Resto (PvE) Healing Discussion - Page 9

airmessy · 01/21/09, 9:21 AM

Originally Posted by Ger

Could any1 explain me what is challanging in Naxxramus 10 pple with 2 healers?
We are doing this from very beginning and last problem was - we missed one healer at thursday raid (last day of the WoW week in EU) and respecced our retrodin to holy, he had 1.5k spellpower and 15k mana buffed, and we wiped at Horsemans several times because his mistakes or OOM.
PS
I am healing in 25 pple raids usally and tanking in 10 pple, i've been healing in Naxx 10 pple only 2 times in the beginning of WotLK

Nothing is a challenge in naxx 10 with 2 healers. Only trouble you might have is if kel decides to ice block a healer. Then it can get a little sticky but still quite easy to save the other healer and keep the mt and add tank up *if the adds are spawned yet*

red · 01/21/09, 11:20 AM

Most fights in normal Naxxramas can be healed by 1 person. Sapphiron is especially easy to solo heal as a druid, since damage is very predictable. All fights are very doable with 1 dedicated healer and 1 support (hybrid, etc) who heals when needed and is dps othewise.

malthrin · 01/21/09, 1:28 PM

Originally Posted by Norfair

Besides all that I find Naxxramas a bad place to look at healing meters since it's so easy. We did a 2x 20-man achievement the other week and our group had to quit halfway because of the lag. When we tried to continue, we couldn't get the same 20 people in the raid and the other half of the guild was saved, so we ended up doing half of the instance (Abo wing, 4H, Loatheb and Frostwyrm Lair) with 4 healers. I guess you could do the entire instance with 3 healers even since it still wasn't a challenge at all.
Now, if you run with 6 or more healers all you do is fight amongst each other to top player X off first. This is entirely different from healing in the end of TBC, where it actually mattered how many healers you brought and you had to stick to your assignment much more in order to beat the encounter.

In the end, healing meters aren't about who is best. I'd focus more on keeping your assignments alive and not fucking up on stupid things like not walking out of void zones and things like that. That being said, I think you could dish out more healing by keeping up Lifebloom on the tank. It's 1 gcd per 10 seconds but it increases your healing done tremendously.

This is a great post and deserves to be repeated. Healing meters for Naxx 25, unless you're bringing 3-4 healers, demonstrate nothing more than who's paying the most attention. Additionally, "total healing done" on an encounter is mostly an e-peen stat; the useful information is in putting that number into the context of who each healer healed, when they healed them, and using what spells.

Natureseer · 01/21/09, 1:52 PM

Originally Posted by Rhaegar

This looks like a nice build to have, especially used as you mentioned it, Silkworm. Might be I'll try that one out myself. After using Living Seed and Replenish for a while, I'm very unsatisfied with it. Although Replenishment works way better for me than the first time I tried it (due to a misreading in the tooltip, which says % of mana... doh! Wasted on Ret/Tank-Pallies...), it is as of now officially underpowered. I seem to be unable to retrack the blue post, but I read it for sure, that they're addressing Replenishment's uselessness now.

For Living Seed, I'm still very unsure of it's use. Yes, it does ~3% of my healing. But it seems at the moment, that we wouldn't really need those 3% anyways. As a sidenote, we're just running Naxx10 so far and haven't done Saph with drakes, but so far we didn't encounter any fights I had to use a pot. Innervate, yes, but what are skills for beside using them?
Anyways, what freaks me out most is the point that I see Living Seed running out without proccing! I guess this is due to very high levels of avoidance, but it just seems useless to me right now, since people will only get more avoidance instead of less. I checked our last night's Naxx WWS and had 287 crits on my Regrowth, which added up to 184 Living Seed proccs. So this means more than 30% of my seeds ticked off unused. I don't like this!

Besides the mechanic of "% of effetive heal" irritates me. Those above mentioned Regrowths added to a average hit of ~7000HP. My average Living Seed proc was around ~1800HP, which is more than 500HP below the estimated values.

Long story short, I understand why you switched those points out and I'm definitely thinking about it myself. Especially because I feel myself lacking of a big "Oh shit button" for Naxx with 2 healers, if Swiftmend AND NS are on cooldown.

