Resto PvE Compendium and General Discussion - Page 8

Teperto · 02/06/10, 3:43 PM

Since the Lich King encounter is here I was thinking about how to approach it. I was reading the tactics and watching the video and I found that our main concern is Infest. I was thinking about bringing back Lifebloom to this fight since it seems to be the best tool against this ability. I would also consider using Glyph of Lifebloom since it makes you more efficient. And after the ability hits I suggest we use Wild Growth and Nourish on the people who got it (The Wild Growth hot that is) since they need to be topped up as fast as possible. I also suggest using Glyph of Nourish for the extra spike healing.
Please share your ideas on the subject.

Greenpower · 02/06/10, 10:42 PM

I haven't been keeping up on this thread much since it started. My old guild imploded, I've moved to a new one (substantial world ranking upgrade) and been working on my own resto guide. Which will be up on stratfu.com by the way.

So today I read through this whole thread, and must admit to being rather puzzled by the mentality. Most of this thread so far, it sounds like has been debate over which are the best 3 glyphs to have all the time. ??!!? If you are not serious about min/maxing... why are you posting on a theorycrafting forum? If you ARE serious about min/maxing.. you will always carry all useful glyphs and switch to them on a per fight basis. Please, they cost about 3g each if you get the mats for a scribe in your guild or friends. Are we really going to argue when the problem is solved by replacing a 3g glyph? I hope we aren't that cheap.

That said the discussion should be which glyphs are best for which fight. Someone said at one point that there is no case in 25 ICC where RR is a hps increase. Saurfang? Wild growth is largely useless since most of the damage is either on the tank, or a dot on random people who are 10+ yards apart. RR rocks that fight. That said RR on an aura fight is really rather retarded IMO. It is NEVER an increase on raw healing output, it can only be a decrease due to less chances for Swiftmends. It is an amazing glyph when its useful, and an utterly terrible glyph when it isn't.

Case in point. Paradox's Sindragosa attempts and kill. (My new guild) We didn't kill her till the very last attempt due to many different issues that aren't relevant here. But I was noticing at least 75% of the attempts, I had more healing then the other 2 druids combined. Even the fight where I literally had every single unchained magic I was lead healer by a good 10% As the new guy I'm trying hard to keep quiet as the "new guy" can't really afford to be an elitist jerk, but that was rather puzzling to me. (Granted 1 has no 4pc bonus for god only knows why, rocking 2 pc t10, and the other apparently lags... but that big a difference?) Finally with 3 attempts left one of the druids makes a vent comment about maybe this isn't a good fight for RR. /facepalm. I gave them both a glyph of rejuvenation and the last 2 attempts they were much more competitive. That glyph's main use granted was to replace the shitty RR, but on a progression fight that healing where it counts can help.

While I'm on Sindragosa here are some tips that may be useful. Obviously the entire fight you're keeping up a relatively pure 5x1. (No RR glyph) Every time Swiftmend is off cooldown watch for a chance to use it (I always do this, its why the SM glyph is the one I never replace). If you get Unchained magic at any point prior to p3, I was healing without slowing down until 10-12 stacks, with the last spell being a rejuv cast on myself, and (I think 7ish seconds later?) a Swiftmend on myself. Smart use of Lifeblooms can be pro here too if SM is on cd. Barkskin is AMAZING for this fight and you'll find yourself using it many times, I went up to 15 stacks by accident once, and my last spell was a Barkskin and I had about 15% hp to spare. When you get pulled in for blistering cold, set your camera and strafe, there is no forgiveness here, you have to be fast. If you are behind anyone due to fucking up or lag, pop Barkskin. (Or just use it anyway to be safe) Even with no resists I survived at least 2 of these with Barkskin.

On the air phase the instant symbols go out, get a rejuv on each of them. I think you have 5-6 seconds (?) and 5 symbols so you can hit them all. Someone suggested Lifebloom but A. if they don't die to the initial damage, they won't, only chance of death is much later if dps takes too long due to suffocation. So the longer/stronger hot wins. B. This is a predictable chance for your glyph of rejuvenation to proc. If YOU are targeted, and there is 1 other person who is also targeted near you (either by strategy or the retard factor), once again, blow Barkskin.

