Noob Resto Druid questions (e.g. do you ever use Healing Touch?)

[Gyrotex]

Hi fellow Druids, I'm looking for some help.

Before you send me to Icy Veins - I've been there, and read the basics - which are a bit cut and dry, hard to properly imagine in a simple situations of healing that I currently find myself in. Hence trying to ask a question here.

I've leveled as Balance thanks to advice from some guys here, and decided to jump into Resto for quick(er) gearing as fresh 110. Currently 835, started TW/Heroics/LFR last night. Obviously trying to get better, so I can start pushing lower Mythic and M+.

Would love your advice on a simple and effective Talents set, as well as a couple of questions:

- Do you ever use Healing Touch? In my few initial runs I thought there was really no use for it.

- What talent set is best suited for 5 mans? What about raids?

- Any advice you can give a beginner that you wish you knew when you started healing?

Thanks

[clevin]

I'll tackle the last point...

Understand the style of your class. Druids are all about HoTs vs direct heals. Yes, we have the latter, but we're really mostly a HoT class. That means you want to anticipate damage and toss HoTs on people likely to take it just before the damage goes out.

Understand your spells. Efflorescence heals people in the circle. Use it on grouped up people... tanks and melee are easy, but if the ranged stack to split damage from something, it's useful there too.

Dont be afraid to use your CDs. Don't waste them, but if Tranquility is up and 10 people just took 35% of their HP in damage, use it. ON THE OTHER HAND... get to know how damage occurs in a fight. In the case I just put forth, you don't want to use tranq if you know there's even heavier AOE damage coming in 20 seconds. My main point here is that you don't get credit for saving a CD... if you can use it and don't think you'll need it before it comes off CD again, use the damn thing.

Finally, it's not about keeping people at 100% it's about keeping them alive. By this I mean you're better Rejuving 5 people back to 80% that focusing on getting 3 to 100% and letting one die.

PS: New healers often focus so much on others they forget to watch their own health.

[Alltat]

- Do you ever use Healing Touch? In my few initial runs I thought there was really no use for it.

No. Never. It just doesn't heal for enough to matter. Just cast Rejuvenation on them and let it tick.

- What talent set is best suited for 5 mans? What about raids?

This is a standard five man build. For raiding, use Spring Blossom or Inner Peace instead.

- Any advice you can give a beginner that you wish you knew when you started healing?

Use all of your cooldowns early and often. It's easy to forget about them otherwise, and almost every time someone posts logs here asking for help, the number one thing they're doing wrong is not using their cooldowns enough. Use Flourish to double Wild Growths any time it's available, for example. Don't save it unless you know that something in particular happens next.

[Gyrotex]

Finally, it's not about keeping people at 100% it's about keeping them alive. By this I mean you're better Rejuving 5 people back to 80% that focusing on getting 3 to 100% and letting one die.

Thanks for your advice, this one is definitely something I need to get better at. Cooldowns too.

Speaking of cooldowns, what's the right way to use our artifact ability - hots and WG first, THEN boost the hots, or the other way around also works (i.e. order of cast doesn't matter) ?

[Cheze]

healing touch is pretty nice in five mans if you take abundance; in raids there is little reason to use it

[Gyrotex]

No. Never. It just doesn't heal for enough to matter. Just cast Rejuvenation on them and let it tick.

Excellent, thank you.

Knowing they've trimmed abilities that made no sense or weren't used, I was afraid I'm missing some obvious mana preservation (or whatever) use-case where I should use HT, and I didn't.

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healing touch is pretty nice in five mans if you take abundance; in raids there is little reason to use it

Hmmm need to take a closer look at what Abundance does to HT to make it worth a button slot on my toolbar. Thanks.

[Cheze]

it's pretty easy to keep HT's cast time pushed below the GCD (remember germinations count as rejuvs)

in higher m+ what you're going to struggle with isn't sustained damage; we're really good at sustained damage. What druid struggles with is ST burst, especially when it's unpredictable. i.e. what do you do when a target is taking more damage than can easily be healed by rejuv/germ/cultivation?

cenarion ward is nice and I used it for a long time in m+ without thinking about it too much, but abundance gives you so much more ability to save people who're spiking that I wouldn't want to be without it now

[Raugnaut]

Excellent, thank you.

Knowing they've trimmed abilities that made no sense or weren't used, I was afraid I'm missing some obvious mana preservation (or whatever) use-case where I should use HT, and I didn't.

