Funny, I find that holy paladins are the easiest to beat if you have better reaction times and situational awareness than, say, a senior citizen. In my guild, we raid with two trees, 1 disc priest (who occasionally goes holy now for dual spec and does very well at it), 1 holy priest, 2 holy paladins, and occasionally 1 resto shaman (if she shows up). Prior to 3.1, the other tree and I battled for the top spot on the meters. We have similar gear and good synergy; we talk about healing styles and bounce ideas off of each other. We work hard to be good healers, so it's not that we don't know what we're doing here...

As of 3.1, the holy priest is surpassing us (as well as the disc priest, when he is specced into CoH for certain fights). I think it would be rather arrogant to suggest that because s/he is being beaten, that s/he must not know how to heal. Experience also has nothing to do with it. I acknowledge it is possible that healing classes have some adjusting to do given the broad array of changes that were made and perhaps the meters will shake themselves out to where they were before, but it is also plausible (and, in my opinion, highly likely) that priests just got buffed *that* much. You say it's quite easy to compete with priests; well, I'm countering that with wondering why you're having a hard time with holy paladins. And moreover, how "hardcore" are we speaking here? I mean, have you completed or attempted these fights in a serious way in 25-man?

As for shamans...I'm unsure as to what to say to that, because I can't fathom losing to a shaman. Oh well.

Well i just bought my Glyph of Nourish and replaced Glyph of Regrowth, as i recently i felt that my major rotation on healing seems to be... Regrowth, Rejuv and then basically top of with Nourish... So i personally think that i would benefit way more from using the new glyph as it will be use more often until Regrowth is about to expire... I am now healing up to 10k+ on crits when the target is FULLY hotted.

Pretty sick Enjoying this very much.

I was looking at the new idol today, [Idol of the Flourishing Life], and i was wondering how it compared to [Idol of Awakening].

The [Idol of the Flourishing Life] increases Spellpower by 187.

As an example, say i heal for 4k nourishes on average, non Crit. With the new idol does this make it heal for 4187 instead?

It is situational. I wouldn't use the Nourish idol unless you are healing the main tank. I typically end up throwing Rejuv's out more often than Nourish, so I use the rejuv idol. I managed to snag the Nourish Idol off of trash before General last night, so I am going to experiment with it a bit.

No, it would increase non-crits with no hots by 129, crits by 194, non-crits with one hot glyphed by 164 and crits by 246, etc. Unless you're doing a very significant amount of healing with nourish and little with rejuv, the awakening glyph is better. The mana reduction on rejuv makes a very nice, cheap heal to toss out whenever you have spare GCD's.

Guys, first of all, excuse my post if it seems kind of dumb. We just began our Ulduar raids, and I have noticed some significant changes to the damage we get to heal. Now this might be our raid problem or my not understanding how resto druids work, but for me it's getting less and less efficient to heal with nourish, and our hots don't seal the deal anymore. Also it's kind of hard to predict the damage and i don't have time to rejuv and nourish it, so i just have to nourish right away. So my question is, with big chucks of life missing and no spare GCDs, wouldn't healing touch strategy become viable?
I did search forums for this question and found out it was discussed before, but now with new raid instances i believe we could have another look at it?
My idea is something like this. I loved this build in 10mans (unfortunatly i got no wws logs), and am going to try it out in 25mans tomorrow. May be I am doing something terribly wrong, so please stop me until I let our raiders down.

PS As always, pawn long-time reader first-time poster =) and please forgive my non-native english.

Sounds to me more like you don't know any resto shaman that can pull their weight. All the healing classes are fairly well balanced at this point (to a degree). A well played resto shaman can easily climb near or to the top of the meters in a heavy raid damage setting. In fact, the same can be said of almost any class at this point. Any class can top the charts on any given fight given the correct assignment (as is evident by the bulk of these recent posts). I think the largely ignore factor is skill level. Perhaps Daedalix plays with a much better Holy Paladin than you are accustomed to. The sheer fact that you play with an "If they show up" type of resto shaman tells me that they probably wont beat a regular raider, nor should you expect to be beaten by her, as such your Resto shaman experiance is tainted.

But please, can we abandon this silly, "How can I top the Healing Charts" discussion? It is not beneficial. There is a large difference in figuring out how to most effectively heal (or maximize your HPS) as a resto druid, and learning how to top the meters. Rolling lifeblooms on 4 targets in BC would drive a druid to the top of the meters, but I think most would be in agreement that it wasnt the 'most effective' method of druid healing. Topping the raid healing charts only helps yourself, A conversation about the merits of Rejuvenation vs. Lifebloom vs. Regrowth (and its effect on the other healers in your raid) however, is helpful for the education and benefit of everyone that reads these forums. Healing is not DPS, you don't get an extra cookie by topping the meters. You should not be competing with the other healers you raid with.

