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Old 01/18/10, 3:30 AM   #16
Deku
Glass Joe
 
Tauren Druid
 
Auchindoun (EU)
Thought I'd link a WOL from our 1 shot of PP last night. (seeing as the old resto pve thread is closed I'm assuming this is the new one to post stuff like this in)

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

As you can see the benefits from Revitalize are quite amazing, considering this was only from 1 attempt and all we did was make sure it had a rejuve active at all times. Our Abo controller had so much energy compared to last week when we didnt spec for it.

Considering the slowing debuff costs 50 energy, gaining 504 just from Revitalize is quite significant.

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Old 01/18/10, 3:40 AM   #17
♦ Carebare
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Tauren Druid
 
Mal'Ganis
I think it really comes down the roles each healer fills. This varies by raid but for the purposes of our conversation (and based on my opinion/experience naturally) I see healing falling into categories:

1) Proactive Offensive Healing/Shielding - This is where your paladins and disc priests fall. Their job is pretty straightforward, provide steady HPS (or damage reduction by way of absorbs) to the tank(s) throughout the encounter. Once upon a time back when LB stacking was viable, we were here.
2) Reactive Offensive Healing - This is where your resto shamans and even holy priests would fall. When the damage hits they provide the burst to bring people out of the danger area. Prior to WG cooldown and even after with 4t8, we were here.

So where does this leave us now?

You could argue that our presence on the healing meters is a result of sniping and/or just spamming and catching effective healing. I would respectfully disagree (for the most part), but again I feel like this comes down to style. Most end-tier raiding druids are playing the versatile middle ground which I've always referred to as "Proactive Defensive Healing". It means that a strong resto druid is going to see the holes the other healers can't cover and fill them. The other healers aren't bad, this is a naturally occurring hole that our tools give us the opportunity to fill. To do this the idea is simple, yet harder to execute. You need to know the damage that is going to happen before it occurs. Your HoTs need to be in place to meet that damage as it happens. I feel like this is a major failing point for new druids.

Our healing prevents that sub 30% bracket if said druid has a definitive understanding of the fight mechanics. I won't disagree that some sniping is inevitable with this style. However, our job is to mitigate damage and keep people out of that danger area and doing that results in a fairly aggressive healing style when done correctly. This is the reason you will see some druids top meters regardless, even if the fight is not a Val'kyr Twins type scenario. They see the damage before it happens and have already provided the proactive defense to meet it. So, that when it happens, those same druids are pulling out tools like Swiftmend/Nourish as opposed to casting Rejuvenation/Regrowth (because those people that took damage had HoTs on them before it even hit).

It is less tangible in terms of "life-saving" measure compared to what pretty much every other class does. But to call it less valuable seems unfair to me. I will concede that it is not hard to be a mediocre or even "good" druid. Being an exceptional druid requires anticipation, awareness, and a very strong fundamental understanding of the proper tool for the job, both before and after the damage has occurred.

<Nite_Moogle> i miss raiding with carebare :< she makes me feel like i am not the only person that hates everyone
Aldriana: I am an asshole, it just so happens that some of my colleagues are even *bigger* assholes.
[R] [85:Neux:2]: i hear if you die on Good Friday they are going to make it where you can't get rezzed until easter sunday
Khazal: Yeah, I don't know about Magic Rainbow Unicorn Land, but here in Reality, Rhyolith is the worst encounter Blizzard has ever designed.

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Old 01/18/10, 4:47 AM   #18
Fallenangel
Don Flamenco
 
Tauren Druid
 
Chromaggus (EU)
Originally Posted by Arawethion View Post
To be honest, we could heal most fights with no Glyphs at all and not feel much noticeable ill effect. They just don't do anything significant (Wild Growth might be the only one that stands out somewhat). Rapid Rejuvenation is the only one that has a serious meaningful impact on the spell we use the majority of the time, but it's not even a change that's desirable at most fights. Nourish is also "good" but only in a situation we're almost never in.

I think that overall people just wind up using Wild Growth because it has a concrete measurable effect, Swiftmend out of pure convenience, and whatever third one they feel like. They all provide minor and sporadic benefits.
Agree with what you said but not with the conclusion. I see RRejuv glyph as a must have and it is desirable on most fights. The only reason you won't want it is maybe (and that is also arguable) is aura fights with one 1 resto druid on 25 man - allow me to ignore gimmicks like Anub P3 if you will. In other cases - where you have less targets than time - powering up our rejuv by 50% has a noticeable effect.
Also, LB rolling is still viable and has been viable for the entire of WotLK. It's still decent HPS, it's still a nice buffer and it will do 15-20% healing on fights where damage is focused on the tanks - Gunboat and Saurfang for instance.