- - - Updated - - -



Hmmm need to take a closer look at what Abundance does to HT to make it worth a button slot on my toolbar. Thanks.

Abundance gives HT 10% more haste per active Rejuve, and Regrowth 10% more crit per active Rejuve, so with, say, 10 rejuves rolling on a 5 man party (Take Germination for 5 mans always. The other 2 are better options for raids), you get 1 second HT casts. Of course, note that Prosperity/Cenarion Ward is more powerful for Mythics, as you really need the powerful burst healing the two options provide.

Always make sure to keep Lifebloom rolling on the tank too - Its the most efficient tank heal, and lets you get free Regrowths. Refresh at ~3 seconds left to ensure bloomage.

For talents, if you take Flourish, plan around it - Ensure that 10x Rejuves are up (With Germination. With 0 haste, it takes 15 seconds to get up 10x rejuves). If you have Cenarion Ward, use it, then cast Wild Growth, then Flourish, then Artifact Power, then watch the overheals come in. But seriously - In the 100 talent tier, Flourish and Stonebark are your two options. Note that if you have Cenarion Ward, you 99% have to take Flourish imo - Combining Flourish with Cenarion Ward and Artifact Ability results in extremely immense tank healing every minute. Then remaining 1% of the time is when you are in a raid, and you need Ironbark up as a tank external, which is something that doesn't happen as often as in the past.

[Yunaqt]

Mostly been answered so a few things.

Healing Touch: One place i've used this is for really high M+s (Over 15's) where I have LB, x2 Rejuv, RG, WG and CW on the tank and they're still getting trucked with every swing dealing 50% of their health pool then i've used Healing Touches, to far that's it.

Personally for 5mans I prefer Stonebark over Flourish 30s reduced CD and 20% increased HoT healing which I find really useful.

Raid as said Just change to Flourish and either Inner Peace or Spring Blossom - Depends on fight length and how the damage is - Consistant damage and shorter fights (Skyorp / Krosus) Spring Blossom get's great value and is another HoT so mastery synergy yay!
Inner Peace for longer fights or more burst healing where you can get an extra use of Tranq. If you're using tranq at set times and could do the same with a 3min CD don't use IP as it's just a waste, good fights for this are Gul'dan and Elisandre due to the length of the encounter and costant bursty damage throughout the encounter.

Advice...Heal as much as you can - Heal the horrible tanks you find that keep you on your toes that take more damage in a +4 than a tank in a +15, a lot of healers shit the bed when they get into the crunch portions of a fight where you need to be quick on your toes so just get familiar with it.
Get WAs for both your own abilities and boss abilities to keep on top of everything even when it gets crazy.

Make sure you have good raidframes, you want to be able to see what you can dispel or if you need to bomb heal someone, personally I use vuhdo frame changes colour and has the icon for the debuff that's dispel able by me - Anything really important like a debuff that needs removing ASAP or can kill a player in a few seconds you can change the colour so the frame highlights orange for example to get a very fast queue to deal with it.

Should also jump on the Druid discord and read through some of the stuff on there for resto, will help give you a few tips you may find helpful.

Best of luck ^^

[Deleted]

No. Never. It just doesn't heal for enough to matter. Just cast Rejuvenation on them and let it tick.


This is a standard five man build. For raiding, use Spring Blossom or Inner Peace instead.


Use all of your cooldowns early and often. It's easy to forget about them otherwise, and almost every time someone posts logs here asking for help, the number one thing they're doing wrong is not using their cooldowns enough. Use Flourish to double Wild Growths any time it's available, for example. Don't save it unless you know that something in particular happens next.

Cultivation blows ass in 5 mans. What people die to is burst, not rot. If you find that people are consistently below 60% health, you are doing something wrong.

Cultivation is awesome in raids due to people not dying to burst, but instead slowly rotting. Cultivation in dungeons are usually something like 4% of my healing, which i would take SoTF/Prosperity build over any day, or meme build with abundance+incarnation(only works with tearstone).

[Gyrotex]

You guys have been beyond awesome and very helpful - thanks to everyone who responded - it's more than I expected.

Advice...Heal as much as you can - Heal the horrible tanks you find that keep you on your toes that take more damage in a +4 than a tank in a +15, a lot of healers shit the bed when they get into the crunch portions of a fight where you need to be quick on your toes so just get familiar with it.