@ Naliehna

I'm going to crunch some numbers tomorrow, but I dont think resto druids are much weaker than most healing classes in the direct heals department. A Lifebloom + Rejuvenation + Regrowth Hot + Nourish (Glyphed or Tier Bonus..or both) + Living Seed combo can lead to some crazy single target HPS. I'll need to poke around to compare and see what other classes can sustain at this point, just some napkin math gives it around 8300 HPS in my current gear. That is without including living seed, and only counts the Nourish glyph (not the tier 7 bonus). It also doesnt take into account the GCD's required to refresh the HoTs. Tomorrow I should have some free time, i'll work at getting a better max HPS value, that includes GCDs, and Living Seed Procs. I would suspect that paladins have us beat on single target throughput, but that we hold an advantage over both Shaman and Priests (in terms of Max HPS). Granted, this 'rotation' is harder to maintain that a single spell spam, but thats one of the fun aspects of being a resto druid.

This is the strategy that I've taken on. I've dropped GOTE and gone for a Glyph'd HT kind of spec. So the tank gets the typical RG+RJ+3LB with Nourish. The raid will get HT and WGs, until the T8 set bonus of course.

Lately, I've been quite frustrated with my raid healing in Ulduar... It feels like everyone is just healing that little bit quicker than me, which leaves me with only RJ+WG on the raid. I think with the speed that random people can die in Ulduar, glyph'd HT seems well suited.

Hey Guys, I have a few questions about healing Mimiron in Ulduar, if anyone has experience here I would greatly appreciate your advice. The only hard phase was phase 2, it gets a little nutty with healing. Now eventually it came down to me deciding to just rejuv the whole raid and if someone got down to ~4k health i would hit them with my swiftmend. Now obviously I can't keep rejuv on the whole raid, but around 15people i can. This seemed to be a good crutch for our shamans to get their chain heals off and priest using COH and POH time to get their casts off. Just wondering what people thought of this technique.

Also this being said, I know it used to be here but if someone happens to know the name of the thread that discusses haste, and how much haste is needed for the haste cap, that would be awesome. Thanks for the feedback in advance.

This is the same techinique i was using last night on Mimiron. I found it was quite effective, and my HPS went through the roof in that phase. I was using a 5 Rejuv 1 WG cycle pretty much.

And i believe you are referring to the Resto Itemization thread.

Thank You I found what i was looking for nearly instantly. Gl in ulduar!

This is my main interest at the moment. I'll guess I'll start it off with my opinions and people can refute:

Lifebloom: Until the MT healer(s) cannot keep the MT alive on their own, I see any form of rolling LB as simply meter padding. There are some timely uses for LB, like Naleihna listed, and it's great for heavy healing group assignments (hi2u mimi phase 2), but in general, it's a waste.

Regrowth/Nourish: Regrowth should only be used for the HoT. With 6-8 healers, direct heals are neither our job nor a good use of our time. Glyph/spec for HT if you feel like you need a lifesaver heal in between Swiftmends/NS. Nourish is still not worthy of a hotkey for the same reason. Glyph HT if you need a fast heal and use RG (or just let other HoTs tick) for a spot heal on a safe target. RG gets better as the number of healers decrease. Nourish looks like a good MT heal on paper, but we should never be MT healing. Druids are the most controlled and preemptive raid healers. And we work the best when we're healing alone, so even in a 10 man with 2 healers, the Shaman/Priest(/obviously Paladin) would be a better MT healer.

Rejuv: Find a comfortable hotkey for this and learn to love it. Still can't measure if Rejuving 15+ people is a benefit to the raid.

edit: fallenangel posted while i was typing and its basically the same thing i said

I'm not really clear on your spec. Is it for tank healing or raid healing? You specced into both HT and nourish/regrowth. Any build without GotEM is presumably for tank healing only, but then why get HT?

I definitely find HT glyph spec to be working great for me in Ulduar. However, HT is not optimal in a tank healing build. It's really only suited as your direct heal in a primarily HoT playstyle. It's for a raid healer, when you need a quick heal and swiftmend is on cooldown.

So a better option for a HT spec would be to drop Nature's Bounty for GotEM. You should also consider swapping Nature's Grace for Subtlety or Natural Perfection. Your direct heal is HT which neither crits that often, nor do you chain-cast it that often...nor does it benefit much from the cast time reduction. A build which focuses on RG/nourish AND HT, but without GotEM does not seem very effective to me.

I also agree with the posters who say Druids are the worst primary tank healers, and the best raid healers.