In phase 3 unless you can more or less stay behind an ice tomb, don't flirt with unchained magic, as the mystic buffet stacks effect it. Don't go over 3-4 stacks.

Dreamwalker I was also #1 healer on every attempt but one (holy pally beat me by like.. a matter of a couple thousand healing). Which probably surprised some people. I highly recommend NOT going into every portal. for anyone. Yes you can stack the buff retarded high, but the wasted time stacking the buff means less time actually healing. Our kill we switched to splitting our healers in 2 groups, 3 in one, 4 in the other, and taking turns on portals. Another reason for this is you waste a good 10+ seconds of the buff time you could be healing if you take every portal. We switched after noticing that I was #1 healer by a good margin, and never had more then 7 stacks of the buff (admittedly I was tunneling and missing portals by accident the first time) While a shaman got up to 64 stacks (!!??!!) and yet I beat him.

By the way, in the portal you don't need to hit the clouds with anything, if you're not getting the buff, its because your flying through too fast. Pause for half a second in each and you'll get it. Make sure to move your camera a lot constantly to make sure your flying into the center of each. If another healer happens to be close to you, stick together instead of competing as the clouds exploding splashes the buff onto whoever is there. But IMO its not worth purposefully stacking as the portals spawn in random places.

For my rotation I was slow stacking and letting Lifeblooms bloom, keeping up RR and regrowth, and spamming nourish, using Swiftmend off cooldown, and nature's swiftness/healing touch first out of my first portal, then next time its up. Based on my own napkin math, I specced into Naturalist, and spammed healing touch when we came out of a portal and got Bloodlust. It was a surprising 13% of my healing in a 7:12 fight, as I only used it twice with NS and for the 40 second duration of lust. I was also using wild growth off cooldown if raid took damage ( not targeting off Dreamwalker, it didn't seem to link? idk why)

Glyphs I used Nourish/RR/and Swiftmend.

The LAWS of Druid Spot Healing

When its necessary to spot heal;
• If the target has no hot, use Regrowth
• If the target has the regrowth or rejuv effect, and swiftmend is up, use it. (excepting the rare occasion its better to save it)
• If the target has any hot on them, and swiftmend is NOT up, use nourish.

oopsminded · 02/07/10, 3:57 AM

Originally Posted by Greenpower

The LAWS of Druid Spot Healing

When its necessary to spot heal;
• If the target has no hot, use Regrowth
[...]
• If the target has any hot on them, and swiftmend is NOT up, use nourish.

Nice post overall, but if you've been argueing about people not being flexible enough, maybe you shouldn't post in the same spirit either. When, as you put it, it's necessary to spot heal someone, using Regrowth instead of Nourish on a non hotted target it's meter haxxing, you're just thinking how not to cast a low HPET spell, instead of thinking about saving that guy.

*edit I might understand by spot healing something else than you do, so to be clear: not hotted target, at 20% health, which is in imminent danger of getting a spike dmg

Greenpower · 02/07/10, 4:47 AM

You have a valid point. I could have been a bit more clear. If you're haste capped, and spot healing a lot then you will probably have nature's grace up, which brings my Regrowth down to 1.14 cast time, and my Nourish much under the gcd at .85. There may be instances where the faster Nourish can save someones life, but its pretty rare. Getting the hot effect from Regrowth which is swiftmendable, and buffing Nourish for any other spot heals in the next 27 seconds, in only an extra 0.14 cast time makes it almost law worthy.. But I'll grant you your point. And depending on how you heal NG might not be up either.

I am considering it time to spot heal anytime people are enough under max health to where its not wasted overhealing, or if they are taking continuous damage. The less time people spend under 100% health, the less chance they'll be rng'd to death. Its worth noting, even in a 5x1 fight if someone's health is low enough that the Regrowth's initial heal won't get wasted, its nearly as good hps as rejuv. Plus it saves their life.