Yeah it looks like as with any activity - best way to get better at it is do it a lot, aka practice... Yesterday it was funny in Cata TW dungeon I got a hot-shot tank Pally who was tanking in Ret build with a 2 hander. Aka no threat beyond DPS, no shield blocking, no real mitigation. I did pop a few heart pills, but kept him up and we didn't wipe. He was decently geared, but not a 890+.

Overall I like the new "job", as I'm normally a tank on all my alts, and a very crappy DPS (don't know what's wrong with me).

Make sure you have good raidframes, you want to be able to see what you can dispel or if you need to bomb heal someone, personally I use vuhdo frame changes colour and has the icon for the debuff that's dispel able by me

Ages ago I used to go with Grid - so installed it again last night, as didn't know if there are better alternatives.

Vuhdo worth a try? Or Grid just as good?

[Cheze]

cultivation is less about its healing done than the mastery stack; effectively it's +mastery% healing on targets below 60% health

I don't think sotf+prosperity is remotely worthwhile in five mans; ToL might be but imo only in a coordinated group that you know is gonna pull big at particular times

- - - Updated - - -

You guys have been beyond awesome and very helpful - thanks to everyone who responded - it's more than I expected.



Yeah it looks like as with any activity - best way to get better at it is do it a lot, aka practice... Yesterday it was funny in Cata TW dungeon I got a hot-shot tank Pally who was tanking in Ret build with a 2 hander. Aka no threat beyond DPS, no shield blocking, no real mitigation. I did pop a few heart pills, but kept him up and we didn't wipe. He was decently geared, but not a 890+.

Overall I like the new "job", as I'm normally a tank on all my alts, and a very crappy DPS (don't know what's wrong with me).




Ages ago I used to go with Grid - so installed it again last night, as didn't know if there are better alternatives.

Vuhdo worth a try? Or Grid just as good?

any of the popular healing mods will tell you the things you need to know; mostly it's a matter of finding the one you like best / are able to configure the easiest. Personally I still use grid1 and a handful of plugins.

[Yunaqt]

Ages ago I used to go with Grid - so installed it again last night, as didn't know if there are better alternatives.

Vuhdo worth a try? Or Grid just as good?

Personal preference, whatever works for you. I personally prefer Vuhdo and have been using it since late Cata without thinking of changing yet.

It's super customizable but you can get profiles for it to do some of the customization for you if that's easier.
https://wago.io/vuhdo/vuhdo/profiles

Weak Auras you can use the same site to take a look through to see if there's anything you might like to keep track off.
https://wago.io/weakauras/classes/druid/restoration

[Gyrotex]

To add to my list of noob questions,

at what ilevel would you guys say I could start healing M+0 up to, say +3 ?

Again, please assume that I'm not a l33t player with twitchy fingers, but not a slow grandma either.

[Deleted]

M+0 can be done by competent players pretty much in the gear you need to queue for heroics. Whether you will find groups that take you with that gear is another question altogether.

[Alltat]

Speaking of cooldowns, what's the right way to use our artifact ability - hots and WG first, THEN boost the hots, or the other way around also works (i.e. order of cast doesn't matter) ?

WG first, then the artifact ability, due to casting times.

For Flourish you want Wild Growth -> Rejuvenation (just in case you proc Power of the Archdruid) -> Flourish. Get into the habit of doing it that way even if you don't have PotA yet. If you're combining the artifact ability and Flourish, their order doesn't matter.


Note that this all changes with the new artifact traits in patch 7.2, as the artifact ability's duration is extended from 8 to 12 seconds.

[clevin]

To add to my list of noob questions,

at what ilevel would you guys say I could start healing M+0 up to, say +3 ?

Again, please assume that I'm not a l33t player with twitchy fingers, but not a slow grandma either.

Depends on the tank etc. If you run with friends etc 840-860 for M-0 to 4 or so, presuming the tank's decent and people aren't idiots about standing in fire, etc.

One thing about getting practice - run LFR. You're not the only healer, so you don't have to be awesome and you will very likely be less geared than other healers so no one will whine at you about meters more than likely. Raids arent 5 mans, but it gets you accustomed to using your spells, you can look at it and say Oh crap, forgot Tranq (or whatever) etc. If you do screw up? you'll never see those people again. And you get chances at gear!

[Cheze]

people did m+0 at like 810 ilvl and it wasn't terribly difficult; these days the reality is that you need to be 845+ to get into pub groups, but it's not too difficult to get your gear to that level via world quests.

+2-3 isn't much harder, but you probably need to be 850-860+ to get reliably invited just because lots of people are in the queue looking to farm