9 days since out last post! Heroic 25 ToC must be keeping us busy

I made a post on WoW Healing forums about an Innervate change. I have talked with a few Individuals on here about it, and how it could be useful. Innervate. Now it is kind of like a self advertisement, but I hope I get a postive response from that.

Real reason why I am here: Northrend Beasts Heroic. A lot of healers/tanks/guilds are having trouble with tanks dieing. We have revamped our strategy a bit, and it seemed to work well, with only taking 5 healers instead of 6. We don't have a holy paladin. I found myself more tankhealing than raid healing, so I suggested I sit out. As there is a fair bit of AoE damage in the fight, it comes in bursts, not constantly like IC Hardmode of Twins. I found myself only healing the raid after the stomp during the first boss, where healing is most critical here. But it wasn't even needed, as a priests CoH (we had 2 CoHers) topped off the melee almost instantly. It helps to pre hot before Icehowls charge, and Icehowls frost breath is avoidable through ret pally's freedom.

I am curious to see how other resto druids are handling this fight. I feel as a raid buffing healer (as our role in my guild), we are pretty useless on the first road bump of 3.2, and I call it that because a lot of guilds are stuck there, like mine.

I think you're underestimating your tank healing skills here. Sure, we're no paladins and cannot provide the support shamans do but in terms of pure single target HPS you're not worse than them.
I find myself melee hotting a bit during P1 most of the time until the debuff on the tanks stacked three times. Then I spammed nourish on the tank und hotted both tanks to heal the dot. Worked just fine.
In P2 I used my WG for heavy aoe damage (poison / burn on more than 4-5 raid members). The rest of the time was MT healing.
In P3 (as you already said) prehotting the raid is just most of the job.

Btw: After we have managed our tank healing (took us 2 or 3 tries) we nearly never had problems with that anymore. Our healer setup was 2 resto druids, 1 paladin, 1 disc priest, 1 holy priest and 1 resto shaman. I think druids' role in nearly every fight is raid healing, but in some situation our burst single target healing is needed and not that bad at all.

But there's another fight where we're just useless - faction champions. I really don't know what we should do in that fight

You should be staying in caster form, cycloning, decursing, abolishing poison, rooting pets, nature's grasping when you get aggro, killing totems, and of course, healing.

That's plenty, no?

Haha, no joke. That fight keeps me plenty busy between AoE damage, decursing, poisons and some occasional CC.

The tanks dieing is not our problem after our first night of serious attempts on Heroic Beasts. We run with a melee heavy group and on P2, when Acidmaw is above ground and Dreadscale doing his AoE Burning Bile, we seem to just lose it. We had to call the last attempts because people kept randomly getting DCed and couldn't come back in until we wiped, but I think what we should do is keep melee spread between the two worms. Any suggestions?

Sounds like maybe your melee need to be a little quicker on their toes. As soon as your melee gets this they should step back and spread out or they will just kill eachother. Something that might help to... We have our two tanks switch off on the worm if they get burning bile, So that others can be dispelled. Most of the time this strat works well because our tanks 80% of the time get the burning bile.

I am probably one of only a handfull of Resto Druids specced the way I am, but I find it very useful for the role I fulfill in my guild.
I am a Tank helaer, and along with our only raiding Holy Paladin, have very little trouble keeping up the tanks. People talk about Nourish, but I find Healing Touch to be a better spell. With the haste I have, I can spit it out as fast as the GCD. This, coupled with standars HoT's, is easily enough to keep 2 Tanks up working in conjunction with a Paladin.
While HT isn't mana efficient, there are so many trinkets around these days that will maximise your conservation of mana. Rare are the times that I run out, uless the dps is too slow, of course.
I welcome any critisism on this, but I much prefer to be challenged in a raid, instead of sitting back spamming WG and Rejuvenations on people.

HT Glyph gets your HT down to the GCD. Throwing Naturalist on top of that drops it below the GCD. There is very little benefit to having it below the GCD (sure, sometimes 0.3s will mean the difference between living or not, but not usually). Faster, but below the GCD does not help your throughput.