The LAWS of Druid Spot Healing

When spot healing;
• If the target has no hot, use Regrowth (Unless death is so imminent that the 0.14-0.40 greater cast time calls for Nourish instead)
• If the target has the Regrowth or Rejuv effect, and Swiftmend is up, use it. (excepting the rare occasion its better to save it)
• If the target has any hot on them, and Swiftmend is NOT up, use Nourish.

Better? =D

Sneakdarkman · 02/07/10, 6:49 AM

We tried Valythria thursday, here is the log: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

(I play elstak)

I Focused the boss almost all the time. Without the cloudbuffs, I was between 9and 10 k HPS and when i went in the dreamphase, i managed to stack up to 7 buffs and was between 15 and 18K HPS.

i rolled LB, RR, WG and regrowth on the boss and then casted nourish non stop and hitted SM when it was up. I glyphed for SM, N and RR.

I think we can be very good to heal the boss, but that does require a perfect hot rotation on the boss and you don't have time to heal the raid.

Videl · 02/07/10, 7:02 AM

Originally Posted by Greenpower

That said the discussion should be which glyphs are best for which fight. Someone said at one point that there is no case in 25 ICC where RR is a hps increase. Saurfang? Wild growth is largely useless since most of the damage is either on the tank, or a dot on random people who are 10+ yards apart. RR rocks that fight. That said RR on an aura fight is really rather retarded IMO. It is NEVER an increase on raw healing output, it can only be a decrease due to less chances for Swiftmends. It is an amazing glyph when its useful, and an utterly terrible glyph when it isn't.

My point had kind of been that RR may still be the best option in an aura fight, used to heal the people who can't be healed by the much more common raid healing spells that heal clustered targets but require more healing than an unhasted rejuv. Some people disagreed. Probably nobody was mentioning swapping glyphs between fights because its assumed. You still need to decide which one is the best for different situations.

If you argue that RR can be a raw healing decrease because of less oppotunities to swiftmend, even though swiftmend is less raw hps than rejuv, you have to also recognize the flipside that it can be a raw healing increase if it generates enough hps on the target to prevent you from the need to use any other, less productive spells to keep them alive. In an optimal simmed type situation it doesn't make a difference.

When I was referring to raid comp mattering a great deal I was mostly referring to situations where you might have 1 tree druid raid healing, 3 blows my mind. If you're using 3 trees and doing all your raid healing with it you're looking at 2 rejuvs on everyone most of the time or a RR (doing 3/4 of what 2 rejuvs would) on everyone all the time plus some swiftmends/regrowth as needed. I'm still not sure RR is necessarily the wrong option in that situation, you could assign about 8 people to each druid and be assured they could keep RR up on all of them safely and probably still have their swiftmend and everyone would have a rejuv for anyone to swiftmend. Either way with 3 druids I don't see swiftmend availability as a problem.
With 2 tree druids handling all/nearly all the persistent raid healing RR probably doesn't hold up since you don't get full rejuv coverage you'd probably be playing a lot of catchup. Two tree druids and a shaman or priest makes it a tough call to me, you could RR for better hps on the ranged and let the third healer pump chain heals or PoH/CoH into the melee, or you could go non-RR, hit everyone with it, and let the third healer focus on the LHW/FH to respond to any burst hits. It would depend on the raid damage profile. Rejuv level persistent damage with burst hits like regular BQ the latter would be superior. Higher than rejuv level persistent damage without a lot of bursty hits to it more like what I'd expect 0 stack heroic rotface to look like would favor the former I think. With 2 druids RR is a hard sell all around. Just don't throw it out because of how comfortable blanketing the raid is.

I would figure each raid probably has 3-5 tank/blood DK/Shadow priest/afflic locks who don't need the normal amount of raid healing if you wanted to include that in your plan as well.

