malthrin

I presume you're talking about Anataen? Let's see, starting with the Hyjal parse:
-Died early on Rage. Presumably no trinket for the Icebolt.
-Poor performance on Anetheron, somewhat mitigated by 5(!) Swarms and 3 Sleeps.
-Atris (presumably your tank) shows 5 blooms expiring on Kaz'Rogal - there's no reason that stack should ever fall off.
-Azgalor. Looks like he's a little slow on the buttons - decent overall healing, but his Swiftmends (coming after Silence presumably) were 68% overheal. That means that healers with cast-time heals are getting theirs in before he can use an instant cast. Also ended up in the fire at some point, which is bad positioning.
Your Archimonde attempts are all too short to draw any meaningful conclusions on. Looking at the trash, however: decent. It seems he spent most of his time hotting your Paladin and your main Warrior tanks, with occasional healing on the feral. Could have been better, could have been worse. Decurse count on trash was very low for the banshee waves.

-Najentus: looks like he spent a lot of time healing himself and the rest tossing random single LBs through the raid. Doing that while keeping a stack on the tank is better, but not bad.
-Supremus: he got hit 4 times by Volcanoes - ok, he didn't die to them, so that's fine. 5 ticks of Molten Flame - not fine, do not stand in the fire. It looks like he also got whacked by Supremus when he got into melee range, which I can't really criticize because the same thing happened to me this week.
-Akama: there's very little damage taken on this fight, so it's hard to gather anything from WWS.
-Teron: he only healed himself and the tank. There's a lot of raid damage going around, so unless you specifically told him to just heal the tank, he probably should have been helping clean it up.

 

◊ Noressa

Tiranar, the biggest thing that stands out is their complete inability to use more then a couple of spells per fight. What is the direction given to Anataen? Right now, it seems like well over 75% of all their healing is lifebloom, and in some cases their swiftmend does more healing then either of the other HOT's (rejuv and regrow). We're not just there to stack lifebloom, contrary to popular belief.

I'd talk with them and start having them maintain all 3 HOT's on the MT for all the bosses in MH, with a few raid healing lifeblooms. (Rage I usually heal the MT, lifebloom people who get D&D, rejuv/swiftmend if someone is close to death. Anetheron I usually stay on the MT, lifebloom or regrow melee who get swarmed depending on if I got swarmed as well. Kaz'Rogal is usually MT HOT's and rejuv the melee for the stomp. Azgalor, all hot's on MT, regrow on melee for rain of fire, Archi is decurse and heal the MT, LB on melee.) We have other healers do more of the raid healing, my HOT's are just a cover usually. Chain heal and CoH are very, very good tools but the extra couple of seconds are good.

I'd have the post a copy of their UI, and any mod's they use. I'd recommend at the very least they get Grid and use mouseover healing macros. Grid will be their range finder, as well as being able to show buffs/debuffs that are needed (curses, who has doomfire, etc.) Mouseover healing will make it easier to change targets and line up the next global cooldown for healing.

For where you are in BT, Naj is simply never going to be a good fight for us, but I still tend to regrow people who are low, while maintaining HOT's on the MT. Supremus our druids keep full HOT's on 2 tanks each, the starting tank gets both sets. Akama I usually heal the tank in the middle and one on the side, full HOT's on both. Teron is full HOT's on the tank, regrow on incinerates if I have the mana. I'm sure other resto druids have their own healing patterns, but just using LB and the occasional rejuv/swiftmend doesn't make for a very good healing pattern.

 

Tiranar

I will first like to point out that I have a very poor understanding of the resto Druid healing class. We have rarely had any consistantly raiding ones, so I came here for expert advice. I peruse these threads to gain a better understanding of the class.

I assign my druids to maintain hots on any tanks, and use any remaining GCD's on raid damage. Is this too broad of an assignment, or should I be more specific per encounter? I will have Anataen send me a screenshot of his UI for your review. Thank you so much for the helpful advice.

 

lairpie

-count number of people taking reliable damage

-If 1, Put lbx3, rj, rg on that person at all times. swiftmend tank as needed. heal up lifetaps and low raid damage with lifebloom. Heal spike raid damage with regrowth. Tell silly paladins that no, really, they should just keep healing the tank, not stopping their healing on the tank to do little 1k heals on people when you can do them without lowering your tank healing. People at 9/10k hp w/o agro are not worth stopping healing the tank for and if they were, a shaman would get it, not a paladin.

-If 2. Put lbx3, rj, rg on both of them. That'll occupy most of your time with a couple GCDs here and there to burn randomly

-If 3. Put lbx3 on all 3, and rj on 2 of them.

