Raiding as a Tree - Page 38

Aciara · 03/15/08, 10:23 PM

Originally Posted by swills

Changing topic, I personally am a big fan of using [Insightful Earthstorm Diamond] as my metagem. I get from it is around 15-25 MP5 from it which makes it superior to the +26 Heal meta for me. However, it has a rather annoying requirement of 2 yellow gems so I was wondering if there was anyone else who uses this gem who could recommend good items where you can use a yellow gem to best effect. Right now I use [Light-Blessed Bonds] and [Robes of Heavenly Purpose] as these both have ok +Heal socket bonuses but they also have annoying Blue sockets instead of red so I'm not sure if there's a better alternative?

I currently use that meta aswell, and use the [Boots of the Divine Light] and the [Thunderheart Tunic] sockets to get the bonus.

Jalhar · 03/16/08, 6:54 AM

Originally Posted by Ribeye

Now that that ridiculous argument is over....I thought I'd lay out what I do for Black Temple fights. This isn't a guide or anything and I'm sure other druid's do different jobs equal, lesser, or even better than I do but nonetheless, some druid, somewhere, might find this handy. For reference sake, my guild runs with 2 druids and while the other healers are somewhat interchangeable, we both show up to almost every fight.

Insert long, detailled and pertinent description of BT druid healing

We raid with 2 druids too, and for Supremus we somehow find it quite useful to roll LBx3 on the 3 tanks. The 2 first take quite some damage so it's rarely wasted, and the third is a paladin so he needs constant healing to get mana ^^

For Teron & Mother, I fail to understand why a druid should only raid heal. It's not really efficient, shamans & priests are much better at this job, and Teron & Mother hit like trucks sometimes, so to have 2 stacks of LBx3 permanently on MT is extremly useful. What we (druids) usually do is to keep LBx3 on MT, one of the druids keep all hots up on MT and the other uses the other GCDs to randomly heal the raid.

For BB, one of the druids is LBx3 on MT(s) - and has to keep them up during enrage to cover the bleeding -, the other is keeping a BB group up and helps with fel rage healing.

For council, we are both running LBx3 + rejuv on the 2 warrior tanks, and use the last GCDs to heal ourselves / stoners / mage tank. We are usually #1 and #2 on this fight with 900+ HPS. Even if I hate the fight for his length, boredom, and the fact that a few players can ruin it because they are so damn slow to move out of bad things, Council is THE resto druid fight of TBC.

For Illidan, we heal MT (LBx3 + rejuv) and randomly raid in phases 1 3 5, with additional regrowth during enrage, we top the raid after after the aoe in demon phase, and we keep LBx3 + rejuv up on the flame tanks in p2. Nothing extraordinary, the fight is actually pretty boring as a druid (or your MT doesn't get shear and it's easy to heal, apart from the enrage from time to time, or he does and it's totally random and he deserves a kick in the balls ^^)

Playered · 03/16/08, 5:48 PM

Im curious about other players thoughts on Sunwell gloves:
[Tranquil Majesty Wraps] vs [Leather Gauntlets of the Sun]

It boils down to a choice of *38 Haste* vs *11 Healing and 8 MP5* because you dont really care about putting anything except 2x 22 Healing in the sockets.

Normally the choice would not be hard, but with the increased benefit of Haste and the improvement to Regrowth it has me not wanting to disregard it pointlessly - not to mention that 8 MP5 is not really important due to the Spi/Int buff and we can now treat this as a minor loss.

Because I am a Regrowth junky im leaning more in favor of the crafted gloves as the loss seems negligible, this is for me pointless because I will end up with both anyway - is there any real loss in picking either one?

Kamileon · 03/16/08, 5:48 PM

For Metas, I actually have 2 of the hats from Najen'tus. One is a SR glyphed hat for Shahraz et. al. with the IED meta. I have a yellow gem in the hat, and an old pair of gloves to activate it.

