Allinone

When it comes to single target healing, I can put out more HPS than a holy paladin. Show me another healer that can have a 1s spamable heal that will crit for 15.6k and leave a 4.6k 'Shield' (for a total upwards of 20k), while also leaving a steady steam of healing through their Rejuvenation, Lifebloom, and Regrowth. The problem isnt that Resto Druids are 'bad' at single target healing, its that we are so 'good' on specific encounters.

On any fights that require a good amount of movement, any classes that do not have a high reliance on HoTs will be at a slight disadvantage. Last night as a favor to a friend of mine I actually did throw a paladin on Raid healing (with the two other Resto Druids) and they worked beautifully together. Hots took care of a large chunk of damage, while the Paladin used Beacon of Light on the MT and quickly brought up any targets that were at low health. Will we keep doing this? Probably not, but its not a horrible way of doing things.

(as a side note, Healer Composition is generally Holy Paladin x2, Resto Druid x2-3, Disc/Holy Priest x1, Resto Shaman x1.)

@Grizabella

I see nothing wrong with your healer composition, other than I'd convince one of those Priests to roll disc. Druids are the only class that makes sense to stack to me right now.

 

• Playered

How long can you sustain that magically superior HPS compared to a Paladin though?
Not to mention Nourish should not be doing 15.6k crits on anything other than a tank with either GS or VB up even with 4T7 on top of the glyph. My spreadsheet is saying you would need 4T7, the glyph and about 5000 spell power for an average crit of 15.5k and while it might not be 100% accurate I doubt it should be more than 500 healing off let alone 5000.

 

Arentios

I'm not quite managing to come up with a gear/buff set that would get 15k Nourishes (I'm capping out at 11-12k in Ulduar gear, Idol of Nourish, using 4 piece T7 set bonus, Glyph of Nourish, and pretty much best in slot in every other slot. Unfortunately I can't get your current gear as you logged out in a feral set, but going by progression, I feel I erred on the side of overestimation.

Throwing on a 4 HoT set-up instead of 3 (not always possible due to Wild Growth's behavior) would certainly bring it closer, but I'm still 1.5k+ off, and that's in BiS gear. I'm not counting potions/trinket activates/procs, but those are clearly outside the realm of discussion for 'spamming'. Naturally, the HoTs themselves would increase the HPS, definitely putting the theorycrafting a touch over the 15k mark (though that does not affect the Living Seed). Somewhat ironic given that they were worried about Druids doing competitive tank healing when they changed Lifebloom.

Anyway, at that point you're not really 'spamming' Nourish, as you need to interrupt every 7/10/18/27 seconds to put up HoTs. I do definitely get your point though, but the HPS is hardly much better than a Paladin (ours put out approximately 14000 HPS in 0 overheal situations), and comes at the cost of no Beacon of Light, which is simply amazing on certain hard modes (Iron Council, Freya, General, Deconstructor). Certainly a viable alternative, but I'd use a Paladin any day of the week on hard modes for the aforementioned Beacon. You are also running with 6-7 healers whereas we use 4-6, so there's a bit more cushion.

Claiming that Holy Paladin raid healing is viable based on the front end of non-hard mode Ulduar using 6-7 healers is a very weak claim, and definitely could use some support from guilds doing hard modes if there any good logs or parses of a Holy Paladin being used as such. I could also claim that a feral druid in DPS spec and gear can tank just fine having used that on some bosses for kicks, but I would sound very silly indeed.

Holy Priests stack just as well as resto druids, but Disc Priests certainly do not (weakened soul), Holy Paladins don't (too one dimensional), and resto shamans are stack, but not nearly to the extent that holy priests/resto druids do.

I modified the Rawr code a bit to include this scenario (as I'm not 100% sure on its current tank healing scenarios), and with 100% replenish uptime and innervate/pot, I came to about 3 minutes (possibly 3:30) of being able to spam this. The shortest hard mode where you need tank intensive healing is probably Iron Council at 6 minutes, or Thorim, but Thorim involves enough tank swaps that you cannot really demonstrate this strategy.

 

Ezarg

Uhm, relatively mediocre-geared holy pally that knows what he's doing can easily crit over and over for 20k+ at a much higher rate than any tree that I know of. And he doesn't have to worry about keeping up any hots in order to do so.

