Resto PvE Compendium and General Discussion - Page 11

Greenpower · 02/20/10, 4:48 PM

I agree with most of your post, but I would prefer glyph of Swiftmend to Wild growth in a 10 man. Most fights it won't hit more then 5 people anyway. If a person needs that quick heal from swiftmend, then I don't want to have to waste an extra gcd refreshing the hot, when I could be throwing an extra Nourish. In a 10 man you can have the whole raid, rejuv'd, which gives you much more opportunity to use swiftmend, I more or less use it off cooldown, unless there's a good reason to save it. Which is where knowing the fight ahead of time comes in.

cloudscraper · 02/20/10, 6:32 PM

I am a 10-men only raider, and I have to say that, for what involves 10men only, you won't have 6 people bunched up a time.

Excluding very particular setups, that I can barely imagine you're not going to have either 2 tanks +4 melees or 2 healers + 4 ranged DPS and have them bunched up all of the time. WG's radius is such that with only 10 people, you're better off using a glyph like swiftmend, imho.

Why?

Cause most of the times, expecially if/when playing with two healers, you need that reactive heal as soon as possible, and keeping sensitive targets hotted will be a non-existant problem in 10s. I can imagine, on deathwhisper for example, death n' decay or frostbolt on someone who isn't 100% HP, a missile where someone is landing on gunship, a beast's hit, someone with only 2 stacks at rotface, and so on... You might say that even non-glyphed SM does the job. Of course it does, but if you are overgearing the inc in such a way that losing HoTs on people is not important, then any of the typical glyphs could be fitting.

I strongly endorse the usage of Swiftmend in 10s, considering how many of the possible combinations, even if having the 'healing control' needed for the raid to succeed, don't have the reactive heals needed.

I usually run with rdruid, holypriest, and holypala, with the priest going shadow for first 4 bosses, and with such a setup when PoM's in CD the only way for us to react efficiently to a spike is an ol'good glyphed-Swiftmend.

slourette · 02/21/10, 6:08 PM

Originally Posted by cloudscraper

I am a 10-men only raider, and I have to say that, for what involves 10men only, you won't have 6 people bunched up a time.

Excluding very particular setups, that I can barely imagine you're not going to have either 2 tanks +4 melees or 2 healers + 4 ranged DPS and have them bunched up all of the time. WG's radius is such that with only 10 people, you're better off using a glyph like swiftmend, imho.

Why?

Cause most of the times, expecially if/when playing with two healers, you need that reactive heal as soon as possible, and keeping sensitive targets hotted will be a non-existant problem in 10s. I can imagine, on deathwhisper for example, death n' decay or frostbolt on someone who isn't 100% HP, a missile where someone is landing on gunship, a beast's hit, someone with only 2 stacks at rotface, and so on... You might say that even non-glyphed SM does the job. Of course it does, but if you are overgearing the inc in such a way that losing HoTs on people is not important, then any of the typical glyphs could be fitting.

I strongly endorse the usage of Swiftmend in 10s, considering how many of the possible combinations, even if having the 'healing control' needed for the raid to succeed, don't have the reactive heals needed.

I usually run with rdruid, holypriest, and holypala, with the priest going shadow for first 4 bosses, and with such a setup when PoM's in CD the only way for us to react efficiently to a spike is an ol'good glyphed-Swiftmend.

So you are basically saying that since glyphed WG has virtually no benefit, glyphed SM is better. Which is clearly true if glyphed WG is bad, but I don't think that is true, at least for my raids.

For fights like Festergut, Rotface, and Blood Queen, we usually have 6-7 people stacked on melee. This includes our 2 melee dps, both tanks, and usually our holy pally (melees for mana) and our destro lock (for meta), and sometimes our disc/holy priest (so he doesn't have to move). Not to mention, usually a pet (we have 2 melee pets) soaks up one of the WG targets, so the extra WG target is being used almost every time. I am led to believe that having an extra WG target every 6 seconds is superior to losing a HoT on a raid member 2-3 times per fight.

My current healing style/strategy is to use nourish or regrowth as a spot heal instead of swiftmend, and to use swiftmend only when I think that they will die before my nourish lands, which is very rare, and happens at most 2-3 times per fight. For fights like Blood Queen especially, a regrowth is almost always superior to a swiftmend, not only because it heals for more, but also because it heals over time, which counters the incoming damage. Also, if you use swiftmend to heal periodic damage, it might be on cooldown when you really need an instant-cast heal.