Because I don't need the regen most of the time, my main hat has a Bracing in it. Back when I put it in, Bracing still needed more yellow than blue, so I put a yellow directly in the hat, too. IMO if my meta gem is going to be tied to a specific color I don't otherwise choose, and the mat has sockets in it, I might as well put that gem in the hat with the meta, so I don't have to worry about balancing or upgrading my other gear and losing the meta.

lairpie · 03/17/08, 11:36 AM

Yeah, insightful meta is really good and should probably be the last thing you drop in favor of more +healing. 26 healing compared to 12 int and ~12 mp5 is a terrible terrible trade and should only be made once you're really sure you don't need more mana.

I'll do a comparative post to Ribeye's after i do some actual work for a bit. For some fights we do basically the exact same thing, for some we play very differently, largely owing to a difference in what our paladins do.

For reference, 159 unbuffed mp5 while casting is just short of enough (when buffed with kings, wisdom, imp DS, ai, draenic wisdom, healing power, brilliant mana oil, fishsticks, oh, and i have ~650-700 spirit buffed, so a pretty hefty innervate) to chain cast lifebloom stacks on 4 people for 11 minutes. I had to drop to 3 people for about a minute. If i would have known they were going to make the bracing diamond not need yellow>blue i definitely would have used a couple amethysts over spinnels where i could make a good socket bonus, but as i'll have a chunk more mana come 2.4 (spirit changes, plus alchemist trinket of amazingness) and would want to go back to pure +healing, certainly not going to resocket.

Also, finally dropped herbalism for enchanting and just going to herb on a friend's alt druid (once you herb as a epic flight druid, anything else is excruciating) till my gf gets her druid to 70 on our shared account (so we can both herb on it). Going to enchant all my rings, then when the sunwell trash ring drops, probably enchant it and level leather working in a day (my hunter is a skinner and spends every short arena queue skinning south of shatt, and every long one farming clefthooves). Ring enchants, memento, and if the stupid bloodboil cape ever drops, should put me to just short of 2600 healing (buffed, obviously) not counting procs/uses with a ~180 +healing aura, and more than enough regen to sustain casting lifebloom/rejuv/sm if there's 3-4 tanks, or lb, rj, rg on 2 tanks. t6 chest, archimonde legs, t6 shoulders would all be minor upgrades, but probably not worth it when other people want them and would get a much bigger benefit. The new alch trinket will take my mana from just enough to lol. Anyone do the math if you can squeeze 400 buffed healing out of 2.4 if you're a lw and alch? I'm coming up with being a bit short of 3k after sunwell. hitting 3k +healing and a 200 +healing aura would be pretty sweet, but i don't think its quite going to happen. Well, actually, lemme do out the math on that again.

lairpie · 03/17/08, 1:59 PM

Preamble

So, people have long tried to make spread sheets for druid healing as is done with pretty much every dps class/spec and some healers, and always run into some rather firm walls. Damage is pretty much damage making damage spread sheets more strait forward. For paladins and shamans shifting ranks is pretty easy to figure, or even balancing HL and FoL. Priests and druids are all about using the correct tool from amongst several choices, and the answer is different for each fight. That has long been a kind of end barrier for a resto druid spread sheet.

The Basic Idea

So, instead of trying to come up with a spreadsheet designed around telling you X item is better than Y item and how much dps you will do like the damage spread sheets, my goal is to match gear with fight duration, casting rotations, and strength of hots. This would allow you to see what what gear you need to use in order to sustain a given rotation for the whole fight.

For example, i knew for council i was going to cast a stack of lifeblooms on 4 tanks, for the entire fight. I knew it would probably be between 10 and 15 minutes to kill it. I could have/should have figured out ahead of time exactly how much mana that would take and made sure I had it for up to 15 minutes, because if we had our normal complement of 7 healers instead of 10, me dropping to 3 tanks with lifeblooms for a minute or two like i did might have screwed us.