 

Allinone

Apologies, knee jerk posts will lead to knee jerk reactions. The numbers I posted were off Recount from our raid last night. It was during Iron Council on a Blood Death Knight tank. I would surmise that the actual 15.6k Crit happened while he had Vampiric Blood active. The number is real, the situation is…unique

With my current gear set, (4 piece t7, Nourish) and 4 stacks of hots, I can get 11k crits completely unbuffed (aside from tree form), which leaves a 3.3k Seed as well. Again, this number is in and of itself a bit flawed. As you have pointed out I won’t have 4 HoTs up at all times. Lets then abandon this line of thinking, the 15.6 crit is an atypical result. Lets instead focus on a more practical set of numbers.

My spreadsheet has the following HPS information based on my gear.

Regrowth HoT HPS: 416
Rejuvenation HoT HPS: 780
Lifebloom HoT (2 Stack Average) HPS: 966
Average Nourish Hit (Non Crit) (0 HoTs): 4870
Average Nourish Hit (Crit) (0 HoTs): 7305
Nourish Crit Chance: 43%
Spell Power (Raid Buffed) - 2872

Now, assuming that the separate tier bonuses are additive and not multiplicative, this leads to a 33% increase, A single HoT gives a 20% bonus to Nourish as well, so we can multiply the original hit by 1.53

Average Nourish Hit (3 HoTs) – 7,451
Average Nourish Crit (3 HoTs) – 11,176
Average Living Seed – 3352
Adjusted Healing Per Nourish crit – 14528

Expected Healing Per Nourish cast – (14528 x .43) + (7451 x 57) = 10494

I’m not about to try and model Nature’s Grace uptime based of a rotation like this. Lets go conservative and say that my average Cast time on Nourish during the spam is 1.2s. Between passive haste and an ~80% chance to refresh natures grace during a Nourish spam without it falling off, I would expect that average to be higher, but lets see where this puts us.

Nourish HPS – 10494/1.2 = 8745
Total (Max) HPS for the rotation – 10907

Over the course of an actual fight, the sustained HPS number will be lower, as any time spent refreshing HoTs (which have a lower HPS than Nourish) will lead to an overall drop in HPS, but they are needed obviously to prop up Nourish. Also, while more mana intensive a permanent 3 stack of Lifebloom could be kept rolling, it would only increase HPS by 483, but a 4% increase in HPS is hardly worth the enormous increased cost of mana to keep that 3 stack rolling. Weaving Wild Growth into the mix during high periods of damage however would lead to a ~1393 boost in single target HPS, or about a 12.7% increase. This does not take into account the other 4-5 targets it could possibly hit.

So, back to my original (if not ill planned) post. Druids are not bad single target healers. Any time that I’ve been tank healing along side a paladin, I’ve came out ahead on the meters (not that meters matter, but they are the only measurement tool available to use). Because of their longevity (and quite honestly because its more difficult for them to effectively raid heal) I would still rate them as a better single target healer (along with disc priests). However, I would rank Resto Druids as the 3rd best option for single target healing, ahead of Resto Shaman and Holy Priests. On a fight that requires much movement by the raid, or requires chasing down OT’s I might even rank Resto Druids higher as mobility will always be one of our greatest strengths. I don’t want to turn this into a ‘Resto Druids are so awesome’ post, but it is my firm belief that due to our versatility (2/5 for raid healing, 3/5 for Single Target), the fact that we stack as good if not better than any other healing class, Replenish, and a variety of other reasons that we are the most complete healing class in the game.

Sticking a Resto Druid on single target heals is not a horrible idea. Certain fights offer steady raid wide damage, these fights are a Rejuv/WG spammers bread and butter. A Rejuv spammer will output more HPS than any other healing class. Other fights do not however, Rejuvenation/WG spamming leads to more average results. On these type of fights there is nothing ‘wrong’ with assigning a druid to a tank.

 

Eddyqw

How many hard modes have heavy and consistent raid damage that a resto druid would be ideal for?