Putting those points in Naturalist means you didn't take Nature's Splendor. If you maintain Rj and Rg on two tanks, not having Nature's Splendor will cost you about two direct heals per minute.

Note that Nourish also takes only one GCD to cast. Unglyphed, but with a HoT on the tank, a non-crit Nourish lands for almost the same amount (within 1% at 3000 SP) as a Glyphed HT.

Take points out of Naturalist and put them into Bounty, and your Nourishes (and Regrowths) crit much more often than HT, meaning more Living Seed, meaning you are less likely to need that 0.3s faster HT. Change the HT glyph to a Nourish glyph, and even with one of your HoTs a non-crit Nourish heals for more than a non-crit HT, and both spells take no longer than a GCD to complete.

At 80, I think you can really only justify the Glyph of HT if you plan to be throwing direct heals at someone with no Hots on them on a regular basis. In almost all PvE situations, Bounty+Splendor+Swiftness+Nourish Glyph will be better than Naturalist+HT Glyph. You'll need two more talent points. I'd suggest Subtlety, Tranquil Spirit, or Improved Tranq as places to grab them.

Don't overlook our mobility. Between that, and the actions Grizabella previously mentioned, I think we're definitely pulling our weight in that encounter.

I switch back and forth between cyloning the Warrior or Hunter, as they provide undispellable MS for the raid. We kill the warrior earlier though. Rooting the DK is huge as well as the warrior. Bear Bash is good too. If your a LW, drums of panic is funny .

I have yet to encounter Twins HM, but I assume its a IC Hardmode repeat, with more situational awareness. As far as having too much melee goes, try splitting them up on the two worms. That is what my raid had to do. We also (like i said before) 5 healed beasts instead of 6, and healing wasn't "a problem". The overall EHPS of the fight is lower than other fights, so it may be able to be 4 healed. We don't have a orange mace either. It adds 1-2 more DPS in order to meet enrage, which we had semi trouble with because people were dieing.

Really depends on your assignments. I was put on soaking duties and to start with my hps was really low, like 6.5k HPS, with our holy paladins FFA healing with beacons on tank doing about 12k HPS. When I got the hang of soaking my HPS wrose considerably to around 9.5k HPS (similar to IC) with the holy pallys doing about 8k HPS. It really is a fight that depends on your assignment and your familiarity with soaking if you are put on that duty, which you most likely will be because you can cast hots while moving.

Oh and also, you should probably take one or two more healers to twins for safety because we ran with 6 healers and were miles ahead of any enrage with dps saving cooldowns for when they reach 100 stacks and get the 100% damage buff yet people were dying randomly.

I've come nothing but top on healing for our faction champions. When they switch targets (focus one of them) rejuv+SM, then de-poison if you have a rogue. That will save so many lives. Also, they tend to go for the same targets and just switch between them, so keep as many as you can remember hotted with rejuv, so all you have to do is hit swiftmend. Get a disc priest to do the same but PW:S. Makes the encounter so much easier.

@Avenged: Whether or not the tank or raid gets a debuff depends on the state of the worm, tail in the floor or out. Each worm does one type of debuff.

I always focustarget the rogue or another melee to see what player the rogue attacks. I've noticed that the rogue switches focus every few seconds, so always having a distance to the rogue and running away if focused works really well (yeah he will Shadowstep and punch you 1-2 times, but then switches his target again). It looks like the other melees doesn't switch that often (at least what I saw). At Faction Champions I find myself often spamming Nourish on the rogue's target and only throwing rejuvenation and wild growth while I move to a safer spot (far away from every melee). Worked fine for me till now, but I didn't see the Faction Champions 25 hardmode yet. As most players die of burstdmg I prefer spamming nourish over putting reju on the whole raid. Maybe this would be a nice encounter for HT Glyph (+ Naturalist). The idea of spamming reju on targets so they don't get focused sounds interesting, I will definitely test this on the next chance.