Blizzard usually gives us fights that are healing intensive (high hps), with not much spike damage (low overhealing fights), or fights that aren't very healing intensive (low hps), which have a lot of spike damage (high overhealing fights). Swiftmend is great for the latter category, in which case you aren't even that worried about a hot falling off, because it would have been nearly 100% overhealing anyways.

swills · 02/21/10, 8:41 PM

I have to agree with cloudscraper, WG Glyph is next to useless for me in 10-mans. I raid 10-mans primarily as well and WG rarely hits more than four people, nevermind six. You gave a very specific example slourette, but I don't think that situation is the 'norm' at all. Also, I have to say I cast Swiftmend way more frequently 2-3 times per fight too.

I've never wanted a WG Glyph in 10-mans whilst Swiftmend Glyph saves many GCDs on most fights.

slourette · 02/21/10, 10:48 PM

Well if your WG's are rarely hitting 5 people, then the decision is clear, but suppose they are. (As a side note, for bosses with large hit boxes, you can make a macro to cast WG on the boss so it hits the tanks and dps.)

I am claiming that if you unglyph SM, you will find yourself using it much less. It will no longer be in your healing "rotation" but will be treated as a cooldown for heavy single-target damage, meaning that on a boss fight where everything goes well, you will never use it. Instead of SM + rejuv, you will instead cast Nourish or regrowth. The value of Glyph of Swiftmend should be determined not by how much you use it while glyped, but rather how much you lose from replacing SM with Nourish in your healing rotation, while reserving SM as a cooldown. I would also like to suggest that this difference is small enough to make glyphs like wild growth and lifebloom competitive for the 3rd glyph slot in 10 mans (after Nourish and RR).

cloudscraper · 02/22/10, 4:58 AM

I have to recognize that the fights you have pointed our attention to, Slourette, are clearly fights in which wild growth gets very very very good, but having it hit 5 people instead of 6 is nowhere near making it utter crap.

What I mean is that, considering that a single druid can keep hotted a whole 10men raid when the heavily-aoe'd style of the boss requires it, adding to the hot blanketing a 5-men wild growth usually helps a lot anyway.

I guess it mostly depends on the amount of melees you have: if your tanks + melees can reach the amount of 6, then of course go for boss-targeted WG and get yourself 6 heals in a matter of moments. If, instead, your raid doesn't, I'm pretty convinced that most of the the fights require you not to have six people bunched up all of the time, even if sum(healers,casters)=6 [Festergut being the best example, thanks Vile Gas, but we could also mention most of Princes' fight].

I was thinking if there's a way, maybe through a specific logging of a raid, to recoil how many people I'll hit with a wild growth during a whole ICC10 raid. Does Recount actually show the number of casts AND the number of ticks? If it does, getting an average number of people hit shouldn't be that hard, considering the amount of ticks is fixed.

Sekke · 02/22/10, 5:34 AM

Originally Posted by slourette

Well if your WG's are rarely hitting 5 people, then the decision is clear, but suppose they are. (As a side note, for bosses with large hit boxes, you can make a macro to cast WG on the boss so it hits the tanks and dps.)

I am claiming that if you unglyph SM, you will find yourself using it much less. It will no longer be in your healing "rotation" but will be treated as a cooldown for heavy single-target damage, meaning that on a boss fight where everything goes well, you will never use it. Instead of SM + rejuv, you will instead cast Nourish or regrowth. The value of Glyph of Swiftmend should be determined not by how much you use it while glyped, but rather how much you lose from replacing SM with Nourish in your healing rotation, while reserving SM as a cooldown. I would also like to suggest that this difference is small enough to make glyphs like wild growth and lifebloom competitive for the 3rd glyph slot in 10 mans (after Nourish and RR).

Except that you seem to be forgetting the role that SM has on fights where movement is important (essentially every single fight except Dreamwalker). Being able to SM someone while running out of the fire, or whatever, is extremely handy. Our ability to be mobile while still healing is one of our biggest strengths, and SM Glyph adds to that in a MASSIVE way.

Arythorn · 02/22/10, 9:23 AM

Just slotted in final 2 pieces of T10 and dropped from 880 haste down to 735 haste. Respec'd to 18/0/53 from 11/0/60 but it occurs to me as I do this that I might want to address the value of 2 talent points in a more constrained resto tree. Mainly, trying to evaluate

3/3 Living Spirit

vs

1/3 Living Spirit AND 2/2 Empowered Touch

vs

0/3 Living Spirit AND 3/3 Living Seed

A good part of this will likely come down to % of Nourish usage (which is fairly heavily impacted on whether I'm running 10s or 25s)

Reviewing recent parses of ICC, my 10s distribution looks like 10% Nourish and 2% Living Seed. 25s looks closer to 2.5% Nourish and 1.0% Living Seed. I'm excluding Valithria because I've been going in portals a bit and that skews the overall balance of Nourish substantially.