-If 4. lbx3 on all 4. Don't post healing meters after the fight, really, you don't want to make people hate you, because you don't have GCDs free in a lot of fights to actually heal yourself (health stone macro is your friend) so you want the other healers to like you.

Brewmaster of WBC

 

◊ Noressa

The biggest issue then, seems to be the lack of them using their HOT's. Reviewing both, there is a very, very low balance of healing across their heals, with lifebloom being the most. Our HOT's are the buffer and swiftmend fodder for tank healing. They should at minimum, be keeping Rejuv and lifebloom up, regrowth too even though it is at some points wasted healing, it's still another HOT. I'd work with them to track their HOT durations (Dottimer, Hot Candy, and even an add-on for Grid will track lifebloom stacks, rejuv and regrows time remaining as needed.) With 1 tank, they'll have a couple GCD's to raid heal (LBx3 is 4.5 seconds, rejuv makes 6, regrow makes 8 seconds of set up, then maintenance cycles.) 2 tanks with full HOT's gives 1-2 free global cooldowns every cycle. 3 tanks is pretty much set for constant casting, and 4 is usually just trash/LB healing. (3 & 4 tanks is usually just trash, so not as important.)

Keep track of healing done, the spells used and the buffs on the tanks. Once they get used to checking the duration and refresh times, it gets pretty easy.

 

lairpie

Can compare to any of our fights if you want, which almost all have 2 resto druids. WBC WWS. My gear's about even with progression other than i generally take as little tier stuff as i can if there's an off set thing that's not too much worse to free up tier gear for others. I'd generally pick a boss, then look for the earliest dated kills to look at. People spend way too much time looking at wwses of farm content and thinking it has any relevance for healers.

Brewmaster of WBC

 

Tiranar

You guys rock, I can't thank you enough for you taking the time to give me advice.

 

Tiranar

@ Noressa, Lee or any others.

Would you mind posting a screenshot of your UI? I would love to have a reference point.

 

• giansm

The first post is now updated for 2.4. The most substantial changes were to the "Stats" section (there is now a discussion of spell haste and the new spirit/intellect regen system), the "Innervate" section (new formula, new examples), the "Consumables" section (new recommendations based on revised calculations), and the "Trinkets" section (added the Redeemer's Alchemist Stone and the value of Memento's proc, redid calculations for DCBD and Bangle). Minor changes were made to "Enchants" and "Gems". A new section, "Gear Choice", was added and contains two alternative lootrank lists (red/purple) as well as a discussion of set bonuses. The other sections remain largely the same.

Please let me know if you discover any errors or have any comments on the changes and additions.

Tiranar, if you haven't read the first post yet you could look at the sections on "Healing Strategies" and "Who should I heal in a raid?" which speak about how restoration druids fit into a raid's healing team and discusses spell selection. They're written as much for raid leaders as they are for the actual druids.

 

Tiranar

I actually read the post in it's entirety, however, I wanted some "on the ground" data for you to review. I intitially linked this post and required my druids to read it, but after looking at meters I thought there was some room for improvement.

 

◊ Noressa

Sure, here you go:
Image of UI Feb 22 - Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting

Point of note:
Grid is now located directly over my action bars
I'm no longer using NECB (bottom left, under where Grid is in the shot)

The other mods I'm using include Dottimer (far right)
DBM Announcements are over the chat boxes
Raid frames is Perl Classic.

Special notes on Grid: I set up an aura for all the debuffs that I need to watch. Doomfire, agonizing flames, rain of fire, corrupting strike, deadly poison, dark barrage. It makes it easy to see who needs special healing and who is in range for me to heal.

 

Rieux

Well, for starters, your recruit could take their gearing a bit more seriously and actually enchant their items. They're missing ~150 healing by not having enchants on their gloves/bracers/weapon. They're wearing their flight form idol, but assuming that their other idol is the [Essence of the Martyr] or similar, these enchants will be about a 10% increase in their base healing, which is fairly substantial. They also have an unenchanted chest from Azgalor, which is a crime since the mats for +15 spirit are only 2 greater planar essences.

Apart from that, the [Ribbon of Sacrifice] is an underwhelming trinket for druids, as we'll never get effective use from the Use effect on the trinket; they're much better off switching to a [Lower City Prayerbook]. They're also exalted with the Violet Eye, yet the two rings they're using are both downgrades from [Violet Signet of the Grand Restorer]. They're also an herbalist, so it confuses me as to why they're using [Adept's Elixir] on the BT parse, as opposed to something more optimal.