I have points in both Replenish and Living Seed right now, mostly because I don't really feel like they would go to much use anywhere else.
In regards to Living Seed, it really only helps me in heroics, because there aren't other healers there to undermine it's use. The only real place I've actually seen it proc consistantly with a real purpose is when we were doing 25 man Sarth w/ 3 drakes. I would get a Living Seed up before each breath, as an extra buffer. It's not much, especially if the Regrowth was part overheal, but when a breath is 30k+ you take what you can get. Honestly, I feel like Living Seed is just a bad talent for 3 points (better than replenish, but that's another story.) A while back I was discussing it with another healer in my guild (before WOTLK actually came out, but the argument is the same.) This is the relevant part:

Also, the Living Seed proc comes only from critical heals, which are inherently going to overheal, because when you're deciding what heal to use, you are not basing your decision on what a critical heal will heal for, you are basing it on what a normal heal will heal for. This creates a problem where in virtually every situation the Living Seed is not actually working at full potential, which is basically wasted talent points.

In addition, crit itself is not a stat that resto druids are going to want. Why don't they want it? Because a) less than half of resto druid heals benefit from crit and b) the talents that are supposed to make us "want" crit (living seed + nature's grace) are not good enough to make us want crit. So at this point it's like a circle, where druids don't want crit because we don't have talents that are incentive enough to make us want it, and we don't want the talents that are supposed to make us want it, because they scale off a stat that most druids would pass on for a better stat, like haste. And druids choose haste over crit because of the lack of good talents. (This creates a circle in my mind anyway..)

Aamaretto · 01/21/09, 6:44 PM

Originally Posted by Natureseer

In addition, crit itself is not a stat that resto druids are going to want. Why don't they want it? Because a) less than half of resto druid heals benefit from crit and b) the talents that are supposed to make us "want" crit (living seed + nature's grace) are not good enough to make us want crit. So at this point it's like a circle, where druids don't want crit because we don't have talents that are incentive enough to make us want it, and we don't want the talents that are supposed to make us want it, because they scale off a stat that most druids would pass on for a better stat, like haste. And druids choose haste over crit because of the lack of good talents. (This creates a circle in my mind anyway..)

I definitely agree with this. What makes me nervous is the GC quote about haste appearing on lower level gear, found at this thread:

Originally Posted by Ghostcrawler

Haste and armor pen are things we put on lower level gear to make it lower level gear. Higher level gear will be more suitablly optimized.

What is more suitably optimized? Perhaps this is a discussion for the itemization post, but it has impacts to how we heal as well. Should we start moving towards more direct heals to make use of crit that's going to be on gear? Or was he simply telling us that haste is going to be maxed out at upper level gear so that we don't have to worry about it and we can concentrate on spirit and spell power?

Akomos · 01/21/09, 7:11 PM

He's telling everyone that they're aware that Haste and Crit (in our case, other classes have similar issues with Crit or AP or Agility or Spirit or whatever) are suboptimal uses of item budget and it's intentional and that everyone should chill out.

Mondas · 01/21/09, 8:07 PM

Originally Posted by KrinKer

Just go around and throw rejuv at 15 people, it's retard proof and you will own the healing metter

For one, I already own the healing meter so that is moot. Do I win something?

The change in T7 bonus as well as the reasons I stated lean me to use LB as my standard single target raid healing spell. In addition, for Sapphiron, due to the constant health drain my HoTs almost never get healed over so the LB's almost always bloom.

Mondas · 01/21/09, 8:11 PM

Originally Posted by Akomos

He's telling everyone that they're aware that Haste and Crit (in our case, other classes have similar issues with Crit or AP or Agility or Spirit or whatever) are suboptimal uses of item budget and it's intentional and that everyone should chill out.

Yes, I read GC's quote to mean that as item budgets increase the lesser stats will not and, therefore, those stats will occupy a smaller proportion of the item's budget.

Nitz · 01/21/09, 8:38 PM

Even with the modified set bonus Lifebloom still has less HPM, less HPS and less H/GCD than Rejuvenation, especially on Sapphiron.

• Playered · 01/21/09, 10:27 PM

Lifebloom as a raid healing tool is so reliant on the final bloom being near fully effective to compete it is somewhat silly to use it. RJ will heal around 2k over 3 seconds while LB will heal 1200 in the same time and the damage taken is generally closer to 1k per sec rather than 500 per sec so the benefit of using smaller ticks gets reduced further.