Arythorn · 02/07/10, 1:36 PM

Originally Posted by Greenpower

Dreamwalker I was also #1 healer on every attempt but one (holy pally beat me by like.. a matter of a couple thousand healing). Which probably surprised some people. I highly recommend NOT going into every portal. for anyone. Yes you can stack the buff retarded high, but the wasted time stacking the buff means less time actually healing. We switched after noticing that I was #1 healer by a good margin, and never had more then 7 stacks of the buff (admittedly I was tunneling and missing portals by accident the first time) While a shaman got up to 64 stacks (!!??!!) and yet I beat him.

Some parts of your post I agree with, some I don't but much of it is opinion and not biblical fact anyway. However, this one thing here, I have to say I 100% disagree with. If you can get in to portals and maintain stacks, you can absolutely crush at the end of the fight. It's like a freight train slowly gaining speed -- some ramp up time but at the end unstoppable momentum. While that shaman in your group that got 64 stacks was clearly nailing the portal phase, it's equally clear to me that he must've been sucking wind in the healing phase for some reason.

We had an offspec shaman get 38 stacks and pump out 18k hps for the fight. I know I can't pump out 18k single-target hps without being stacked and I'm pretty sure you can't either. Portal phase is only a waste of hps if you can't figure out how to time it. And timing it isn't that hard:

1) make sure that you are hovering near an orb a couple seconds before portal phase is over and tick it just before you drop out

2) on new portal, immediately go to nearest orb and tick it.

Do those two things and you will have time to spare on maintaining stacks and you will be throwing progressively larger and larger heals -- almost nuclear style heals toward the end that someone who is not stacking has not chance whatsoever to keep up with.

Rijndael · 02/07/10, 2:06 PM

Look, if a healer goes into the portal each time, 50+ stacks are not difficult to achieve (60+ possible with some luck). Each stack is +10% healing. Since the stacks ramp up linearly, that means 25-30 stacks on average for the duration of the fight. The healer maintains about 50% uptime on dragon healing if he is doing it correctly. It's pretty easy to math out how this compares to staying out full time (hint: it doesn't look good for the guy staying out).

By the way, while it is true that druids can be competitive with paladins on single target healing with infinite mana (which constant portals will provide), I believe druids are a terrible choice for permanent portal duty. This is because no component of druid tank HPS benefits from heroism, and abusing guardian spirit + heroism after the last portal is a big part of what makes paladins so very awesome for portal duty. On the other hand, druids are great 'stay out' healers -- they can have their hands in lots of different pots and are super mana efficient.

Re: RR glyph: most of this has been covered in post 2 of this thread. It's useful when HPS is important, and not useful when HPET is important.

Re: spot healing: The issue with Regrowth is that it's slower than the spot heals of other classes. I find Regrowth basically unusable as a spot heal unless the target takes subsequent damage (Putricide slime targets, etc.) Personally, I believe glyphed HT is the best no-cooldown spot heal in the game (just because it's so wonderfully fast), it's just that you give up too much to get it, and Nourish is almost as good.

Greenpower · 02/07/10, 7:23 PM

Originally Posted by Rijndael

By the way, while it is true that druids can be competitive with paladins on single target healing with infinite mana (which constant portals will provide), I believe druids are a terrible choice for permanent portal duty. This is because no component of druid tank HPS benefits from heroism, and abusing guardian spirit + heroism after the last portal is a big part of what makes paladins so very awesome for portal duty. On the other hand, druids are great 'stay out' healers -- they can have their hands in lots of different pots and are super mana efficient.
.....
Re: spot healing: The issue with Regrowth is that it's slower than the spot heals of other classes. I find Regrowth basically unusable as a spot heal unless the target takes subsequent damage (Putricide slime targets, etc.) Personally, I believe glyphed HT is the best no-cooldown spot heal in the game (just because it's so wonderfully fast), it's just that you give up too much to get it, and Nourish is almost as good.

Ok I just wrote my whole reply and forgot to copy/paste to notepad and lost it all. /facepalm Here goes again..

If you read my post.. you'll see I was spamming Healing Touch, specced into Naturalist during the Bloodlust. It was +13% of my healing in a fight 7:12 long, and I only used it outside of Bloodlust twice with NS. And like I said that was without stacking buffs either. Worth mentioning is I'm pretty sure I used some Lusted gcd's for things other then HT, I think I used WG on raid a cpl time at least. All told makes 13% in 40 seconds rather amazing.