I have heard of some people 3 healing Faction Champions, and I could see this happening. Disc priest, Resto druids, and another healer. The HPS of the fight wasn't much, it was burst damage. Disc Priest and another healer for that, and resto druid to blanket aoe's.

I died to the arcane mage a few times. Arcane Blast for 13k to a Arcane Barrage for 14k within .78 seconds according to our combat logs. I suggest Warlocks wear Stamina/PvP gear with a hit raiting trinket. They like to get on the warlock. And some priests as well, if you have the Stam/armor trinket from regular 5 man ToC, I suggest that too.

The healing required really depends on what random makeup you get on Faction Champs, some are more burst damage heavy than others. We always wait to see what we get, then assign roles etc., it's never exactly the same every time, and some weeks you can get a really easy group (or vice versa). Typically we've 3 healed it on 10 man and 6 healed it on 25 but i can definitely see situations where you could get away with fewer healers.

As far as healing for a druid on this encounter, my strategy has been keep hots on as many people as possible and SM/nourish anyone getting focused, and remove poisons if you have a rogue .... it's a lot like healing an arena or BG really.

We assign each of our healers to a specific DPS NPC to heal. Or rather, heal that NPC's target using healing macros for the most part. Something like:

Create one of these macros for each spell you want to use in this way. Having the macros help you to free your focus up for more CC'ing, clensing, and random Rejuv spamming.

My raid uses CC pretty aggressively in this fight though. We have full time CCers assinged to the warrior, DK, ret pally, and sometimes the rogue. As well as part time CCing on the other DPS NPCs. So other raids might not find this type of approach very effective if they leave a lot more of the NPCs free to inflict damage.

So I've recently started playing my druid a lot more, taking him into my guilds alt runs as a healer. I started looking around at other resto druid specs recently and saw that mine was a bit abnormal. Some things I can understand, I need to drop points from Tranquil Spirit since it only benefits Nourish and not by enough to count. I've read about Living Seed and how much effective healing it can do in a raid, which surprised me a bit, but I'll put points into there. There were a couple other things I need to change that I understand, but there are 2 cases which I straight up just don't get. One, I see very few druids specing into Natural Perfection for 3% crit. I could see how this might not have a lot of value before ToC, but with the 4 piece t9 and Druids looking for more crit gear, I figured many druids would go for more crit in the talents more quickly than on their gear. And yet so very few druids have ANY points in Natural Perfection, let alone one or two floaters. My second point deals with Nature's Grace in the balance tree. Three points for a guarunteed 20% haste buff on spell crit. Now I can see the value of this for some fights where we might have to do a lot of Nourish/Regrowth for burst healing, but I don't see a 20% haste buff being valuable to use 3 points on for some fights that we can do fine without it on. If the buff lasted a bit longer I could understand, but 3 seconds is weak. We're already supposed to have enough haste to reduce the GCD to 1 second, and past that its personal preference, but I think those 3 points could be better spent. And yet I see 90% of resto specs with points in it, most of them maxed out.

So my questions are:
1) Why do druids not place value in Natural Perfection?
2) Why do druids place value in Nature's Grace?

P.S: Spec I'm probably gonna change to.

Nature's Grace is one of those situational things. I personally try not to use any casts if I don't have to, but the few times that I do cast, NG is worth those 3 points I've found. In a raid I'll have around 40-50% crit on a regrowth or nourish. If I do find myself casting, it's often a really sticky situation where swiftmend is on cooldown and I know that hots won't heal fast enough for the spike damage. If it crits, which either of those will have a high chance to, it will proc a faster next cast. A lot of times you can chain cast hasted rg/nourishes like that, which is also very nice for tank healing.
An example of what I'm talking about would be anub'arak. I did the hardmode on 10 man last week and this week, and found that in p3 blanketing hots over the raid plus rg/nourishing the people with the permafrost dot is a very efficient way to keep people alive. NG helps a lot here, where a lot of the time I'll have the haste buff up.

I agree with NP though, most people don't have the t9 4pc yet and without it...there is no need to stack crit.

