time forced out of casting will only give you some added endurance due to OO5SR regen and a positive MP5 status, any drains will obviously hurt.

Rejuvenation, Swiftmend, NS-HT are all ignored, as is needing to drop ToL form - bursts and spikes are out of your hands.

Working out the maximum HPS a Druid could potentially yield and the cost of doing so should be useful in finally stamping out the argument about healing vs regen :P

Note: its 4am and my math might be wrong in several areas, something doesn't look right to me atleast.

Currylaksa · 02/05/08, 1:30 AM

A lot of druids have always boasted that they top healing charts by maintaining LBx3 on 3-4 people the whole fight, and never go below 80% mana. They do exactly just that - renew lifeblooms. Not even a rejuvenation. Sure I can stack 22 +healing, LB bot everything, look like a total hero on the heal charts, but people will still die from spike damage.

Wilbert · 02/05/08, 2:33 AM

Originally Posted by Currylaksa

A lot of druids have always boasted that they top healing charts by maintaining LBx3 on 3-4 people the whole fight, and never go below 80% mana. They do exactly just that - renew lifeblooms. Not even a rejuvenation. Sure I can stack 22 +healing, LB bot everything, look like a total hero on the heal charts, but people will still die from spike damage.

I think that's why you bring 6-8 other healers

Whitemane · 02/05/08, 7:42 AM

If someone dies to spike damage and you had him fully hotted, then it's not your fault. If you don't have other healers assigned to people in danger of dying to spike damage, your raid is just being moronic.

I've stacked fully with +22 healing and I'm only 2 items short of having the best gear, as I see it. Crystalspire and Sanguinar's Claim / Nadina's. I never have a shadow priest in my group, I often have a shaman but can't remember if I ever get the manatide anyway. I use perhaps 3 mana pots going through all current content and I never use a flask of restoration either.

Can I push it harder? Yes, the hell I can. Spam chugging mana pots and a flask of restoration would give me a boatload more longevity. Fitting your gear with +healing gems is a matter of how far and how hard you want to push your healing. Why have extra mp5 on your gear if you don't really ever have mana problems? I can see a problem if you were always oom at the end of a fight in BT/MH despite going at consumables aggressively, but for a druid this is not so. Even fully stacked with +healing gems.

Bilqis · 02/05/08, 12:54 PM

Yes, if you're talking about the perfect endgame content you might be right - the equip of your raid should be good enough to have short fights (in comparison to first kills) with less mistakes which cause a lot of extra healing, every extra point mp/5 which isn't really needed while potting is just lost heal.

But this answer to the question about what to prefer (+ heal or a mix of mp/5 and heal) is a little bit too generally, too. Every raid has got different healers with different styles of healing: Somehow you might have to heal more or less, you might have to heal the raid or the mt (or even both). LB is a nice spell to heal and if you're just looking into damage meters you might be the king at all. But a druid's task is also to stabilize the raid and the mt with your hots. Remember - druids have more than ONE heal spell - they've got three hots which can be perfectly used for this task. And at this point, there's a second thing you should think of: Every druid has got his own style of healing. If you're fanatically spamming BL, you don't really need much mp/5 at all, but if you are using rejuvenation und regrowth as well you might get into problems.

I can just talk for myself, but some of our directhealers are really awful and I sometimes catch myself spamming regrowth to stabilize the raid in very dangerous situations without having any overheal although it takes me half a second longer to cast than, for example, a paladin. At most raids I'm ending up with 45 % LB, 30% rejuvenation and 25% regrowth. And somehow this is reflecting my opinion - yes I'm a ToL-druid and yes I should be a hot bot but if I'm not neglecting my tasks why should I stop at this point? I think if you want to play your druid with 100% efficiency you are forced to use the right spells at the right time. This means: Raid heal with LB spam (and rejuvenation on targets which are getting more damage), well timed regrowths to safe someone's life and, as good as possible, all three hots on the mts (of course LB is more important than regrowth). Although I'm thinking Blizzard sometimes has no idea what they are doing with the healdruids at all, I'm thankful for the "new" druid with the chance to heal with different hots. (Since you're not wasting as much mana with regrowth as pre BC and you've got LB)

Without some mp/5 I would get into mana problems and without using other spells than LB I'm sure that people would die because of aggro (and because I've got the chance to prevent this I'll never say "its not my fault if they die because we've got directhealers and it's their task"). I think its the best to choose a fixed amount of mp/5 (for myself, I'm thinking of about 215 mp/5) and then to get as much + heal as possible.