Flame Leviathan - hurr.
XT - yes.
IC - yes.
Freya - yes.
Hodir - yes.
Thorim - yes (it's random/spiky, but hitting enough people at once that high Rejuv coverage is worthwhile).
Mimiron - haven't attempts Heroic: Firefighter. Based on 10man experience, definitely yes.
Vezax - yes.
Yogg - dispeldispeldispeldispel.

I'm not going to say "A druid cannot heal a tank". Thats clearly not true and would be silly. But I do firmly believe that putting us in that role if you have a priest or a paladin in the raid is stupid. Druids might be the 3rd best healer for tank healing, but we're a far cry from a disc priest or a paladin's tank healing. Druids and holy priests are the best raid healers - I don't think anyone is arguing that point. Why are you putting the best raid healers on the tank? If you must assign a non-paladin/disc priest to a tank, use a shaman. Or get people to respec... dual spec is your friend.

Tanks don't tend to die to being whittled away (which is what hots are great at healing!), they die to bursts. Druids are capable of some very nice burst healing with swiftmend and NS of course, but you don't need to be assigned to tank healing to do that. Personally, I keep a rejuv rolling on the tanks, allowing me to swiftmend if necessary, but I wouldn't say I'm "tank healing". Its a bit like a paladin dropping a Holy Shock->FoL combo into a raid member who gets low. Sure, it saves lives, but it doesn't make them a raid healer.

If you have a disc priest or a paladin in the raid, put them on the tank. Put the resto shamans on the melee (or any other clumps you might have). Put holy priests and resto druids on the raid. Essentially: play to the strengths of each class/spec. I realise not every guild has access to an ideal healing makeup, but when you're doing hard modes and only have room for 4-5 healers, spec and class really begins to matter.

 

Rijndael

Resto Shamans are better tank healers than resto druids, I think. The thing about Nourish is, it gets boosted a lot by hots and the glyph, but its native coefficient is quite low, and while it has that nice +25% crit talent, it doesn't have a spellpower boosting talent like Tidal Waves or Empowered Healing. Glyphed LHW on the tank with Earth Shield will output numbers compatible to Nourish. The advantages of shamans on the tank are threefold:

(a) They have less preconditions to keep up (just Earthshield, vs 3 separate hots for us). This means they are far less likely to be caught with their pants down and GCD-locked during a burst event, whereas this happens to druids a lot more.

(b) Inspiration. People underestimate how much effective healing this is. On our recent Hodir 25 hardmode kill, inspiration accounted for 24% of healing done by our Disc priest -- ahead of all other healing spells used. (I was using Event Horizon Fight Statistics, which keeps track of absorbs and inspiration). A shaman in tank healing gear will easily have 50% crit on LHW, so Inspiration will basically be permanently up.

(c) Shamans get mana return on crit, we do not. They are almost as sustainable as paladins on the tank.

Finally, shamans just aren't as good on the raid as druids, except for a few select fights, so sticking them on the tank makes a lot more sense.

Also, druids can keep their hots to support a tank healer (and should, unless the fight has ridiculous raid damage), just as a shaman could keep Earthshield, so it's not entirely fair to count hots as druid-exclusive hps.

edit: I know people like druids on the raid, and they can certainly put out impressive HPS (13k on ideal fights isn't hard to pull off). Then you look at guilds like Vodka and see their priests output 20k HPS on Hodir Hard during Frozen Blows. And that's without divine hymn.

 

• Vykromond

Imp Tranq is a tolerable choice on some long fights. I definitely like using 2 Tranqs on XT Hard to hit a group two times for Tantrums. That said, I would rarely if ever put a point in Tranq over say Barkskin which as I noted a few pages ago is quite a good talent. I assume most druids taking 1/2 Tranq are doing so as "spillover" from having 1 point left after picking their preferred talents.

What about Jersey? Mafioso, murderers, addicts, juvenile vagrants, Bon Jovi. Here they praise these felonious people. Blighted little Jersey: guns, hookers, Goombas, Atlantic City. "Come home, criminal miscreants" reads the tourism website. And here come the hucksters, racketeers, trannies, and every korrupt-cop. Jersey, news flash: Criminals rarely benefit children, businesses, or organizations.

