Hot the tank anyways, you can do both. If the raid heals were so urgent they wouldnt have a druid doing
it. I found i had to ignore a lot of my healing assignments, they'd tell me to heal 'x' and sure i'd heal 'x'
but i'd heal 2-3 other people also. I'd just keep an eye on 'x', and after a while they stopped even giving
me healing assignments because i was crushing the meters and keeping everyone around me alive.

my bad i meant BLUE sockets not yellow, both yellow and blue are useless
yeah finally some RED sockets yey

When we do VR (We are currently a 1/6SSC 2/4TK guild) I always go tree form and then go in with the melee at VR's feet. Its very simple to throw a LB on yourself in your rotation to heal up the pounding dmg on yourself. Keeping LB stacks at least on the current tank and throwing single LBs on the melee, makes you a great healer for this fight. With 7 healers last time (including a shaman and 2 CoH priests) I healed close to 30% of the total healing the last time we took him down.

Not having to dodge orbs helps out a TON. Just make sure you are completely in with the melee so you don't draw an orb down on them.

The problem with healers going in and just healing themselves through the pounding is that its not like VR doesn't throw your orb anymore, he just throws all the ones that should have been at you at someone else. Not only that, but there's a 100% chance he's throwing at a class that's less able to perform their raid roles while moving than you are.

Spell haste is a great stat and people are now playing with it, which is why there isn't much discussion on healing. Yes, you're "gimping" your regen, however there is no magic cookie for having a ton of mana left at the end of a fight. If your +heal is fine, you're regenning more then you can possibly use and you have access to over 150 spellhaste (220 is my personal minimum, with 250 being ideal) then haste is a great stat. You aren't just looking to lifebloom 5 targets. You can completely change your healing cycle by being able to pull in 1.70 cast regrows, 1.3 second rejuv/lifebloom/swiftmends. Pots, food buffs and oils are all amazing at regenning mana, take advantage of them.

That said, if you can't get much haste, you won't see much of a difference other then more time to wait between refreshes. While you're still gearing with tier gear, I'd recommend sticking to straight +heal or +heal/mana per 5 gems.

The pounding does a fair chunk of damage, you're going to either healing yourself a lot, or getting a lot of heals. If anyone should be using that strat, it would be paladins, not druids. They can't heal while running, and actually gain an advantage from being hit. TBH, your entire raid should be taking the pounding other than hunters and druids before a druid should ever be the right choice to take it. Especially if you have a coh priest, a few more people taking the pounding and clearing out space around VR might be nice, but druids are about the last class it should be.

The difference between this and archimonde is that running through a fire to stay close to the tank on archimonde makes you more able to keep healing. On VR you can still heal fine while dodging orbs.

Its going to bother me; I really want to get a haste set sorted but I've always had a 'goal' of getting 300 single LB ticks (going to need another 120~healing) which I should be able to get upon reaching Twins loot.
To get enough haste to matter its going to eliminate my goal of doing this, and I've been completly happy to pass the new T6 pieces to the Mages/Rogues in the guild as for them it helps them maintain set bonus without having to ignore upgrades due to breaking it.

Naturally we have
Neck (30~ haste) - ZA
Ring (30~ haste) x2 - BT
Belt, Bracers, Boots (40~) - SP
Cloak (30) - BT
Gloves (40) - SP
Shoulders (30) - SP
Offhand (20) - SP

Making roughly 250 haste without gimping -that- much, and excluding gems ofcourse which could top it up to around 300.

Are there any other items im missing from this which fit nicely with normal gear without gimping your general stats too badly?

The only things I can think of would be either the Brooch of the Highborne (20) and Amulet of Flowing Light (25, JC only.) The biggest issue I'm having with the ZA neck is the lack of stamina.

I've read many here talking about 1.3 second GCD and 220+ haste but no calculations. So I did some calculating...

Assuming a 7 second cycle (time before lifebloom expires)

4 Casts per 7 Seconds
So 7 second cycle / 1.5 second global cooldown = 4.67 casts every 7 seconds

This means there is a good amount of buffer for lag for a normal resto druid to keep constantly refreshing 4 hots without any issues.

I believe this comes down to about to a .25 second buffer between hots, for a total of 1 second buffer in a 7 second cycle.

5 Casts per 7 Seconds
Now, to get to 5 casts per 7 second cycle, one would need a global cooldown of 1.4. This is about 6.67% haste rating.