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Old 01/18/10, 8:51 AM   #19
Erdluf
Great Tiger
 
Night Elf Druid
 
Echo Isles
Rij, Pain,

I think you're on the right track. However the formulation is a bit too simplistic.

Suppose I'm the only healer, and Bob who has 20k maximum health is taking aura damage at 1k/s throughout the fight.

I can keep Bob at nearly full health (never more than 3k damage) by rolling unglyphed Rj. Alternatively, I can cast Nourish every time Bob's health drops to 18k below maximum.

I really don't like metrics that would say the Nourish strategy is more "effective" than the Rejuv strategy. A 5k effective heal just before someone takes a big hit is at least as useful as a 5k heal right after a big hit.

Here is one algorithm I've used to identify "significant" heals from a combat log:

1) Identify a danger threshold (perhaps -10k for a raider, or -20k for a tank, depending on the instance). In some cases you might decide to use zero as your danger threshold.
2) Look at all damage and heals (including overheals) that hit the toon during a particular fight. This will give you a graph of health-deficit as a function of time.

The toon's "danger factor" is the "area under the curve" between the health deficit and the danger threshhold:

integral (over time) of max(health_deficit - danger_threshold, 0)

3) Remove a single healing cast from the log (perhaps a FL or an entire Rj, not just a single HoT tick). The heal was "significant" to the extent that removing the heal increased the toon's "danger factor."

Note that a very effective heal (say NS+HT, with no over heal) might not be all that significant The log might also contain a Swiftmend that landed 1 ms later, and was entirely over heal. Had the NS+HT not landed, the toon still would (probably) have been safe.

Clearly this could be automated. When I've done this type of analysis I've used a spreadsheet, or just estimated the values using a graph that shows incoming hits, heals, and current health deficits. WowLogParser, an offline parser, has such a graph.

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Old 01/18/10, 10:42 AM   #20
mhenrique85
Von Kaiser
 
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Tauren Druid
 
Llane
Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation

In my opinion, as a 10 man strict raider, Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation is a must have glyph on 10 man raid environment, meanly at ICC.

The only fight that i thought it would be counterproductive was Professor Putricide, because of Malleable Ooze debuff, i tried a couple of tries to run without this glyph when we were progressing trough the fight, and it was there that i really felt the difference, then I reglyphed it, and the heal became a lot smoother. Malleable Ooze debuff can be easily avoidable and the difference between how fast you heal heavy AOE damage with this glyph is evident.

On 10 man raid environment, you have a cap of how many players you can heal with your Rejuvenation, even with your Rejuvenation ticking between 2 secs, with 12 secs duration, you can keep up Rejuvenation on most players in the raid. And you just have 2 healers in the raid, the necessity to heal faster is evident.

For 25 man raids, i really think that depends on your healing style and raid healers setup. With the glyph, you heal faster, less overheal. Without it, More Blank Rejuvenations in the raid.


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Old 01/18/10, 11:49 AM   #21
Kirbie44
Piston Honda
 
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Night Elf Druid
 
Magtheridon
I see you already implemented a few things from my PM earlier. I see a few things that you could add if you see fit.

Unlike our other "over time" effects like rejuvenation, Abolish Poison ticks/removes the poison on application. Just a minor thing, but I think it is worth mentioning and adding into the spell description.

Wild Growth: You may also want to add the targeting mechanic of WG. You mentioned it may not always hit your target, but also you CAN cast it on a hostile target. A quick example is the Volatile Ooze on the Prof. Putricide encounter. I target the ooze and hit WG approx 1 second before it explodes on it's target. It helps heal up the Ooze Eruption damage quicker.

[Revitalizing Skyflare Diamond] is a higher throughput upgrade on a 5x1 spec with 4T9 than [Ember Skyflare Diamond]. Also, when tank healing, with the high crit chance on nourish, this also provides a higher HPS upgrade for both LS proc's from Nourish and LS critical, as these heals from LS would stack exponentially with the meta. It may be worth mentioning.