Most fights can be expressed in some sort of preset form like:
4 tanks with lifebloomx3
lifebloomx3 on 3 tanks and rejuv on 2
lifebloomx3, rj, rg both on 2 tanks + X swiftmends per min
lifebloomx3, rj, rg on 1 tank + X swiftmends per min
lifebloomx3, rj, rg on 1 tank + X swiftmends and Y regrowths per min

those, maybe a few more sequences, and some options for using a rez, innervate usage, potions, dark runes, ns-ht, buffs, and fight duration, basically can give you a distinct mana requirement. Unlike some classes, druids basically either have enough mana, or they don't. Having more mana is often quite useless unless you can get to a whole different rotation somehow, having less is really bad. A priest with slightly too little mana cancels a heal here and there that was borderline on if he should have cast it. A paladin or shaman uses a different rank for a couple heals. A druid lets his hots drop of forcing a shift in other healers healing output to compensate and undermining the entire roll of being a constant stream of healing. TBH i haven't really done the math on something like downranking rejuv, but i just can't see that as practical. Downranking regrowth as a flash heal is for the sake of a spread sheet, pretty much the same thing as just casting it slightly less.

So yeah, the idea would be to see for a given set of gear, what rotations are mana sustainable and the strength of each hot. Ideally, i would also like to make it work backwards such that you could say 'I want to do rotation A, pure lifebloom spam," and it would show you the mana required, and let you adjust gear to meet that.

Because the idea is not to determine a pure "this is your best set of gear" but rather more of a "if you had all these items to choose from, which ones should you use for this fight" I'd also like to include something of a bank feature to let you more quickly choose from all of the items you actually have, gemmed and enchanted like you actually have them, and build from that a set that can sustain a certain rotation for long enough. I wouldn't really aim to do that till a 2.0 or something, after i have the basic functionality worked out.

So, questions for you
1. What rotations make sense? Basically a list of what hots on how many people + a number of regrowths or swiftmends, or NS-HTs per minute.
2. Do people that downrank regrowth as a flash heal see a large benefit to including that as an option at all, or is just knowing that 5 full rank regrowths per minute is the same as 6 (or however many) downranked ones? That seems like you could approximate it pretty well and would add a lot of complication to include.
3. Seriously does anyone not have all the same relevant talents? I really don't care about what hot rotations feral druids or balance druids pressed into healing for a fight can sustain. The only thing i can really see varying without just being a terrible decision is whether tranquil spirit and natural shape shifter give you cheaper NS-HT casts. Meh, maybe i'll include an option to be a bad spec just so i can show people why i was so emo last night healing a spontaneous kara/mag/gruul as 13-11-37, because oh god was doing a raid in completely +heal and spirit focused gear without emp rejuv, tree form, living spirit , imp DS, BoW, a shaman, or a sp terrible. I could barely cast anything before i was oom. Magtheridon wouldn't let me run away and drink like all the nice players in arenas do

4. Google spread sheets work for everyone?

This will simplify my quest for a sustained 3k +healing and a 200 +healing aura, my pre wotlk goal by allowing me to more easily see what i need to get. If i can't figure out a way to pull that off, I'll just retroactively pretend that i meant 3k healing including my aura, duh, as that's very doable.

edit: made this post like 1/3 as long. if you really want to see the original, go for it.

lairpie · 03/18/08, 4:29 PM

(also to some extent what other healers are doing. I'm using > as an indicator of priority. Obviously no one ever lets anyone other than oom mages die, but as things are harder, you have to trust in other people to do some jobs, and you worry about yours. Sure, there are times that its worth it to let that lifebloom and rejuv drop off the tank, to regrowth some mage with agro, but 95% of the time, I need to just let it go and trust a paladin or shaman to save the mage.)

Hyjal

Rage:
2 Druids: keep lb, rejuv, regrowth on tank > Regrowth the frost bolted person if they're close enough to me and have a chance of dying > top off D&D damage on ranged with lb. Stand in range of jaina's aura, boosting our 2 druids to a combined, like +350 healing on the tank.
Spirit Priest: Shield frost bolted people > GH / renew tank
Everyone else: Heal frost bolted people > top off DnD
My Basic Cycle: lbx3, rj, rg on 1 tank + X random heals

Anatheron
2 Druids: lifebloom, rejuv on both tanks sometimes a regrowth > lifebloom top off swarm damage on people close. In range of Jaina again. In my case, take statistically improbable numbers of swarms regardless of where i stand.
Shaman / CoH priests: swarm heal
1 Paladin: stand way back, outside of the range of the swarm and heal the off tank.
Spirit priest: Heal tank
Other paladins: heal particularly low people from swarms / tank, kinda whatever.
My Basic cycle: lbx3 + rj on 2 tanks + X random heals

bah, forgot about a meeting with my DBAs, i'll edit this and add more later.