My thoughts are to optimize for 25s so I'll use 2.5% effective healing from Nourish and 1.0% effective healing from Living Seed currently using a 11/0/60 spec. that has all of the above talents maxed.

We can assume ~1100 self-buffed spirit BEFORE Living Spirit. Skipping 2 points of Living Spirit = 10% of that and even calculating for raid buffs, we're really talking about a minimal spell power loss from that 10% spirit and I'm not too concerned about the regen side as I'm fine on regen. So a small loss of spell power vs. a 20% sp buff to 2.5% of my effective throughput on Nourish vs a 1% effective healing add through Living Seed. That's what I've got it boiling down to.

I'm leaning toward taking the 2/2 Empowered Touch + 1/3 Living Spirit (mostly because that vs Living Seed seems a wash and as a nod to Valithria encounter where Nourish jumps significantly in my output) but curious for other thoughts / perspectives.

Armory doesn't link correctly do to special character so spec / setup currently looks like:

The World of Warcraft Armory - Calculat�d @ Kel'Thuzad - Profile

though this is really a broader question than is it good for me and really about overall value of those 2 points generically speaking.

EDIT: Also, in case anyone wants to go down that path, removing any of the 3/3 in Revitalize is non-negotiable from my perspective as a raid healer. Really just looking for thoughts on the effective throughput value of the above combinations.

Erdluf · 02/22/10, 10:13 AM

Arythorn,

Your 3/3 Living Spirit build has 35 points in the first seven ranks of the tree. That means you can move two points from Living Spirit to ET (and I think it is probably a good idea).

Points for Living Seed would need to come from the balance tree, or deep resto (Revitalize, GotEM, WG, IToL). I can't see doing that if you want to remain near-optimized for 5x1 (unless you don't need all three points of CF).

Arythorn · 02/22/10, 1:03 PM

Aye, I'm fairly sold on 1/3 Living Spirit and 2/2 ET at this point. As to the future and getting points into Living Seed . . . I'm at 734 haste now, and thus require 3/3 CF. However, I'm one haste offhand (say Sundial) away from getting to 775+ haste, at which point, I could see dropping to 2/3 CF, 1/3 Living Spirit, 2/2 ET and putting 1/3 into Living Seed. At 815 haste, I could drop another point out of CF, and go 2/3 Living Seed (unfortunately, still have to keep at least 1 point in Living Spirit just to meet requirements for next tier of talents). I really need to be at 856 haste to go 3/3 at which point, I could go 11/0/60 anyway and this whole issue goes away.

At any rate, my assessment is those points in Living Spirit have limited value (~30-40 sp at ICC gear levels) when compared to ET and Living Seed -- though again, I'm definitely looking to hear more opinions outside of my own. I just can't see a way to get back to 11/0/60 again as long as I keep Trauma in main-hand AND wear 4 pc T10 (shy of gemming a ton of haste), so I'm trying to get as much bang for the buck as I can in a 18/0/53 (or eventually 17/0/54 or 16/0/55).

• Hamlet · 02/22/10, 2:05 PM

I've gone with 2/2 ET and 1/3 Spirit (Armory build now). I haven't checked in a little while, but I thought I remembered that you couldn't hit 856 haste without gems if using both 4T10 and Trauma, rendering the second issue kind of moot.

kcirreda · 02/22/10, 4:41 PM

Just recieved my Trauma last night, since my raid isn't up to PP yet, we went to Princes but I was still 11/0/60 and way under haste cap since I gave up the 10 ToGC super haste stick. Given our usual role of HoT blanketing and tank support I've been attatched to Living Seed, with my attention usually on the raid I could throw on nourish crits to a tank or two and quickly turn back to raid.

Then theres that other purpose we can serve, as redundancy tank healing if another healer is taken out. ET would be better for sure, but the raid will still probably be our responsability.

So what would be better? An extra safety net or better focused HPS to one target? Both scenarios will happen frequently for the rest of WoTLK. The choice may be more personal than you first think, depending on how your other healers work and if you're in 10 or 25.

Heres the Princes log for those interested in all the Trauma they can get, was on ranged raid heals.
World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

Jurik · 02/22/10, 7:07 PM

I don't see the problem in gemming haste and going for 11/60, even with Trauma. Especially if you're going from pure red to orange: due to rounding up to 12 spellpower, you only gain 11 spellpower for each 10 haste you drop in gems. Check my armory for an example of hitting this. As an additional benefit, gemming with a heap of oranges lets us hit a ton of our socket bonuses, because apparently yellow sockets are in fashion for the designers this tier.