While they can certainly improve their healing through technique, which has already been covered, they can see a significant boost in their effectiveness by simply being a bit more discerning about their gear.

 

lairpie

I'll link a screen shot when i get home but the only thing I'd say is actually important, where I'm actually gaining functionality rather than just making it look better is grid, bigwigs, and sct. Post from a bit ago where i said what grid stuff i had and some basic setup. Beyond that, i have missing buffs setup to show me a purple dot for when people don't have mark, then if they do have mark, and don't have thorns and are a tanking class, it shows a green dot. oh, and i have a white dot in a corner for PW:S and it turns yellow for the PW:S debuff, just sorta nice to know if a tank is going to get a pws or already has one or what when i'm thinking to swiftmend or NS. Having all that in a pretty small setup lets me, gasp, actually watch what's going on in a fight. Helps a lot of staying out of fires and knowing who to heal before they're getting hit.

Pre 2.4 i was using a grid addon called gridraiddebuffs or something that basically was just a list of every boss or prominant trash mob ability sorted the same way i would have wanted them instead of having to add them all manually. Noressa mentioning adding an aura for the debuffs reminded me of that. It actually broke for me in 2.4, but i probably just have to go re-enable it or something, but I only ever remember when we're in the middle of a boss fight and I'm like "huh, forgot again to see why i can't see doomfires anymore." Fortunately for me, a few thousand or so AB battles (Grand Marshal and all) prior to reliable range checks and with los obstacles, no convenient agro boxes and ever shifting damage trained me to be pretty good at watching the actual characters on the screen for clues on who to heal, not just UI bars. But yeah, that addon was amazing until it broke, I really need to go fix that.

Its very nice to see:
who is bolted on rage, who's in D&D
who is swarmed on ana
who is silenced, doomed on azgalor
who is doomfired, cursed on archimonde.

who is spiked on naj
blood boils
deaden / spirit shock (if you mess up, well, not you, but you know what i mean)
parasites
and a ton of other semi random things.

Brewmaster of WBC

 

Tiranar

Here is last night's WWS from BT: Wow Web Stats

Focus : Recruit Druid Creedo

With these numbers we have a some room for improvement obviously. We had a lot of new people in our raid last night, so we didn't get very far. I especially liked how Gorefiend liked to choose new people to get ghosted. Every attempt.

Thoughts?

 

Heffro

Two comments on the consumables section:

1. The Skettis escort daily quest no longer gives [Unstable Mana Potion] since patch 2.4; it only gives gold now.

2. [Superior Wizard Oil] is a good option for weapon oil. Although the tooltip doesn't say so, it gives 42 healing as well as 42 damage.

 

Ribeye

Here's a nice little gander at my UI. Love me some perfect raid. Because I am first and foremost a healer, almost everything is concentrated around my Lifebars rather than a DPS who might have everything centered in the middle of the screen. I could probably take a better pic while actually healing for all the bells and whistles though.



http://i86.photobucket.com/albums/k1...808_201320.jpg

 

lairpie

We actually discovered that if you "accidentally" start the fight while the people you really don't want to get ghosted are out of the room running back (since you rezzed all the other people and had the new people run back), they get locked out. Naturally you just tell them to run as far from Gorefiend's room as possible since you "don't know what will happen if they get ghosted" and you have time to kill Gorefiend before their ghosts get to you and wiped you since, even with the entire instance to work with, they will still fail to kill their ghosts. Actually, I may do that like, intentionally and publicly. Just tell any people that are new and don't know what to do to wait as far away as possible so they have a ton of room to get a feel for getting the ghosts down and they can watch other new people without being distracted by dpsing and such. Hmmm...

As to the actual question, the first thing i looked at after just raw healing, was who he healed. He did almost as much healing on himself as he did on you. That's like, amazing. I... I'm not sure I could physically take enough damage in a night to be able to heal myself as much as i healed the tank. Some of that is that he's just trying to heal too many people as opposed to doing more healing on the tank. The days of random free form healing are over unless you're actually assigned to be doing it. Some of that could be your healing setup. With 2 druids worth of hots and a renew or two we usually only have 1 priest healing the tank by default, maybe paladins chipping in here and there.