Considering the cost difference (with Idol and 2T7) is a huge total of 5 mana... well quite honestly the downsides of LB (no SM material, more time needed to babysit due to 8 second shorter duration, reliance on the bloom..) compared to using RJ are just not worth it for a saving of 5 mana.

Today I had something around 70% RJ on Sapphiron but it felt slightly inferior to my normal usage here which is somewhat half that with RG making up a large part of the difference in healing. My healing done didn't really change much nor did other healers edge closer to me on healing than normal but it obviously works... it just might make you feel a little numb.

Aamaretto · 01/22/09, 12:06 AM

Along those same lines, it seems that RJ would be more effective on Loetheb than anything else. In the past I've tried to hot up people with LB so that it blooms when you can heal again, but that's so reliant on timing and chasing around the spore things that it doesn't seem like the most effective use of my time. It almost seems like throwing out RJ's on as many people in the raid as I can get would do more even though it would only get in 1-2 ticks. Or would nourish be a better raid healing tool in that fight?

grutak · 01/22/09, 10:24 AM

I haven't tried RJ on Loatheb yet. This week I tried to get LB on as many people as possible during the 10sec - 1sec time frame. Throw up WG in that last second, and then get off 2 nourishes during the 3 second window. However, now that I'm thinking on it, LB vs RJ works out to about 800(2 LB ticks) vs 1900(1 RJ tick). I would still want to get a few LBs up during the 10-7 time frame though for the bloom.

CowTree · 01/22/09, 12:39 PM

Originally Posted by Aamaretto

Along those same lines, it seems that RJ would be more effective on Loetheb than anything else. In the past I've tried to hot up people with LB so that it blooms when you can heal again, but that's so reliant on timing and chasing around the spore things that it doesn't seem like the most effective use of my time. It almost seems like throwing out RJ's on as many people in the raid as I can get would do more even though it would only get in 1-2 ticks. Or would nourish be a better raid healing tool in that fight?

I've found it best for me to use both LB blooms and RJ. I think one needs to keep up RJ's & RG's on as many targets as possible to give you options with SM, as it is used it in every window. 3 stacking LB also works for me, if I think I missed the 3rd bloom target, as it can potentially heal for over 3k. The problem with that is you lose 2 GCD's, but it seems to work well for me to compensate for a missed bloom.

Ezarg · 01/22/09, 4:07 PM

On Loatheb, I schedule 2 lifeblooms with 2 stacks to bloom in the window (one on the MT) - that put's me at ~9 sec to the window. Then I throw Rejuvenation around on whoever else I can (~5-6) until ~2 secs before the window. Then I hit WG (which will tick for the duration of the healing window at this point - typically 2 secs before the window opens). Then I precast RG on the lowest person, and usually fit another RG on that person or someone else. Repeat over until people fall down to ~30%, then time same thing except forget WG/RG, just time your Tranquility. If the other healer is doing not too shabby, we can heal like this for a pretty long time. At start of the fight, I don't have to bother with RG usually - that's normally only for blooms > #8. I reached bloom #16 and #18 on two occasions. I usually heal out of tree form there so I squeeze a few moonfires now and then - "aggressive healing" as I call it. If the DPS can't get him down by then, then there is something seriously wrong...

It sounds complicated but once you get the hang of it, it's fairly rhythmical. The plus side of the fight is that as a druid healer you don't really care much about a crit buff so you can just sit in one spot and keep on healing - no need to chase the spores. Threat is a non-issue there because the tank keeps on whacking him, you got only 3 seconds every 20 seconds to heal, and the tank does now 140% threat while you have only 70%.

PS: In the pinch, battle rez can be a nice healing tool too...

Mondas · 01/22/09, 5:59 PM

Originally Posted by Playered

Lifebloom as a raid healing tool is so reliant on the final bloom being near fully effective to compete it is somewhat silly to use it. RJ will heal around 2k over 3 seconds while LB will heal 1200 in the same time and the damage taken is generally closer to 1k per sec rather than 500 per sec so the benefit of using smaller ticks gets reduced further.

Considering the cost difference (with Idol and 2T7) is a huge total of 5 mana... well quite honestly the downsides of LB (no SM material, more time needed to babysit due to 8 second shorter duration, reliance on the bloom..) compared to using RJ are just not worth it for a saving of 5 mana.

Today I had something around 70% RJ on Sapphiron but it felt slightly inferior to my normal usage here which is somewhat half that with RG making up a large part of the difference in healing. My healing done didn't really change much nor did other healers edge closer to me on healing than normal but it obviously works... it just might make you feel a little numb.