As for spamming glyphed HT on raid members during heavy raid damage, the numbers rarely line up in a way which makes this a good choice. You will always provide more HPS and usually end up with more living players by laying down Rejuvs (even without the set bonus) on as many people as possible. It only takes a few seconds for the healing to have surpassed HT spam. Each Rejuv cast is potentially ~12k of healing per GCD, while HT is only about 5500. As long as the player can survive until the first and second tick, Rejuv will always be better. If the damage isn't deadly, Rejuv is more efficient. If they can't survive until the second tick of Rejuv, chances are other players aren't going to survive either and they better be getting hit by a chain heal or coh soon. HT spam might save a player or two in the very short term, but in almost all raid damage situations it will have you desperately trying to catch the incoming damage, and failing due to your lower HPS.

I completely agree on everything Red said, both on current situation and critisizm about Vomityn's build. My idea was to drop nourish/rg for ht, while keeping all of our rejuv/wg magic. The benefit being better unpredicted damage spikes healing. Red if you could spare a minute and discuss the differences between my take and yours ( i looked up your resto build in your armory) ?
Also I was very wrong not to use the WG glyph instead of Rejuv.

The differences I see are that I took Subtlety and Natural Perfection, while your build has Imp. Tranquility, Living Seed, and 1/3 Revitalize. Also, I have the Lifebloom glyph while you have Rejuvenation (or I guess Wild Growth).

As for the talent differences, I didn't put a lot of thought into those 6 points. I just kind of went with a quick gut feeling rather than careful consideration. Since our crit with this spec is low, I figured Natural Perfection would beat out Living Seed. I also went with safety by taking 3/3 Subtlety, even though I really love Imp. Tranquility as a talent. I don't know whether my choices were optimal ones or not, sorry. I suspect that either way will work fine in any situation.

As for the glyph choice, I wasn't sure what to grab. Again I kind of just picked one (Lifebloom) in case I might need it. I wasn't sure how much I'd be using the spell in Ulduar. I did find myself using Lifebloom on tanks, but never refreshing a 3-stack. So I don't really know how much use I'm getting out of the LB glyph. I had planned on swapping in Innervate, but so far I haven't had any real mana problems. Next reset I will be giving a different glyph a try; I like to try out as many different builds as possible to get a feel for what is most effective in circumstances which I often find myself. I suspect that Wild Growth or Lifebloom are ideal in most cases though.

I wanted to comment on this. Can you explain why it is a bad thing to minimize the time that someone is dangerously low on health?

Look man, you're more then welcome to refute somebodies idea/methods.. that's what these forums are for. But this certainly isn't the way to do it. I give you a WWS and solid math showing that setting up 2 stack blooms is the way to raid heal predictable heavy raid-damage(Frozen Blows).. and you reply with "Go try it" on a boss I didn't even mention?

You were wrong when you stated lifeblooms inefficiency, because when you let it bloom its more efficient now then it has ever been. And in my stated scenario, pre-hoting 2 stack blooms on selected people does nothing to prevent you from throwing rejuvs once the damage has actually begun occurring.. as you're certainly not going to be refreshing bloom stacks. Your only argument could be that pre-hotting rejuvs > pre-hotting 2 stack blooms... but the math doesn't support that if the blooms aren't overheal. The blooms alone(not including crits) would be worth almost 9 seconds of rejuv, or nearly half the duration of the occurring raid damage. Especially when considering that in the scenario I was referring too, there is a definitive break in all damage(due to freeze being cast and everybody stacking up) directly preceeding the raid healing.. giving you nothing else to do except pre-hot.

If you did indeed decide to pre-hot rejuv perfectly in preparation for Frozen blows, you would max out at a potential 18 targets before hots start falling off. 18 globals, with all of your initial 3 targets benefiting from only 1 tick, another 3 only benefitting from 2 ticks, etc. In those same 18 globals, you could stack nine 2-stack blooms, with the added benefit that your initial targets will gain nearly the full benefit of the healing and be immediately topped off from the first damage.

If you have any actual data/math/theorycraft to refute, feel free to bring it forward.

Vezax is also a special boss encounter. You don't get any source of natural regeneration and lifeblooms that expire only give you back half of what they normally do. You can't compare general healing strategies with what you do on Vezax.

I often find myself throwing LB out on people who predictably take damage, or when there's predictable raid damage whenever I've got an omen proc, I kind of see it as 'banking' that mana I'll get back in 10 seconds :p

I've generally been a lb -> rejuv -> nourish healer, but more and more I find myself moving to rejuv -> regrowth -> nourish.

I think you are missing the point somewhat. I have no doubts that nourish presents a more efficent tank heal than glyphed HT does and everyone has their preferences how to heal as well as we have different conditions to handle and diferent people to work with. But like I said your reason why not to use the HT style is besides the point. You do not spec/glyph HT to spam it. The entire point of that setup is speed, landing a heal as fast as possible and that is exactly what the HT glyph+spec delivers. An on demand lightning speed heal with no CD and no conditions like allready having a HoT of any kind on the target. That there is a longer GCD attached to the spell than its actual cast time matters not if you manage to save someone with it. Healers do not work with their GCD the same way DPS does.