Playered · 02/05/08, 1:22 PM

That you might have to do other jobs in your guild, does not change the fact that the most efficient and best use of a ToL Druid is to maintain LB's on multiple 'tanks' taking sustained damage.

Currently the situation where this becomes possible on 4 doesn't really exist in boss-format, theres Mother, Council which you can do 3 on, Gurtogg, Supremus, P2 Illidan for 2...

The reliability and sustainability of the LB roll is just unbeatable by any other class when its done on more than 2 targets.

Norfair · 02/05/08, 3:02 PM

Originally Posted by Playered

That you might have to do other jobs in your guild, does not change the fact that the most efficient and best use of a ToL Druid is to maintain LB's on multiple 'tanks' taking sustained damage.

Currently the situation where this becomes possible on 4 doesn't really exist in boss-format, theres Mother, Council which you can do 3 on, Gurtogg, Supremus, P2 Illidan for 2...

The reliability and sustainability of the LB roll is just unbeatable by any other class when its done on more than 2 targets.

Using LB on the tanks at Supremus and Mother isn't really "effective" imo. They don't take "sustained damage", but very periodical damage, making Lifebloom overheal like 80% of the time. Those cooldowns are better used elsewhere.

And yes, theoretically Lifebloom could provide the most healing output (HPS) and also the most efficient healing (HPM), making it really good. However, pwning on the healing meters isn't everything. Sometimes it's better so save a life using Regrowth on someone instead of keeping Lifebloom up on a tank who will survive just as well without it anyway. As a healer, even though on some fights I get assignments, I'm not going to ignore everything else just because "it's not my job". So it depends a bit on your guild and other healers as well. I find it hard to "trust" them with healing everyone in time and therefore rather don't risk someone dying, resulting in me burning more mana than the "ideal" druid which just keeps hots on the tank. That being said, if my guild wasn''t so low on red gems I'd probably gem a lot more into red as well.

Playered · 02/05/08, 4:00 PM

I didn't mean to say all of those bosses were ideal examples of where you can do it, only possible ones you could

I guess EoS P2/3 you could keep 4 up for a while.

Edghar · 02/05/08, 4:04 PM

Originally Posted by Norfair

As a healer, even though on some fights I get assignments, I'm not going to ignore everything else just because "it's not my job". So it depends a bit on your guild and other healers as well. I find it hard to "trust" them with healing everyone in time and therefore rather don't risk someone dying, resulting in me burning more mana than the "ideal" druid which just keeps hots on the tank. That being said, if my guild wasn''t so low on red gems I'd probably gem a lot more into red as well.

The trouble with this line of thinking is that if you're doing it, other healers are likely doing it too. So when someone dies, your raid leader is going to think that there is not enough healing assigned to that person, but in reality the two people assigned decided to cross heal as well (because they don't trust the other healers). Our guild went through a big discussion concerning this type of thing and we decided that it was in everyone's best interest to stick to your assignments as much as possible. Sure, if the assignments aren't solid you're going to wipe, but at least you'll know why and can adjust properly next time.

Pyros · 02/05/08, 7:55 PM

Originally Posted by Edghar

The trouble with this line of thinking is that if you're doing it, other healers are likely doing it too. So when someone dies, your raid leader is going to think that there is not enough healing assigned to that person, but in reality the two people assigned decided to cross heal as well (because they don't trust the other healers). Our guild went through a big discussion concerning this type of thing and we decided that it was in everyone's best interest to stick to your assignments as much as possible. Sure, if the assignments aren't solid you're going to wipe, but at least you'll know why and can adjust properly next time.

Yeah but as a druid, I still end up crosshealing a lot, cause there's only so much to do when there's only one tank. I keep lifebloom and rejuv up, regrowth if the boss hits hard or silence(azgalor is the most obvious one), and all the other GCD are spent lifeblooming people taking random damage, or rejuvenating warlocks before they start lifetapping so they take no risks.