He didn't use Nature's swiftness - healing touch at all. There are nights where everything goes smoothly and I don't ever use it, but I'll pretty much promise somewhere in the course of 8 boss wipes someone could have used a 6k instant heal somewhere along the way. For that matter, your other druid only used NS-HT once. Unless you wiped every time to enrage timers, someone should have been getting a few NS heals instead of dying. Wait a minute... OK, he used NS with regrowth? There are people that prefer to NS regrowth then swiftmend, but its just plain less healing in the first cast. NS RG then SM is the same amount of healing in the same time span as NS-HT, then shifting back into tree form, but it burns your SM timer too, preventing you from doing NS-HT, SM if the tank is really getting railed. It also gets the healing there slightly slower. The only thing it really saves you is the mana from shifting back into tree form. Spending a little extra mana realistically every 4-5 minutes, is not going to break your mana pool. If you're worried there's plenty of free points after getting actually important things to get natural shape shifter or the silly HT mana cost talent.

WWS has a stat called focus. from the WWS page "The focus is the number of players who received 50% of the heals of this healer. A small focus means the healer is focused on few players. A big focus means the healer heals "randomly" in the raid."

For insance on council last night, both of our druids had a focus of 1.5 (both doing nothing but spamming lifebloom on all 4 tanks, though not all the tanks take equal damage). The 2 paladins that had specific healing jobs were at 1.2 and 1.7. The rest of the healers were all healing "whoever takes damage" and were more in the 4-5 range. For the whole night last night I was at 2.3, and that includes all the time I spend amusing myself by seeing how many times I can cast regrowth on trash with my nearly infinite mana and crazy innervate, a fight where I'm spamming anyone in the raid who takes damage with hots (RoS), and a bunch of 3-4 tank fights. The night before, doing the same fights your wws was from plus one more (yeah, rough night for us too: trying to beef up our raiding group with a few recruits and people that are friends of raiders and such, since attendance is a bit flakier over the summer for even consistent people go on vacation) i as at 2.5, and that was high for me it felt, owing to fewer of our normal healers.

For you Creedo was super high and anataen was super low. Ana needs to do more than just cast lifebloom on 1 tank. Creedo needs to find a sense of who he is healing and stick to them a bit. Over the course of a night My healing targets in order are usually something like: MT, OT, OT, OT, Self, my GF then varying amounts on all of the ranged, often very proportional to how much damage they do (our shaman chain heal spam the melee so i don't bother, other than my GF because I've found raiding much more pleasant when she's not dead. Unless I need a beer or something, but I digress.)

The problem for you is that this might not be all Creedo's fault. There's only so much healing a tank can really need, and if you have 9 healers in the raid, there's a pretty decent chance creedo was sitting there pondering who he was supposed to be healing when the tank's were kept up most of the time. This is the battle we're having as we're also searching for a resto druid to let our main feral druid (pressed into healing when our 2nd resto druid disappeared for a while because of work) go back feral. Resto druids with tanks that don't need healing are usually at a loss for what to do. If you dying was rarely the main issue last night, you're going to have to get your shaman and paladins to do less healing on you, so that your druids can do more and still be efficient. That's not an easy thing to ask healers to do. Every healer thinks they're the one that's always landing every heal that saves the raid and omg if they do something else they'll wipe. When you're asking them to rely on a druid they don't really trust its even worse. This has been the big sticking point for many guilds in working resto druids into their healing setups. If you can drop a healer or two, have your paladins and shaman concentrate more on raid healing, and druids more on tank healing and the druids still have low numbers and you die, they're bad, get new ones and start over, but its pretty hard to really get the other healers to stop spamming you with heals in the first place.

Brewmaster of WBC

 

• giansm

Thanks, I updated the post.

 

Tiranar

@ Lee

You extensive responses are very much appreciated, after all the data I have recieved today I will be discussing in-depth my druids healing strategy. I will let you know the results.

 

Currylaksa

I'm not sure you'll agree with me, but the impressions from the 1st two bosses in Sunwell is that the target has moved quite a bit on resto itemizing. The fights are becoming far less mana intensive, but healing/GCD intensive. There isn't a single moment where we are sitting on idle GCD waiting to renew LB ticks. Back to pre-Illidan, pretty much the spell haste leathers were sharded and the LW plans were given out as door gifts. Now I believe stacking spell haste and healing power religiously will be the way to go in Sunwell. A fight like Brutallus has 6 minutes, with pot and innervate there is no risk of OOM with lv141 haste leathers. Having enough haste to spread HoTs over multiple burn targets plus tank would be very useful instead.

I came back from a long post-Illidan retirement to help out Sunwell temporarily because one of their core druids quit the game. Well, at least until they find a new druid recruit. So my gears and gemming are terribad as I missed the T6 farming phase. WWS Kalecgos. In this kill I wasn't fighting Kalecgos, I was fighting the GCD. The gear gap is frustratingly evident because in one wipe I had full Hots (LB3, Reju, Regrowth) on a demon tank but he got gibbed in one stun duration.