None of these are do or die changes, just minor suggestions for additions to your post.

I will stay out of the Rapid Rejuvenation discussion, but also throw in this about the regular Rejuvenation glyph; you can't really base how its effectiveness works on farm content. It see's it's glory of AoE fights like twins not on farm, but during progression content, when your SP is lower, player health pools are lower, Resto Shamans heal tanks more as their gear has them take more damage, and factors of the same concept leave the raid (typically your assignment) with less heals in general. The actually proc's of this glyph will reduce as your gear up to an encounter, rendering it less useful. Sindragosa progression, both Normal and Heroic, you may notice this glyph to really get it's usefulness.

The past 4 months of raiding, healing hasn't been much of an issue. Heroic Twins progression (for those of you who progressed) was the last HPS speed bump. None of the ICC fights so far have been close to healing intense, so it is really hard to judge accurately with current parses how "useful" your Rapid Rejuve or Regular Rejuve glyph is until we get into difficult healing content. Maybe this is just how I see content now, but I haven't worried about my healing effectiveness since Firefighter/heroic twins.

Artificial Intelligence usually beats real stupidity.

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Old 01/18/10, 9:34 PM   #22
♦ Carebare
::stare::
 
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Tauren Druid
 
Mal'Ganis
I am so far not a fan of RR unless we are running 2x Resto Druids in 25 or for 10 man (and even then I often don't glyph it for content to this point). I feel like you lose a lot of the defensive angle by clipping the duration and move closer toward reactive healing with it. I'd rather blanket for safety and use other tools when more healing is needed. We may see a fight on 25 where it becomes necessary, but even then you'd be running 2x Resto druid more than likely and splitting up the raid to some degree.

<Nite_Moogle> i miss raiding with carebare :< she makes me feel like i am not the only person that hates everyone
Aldriana: I am an asshole, it just so happens that some of my colleagues are even *bigger* assholes.
[R] [85:Neux:2]: i hear if you die on Good Friday they are going to make it where you can't get rezzed until easter sunday
Khazal: Yeah, I don't know about Magic Rainbow Unicorn Land, but here in Reality, Rhyolith is the worst encounter Blizzard has ever designed.

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Old 01/18/10, 11:01 PM   #23
Lightflower
Von Kaiser
 
Tauren Druid
 
Dath'Remar
I think that your viewpoint on the Glyph of RR is skewed because you are generally the only Tree in your raid. If, as you say, a raid group were to run 2x Trees then the benefits of Glyph of RR are quite obvious and become even more pronounced if you assign definite groups to each Druid so that they can maximise HoT coverage.

I do agree that, with only 1 Tree in the raid, blanket HoTs (RR, WG glyphed, 3rd optional) is a better choice. Perhaps we should be doing some theorycrafting along the lines of which Glyphs and/or talents we take to fill the "Proactive Defensive Healing" role based on the composition of the healing team.

Erdluf - I don't believe the discussion revolved around what the most "effective" strategy is at all. If the fight favours a defensive healing strategy then the most effective course will be to ensure no one gets into the danger zone of sub 30% and blanket HoTs will be favoured. The flip side is a fight with high spike damage which favours fast, reactive healing.

So I do agree that letting people get low then hitting them with a big Nourish is not the most effective strategy but, in the event that someone does get that low, the Nourish has the highest impact on their survivability chances and is thus the appropriate strategy. That was why I wanted to get at the concept that HoTs are strongly indicated when people are above the danger zone but other heals work better when people get low. I'm sure everyone here has an intuitive understanding of this and actually practices some form of triage in their raids. Some sort of parsing tool would be very helpful though if it were able to determine the difference between clutch healing and raid maintenance.

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Old 01/19/10, 10:44 AM   #24
Kirbie44
Piston Honda
 
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Night Elf Druid
 
Magtheridon
I put up a post in the Druid: Simple Questions/Simple Answers about swiftmend, and some parts of the mechanics. I have gotten a few PM's about results and testing that I did with it. So with that, I have concluded the following answers to a few questions:

  • SM can use any druids Regrowth or Rejuvenation (even a spell stolen one from an opposite faction).
  • SM use the HoT on your target with the lowest time left. IE - Regrowth has 2 seconds left as Rejuvenation has 11 seconds left. Even though Rejuvenation will be a bigger heal from the SM, it will consume the Regrowth.
  • SM is only effected by your + healing talents. Gift of Nature, Tree of Life Aura, and Master Shapeshifter are the only + healing effects/coefficients it gets. Improved Tree of Life and Lunar Guidance both effect your SP on your character sheet, so I do not include them within this category.
  • SM heal is based off your current talents (above), Spell Power, and Critical Rating at the time you cast SM.
  • SM is NOT effected by; Spell Power of the HoT, Talents of the HoT, or who casted the HoT. IE - A feral druids Rejuvenation with zero SP and talents will SM for the same amount (your SM) as your Rejuvenation will.
  • Regrowth Glyph in action does not increase the SM by 20% or at all for that matter.

Last edited by Kirbie44 : 01/19/10 at 11:14 AM.

Artificial Intelligence usually beats real stupidity.

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Old 01/19/10, 11:10 AM   #25
Ogbar
Von Kaiser
 
Tauren Druid
 
Wildhammer
Originally Posted by Lightflower View Post
I think that your viewpoint on the Glyph of RR is skewed because you are generally the only Tree in your raid. If, as you say, a raid group were to run 2x Trees then the benefits of Glyph of RR are quite obvious and become even more pronounced if you assign definite groups to each Druid so that they can maximize HoT coverage.
I need to disagree with you here. I've tried RR a few times and found that it is least useful when I have strict group assignments either because of another tree or other healer. In a 2 to 2.5 group cover model I can maintain Rejuv on all targets while still having GCDs available to handle targeted burst. With RR, I end up in a position where I am gcd locked to be proactive, so I instead need to switch to a reactive model. With current fights I find the proactive models is more effective, letting me cover the group wide damage (from many folks in cold flame, DnD, fester aura) and the individual spikes (shadow bolt, bone spike, vile gas).

In 10 man I could get away with reactive healing, and the glyph really shined. But for 25 man it just wasn't working.

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Old 01/19/10, 6:51 PM   #26
Lightflower
Von Kaiser
 
Tauren Druid
 
Dath'Remar
I have found with a 12 second glyphed Rejuv that I can get very close to the 5x1 "model" healing. For the fights in ICC so far though, 5x1 isn't necessary and I am finding that the more reactive nature of RR glyph is excellent for helping out on targeted burst type abilities. That said, I definitely agree that it noticeably lowers my ability to counter mass AoE effects like Deathwhisper's frost bolt blasts.

It just irks me that the result on RR might be "ymmv". Because of that, I lean towards having 2x Trees responsible for 2 groups each with the last group containing mostly tanks. I like to think that my strategy will come to the fore once raid damage meets or exceeds the HPS provided by a non-glyphed rejuvenation.

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Old 01/19/10, 7:41 PM   #27
Arentios
Wisdom as dump stat
 
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Tauren Druid
 
Lightning's Blade
This was briefly touched on in the itemization thread, but it probably belongs here more than there.

I wonder just how haste we effectively do utilize on a given encounter given simple human reactions (I'd guess maybe a few hundredths of a second on average per spell) and occasional human mistakes where we aren't able to walk and chew gum at the same time and so don't chain cast spells when we could. For example I know a lot of druids slow their casting while moving out of fire.

I've been digging through my own logs trying to figure out a good way to capture this without checking the individual timestamps of spells, but at present it's a lot of effort for something with little impact; it's not going to be nearly enough to affect item choice with how weak crit generally rates; you'd need to be wasting 50% or more of your haste to think about trading an equal ilevel haste item for a crit item. Just from using a Perl script to scan a WoL parse I'd estimate I'm wasting 10% of my haste (10% of haste, not 10% haste) over the course of a high movement encounter (Putricide), throwing out Tear Gas durations. I don't have a way to factor latency out of that, if it has any meaningful impact.

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Old 01/20/10, 5:37 AM   #28
jula
Von Kaiser
 
Night Elf Druid
 
Ravencrest (EU)
Originally Posted by Arentios View Post
I've been digging through my own logs trying to figure out a good way to capture this without checking the individual timestamps of spells, but at present it's a lot of effort for something with little impact;
First, if someone is not casting because of something like moving out of fire - this is irrelevant for the evaluation of haste.
Player A has 0 haste rating, and had to 'move while not casting' 5% of the fight.
Player B has 800 haste rating, and had to 'move while not casting' 5% of the fight.
Both players will lose the same percentage of their total throughput (ignoring heals with CD such as WG from the calculation), if they are casting the rest of the time.
Its true that player B will 'lose' the option to cast more spells than play A, but you could argue the same for any heal boosting stat, such as spellpower - if player B had more spellpower than player A, he would lose more powerful spells.