 

Beary

Thing about HoTs vs Burst damage on a tank is that HoTs cushion the damage and let the higher burst healers have a little more time before another blow. Even if I'm assigned to the raid I will put, if anything, LB on the tank. With a tic per second of about 1k, why not? I appreciate everything else you said, but I wanted to point out that HoTs are still very useful against burst damage. I'm not saying druids should be assigned to a tank for heals, just that it is good to support a tank with HoTs.

I'm one of those druid healers that have a finger in every pie of raid damage, I should probably be shot for it.

 

snipe2kill

Quite an exaggeration, unless you are also averaging the bloom effect into the ticks. RJ is more viable as it ticks for a good amount and allows the use of a quick swiftmend should the tank get low.

 

• uliko

A slow stack LB will average about 1k HPS without counting the bloom. Obviously it bottoms out at 500 HPS and peaks at 1,5k HPS depending on where in the cycle you are. Keeping RJ up as well is a good idea for, as mentioned, SM possibility.

Why hit food is bad
"You have to spend 10 seconds to apply it, you have to fish it and you cant use the feast."

 

Omen

I'm very similar. I believe that we should all be helping each other out where ever and whenever we can. Even if I'm not assigned to the tank, if I know raid damage will be minimal, I will spend some GCDs to throw up hots as well as roll a LB on him. There have been occasions where a few of those ticks kept the tank (and the spot SM or NS/HT) alive due to the MT Healer having to move.

 

khel

It's difficult imo to quantify the value of hots on a tank for keeping him alive, but I can tell you that prehotting the next tank in the taunt rotation for Thorim hard-mode, and keeping hots on the tank for Vezax and Mimiron P1, both drastically increased tank survivability for us. Most encounters in Ulduar require some healer movement at some point, and those hots are fire-and-forget buffers that helps cover situations where all of your main tank healers can't be casting when you need the heals most.

Maybe this isn't as necessary or beneficial if you have really well geared Druid or DK tanks, but when we are using a prot paladin or prot warrior this HoT buffer really helps.

 

calis

Does anyone have some experience in resto druid performances at vezax hard mode, as well as how many / what kind of healers should be in the raid?

 

Saxe1978

We have 5 Healer and 1 RetPala.

MT Heal Pala + 2 DisziPriest
Range Healer Druide (me)
Melee Healer RestoShamane

Diszi 1 heals up to the Mana ends, afterwards the other Diszi. takes over.
Priest stand in the black zones and shild their targets.
Shamane take the Earthshild on MT.
Druid heals MT with Reju HoTs.

Group Healer save their Mana for phase 2.

From Druid view. You place yourself against the boss and hit him. Uses the free Casts for your Healing Spells. Reju on the Tank or Wild Growth into the group. With reach the phase 2 should you still have 90% Mana. In phase 2 your Targets should be well supplied with Reju Rotation's. If necessary a Swiftmend or an Wild Growth. In phase 3 I have no more Mana and heal nearly only over free Casts.
I use Glyphe of Reju and also on free Casts Lifebloom for Mana gain.

an example Wow Web Stats

I try to go with maximum intelligence into the fight (regemming, Flask of dest. Wisdom) My Manapool is about ~28.000.

 

Vazu

You don't have to regem or go crazy with INT for hard mode Vezax. You need people to not miss shadow crashes and for MT healers to be smart and not overheal. I usually stand behind the boss with melee and treeform auto-attack. Everytime I get a Clearcast, I throw a Rejuv up on the MT. If I get another CC before Rejuv ends, I Regrowth the tank. But that's all I do until the Animus spawns. Basically you shouldn't need to spend more than 1-2k mana at MOST before P2.

 

Fallenangel

Only did the 10m version of vezax hardmode, what I did was make sure rejuv is always up, regrowth on OoC procs from melee attacks. If I got another proc before the HoT is over, toss a LB. SM if the tank drops below 15K HP. This should be enough for p1 and won't cost too much. I wouldn't cast rejuv on OoC since it's so cheap and I wouldn't let it drop either, since having a SM fodder is quite beneficial.

 

Nailer

I beg to differ. Having played all four healing classes and lacking extensive raid experience with none but priests I am fairly confident shamans are the worst choice for tank healing.