The formula to calculate how much haste rating we would need for 1.4 GCD is:
2355/(H + 1570)=GCD --> (2355/GCD) - 1570 = H
Put in 1.4 for GCD and we get 113 Haste rating for 5 casts per 7 second cycle.

However, this has no compensation for latency. Perhaps a more ideal GCD might actually end up as 1.3.
(2355/1.3)-1570=242

To get that much a druid would need 242 Haste to compensate for lag by a total of .5 seconds per 7 second cycle, or .1 per cast. This is about half of what we normally get.


Anyone see any mistakes on my calculations? My aim will now be to get to 113 and then get a feel for my own latency issues.

---

I recently found a forum post by someone linking all the haste gear he could find:
Ogg Gulnath Tago :: View topic - Musings on spell haste for resto druids

It's at the bottom of that page.

I think you should maintain a lifebloom stack on the tank unless a) his assigned healers have him covered so well that it is truly unnecessary, or b) the damage on the raid is so intense that you cannot spare the GCD. Keep in mind that if either of these situations does happen it may be a sign of bad healing assignments by your raid leader (both situations could happen if there are too many healers on the tank).

For example on Void Reaver I was assigned to the raid and usually did what you describe, since we had 1-2 shaman and 1-2 paladins in the pounding healing the tanks and melee. I would run around the outside and clean up people that got hit by orbs as well as hot melee and tanks. I kept lifebloom up on the tank when not much else was going on, but I didn't attempt to keep it up 100% if I had other things to do. This was because of reason (a), since the healers in the center had the tanks completely under control.

As another example, on Archimonde our strategy calls for all healers to have a combination MT/raid "heal whatever you can" role due to the range issues brought up by doomfire and air burst. In a crunch situation (bad doomfire on the melee for example, or cleaning up after a soul charge) it ends up that the paladins spend most of their time on the tank and the shamans and priests spend most of their time on the raid since that's what they're used to. On this boss I maintain a stack of lifebloom on the MT 100% of the time (since healing on him can be shaky if too many healers are bursted) and I spend the rest of my time either loading him up with hots or healing the raid, depending on what other healers are doing.

After reading this message I have been wondering a lot if it's possible to solo-heal Burn people as a druid. I did some theorycrafting and came up with the following macro:

Been trying it the last two raids, and it works. You need to start casting it at 19.5-20 sec left on Burn, and you can basically solo heal that person (requirements are that he has at least 4k hp and no more Meteor Slash debuffs). There are some things to consider though.

Let's say the first person getting Burn is player A, the person that gets it next is person B and the person after that person C. Since Burn lasts 60 seconds and gets applied every 20 sec, only three people can have Burn at a time. So when player C gets Burn, player B will have 40 seconds left on his debuff and player A 20 seconds left.

Now what we did in our raid, is make me use the macro (I'll call myself macro-druid) and the other druid heal player B and C (I'll call him backup-druid). This has several advantages:

- backup-druid can spend most of his time healing the tanks since player B and C only got Burn recently and therefore receive only little amounts of damage (a hot or two is enough to keep them up)
- there is more control in "oh shit everyone has Burn" situations, where otherwise the two healers could be healing player A to save him while player B is dying
- it makes the job a lot less stressful knowing everything is going according to plan

There are two drawbacks I experienced myself. The most important one is that when player B and player C both have a lot of Meteor Slash debuffs, backup-druid has a hard time keeping them up as they both receive quite a lot of damage. Since macro-druid is only healing player A (and nothing else), he can't help them out. But, imo, this is not much different with any other Burn-healing tactic where you are using only two healers, since in the end you still have to heal up three people with a lot of damage.
Second one is you need to stay in casterform while you're at it. This makes it pretty mana intensive. With chainpotting and an Innervate it's pretty doable though, but if you have bad luck and a lot of people get Burn who can't remove it (rogues/mages/palas), then you will be spending a lot of mana. Also you need to Innervate each other since if you are spamming the macro there is no room for a gcd to Innervate yourself. When there is a break (e.g. a rogue/mage/pala gets Burn next) you can Innervate the other druid.

The first time we killed him we didn't do this and were just spamming everyone who had Burn. Usually this went "okay" but sometimes it was really close with people dying. Also I felt that we were overhealing like crazy a lot of the time and that that healing could better be spent elsewhere, as Burn damage is rather predictable. As a side-effect, none of us had time to heal the tank when there were people with Burn alive, so I figured this would help out on the tank healing as well. I wondered if other Burn healers experienced this as well and/or have a good way to optimise Burn healing, besides "just spam anything that has the debuff".