I can see your argument, however, you know they changed the 2T7 bonus to Lifebloom? I also don't have the Rejuv Idol so for me LB is much cheaper for "confetti" casting. Also, we seem to live more on the edge for Sapphiron with most of the raid hovering around 50% health so my LB's generally bloom. I'm sure as our gear improves LB will be less viable with fewer and fewer blooms each fight, but for now I run around hearing the blooms all round me.

I do throw a Rejuv and LB on targets that are high risk, i.e. they seem to always be low on health (maybe they don't get out of the blizzard fast enough), but their dps is too high to let them pay for their slacking, lol.

• Playered · 01/22/09, 7:59 PM

Originally Posted by Mondas

I can see your argument, however, you know they changed the 2T7 bonus to Lifebloom? I also don't have the Rejuv Idol so for me LB is much cheaper for "confetti" casting. Also, we seem to live more on the edge for Sapphiron with most of the raid hovering around 50% health so my LB's generally bloom. I'm sure as our gear improves LB will be less viable with fewer and fewer blooms each fight, but for now I run around hearing the blooms all round me.

I do throw a Rejuv and LB on targets that are high risk, i.e. they seem to always be low on health (maybe they don't get out of the blizzard fast enough), but their dps is too high to let them pay for their slacking, lol.

Yes I am rather aware that they changed the bonus, considering I posted after the patch was live with direct numbers, I also made sure to put that this was under the assumption of both the 2T7 and the Idol.
If your guild likes to have its raid sitting at 50%~ HP for the majority of Sapphiron then hey thats good for you as you want to use LB and it enables the biggest crutch of the spell to not be an issue in regards to efficiency.

trismegistus · 01/22/09, 8:35 PM

I would say it depends on your healing group and the raid size for that encounter.

We ran our first real attempt at Malygos 10man last night and I found LB spam to be equally useful as rejuv spam. I used LB mostly for the pot shots and rejuv for the Vortex with LB mixed in for key targets.

If you are on 25-man and you have a lot of resto shamans in the raid, you can relax on the LB and use more rejuv.

More and more I'm finding several ways to be successful instead of the old method that was pretty static. This is definitely an improvement for raid healing as a resto druid in my mind.

malthrin · 01/22/09, 9:18 PM

Rejuv heals a lot more for the same mana as Lifebloom, and it can be Swiftmended if necessary. Unless you're specifically timing the bloom to occur precisely after something happens, don't use Lifebloom to raid heal.

Ger · 01/23/09, 8:07 AM

All depends on encounter.
Rejuv is not so good at Malygos 25 people. Keep in mind, that damage, inflicted by vortex, must be and will be healed before next Arcane Storm. So you can spam rejuv, while flying, but most of it will be wasted, because people will be topped soon after landing.
Teoretically, the best way there is rejuv before vortex and in the beginning, wildgroth at beginning and end, lifeblooms starting from the middle of vortex.
Healing storm damage with Rejuv not so effective too.
PS
I keep swiftmend for MT at Malygos, to use it after breath landing.

Niallest · 01/23/09, 11:29 AM

I've liked Nourish from the beginning, just because i liked the idea of having a flash heal when needed on a tank that's already full of HOTs and things aren't so dire that i need to swiftmend my rejuv away. It's been situationally useful at best though. However, doing Sarth 2 drakes last night in 10 man was the most i've ever used Nourish by a good margin.

Using 2 healers, with pally on the MT and myself handling the warrior drake tank and the add tank who was a DPS spec DK, as well as most of the raid healing. Easy enough to keep a full set of HOTs on both the tanks, but even with that they were constantly taking more damage than my HOTs could keep up with, so i was spamming nourish rather frequently on them. With the 4pc bonus it was incredibly effective and mana is far from an issue on 10 man because it's such a small window of time where you need to get that first drake down and you're golden.

Perhaps something that could make Nourish a more attractive spell for druids would be giving it a chance to refresh all HOT effects on the target? Maybe replace our Living Seed talent with Improved Nourish, giving a 10/20/30% chance to refresh all HOTs on the target of Nourish?

red · 01/23/09, 2:59 PM

Assume you somehow cast Rejuvenation on player X and Lifebloom on player Y at the exact same time, and count the total amount healed on each player by those spells once every second. Player X (rejuv) will have been healed for more total health every second except seconds 1, 2, 10 and 11. So unless you -really- need the health at those precise seconds, Rejuvenation will always be the better raid heal. Additionally, the amount by which Lifebloom beats Rejuvenation during those seconds is very small.