- Earth Shield, AA and Earthliving is nice but can not compete with our HOTs and seed in terms of both cushioning spikes and healing back moderate damage.

- Shamans lack the on-demand short CD burst we have. Riptide and Tidal Waves is not on par with a precasted Nourish followed up by Swiftmend, likely NG procs and proper juggling of tri-stack Lifeblooms.

- Even fully geared for crit their longevity is nowhere near that of paladins. In fact I have yet to see a druid run OOM sooner than any shaman save an AFK one.

- Talking about armor value you have a point here. Frankly I have not seen the numbers before. Still if anything I consider it a nice bonus towards passive mitigation rather than something that's going to save lives. I am sure we can agree it is spikes killing tanks, my concern about shaman burst potential remains.

Regarding that "pants down" situation, that should simply not be happening. When Swiftmend is on cooldown you are obviously more vulnerable. Force seeds and sustain NG regardless of 100% tank HP, be conscious about directing potential blooms towards that window of vulnerability and precast after meeting all these conditions. Communicate with your tank, he has his CDs for a reason. Communicate with your healers, even paladins need assistance now and then. If all else fails you still have NS. Should you run out all of these options and still need NS twice within 3 minutes then something else is awry, certainly nothing a shaman could have managed better than you.

I will be the first to admit calculus is not my choice for communication, Nourish may indeed look weaker on paper. But experience says otherwise, plus we have quite a big and powerful arsenal to complement it. In the end of the day the point is moot since no sane raid is going to run regularly without a pally or disc priest and 10 man is a non-issue. What I do feel is an issue though is I argued they are the worst for tank healing. And as we agree there are better raid healers save for a few special cases. Do our shamans suck so bad - highly doubt it - or are they really that much behind the rest? If so I can not begin to imagine why this has not raised some eyebrows yet. Yes they have nice utility but that does not offset the gap what I believe exists between their sense of achievement and other healers. I continue to refuse asking our shamans to respec elemental for farm nights but this has been going on for too long.

One last thing and please believe me it is nothing but genuine curiosity: That 20K HPS you mentioned is an actual number of effective healing you have a parse of? Just the other day after Mimiron I was playing around with numbers and came to a ~15k hypotetical cap for my current gear (2500 sp unbuffed), something I manage to near the more the less healers we do fights with. Correct me if I am wrong but isn't Prayer of Healing the highest HPS spammable heal in the game? If so that affects up to 5 targets and Frozen Blows is 4000 damage unresisted every 2 seconds. Barring crap DPS - which I am sure Vodka does not suffer from - Hodir hard mode does not require players to ignore Biting Cold excessively. Thus that leaves 4000 * 5 / 2 = 10k damage per second per party that needs to be healed disregarding JoL, VE, PoH glyph, HL glyph, Healing Stream and all the like, assuming 2 priests and a pally. Now if there is a link and it was more than a lucky spike I am jealous, although druids still retain more control over deciding whom to heal when doing their RJ / WG spam.

 

Omen

I thought I would share my XT-002 Hard Mode parse with everyone in case there are folks who use Revitalize data.

linky

From the data on XT, there are 2 resto druids both who use a fairly intense RJ/WG spam. There was an average of 47.67 procs per player with a mana bar, which translates to 47.67% mana per player or 23.835% mana per player per druid. Given that the fight was 10 minutes long, this normalizes to 0.039725% mana per player per druid per second. The absolute mana gains, of course, depend on how many players you have with mana bars and how big those bars are, but for this particular raid setup we are looking at 91.075 average mp5 per player or or 45.5 per player per druid.

I haven't looked at the relative energy gains, rage gains, and runic power gains, but I suppose I could just total the number of procs over the entirety of the raid to calculate the average procs per second.

Also interesting is my 4T8 Rejuv data (I ran to Dalaran right after the FL kill because I got enough tokens to pick up the chest. Yay!) which accounted for nearly 10% of my total healing that fight.

