It doesn't have to be black and white really. If you can't get a feeler for what you need yet, because your raid role changes often for example, taking the middle road is usually a good idea. In a practical sense you can do little simple things like keeping purple gems in places where filling one socket correctly gives a bonus of 4 heal for example, and go straight for reds where the bonus is less appealing..

Your infraction is based on the grammar of your posts, not their content. I think you'll find that some of the most knowledgeable druids around are nowhere near BT/SP gear and although the site's name might suggest otherwise, this is a place for anyone with the right mindset, regardless of wether they have 500 +heal or 2500.

Just make sure to tidy up your posts after writing them, adding capitals where appropriate and replacing retardisms like 'any1' with 'anyone' and you should be just fine around here.

When in doubt, you can keep the staff and take the mace. Just use the staff on encounters where you feel you need more mana and the mace otherwise. Especially on these 'big' decisions it's worthy to waste an inventory slot to extra gear.

Try innervating yourself without the Bangle and see if you are able to fill up your mana bar. This is the case for most druids post 2.4. If a plain innervate without the Bangle buff will fill you up, Bangle will be overkill and totally useless. Same thing with swapping in a spirit weapon. I used those tricks pre-2.4 but have found them to be totally pointless now.

In short, no. You can swap in combat and all, but the reason it works for balance druids is the moonfire idol buff actually applies when the moonfire lands, so in the fraction of a second where your computer is telling the server you moonfired, and the server says ok, the idol gets equipped and then its on in time to give you the buff. Idol of terror works the same way. And starfire and wrath, because they have casting times have time to equip the idol during the cast.

If you really wanted to get hardcore, you could setup a macro such that each spell you cast, you would hit shift, ctrl, or neither to equip the idol for the spell you were casting next. So if you were hitting a rejuv, and knew you were about to lifebloom you could hit alt-rejuv and have it set so that alt-rejuv casts rejuv and puts on the lifebloom idol. I've thought about it, i tried it out, and decided it seemed like a huge amount of additional focus required to heal for very little benefit. Also, even without haste, instants where i also swap a weapon or idol definitely feel longer than ones where i don't. I use caster weapon swap to give my group spell surge, and i can definitely notice the GCD taking longer when I swap a weapon. Only probably .1 seconds, if that, but if you add that onto all 4 casts in a cycle, that's eating into your lifebloom cushion quite a lot.

Haste further makes it unfeasible as haste does not lower the GCD from swapping weapons that I know of.

35 percent regrowth healing vs 15 percent regrowth healing.

How would that effect your healing meter increase or decrease?


Many different views on this but i feel using regrowth and lifebloom (not wasting mana on rejuv) would benefit you 100 times better than just using lifebloom and rejuv. I base this on the sunwell attempts that i have done (not as a MT healer because i was not assigned to that).

Any comments plz

It got heated up in IRC so i thought i would post here.

If you need a WWS just holla.

Might need a little bit more reheating within this thread to make it eatable for people that weren't on IRC just now I think. I do know what you're talking about, but a bit more meat on the premise of it would make it easier to respond to your post.

Regrowth was always worth it if you could spare the mana for it. The only change is that now you can spare the mana for it virtually all the time. All the hate for regrowth has always been for people that used it to the exclusion of other spells. When it comes down to it, there's only so many people in a given fight that you know are going to take enough damage to get a stack of lifeblooms.

The main issue druids have always faced is quickly assessing whether you can help raid heal a given person taking damage, whether you need to (or if someone else already is), and whether doing so will cause more risk to the tanks by letting your hots drop than is worth it, when there's a pretty good chance someone else will get them. Successfully answering this question every 1.5-2 seconds is the difference between druids that are successful healers, maybe even integral to their guild's raids, and amazing druids. Unfortunately, there's not much of a way to do an objective determination based on wws or anything of that sort, but I think with a bit of looking at their WWS stuff, a bit of reading what they write, you can to a large part figure out who they are. Anyone can keep hots up on tanks. Don't get me wrong, a druid that that's literally all they do can still be doing amazing on healing meters, they can still be a very useful person to have, but their missing a big last jump to the next tier of usefulness.