Ribeye · 03/18/08, 5:35 PM

Originally Posted by lairpie

( In my case, take statistically improbable numbers of swarms regardless of where i stand.
.

Lol, I thought I was the only one....I swear to god no matter where I stand, where I move to, whatever I try to do to avoid these I can almost guarrantee that every single Swarm will be aimed right at me...Its to the point that others won't stand near me because of it.

Noressa · 03/18/08, 5:38 PM

Granted it's not needed by any stretch, but if you're targetted by swarms often, you could consider using shadow resist gear for that fight since Swarm is a shadow effect.

Azirth · 03/19/08, 1:26 PM

So I was briefly searching through the thread, and couldnt find a distinctive post of what stats i should be shooting for gear wise at different levels of raiding.

Unless im blind and missed it, and i apologize if i did, could someone give me a rough idea of what Healing/Spirit/Mana/Mp5 I should be shooting for:

Entering Kara
Gruuls/Intro SSC/TK
TK/SSC to BT
BT and beyond

Mucho Thanks in advance

• malthrin · 03/19/08, 1:39 PM

Originally Posted by Noressa

Granted it's not needed by any stretch, but if you're targetted by swarms often, you could consider using shadow resist gear for that fight since Swarm is a shadow effect.

I like to nuke the infernals when I get swarmed.

Diameter · 03/19/08, 2:28 PM

I put on full shadow resist gear for Anetheron, Kaz'rogal, and Mother Shahraz. Just one or two resisted carrion swarms will make you more of an effective healer than if you had that 400 more +healing (especially since lifebloom is affected by carrion swarm as well now). Same goes for the mana drain on Kaz'rogal. With 2 mana potions and my innervate, I can normally last for a very long time on that fight.

Kalaghan · 03/19/08, 3:43 PM

Originally Posted by Azirth

So I was briefly searching through the thread, and couldnt find a distinctive post of what stats i should be shooting for gear wise at different levels of raiding.

Unless im blind and missed it, and i apologize if i did, could someone give me a rough idea of what Healing/Spirit/Mana/Mp5 I should be shooting for:

Entering Kara
Gruuls/Intro SSC/TK
TK/SSC to BT
BT and beyond

Mucho Thanks in advance

Quick answer IMO (all stats unbuffed):
Entering Kara - +1000healing +75mp5
Gruul/Lurker/VR/Mag - +1500 healing +150mp5
End TK/SSC and BT - +1800 healing +175mp5
End BT and Beyond - around +2000 healing and 200mp5

Stats will vary a bit depending on your healing style and role. There's no base requirement for spirit. In my opinion, get enough to satisfy your regen (mp5 should be incidental once you're nearing the end of SSC/TK, since spirit is clearly superior for us post 2.4 at higher gear levels). And mana/int...well, right now it's fairly irrelevant except that it caps your innervates. Post 2.4 int becomes more important in terms of regen formulas, I'd recommend taking a look at this article (I haven't checked her math but she's usually fairly accurate).

Edit: To clarify, I'm talking about the minimum to be raiding those areas. You should be around 2000 healing when you're making serious attempts on Illidan. If you're farming BT, you should probably be higher (obviously it varies depending on gear selection, but 2100-2300 is probably a good range).

ekochai · 03/20/08, 10:03 PM

Hey, I was curious if anyone uses lootrank.com to decide on upgrades.

With the upcoming spirit regen changes I feel the one initially linked in this thread would be slightly outdated. Since it's weighing Mp5 much much higher than spirit.

Prahfit · 03/20/08, 10:28 PM

Hi all,

I'm not much into Theory Crafting, but these forums were brought to my attention awhile back and I finally got around to actually scrolling through the pages. So, to say the least...any critiquing advice from the experts? Gear / Gems / Talents?

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