Re. stacking buff. No I totally agree with most of what you all said, mathematically speaking the best way to handle it would be certain people stacking the buff as high as possible, and at a certain point when the healers are *high enough* the raid uses Bloodlust and you just spam all the way through it. (losing your stack at some point, but ideally finishing her off, or close)

The risk is one of the 3 things that must have happened to the Shaman.
1. Lose the stack somehow before you get to do your burn.
2. Have your burn massively interfered with. (maybe having to move too much?)
3. Or what I'm thinking is most likely... He never burned out, he probably went into each and every portal for the duration of the encounter, thereby wasting half of his Bloodlust.

So if you just want to "kill" it, it seems the safe/easy way is to alternate portals. If your ever going to do hardmode though you should be practicing stacking. I'll be suggesting perfecting that technique next week.

Re: Regrowth as a spot heal. I can see the points here, imo it comes down to a matter of play style. I shouldn't have stated it as a law, I was trying to get some general points out there, for new druids (the "laws" were copy/pasted from my guide.)

I use every single gcd in the duration of an encounter. (Excepting Anub where I can't be gcd locked) I know the fight ahead of time and am keeping hots on people most likely to take damage, so I CAN Swiftmend/Nourish. And the rest of the time I'll likely help on the tank, or maybe roll a few Regrowths on people for the long hot. 2 things to note about my playstyle.
1. I'm gcd locked so anything under the gcd is time wasted.
2. The more Spot healing there is with the less 5x1 raid healing, the higher my NG uptime.

So gcd locked with NG up, there is 0.14 difference cast time between my Nourish and Regrowth. Regrowth clearly wins with a 27 second hot that will buff subsequent Nourishs, is swiftmendable, and heals in its own right. The grand majority of fights, people who take spot damage, 0.14 won't make or break them. If there is a fight where it might, I'll go with my Anub spec, I won't be gcd locked, and I'll use glyphed HT. (which hits for 8k I believe? much higher/faster then Nourish, they didn't seem that close to me)

That said if your style of play is to sit and wait for spot damage to spot heal with Nourish, I won't say thats wrong, it just doesn't seem to be appealing to our strengths imo.

Re: RR in an Aura fight. Yes it can work if your raid uses strict and specific healing assignments for all healers. And if you alone are responsible for 1-2 groups, and the aura ticks for more then the regular rejuv, yes RR is perfect. Looking at each healers strengths and weaknesses, the only one that seems to really work with a strict assignment is a priest with Prayer of Healing. Shamans heal is a smart heal, it doesn't respect groups. You can assign them to melee, but unless there is 2 Shamans I doubt its enough. Clearly specific assignments can save some overhealing, and I'm sure works for some people don't get me wrong.

But even in that scenario, it seems like appealing to a Druids strengths, would be having him as the "swing" healer. Filling in the holes left by the others. You keep hots on the tank, and fill in for tank healers when they are moving with hot ticks, Lifebloom's bloom, and Swiftmend. Your WG on melee and often rejuv them as well as they take the most damage and benefit from Revitalize. Even in a 5x1 fight, I don't mindlessly roll Rejuvs top to bottom. I'm prioritizing the people who need it most, aka the "holes" left by others. Those last melee that the 2 shamans chain heals missed. Those guys in the Priest's group that would die in the duration of a POH cast cause they ate an orb. AKA smart raid blanketing. Just seems like what Druids do best.

Lightflower · 02/07/10, 7:29 PM

Originally Posted by Greenpower

You have a valid point. I could have been a bit more clear. If you're haste capped, and spot healing a lot then you will probably have nature's grace up, which brings my Regrowth down to 1.14 cast time,

I assume you mean if you're haste capped in a spec that includes Nature's Grace. Given that a substantial amount of discussion on this board has been revolving around how to stack haste to remove the need to spec CF, many Druids are strongly considering reverting back to a 11/0/60 spec. I know you address this below but it was in the context of a 5x1 rotation where you mostly won't have NG up.

and my Nourish much under the gcd at .85.