Second, if you wish to evaluate how much time a player is not casting, how about just look at all spell casts by the player, his haste rating from gear / talents / buffs (can check average uptime of those) and then come up with a number - how much time should it take to cast all those spells. If you divide this number by the total fight length (pick a fight without 'dead time' - for example Northern Beasts or Mimiron are bad, while Twins are good) that should give a good estimation on how much time is lost.

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Old 01/20/10, 7:26 AM   #29
Arentios
Wisdom as dump stat
 
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Tauren Druid
 
Lightning's Blade
Originally Posted by jula View Post
First, if someone is not casting because of something like moving out of fire - this is irrelevant for the evaluation of haste.
Player A has 0 haste rating, and had to 'move while not casting' 5% of the fight.
Player B has 800 haste rating, and had to 'move while not casting' 5% of the fight.
Both players will lose the same percentage of their total throughput (ignoring heals with CD such as WG from the calculation), if they are casting the rest of the time.
Its true that player B will 'lose' the option to cast more spells than play A, but you could argue the same for any heal boosting stat, such as spellpower - if player B had more spellpower than player A, he would lose more powerful spells.
This is very true, and is part of why this isn't an itemization question; it's a better play question. Player A and B are both wasting spellpower (and crit, any other throughput stat), but only player B is wasting haste. However, if player B had 100 haste rating, he'd have been wasting that, or he had 1000 rating, same thing. Percentage based, not an absolute number. Because they're all throughput stats they're all interconnected. Since we're not trading spellpower for haste in general, it's not a matter of 'what could I better spent those haste itemization points on', it's a matter of 'how far from the optimal play nirvana that we tend to assume am I?'

To put it another way. Every time we overheal or have another healer heal over a HoT, we are wasting spellpower, everytime we overheal with a crit, we're wasting crit. In each of those situations we're also wasting all the other throughput stats. Of these scenarios the 'not pushing buttons fast enough' scenario is the easiest to control. It would be nice to be able to optimize the other two, but they've been around since WoW began and often hinge on making snap predictions about the future and the habits of other healers, and of the person being healed.

There are also cases where you don't want to be chain casting, and in these cases you're 'wasting' haste, but don't really care. It's important to parse those out. It ends up being a somewhat small set of cases where haste waste is significant but a lot of decisions we make for spec, gearing, and suchlike are based around the highest healing required cases, even if they're rare.

Last edited by Arentios : 01/20/10 at 10:35 AM.

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Old 01/20/10, 2:23 PM   #30
ganuard
Von Kaiser
 
Night Elf Druid
 
Ner'zhul
Originally Posted by Carebare View Post

Our healing prevents that sub 30% bracket if said druid has a definitive understanding of the fight mechanics. I won't disagree that some sniping is inevitable with this style. However, our job is to mitigate damage and keep people out of that danger area and doing that results in a fairly aggressive healing style when done correctly. This is the reason you will see some druids top meters regardless, even if the fight is not a Val'kyr Twins type scenario. They see the damage before it happens and have already provided the proactive defense to meet it. So, that when it happens, those same druids are pulling out tools like Swiftmend/Nourish as opposed to casting Rejuvenation/Regrowth (because those people that took damage had HoTs on them before it even hit).

It is less tangible in terms of "life-saving" measure compared to what pretty much every other class does. But to call it less valuable seems unfair to me. I will concede that it is not hard to be a mediocre or even "good" druid. Being an exceptional druid requires anticipation, awareness, and a very strong fundamental understanding of the proper tool for the job, both before and after the damage has occurred.
QFT. An amazing summary of why I think a lot of Druids do less then they could to improve the chances of success on encounters where the stereotypical Druid says, "Oh, I'm sorry, this isn't a fight where I'm supposed to do well." No, you shouldn't continue to 5x1 even though everyone is at full health and you know there is no AOE attack coming (I've run with far too many healers like this). Just because there isn't a steady damage aura doesn't mean we don't have some of the strongest tools in the game to keep someone alive, all backed by our ability to cover most of the raid or to target a group with our HOTs.

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