Rijndael · 01/23/09, 3:36 PM

Originally Posted by red

Assume you somehow cast Rejuvenation on player X and Lifebloom on player Y at the exact same time, and count the total amount healed on each player by those spells once every second. Player X (rejuv) will have been healed for more total health every second except seconds 1, 2, 10 and 11. So unless you -really- need the health at those precise seconds, Rejuvenation will always be the better raid heal. Additionally, the amount by which Lifebloom beats Rejuvenation during those seconds is very small.

What you say is correct, but a little misleading, because you ignore the finer granularity of Lifebloom, which is useful in some situations. An easy example is tank healing. Tanks get hit for a lot, and shift unpredictably and frequently between full hp and less than full hp. In such situations a hot that ticks every second is useful more often and will heal more frequently (rather than overheal) than a hot that ticks every three seconds. In some types of raid healing situations, the same thing will happen (Malygos vortex was mentioned a few posts up).

In practice, in current encounters I use Rejuvenation a lot more than Lifebloom for raid healing, but Lifebloom isn't useless for raid healing by any means, it isn't just a tank heal (and of course another advantage of Lifebloom is timing blooms for dealing with predictable damage like on Loatheb).

red · 01/23/09, 4:38 PM

Originally Posted by Rijndael

What you say is correct, but a little misleading, because you ignore the finer granularity of Lifebloom, which is useful in some situations. An easy example is tank healing. Tanks get hit for a lot, and shift unpredictably and frequently between full hp and less than full hp. In such situations a hot that ticks every second is useful more often and will heal more frequently (rather than overheal) than a hot that ticks every three seconds. In some types of raid healing situations, the same thing will happen (Malygos vortex was mentioned a few posts up).

In practice, in current encounters I use Rejuvenation a lot more than Lifebloom for raid healing, but Lifebloom isn't useless for raid healing by any means, it isn't just a tank heal (and of course another advantage of Lifebloom is timing blooms for dealing with predictable damage like on Loatheb).

My post specifically referred to raid healing, not tank healing.

Malygos vortex is a great example of Rejuvenation being better for raid healing. The damage is steady and not insignificant, so you don't get overheal and there are no sudden spikes that a 1-second heal would prevent. That allows the increased hps, total amount healed, and efficiency to shine.

Of course, optimally you would only be responsible for healing a portion of the raid during vortex, allowing you to use both Rejuv and Lifebloom. However that's not usually practical due to seemingly random people being out of range.

Rijndael · 01/25/09, 2:58 AM

I just got back from a Naxx 10 alt run, where I tried to see how useful Replenish is, now that Wild Growth has a cooldown, and druids spam other spells as a result. I followed a Rejuv-heavy strategy.

Results:

(a) 45% of my healing is due to Rejuv (lifebloom is second at about 20%, Wild Growth third at 15%, etc.)
(b) Replenish gave me and all other mana users between 1/2 and 2/3 of the mana that Improved Mana Spring Totem gave.

Since Improved Mana Spring gives about 100 mp/5, this means Replenish gives 50-60 mp/5 to the entire raid, on average. On top of the energy/rage/runic power gains which are harder to quantify but probably result in a small dps/tps gain. My conclusion is, if you are finding yourself using Rejuv a lot, give Replenish a look. It used to be garbage, but it might be a reasonable talent now.

Sioned · 01/26/09, 4:52 PM

I've read a post on wowhead from someone suggesting 3/3 in Celestial Focus for the haste bonus.

After reading through this entire thread, I've only heard of this idea mentioned once or twice, and a lot of discussion on "where else would you put the 3-4 last points?" Taking a look at the talent calculator, I've come up with this:

WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Druid -> Talent Calculator

Points of interest:

- I decided not to take Living Seed since it's on average only 1-3% of healing done from all the WWS's I've seen my guild's regular trees do
- No Replenish
- I took Imp Tranq primarily for 5 man heroics and since I think it's a fun way to use Tranq
- The 1 point in Nature's Reach can be put in Brambles if desired (it's only a filler point)

What do you think? Somehow I'm feeling like the haste is wasted somehow, although I can't explain it in terms.