Also while I agree totally with crosshealing with regrowth, I just find it's not efficient for that, in my guild, with our healers. We have a very awesome priest and paladin, and healing the raid with 2s regrowth is mostly always 80%overhealing, even when targetting someone at 20-30%. I'd much rather spam lifeblooms all around, heal for 2ticks, which serve as a way to "stabilize", and will top people if the flash heal/fol didn't full heal them. On the same page, rejuvenation is most of the time wasted because it doesn't tick right away, but instead wait for a full tick cycle(which is 2secs), so it suffers from the same problem that regrowth does.

However, this is very guild dependant. I'd say on most fights, my LB usage is 75% of my healing, the rest being rejuv and swiftmend. I only use regrowth on certain fights, and there's pretty rare. If I want to heal someone fast, I'd rather rejuv+swiftmend than regrowth, because it will land before another heal more often. Then again, unless the target is in dire need of healing(doomfire etc), I'll just ignore it, slap a lifebloom on him and keep swiftmend for the tank.

Sylvannae · 02/06/08, 2:39 PM

My lifebloom is usually over 90% of a fight's effective healing. I feel that my best niche as a tree is to roll Lifebloom on as many tanks as possible, or else spam lifebloom on raid members taking consistant damage. Rejuv is a nice though not stellar spell, mathematically.

Chaincasting lifebloom on the GCD takes 176 mana/1.5 seconds, which translates to 587 mp5. With 220mp5 while casting in combat, combined with innervate, pots, and shaman totems, it looks like mana regen isn't very necessary for me, anyway. I guess that makes season 3 mace the best healing weapon, then?

Kamileon · 02/06/08, 5:22 PM

The other day when we went back through SSC for keying people, I had 300 mana/5 while casting after full buffs and consumables. I don't get a spriest, or a shaman. I have almost 12k mana when buffed out the yang, mana pots, and resto drums. And I don't gem for mana/5.

My gearing choice for spamming mostly lifebloom and my regen works for me. I don't need to cross heal, though I will when bored, or regrowth because we have 2 amazing pallies, 2 amazing shaman, and a god of a holy priest. These guys actually make my job pretty damn boring, and they're on top of it to the point where I can't just cheese the meters rolling 4 stacks.

As long as people are gearing just enough regen to do what they need to do, they're not gearing incorrectly. That's the argument we should be pushing rather that denegrating lifebloom bots for stacking heal, or telling people their regen is wasted if they're turning that mana into effective healing.

Currylaksa · 02/06/08, 8:54 PM

Of the other healers, which class is best suited for dealing with spike damage? When you have skills like swiftmend, why is spike insurance delegated to classes with casted heals, who have their own assignments to watch unless you decide to stack excessive healers. There are splash damage and boss skills to deal with, not just the 2-4 people you LB bot on. So if the MT gets judged and your 2nd healer is running from an AOE, you keep the LB3 and glare at the shamans when the tank dies? Even a rejuvenation there to be swiftmended would have made a difference, but rejuvenation is inefficient now? Encounters are about spike damage, not steady damage, which LB3 does not mitigate when it really counts. If having amazing priest/shaman/paladin is pretty much the reason to not pulling your weight in keeping people alive, well that's fine.

Kamileon · 02/07/08, 1:48 AM

Because even a swiftmend is a one-shot 5k heal with top gear. When tanks have 20k+ health, 5k can keep them from dying, but it won't keep the next hit from killing them. The spike-insurance comes from your direct healers who are spamming or cast-canceling heals. You can't swiftmend again in 1.5 seconds, you have to wait another 15(12). Another spike can occur in 15 seconds. You can't guarantee that swiftmend will be there. You can guarantee that your direct-healing tank healers are on their assignment.

Spike insurance comes from your 5k swiftmend, and the Flash(es) of light, the Greater Heal, etc. that are also going to land to fix a big spike (10k+) that puts the tank in danger.

There's also the factor that if your healing lead has you assigned to roll HoTs on certain people, it's not your job to go mavericking about, and leaving your assignment.

We get that you hate "lifebloom spambots".