Which only affects the subsequent spot heal, not the first one - Nourish still lands substantially faster.

Getting the hot effect from Regrowth which is swiftmendable, and buffing Nourish for any other spot heals in the next 27 seconds, in only an extra 0.14 cast time makes it almost law worthy.. But I'll grant you your point. And depending on how you heal NG might not be up either.

I am considering it time to spot heal anytime people are enough under max health to where its not wasted overhealing, or if they are taking continuous damage. The less time people spend under 100% health, the less chance they'll be rng'd to death. Its worth noting, even in a 5x1 fight if someone's health is low enough that the Regrowth's initial heal won't get wasted, its nearly as good hps as rejuv. Plus it saves their life.

There's a world of difference between someone "under max health to where it's not wasted overhealing" and "will die in the next 0.85 - 1.14 seconds". If you have longer, RJ+SM only takes 1sec + latency and leaves a stronger HoT on the target. RJ + Nourish at around 2 seconds is also a good option. However, if they're on ~20% and in imminent danger then you are correct in your analysis. Just your text explanation and listed laws seem to conflict.

Shouldn't NS+HT come first & foremost though - as our ultimate saver?

Greenpower · 02/07/10, 7:35 PM

Yes NS + HT is the ultimate saver, with it's 3 minute cd it obviously can't be included in any kind of priority system or you might not have it when you need it. I usually use it on someone I battle res, especially when there is a high chance they'll die again. Or of course if someone is in imminent danger of death, usually a tank.

I think you replyed before my next post explaining it better, but that does bring up the mentality again. Face it, flashhealing isn't our strength. Raid blanketing/tank hots is our primary role. Its not like we are the only healer in the raid. Yes I still spot heal and often still do it better then anyone else in fights where the raid blanket isn't needed. But for instance a fol spamming holy pally is clearly better as a spot healer, he keeps Beacon on the tank and just rolls those fol's on who ever needs them. As well as a Shamans Riptide on a 6 second cd. I'm granting there are exceptions where Nourish or glyphed HT is better, but I think in the majority of cases my "laws" stand. It fits our strength better.

As to dropping NG.. I'll have to do or see some math but I don't see it happening for me. As some people have pointed out, having a spell under the gcd isn't a bad thing anyway, and like I've said, if your gcd locked then Regrowth with NG up is awesome. I can't wait to drop cf, as those 4 points can be handily used elsewhere, but I doubt I'll drop NG.

grimtage · 02/07/10, 10:25 PM

With very few circumstances that are the exception, I find spot healing pointless on a druid. The fact of the matter is we're the worst class for filling the role you guys are discussing. If someone is on low health I expect any of the other healers in my raid to deal with them: Paladins who have beacon on the main tank are quite often spamming the raid with HLs, Holy Priests tend to spam Flashes to get their Serendipity up, Disc Priests who see the main tank is safe "for now" will throw shields here and there, Shamans have a few options depending on the circumstances, but each of these have a much bigger "extra" benefit than the Regrowth HoT. It's true that quite often someone will take damage after being healed, but one would hope that if they are in that position that you will already have a HoT on them. In circumstances like Lady Deathwhisper (Phase1, she does bolts on random raid members) where the damage is concentrated, random and deadly, our best bet is to tank heal in order to free up other healers to deal with that job; trying to do a job we're not suited for is just the wrong way to approach it, you don't dps and let your shadowpriests heal, do you? The same logic can be applied here. I'm not saying *never* spot heal the raid, I'm just saying that you would be much better off relieving another healer from their job and getting them to do it. I have assumed that "spot healing" was reacting to damage that has been done - pre-empting damage and pre-hotting targets is a completely different story, and what I think we excel at.