 

• giansm

I've felt this way since I first ran Zul'aman in a 2-healer group. Before then I was skeptical of the value of haste even knowing it would reduce the GCD, since BT and even Hyjal really are not intense healing experiences if you have 7 or more healers (which we generally do). After running a few 2-healer ZAs and especially after killing Kalecgos a couple of times, my opinion has changed since in situations like that I'm always fighting against the GCD so I can get the next spell out.

 

Fieryeel

Guys, need some advice of my next line of upgrades for weapons. Currently I am using Light's Justice + Voodoo Shaker, and while they are looking pretty sweet already, let me just say that T6 contents are out for me.

Staff of Dark Mending(assuming +18 heal gem, +9 heal +4 int, +9 heal +4 spirit)
46 Stam
51 Int
04 Spirit
452 Healing
16 MP5

Ethereum Life-Staff
52 stam
44 Int
62 Spirit
415 Healing

Light's Justice + Voodoo Shaker
34 Stam
41 Int
45 Spirit
437 Healing

Gavel of Naaru Blessing + Voodoo Shaker
60 Stam
48 Int
25 Spirit
519 Healing

Currently I am stacking badges incase I decide to go Gavel of Naaru Blessing, but that thing cost me 150 badges afterall, so should I get an upgrade, or is Light's Justice + Voodoo Shaker truly good enough for me to last till my guild one day goes to T6 content?

 

• giansm

It depends what you mean by "good enough." It certainly can get you through the content, but as you know, there are much better options available. I would say that unless you are a very casual player, you should get the [Gavel of Naaru Blessings] or the Season 3 mace, [Vengeful Gladiator's Salvation]. With these items available, Light's Justice is pretty outdated and I can't recommend continuing to use it.

 

Kanji

I dunno. I've kinda had the same feeling as Pippo durring my time in Sunwell. While my preformance isn't abysmal, it's no where near what I hoped it be, and definately not up to what your WWS show. I have to ask, how do you handle healing? I've been going over one WWS after another, and from everything I've seen, all the Druids who preform really well on Brut (like your WWS show) have the majority of their healing from Lifebloom. As a burn healer, it seems there's much more at stake than simple Lifeblooms can handle. From 40-15 secs. Lifebloom is capable of keeping burn targets up (provided they don't have Slash (which they shouldn't)). At that point, my healing usually goes from LB to max HoTs and then spamming Regrowth on said person between refreshing LB and reapplying Rejuv (with occassional assistance from another healer durring the last burst).

Provided there's some free time (someone who can remove burn gets it), it seems the only way to maximize your healing durring that period is to, again, apply max HoTs to the tank and spam them with RG in between refreshes until another burn victim becomes avaliable for you to heal. Maybe I'm going about this all wrong, but that seems to be the best was to maximize my effectiveness on the fight. However, judging from your WWS, you simply seem to keep LB up on the tanks and burn victims while occassionally throwing out other HoTs. Would you say that's the best way to maximize Druid healing for Brut? And if so, do you have another person assigned to heal burns full time while you simply keep LBs on them as a "cushion" of sorts to help them out? I've also noticed our healers seem to pump out considerably higher numbers, but I'm guess that's due to the fact that we bring 2 less than you guys, which is also what may allow you to simply get by with LB alone.

Anywho, more feedback from you would be much appriciated (Or any of you Tree Druids in Sunwell). I like to think of myself as a damn good player, so when preformance issues like this come up, I find them a bit depressing and try to fix it in order to maximize myself as best I can. Just for reference, here's our WWS for tonight: Brut WWS

I'm also curious about getting better preformance on Kalecgos and Felmyst as well, but I'll save that discussion for another post.

 

Benita

Macros on F1+F2 for lifebloom on the tanks, almost 200 haste and then fitting in the rest in the 5.2sec left (usually 3 hots or 1 hot and regrowth on a tank). Dont stack up 3 LBs too fast on burn victims, the first 20sec are a joke healing wise even with 2 slash stacks.
And 30sec of offtanking for each tank means you can easily let the LB fall off after you made sure theres no taunt resist and build it up again.

I was nowhere near perfection there either, but haste does help alot, especially when it comes to solo raid heal ZA, burst spike healing or fitting in regrowths in the usual rotation. It also makes use of my somewhat unwanted regen, which takes some time to gear out of, i used 1 pot on the 2nd WWS and not because im running out of money.