This is something I've been looking at a lot lately in our attempts to recruit another resto druid as one of ours has had to tone back raiding because of work. I've come to the conclusion that their are rather distinct tiers of resto druids. The druid we lost never did quite the healing I did, but he did the little things that can't quite be quantified but make a huge difference. That regrowth on a sp as their mind-control broke that landed right as the mob hit them; things like that. We've found a lot of druids that i would say are all distinctly second tier. They put hots up on the tanks, they keep them up most of the time, they generally do what they're told, but you look back at the wws deathlog and you see that each time the tank died, their hots happened to have cleared right before that. You never see that swiftmend other than yours there when the tank takes a hard hit. You look and see they didn't use NS the whole night. The biggest problem is there's nothing you can tell them that I've come up with to get them to see how they could have done something better. Maybe with time they will, or maybe something you say will trip some switch, but for the time being, but you can't just be "use swiftmend more" or "don't let your hots drop off the tank."

The druids i've decided are 3rd tier druids, are pretty much just bad. They just don't grasp how to align the spells in their spell book with the damage the raid is taking. I was doing a pug maulgar the other day to help some friends that wanted some alt gear or something, and the guild that was running it asked me to do healing assignments as they knew I did them for our guild. I setup some healers for the various tanks and then told the other druid "just do what druids do" by which I had sorta meant "put some lifeblooms on the mt and any other tank that looked like they needed, and then kinda, fill in the gaps." So she responded "use hots to top off the raid?" I paused for a second, decided it wasn't worth it, and just said sure. In the end, it didn't matter because she died somehow right away anyway, but having been fairly spoiled up to that point having worked with the same druids all the time, I was kinda struck that one of the main healers for this other guild felt "what druids do" was "top people off with lifebloom." Oh, and she's dreamstate, and doesn't use IS or HT. I uh, just don't know what she can be spending the dreamstate mana on by just spamming lifeblooms.

The first tier druids, in a lot of ways, don't seem that different from second tier, but oh you can tell the difference when you're used to playing with first tier druids and then get a second tier one instead. I'm sure the possibility exists to be like a 1.5 tier, but I've never really seen it. Being aware of where people are positioned, and getting a good general feeling for the other healers in your raid and what they're going to do is essential. No healer is an island, and if all you ever do is the same thing another healer does, you're not useful. Seeing the patterns of damage coming in, healing going out, and using your different abilities to make those curves match instead of blindly using the same abilities all the time makes a huge difference. In one of our first archimonde kills someone asked me why I was using tree form when I had to decurse, and I said I only dropped it to decurse when someone else wasn't going to get it, but I didn't mean, like, I wait 3 seconds to see if someone else gets it, I just keep track of where the decursers are and if the people with the curse are close to one of the mages I trust to actually remove it. The rest of the time I rather like my too slow to get feared into a fire unless I'm right next to it form. Little things like that, make a big difference. Sure, the mana from be being in tree form doesn't matter, but that lifebloom I knew i could refresh in time and count on the mage to get the curse instead of letting my lifebloom drop, might.

I kinda got on a tangent, but knowing what spells you need to use to make the overall raid healing output match up with the damage coming in, and combining reacting to damage, with predicting it, make all the difference in the world. There's no way to really say how much of each spell you should be casting, as it wildly varies based on fight, and based on what the other healers in your raid are doing. I've had fights where I didn't touch regrowth, and fights where it was 50% of my healing. I've done the same fight, with the same assignment but with different other healers, and completely changed what spells i was using based on what i felt they would do. Early on in raiding we didn't have any resto shaman, which shifted a lot more of the burden of healing melee damage onto me. I was using regrowth a ton even before the mana boosts and had socketed extensively with regen and geared for it. A few buffs to regen and 2 consistent resto shaman later I stopped needing to regrowth the melee hardly ever and started shifting my gear towards a lot more +healing rather than regen and started focusing a lot more on just tanks and ranged (where chain heal is a bit less effective). There's no right or wrong answer here without knowing what all the other healers are doing.

all i got to say is <3 lairpie period.

lol

Very well written.

Lol Lairpie. Ya know all this time, reading this thread and responding I had sort of begun to think of you as the anti-me as far as healing went. You are of course knowledgeable and a great druid, but your style always seemed counter to mine in that you performed the role of druid as a raid leader might expect it to be played, perhaps even how the designers of our class expect it to be played. But now I see we really aren't that different. In a given fight we might heal completely different but I'm willing to bet we'd produce about the same numbers, just arrive at them a completely different way.

Since I changed guilds recently, I have begun to change my perspective a little bit on druid healing as well. In my old guild, the shamans were not quite as strong as people in threads like this always referred to, and so I was forced to become a certain type of healer to make up for that weakness. On the other hand, our paladins were always extremely strong, and so maybe it was "growing up" with this guild that made me the oddity I am, and yet I think it made me a stronger healer over all.