Totally agree.

Most times when i procs, i wont even notice, since i aint casting a casttime spell, but its in the situations where u really need to punch out some serious hps that it shines.

Nourish got approx 50% crit chance, and spamming 12K crits every second in a sticky situation, does save lifes, and saving a tank or topping up a raid with super fast nourishes is a joy.

I like it a lot, but doesnt bother with NP either yet,

Im prefrable to NG for nourish spam, crit doesnt have a signifigant value due to the fact hots cant crit(exception t9 4p) but also because haste is such a huge stat, for us its basically what hit rating is for dps. Couple that with the fact that itemization nowadays is on items : crit/mp5 VS spirit/haste we dont tend to get it from gear(exception T8 had an assload of crit) also you gotta look at it from the perspective that all critical strikes are hypothetical HPS vs faster casts which in the long run will stack up and equate to more spells cast.


The thing you should be looking into is the fact you are 2/2 ET while that is a valid choice ( i prefer 1 myself ) you contradict it by only having 1 point in TS. toc is not a huge mana burn even on heroic its a joke mana is not an issue that said i would suggest taking 1 or 2 points out of replenishment and putting them in TS: this is because A the More points is just chance to proc so filling it up is wasted especially because its 5/10/15 percent. also B it counts for very little of your overall return mana. Plus the mana you save from casting nourish overtime will probly end up being more than the mana you would have gotten back from a 10 percent extra chance to proc an ability .

There is no way you should move points from Revitalize to Tranquil Spirit, unless the only thing you ever heal is a rage-capped tank.

A point in TS reduces the mana cost of Nourish by 2%. That is 2% of 18% of base mana, or 0.36% of base mana saved every time you cast Nourish (actually a bit less than that because of Moonglow and OoC).

A point in Revitalize gives any mana user a 5% chance to get 1% of total mana back, for every Rejuv tick (this ignores the benefit from WG also), so about .05% total mana per rejuv tick. Total mana is roughly six times base mana for many mana users. So a point in Revitalize restores roughly as much raid-mana per Rejuv-tick-on-mana-user as a point in TS provides for a Nourish cast.

This completely ignores the benefit of Revitalize to Energy users and DKs.

TS will save you personally more mana (unless you maintain Rj and WG on yourself anyway), but the raid benefit (probably even in a 5 man) is larger with Revitalize.

Theres no way you can argue that first off i said take 1-2 points im not saying the whole thing so in actuallity you just reduce the chance to proc and by a very small amount.

Second i know we have a thread around here with the actual math but the gaines from rune power and energy from revitalize over a 5 minutes fight was caculated to 50- 60 energy per minute. Thats one combo and the rune value was something like 50 which is 1 stike worthy. this is not only to mention that we are messing with a science of energy /rune power return and a perfectly planned rotation may go to waste.

I am not an expert on DK's, but I believe that only 2 specs THRIVE on Runic Power, Frost Strike and the Shadowfrost 2h Deathcoil Spam spec. Neither of which would complain about extra runic power because it messed up their rotation. As far as energy goes, there is not perfectly planned rotation. Sinister Strike Glyph allows for RNG in combo points; and AGAIN, I am sure not one rogue would complain about extra energy, and if you need me to explain feral druids, then insert sadface for your ignorance.

This also has even more to do with mana restore for mana users, like Healers, Mages, etc. Look at the previous pages in these forums. It is clear that the better portion of the Restoration Druid community support nothing other than 3/3 Revitalize. Those who think points out of this can/should be dropped are completely ignorant of the support utility it provides. I start out our DK's with full RP before the pull with this talent. They enjoy it. It allows for running in damage from DC.

As far as spec's go; look up other druids on these forums spec's, and balance it out with what works in your raid comp. I like NG because of burst healing, on a tank, a plasmablast target, Sara's Fervor (I think), and other abilities like that. It isn't that useful in naxx, or regular modes Ulduar, but once more damage is being pumped out on Hardmodes, it sees more play time.