20k is roughly the theoretical maximum for priests that they rotate their PoH through groups to optimize the PoH hot ticks. On fights such as Hodir, this amount amplifies greatly because of the 100% haste buff of the moonbeams. For druids, we're not far behind if you include ~1900 hps you get from 4T8. I'll go crunch some numbers. The only drawback is that we are completely capped haste-wise whereas priests can potentially reach a 1s PoH cast time and potentially over 40,000 hps. Of course this isn't at all sustainable and highly overkill in any current encounter, but I'm guessing on fights like Mimiron P2 Hard Mode it's better to overheal than underheal.

Edit: Napkin Math for our potential HPS. Using the average values from my XT data (~3050 buffed SP) and using a standard WG, RJ*5 rotation averaged over 18s,
WG = 814.2 hps * 6 targets = 4885.2 hps
WG overlap (3s over in every 18s excluding the initial cast where 12 people have WG) = 814.2 * 6 targets * 3s / 18s = 814.2 hps
RJ tick = 2456.7; RJ = 818.9 hps * 15 targets = 12283.5 hps
4T8 = 1889.1 * 15s / 18s = 1574.25 hps
Total = 4885.2 + 814.2 + 12283.5 + 1574.25 = 19557.15 hps

The initial 18s cycle will only have 2s of 12xWG, but over an extended period of time it should approach a 3s of 12xWG average per 18s cycle. I probably screwed up in the math somewhere so if someone could double check this, that would be great!

 

Ezarg

@ Omen

I think your theory is fairly good. In practice, since nearly all fights are pretty movement intensive, you won't probably maintain 18 rejuvs and a WG going at the same time.

But 15-16k is definitely achievable. Maybe even 18k. I clocked 13.3k effective healing on our last Hodir kill (really, really sloppy kill at that...) and I didn't use WG to the limit. I'll shoot for 15k next week.

 

Vazu

So, 95% of my healing is Rejuvenation and Wild Growth.

All I do is Rejuv 5 people, Wild Growth, repeat. So it's not impossible at all. That's how a Druid should raid heal most hard modes.

Edit: ..and Rejuv/WG are both instant. So, I'm not sure why movement has anything to do with keeping them up, unless the person is bad.

 

Ezarg

Looking at your kill from May 20th, you don't do this yourself - 83 4T8 procs over 3:43 combat time.

Just saying that we're not machines.

Even if you do that, realistically a lot of your 4T8 proc will be just overheal. And you better be over your haste cap 100% of the time.

 

malthrin

Just gonna quote myself from a couple months ago here:
Vindication!

 

Vazu

(XT- Hard) 95% healing from Rejuv / WG: Wow Web Stats
(IC - Hard) 98% healing from Rejuv / WG: Wow Web Stats
(Hodir - Hard) 95% healing from Rejuv / WG: http://wowwebstats.com/1djiba64rhszm...80000002376578
(Kologarn) 94% healing from Rejuv / WG: Wow Web Stats

Those logs are all from last night, by the way. There are some fights where I use Regrowth a little. Usually when we are dealing with healing more than 3 tanks. For example I was keeping RG/Rejuv (more or less) on like 5 tanks last night when we did Crazy Cat Lady. But for the most part, literally 95% or so of what I cast is just Rejuv / WG.

 

sulliwan

While blanket hotting is extremely effective, it's also extremely silly in most situations that are not first 2 phases of iron council or frozen blows during Hodir or Mimiron p2.
While hardmodes are raid damage intensive, it's usually not the overall raid damage that kills people, it's the bursts of increased damage that are usually predictable and giving up some of your hps output to make sure those people don't die is generally a good idea. First use the best tool you have to heal up the predictable damage, then fill in the rest of your time with blanket rejuves. For example, lifebloom on gravity bomb on XT will most likely lower your overall hps output, however it will bloom exactly when the person will need the heal the most. Same thing with regrowth+rejuve on rooted/furied people on Freya, keeping hots on tanks on almost any fight, etc.

As for how much like a machine you can play, looking at our last council during first 2 phases, I had 31 WG casts and 156 rejuve casts in 214sec for an effective hps of 10.5k and average casttime of 1.14sec. Since instants can not be queued, 1.14 is pretty close to the theoretical maximum I can get. Third phase I swapped from blanket hotting to keeping all hots up on tank+disruption soakers, which again, lowers your hps, however it increases the chances of people staying alive.