Now that my new guild has very strong shaman raid healers, I can see why it would be easy to slip into a pick 3 lb target druid and just spam that, but thats not who I am, and the guild already has one druid that is very good at that. In fact, I would argue, that no guild needs 2 druids that heal exactly the same way because if they do, they are simply splitting healing done on the meters by dropping LBs on all the same targets when it really isn't neccessary.

Which brings me to the point of this post, and something we haven't talked about in this thread as of yet. Druid synnergy. We all know that two resto druids tends to be the standard template for a 25 man raid force these days. Now of course there are certain fights where both druids stacking hots on the MT is a good decision, but I would argue that those fights are a rarity, so how best do both druids define their role within a raid, and is it even something that can really be thought out in advance? Lairpie mentioned that most of what his companion druid did was intangible, and I would argue that maybe that intangibility was being strong in spots where he was weak, and vice versa. Is the synnergy of two druids even worth mentioning, or do you just heal around the other druid and hope it happens?

For my part, I think the standard LB rolling druid *is* an important part of a guild and yet I realize that I will never be that druid. That makes it easy for me to be me and do tons of raid healing and proactive healing, and yes, spam regrowth.

@Ribeye
Yeah, you're pretty much the first druid that didn't agree with me on everything that I didn't think was just retarded. That's part of why I had been asking about other druids posting wws links a while ago is I was trying to see what was different in your raids healing setups that made healing like you do viable. And yeah, the difference in what roles the other classes were filling seemed to be the big difference. While I personally like our setup a bit better in terms of playing to the strengths of our class setup, a setup that plays better to the strengths of individual people in a given raid would often be better.

Partially since I do most of the healing setup, and partially because since BWL or so druids have been one of the most consistent classes our strategies for healing have always been very druid centric. I've made it a point to raid as a priest and a paladin quite a bit at 60 and a little bit at 70 to better make sure I knew the strengths of each class (somehow i didn't think I needed to actually play a shaman to grasp the ever complicated role they have in pve healing, haha) and I think that's put me in a position to work out strategies a lot better than someone who hasn't played a druid could.

I know a lot of our healing setup was modeled after Forgotten Aspects as they were one of the better guilds i could find that like us had 2 resto druids standard with druids that weren't stupid. I'd been looking to their WWS stuff for a while to try and see how Pyxis and their other druid whose name escapes me would do things, and then mimicking a lot of that within our guild. Helped us get to where we were able to run 6 healers, once in awhile 7 until BT. Then when their paladins made one of the first big posts I had seen about running 2 druids as a standard setup and it became a lot more common, I had to laugh.

More recently, with the overabundance of mana I've had I actually looked to your wws stuff for more ways to effectively use the free GCDs I do have and effectively burn some mana into people. From that we've shifted more of our paladin healing to being on the tanks for any fight with raid damage that I'm confident the shaman and I can get w/o their help and w/o my hots dropping. In your post about what you do in a given fight really the only fights where you and I do vastly different things are sharahz, council, illidan. We've been running 2 resto shaman and a CoH priest most of the time lately so I've actually gone back to being more focused on tanks again for any fight where there's more than 1.

Think however this week I'm going to try not bothering with healing the off tanks for sharahz and just let our other druid / brain heal bounces get them and try and help out more with raid healing and put a paly that would normally just be raid healing on the tank. We've found that just a lifebloom stack and a rejuv from each druid an 1 dedicated healer was plenty for keeping up the mt with lifeblooms doing all the healing on the off tanks. The leaves (with our recent 2 of each class setup) 2 palys, 2 shaman and a coh priest free to raid heal. Its worked out pretty well for us so far, however our normal 23-38 priest has become our normal enh shaman and we're not quite ready to rely on our new priest to solo heal the tank other than hots, so, looking to try something else out.

That's a pretty commonly asked question and no one's really come up with a good answer to it that I've ever seen. Using druids effectively requires the rest of the guild to have a lot of faith in them. Healing from hots just doesn't seem as real to many people and letting go of the idea of being able to just count healers on a tank the same way doesn't sit well with people. Around the game, there are tons of guilds that see druids as almost useless including many that have them, and guilds that have been trying to recruit good resto druids for ever to try and get that magical double lifebloom stack that all but guarantees the tank will live long enough to get that next holy light or greater heal.