When you think about it, Nature's Grace is not terribly useful at the haste cap, which means that we are spending 7 talent points (3 NG + 3 CF + 1 filler) to gain the equivalent of 121 haste. 17~18 haste rating per talent point is pretty slim returns.

Those 7 points can instead be spent on 3/3 Living Seed and another 2/3 Living Spirit, leaving 2 discretionary points that can be moved around for particular encounters. Using Arythorn's valuation above of 30+ spellpower per Living Spirit and more for Living Seed, the first 5 points reap over 150 "spellpower" equivalence.

Edit: Also, we all say that we're "fine on mana", but the extra points in Living Spirit are still nice when there's a fight like Blood Queen where replacing a Solace with Titan-Forged Rune of Audacity can be a good idea.

MegaVolt · 02/23/10, 9:20 AM

Originally Posted by slourette

meaning that on a boss fight where everything goes well, you will never use it. Instead of SM + rejuv, you will instead cast Nourish or regrowth.

You are using a best case scenario to make your argument which in my opinion is fundamentally flawed. If you are doing a boss where everything goes well you might as well run without any glyphs at all, you will still down him. Fights in which your raids execution is perfect (meaning: encounters you have a lot of experience with, encounters that are on farm) should never be used to justify a glyph choice.
It's a bit like the Glyph of Rejuvenation: Yes, if everything goes well it is a wasted glyph. But during progression fights not everything will go well.

A glyph that improves my healing in an emergency situation is what I want. I don't need any glyphs at all as long as the fight goes well, I need glyphs to save the day when someone stood in fire too long or when the tank healer died for some reason and for all the other things that can go wrong in a fight. Swiftmend - especially in 10man - is absolutely vital in those situations and when stuff goes wrong the single saved GCD from that glyph can mean the difference between a wipe and a kill.

Totally unrelated:
We guild recently downed the Lich King on 10man. I'm currently specced 14/0/57 (with ET and LS), the second Druid healer I'm running with is going for 18/0/53 (CF but neither ET nor LS). On our kill I got pulled into Frostmourne twice and healing the add there was pretty easy. On one of our wipes the other Druid got pulled in and he said he had huge difficulties to heal it, he just barely made it out and used up most of his mana.
Are ET and LS really that much of a difference? Do other Druids with the 18/0/53 spec struggle there, too? Might that encounter actually be a reason for keeping a reasonably strong single target spec?

Another general question:
At my current gear I have around 1200 spirit so every point in Living Spirit is worth 60. Raid buffed that's roughly 15 spellpower plus some nice regen.
Each point in CF gives 32 haste below the cap. Assuming I'd socket for haste if below the cap those 32 from CF will also translate into about 15 SP (replacing 23 SP with 12 SP / 10 haste in a yellow socket results in a 4-6 SP loss).

So assuming we have enough yellow sockets on our gear to make the haste cap using hybrids without 3/3 CF Living Spirit and Celestial Focus should be roughly equivalent in terms of throughput while Living Spirit provides additional mana regeneration, right?
Gemming hybrids to be able to shift points out of CF and into Living Seed should be worth it.

Erdluf · 02/23/10, 10:46 AM

Originally Posted by MegaVolt

We guild recently downed the Lich King on 10man. I'm currently specced 14/0/57 (with ET and LS), the second Druid healer I'm running with is going for 18/0/53 (CF but neither ET nor LS). On our kill I got pulled into Frostmourne twice and healing the add there was pretty easy. On one of our wipes the other Druid got pulled in and he said he had huge difficulties to heal it, he just barely made it out and used up most of his mana.
Are ET and LS really that much of a difference? Do other Druids with the 18/0/53 spec struggle there, too? Might that encounter actually be a reason for keeping a reasonably strong single target spec?

...
Each point in CF gives 32 haste below the cap.

Assuming LS means Living Seed and not Living Spirit.

His non-crit nourish hits for 100, his crits for 150 (or 154.5 with crit meta)
Your numbers (assuming all your seeds are used) are 120 and 234 (241).

At 50% Nourish crit, your average Nourish+LS is 41.6% stronger than his, for the same amount of mana. His heals might be 3% faster (but maybe not, since Nature's Grace puts you both way past the cap).

...
Note that near the cap, a point in CF is really worth more a bit more than 32 haste. With GotEM, Moonkin and Totem, 3/3 CF saves you about 120 haste (even more if you are missing one of the raid buffs).