In short if I were to often find myself responsible for the MTs survival I´d go the nourish way, but when I´m in charge of general raid health I currently prefer working with my Rejuvs and WG and the occasional HT when shit is about to hit the fan. I´m sure your method for raid healing works as well, we just have diferent preferances of tools to do our job.

I must say I'm scratching my head a lot, reading these past few pages. How is there still a serious discussion about Druids going back to a "direct heals" play style, after how many times this idea has been refuted? Our niche is HOTs, Blizzard has stated that they like it that way, and it still works just fine. You can always roll a paladin. I don't know, they seem dull to me. If anything, I'm enjoying the 3.1 mechanics, and blowing through [today's hot raid zone] with plenty of mana and raid members staying alive.

Let's back up. How do you define "being a good healer"?
Is it:
A) I play whack-a-mole on some raid frames trying to keep up with all the crazy shit that happens to people.
B) I am Superman. I can save everyone, all the time, and I'm a hero because I have the biggest numbers on Recount!
C) I understand my class mechanics and each fight well enough to make intelligent decisions about which spell to hit every time; I understand that I am surrounded by other healers who have different mechanics and will also make good decisions; and my raid leader knows that no matter who I am assigned to cover, those people will survive under my care.

DPS can be reduced to math. Once you've reached a threshold for being adequately geared, healing has too many variables. So, rather than another post saying "I can win the meters by doing X," I'll say that I've continued rolling HOTs with slightly more Nourish/Swiftmend than in 3.0/Naxxramas, but still only "as needed," and I still feel as effective as ever.

Lifebloom remains as useful as before, especially when you predict damage auras and incoming spikes, and I'm loving the multiplicative blooms and mana-return mechanic. I'm still running around with tons of mana. Living Seed is still highly useful and desirable - it's free healing when a tank actually gets hit. And by paying attention to the actual encounter in front if me, I can time some Regrowths such that they'll heal more than just obsessing over HOT timers.

Druids still work, and I still have my raid spot without reinventing how to play one.

Concerning the Lb vs Rejuv discussion:

Since the wowwiki info concernig lb wasnt up-to-date, i prefered doing some napkin test healing a Felhunter. The following numbers are without 6% healing-ToL-Aura and sitting @ 1930 spelldmg (no tol and manareg-gear)

I used [Idol of Awakening], [Spark of Hope] and [Glyph of Lifebloom].


After subtracting the lb-bloom-mana-return, one cast effectively costed me 213 mana.
Over (glyphed) 10 seconds, it ticked 10 times for 351 + a final bloom of 2863. At 14% crit, thats 6.573 healingin 10 seconds or 657 hps with 30.86 Mp5

Rejuv costed 341 mana and ticked 6 times in 18 seconds for 1742 healing each. Overall, thats 10.452 healing per cast (hpc)at 653 hps with 30.65 Mp5.


The following is based on my napkin-theorycrafting, dealing with an slight unreal setting and mainly focusing on 1-healtarget. Prehotting will vary my thoughts one way or another.

So in a 10 second time frame, lb heals for marginally (50!) "more", sitting at a "slightly" (4!) higher hps but costs 128less mana.
Rejuv, on the other hand, heals in the first 10 second nearly the same and continues ticking for 6 more second. Thus, its healing-per-cast is totally blowing LB out of the water - as long as there exists steady raiddmg, where healing will still be needed 16 seconds after casting. For raiddmg, which is healed in exactly 10 seconds, LB, thanks to its mana-costs, could be a better raidheal than rejuv. However, as soon as LB's final bloom effect is wasted, rejuv tops in hps, even in an timeframe < 10 seconds.
Rejuvs side-effects, being swiftmandable, being castable at 15 targets and sitting at a superior hpc, totally ignored.


My conclusion:
LB is still very manaeffective - basically even more than pre "nerf"
Rejuv will be the to-go-heal in most situations, since lb 10-sec-hps is only marginally superior (basically ignoreable) and depending on its final bloom. Additional, outside this theoretic 10sec window, rejuv will come ontop thanks to its immense hpc (nearly double as high as lb)
Most druids will probalby exchange LB-Glyphs with WG-Glpyhs (although there were discussions about prefering lb over innervate), thus reducing its hps and hpm.

Personally, i think ill have to rebind LB and Rejuv - since my LB currently sits on "1", i find me using it thanks to old habits. And, more ernestly, i still need to think about pre-hotting circumstances. Will a 10man triple stack lb, blooming into Hodir & co really beat rejuv? Gotta sit back at my excel sheet.


Ps: please forgive me major erros, grammar and stuff - even european gamers arent perfect