On a different note: Infest is *easily* countered by just a resto druid doing 5x1 rotation, the other healers can just pick up where the HoTs are lacking, yes it is 99% overheal but it prevents a lot of damage from happening if the HoTs tick as soon as the debuff comes. That alone makes us probably the strongest healer at Lich King.
Also, Rapid Rejuv can be very useful at BQL, as the melee will take more damage than the rest of the raid because of the AoE Bolts the boss does, so having a single druid doing Rapid Rejuvs on the melee+tanks and another druid without RR covering the rest of the raid works quite well.
On the Valithria Dreamwalker fight, I used an addon called ACB (AzCastBar) technically it's a castbar addon, but can be used to display your own buffs/debuffs ala ElkBuffBar and can also do target & focus buffs etc. This can be made to look like EBB and ForteXorcist on the respective parts, but obviously being one addon instead of two reduces your clutter :p Can also make your castbar very thin, useful if you want to put it inbetween groups on Grid.

Also, I'd like to re-iterate Arythorn's point. On the Dreamwalker fight, we had 2 holy priests outside, 4 healers going inside every portal - our paladin, me and the other resto druid and an offspec Shaman. In offspec gear he hasn't really kept up to date because of the state of shaman healing, he easily crushed all of us on healing, whilst his Ancestral Awakening removed any danger of people dying, it was quite embarrassing to say the least :p (World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis)

Nefaruis · 02/08/10, 2:48 PM

On Dreamwalker;

Here is the healing meter from our dreamwalker 'kill'. I was running LB,Rapid Rejuv,Nourish glyphs. I entered every portal I saw except for the very last one that occured with less than 100k of healing needed. The stock Blizz focus frame with clique was enough, I just had to carefully watch my hots. I think i had up to 40 stacks at the end but I dont recall exactly.

The most important thing on this fight is to maximize your stack and not alternate portals.

Faeylin · 02/10/10, 10:57 AM

You know, when I first started druiding in Wrath content (Nax & Ulduar), I used to spam the raid with rejuvs and support the tanks with lifeblooms that expired at three stacks. A lot of my healing was overhealing and kind of silly, really. People would die because other healers didn't always get to them right away after they were hit by burst damage (and my hots didn't keep them from dying).

Lately, I've shifted to using a lot more of Regrowth + Nourish. I stick my hots up when I know for sure that a target is going to be taking heavy damage, or for aura fights. I'm talking mostly 10 man content (especially ICC), and I almost never am the devoted raid healer (I frequently tank heal, or do some combination of tank + raid). Actually, I feel so smug that I tend to assign one healer to tanks, one to raid, and I fill in whenever they can't keep up (although for two-healer setups, I easily manage my own role and usually help with the other healer's job as well)

Am I doing things wrong? Since I've swapped away from raid hotting, I've felt much more capable, powerful and flexible as a healer. Probably the only downside of more aggressive healing is that I frequently run myself OOM right near the end of the fight (but I pace myself to make sure that I last to the end by letting other healers fill up safe damage that I know won't kill anyone).

I just read the resto druid guide (which was smart, very mathy, and contains tons of useful info) and I felt completely out of sync with the described playstyle. O.o

My current spec may not be ideal for PvE, because I have Improved Barskin (for PvP purposes) and I dropped NG because I'm starting to approach (or am at) a 1s Nourish with raid buffs. I've also started to gear for more throughput at the expense of longevity because I can have access to multiple Innervates (my all-the-time-partner is a kitty/bear druid) and I frequently abuse every last bit of mana with the idea that it's just not helpful to end the fight at 60% mana.

Sorry I don't have any logs to post. I run on a laptop that sometimes gets too hot, so I try to avoid any unnecessary strain on it.

Ermine · 02/10/10, 11:32 AM

As a general point, I agree that approaching 10 man content as a druid is often quite different to 25 man. I wouldn't necessarily agree with the spell choices you describe and certainly regrowth as a primary heal will run you dry eventually, but you will probably spend less time blanketing 5x1 and more time performing the sorts of roles druids will typically consider weaker elements of our class. That's just the nature of the content size. It's not to say that the general principles as laid out here are not applicable.

I wouldn't expect much focus on these different styles however, as quite aside from EJ focusing on 25 man end-game raiding, your role will be largely dictated by your healing partner in a 10 man.