Resto druid: Stepping it up.

[Hildrande]

I'm still new to raiding, and not long ago I was a faceroller. I've been reading guides, wowhead comments, these forums, studied combat logs, done heaps of flex, lfr and all normal kills I've had a chance to do as well as wave 38 in proving grounds and 9/9 Gold. I use the entire toolkit - I have a nice Soothe macro, use maim to stun the healing trash shamans before Nazgrim and might try use MoU to soak the Iron Star impact or to get insta-taunt to pull away my add after empowered whirling corruption. Frequently switch to Cenarion Ward and Incarnation for nasty trashpacks where people tend to get almost insta-ganked.

There's room for some tweaking in the UI, macros and keybinds. I do occationally take unnecessary damage, and cooldown usage isn't always very good. I do some rudimentary log analysis on warcraftlogs, although I think it's hard to evaluate healing based on the combat logs.


The question:
What more can I do to step it up, and bring my play to the next level?


One thing I've been thinking about are the procs. I have really nice tellmewhens blowing up in my face whenever trinkets, gem or cloak procs, but hardly ever find any room for actually utilizing them for healing. Should I?

Looking more on the battlefield and less on the raidframes in order to better be able to anticipate incoming damage, is that feasible? I already use tidyplates and friendly nameplates for shroom and efflo positioning.

Boss swingtimer? Garrosh sometimes dishes out regular hits very hard very fast.

Or maybe it's just getting better at all those small things together.


I'm member of a two-nights a week casual raiding guild, with 14/14N and Immerseus down on HC. We are not serious about HC progression, with the VP nerf my guess is we might make it to wing 3 before WoD. If I had joined a 3/4-nights guild aiming for Garrosh HC kill the pressure and demands of the fights might have made me innovate. As for now, increased healing challenges for me would mostly have to come from solohealing encounters on flex or normal - which I might try to do.



Cheers,
Hildrande

[Jordaen]

Linking your armory and logs would be really helpful...

As for swingtimers you don't need it. You should always have lifebloom on the tank by default, as well as a rejuv and probably your mushroom on normal garrosh so the odds of your tank getting deleted in a global is very unlikely. If it does happen, it's more than likely a tank problem and not a healing problem.

I'm 14/14 heroic and I've never ever used cenarion ward. The extra global is not usually worth it, especially since you've got regrowth (probably glyphed) swiftmend, nature's swiftness and if nothing else you have genesis.

You should definitely use your meta proc wisely. It's best to use it on wg if you can for one of your spells and then rejuv for the rest of the duration. If it procs after you cast you can only get 3 spells in before it ends. If you're casting as it procs you can technically get 4 spells.

You should position your raid frames in the lower center of your screen so you're staring at your feet, the bosses feet, and your raid frames at the same time. This allows you to react better to fire coming your way without having to move your eyes. Eventually you shouldn't really have to look at your frames because the damage in SoO is very predictable as well as the movement required on most fights. Just practice on multi tasking more.

If you're not already, track your cds such as Tranq, swiftmend, nature's swiftness, nature's cure, wild growth, incarnation if you use it etc. You can use Weak Auras to do this and it's very helpful, especially if you're using SotF.

That's about as general as I can get with the info provided. As I said, armory and logs would be way more helpful to be more precise.

[Alvito]

You don't want to over do the weakaura/tellmewhen announcements. When I first started using those sort of add ons I tracked everything and set noises to them and quickly they became white noise and bars I ignored. Now I have main abilities set to noises, like innervate, if I am sub 83% mana and it is off cd a air raid siren goes off. If you find a nice UI set up that you are comfortable with without over loading your screen and eyes mixed in with macro's the sky really is the limit.

[ryklin]

skills: yeah the only fights I found cenarion ward at all useful were garrosh (nothing else to do while prepping for whirl) an paragons and IJ (because low cost stacking heal while moving) on heroic, but ysera's gift should suit you well when it's not pulling the entire zone for no reason
only fights I used might of ursoc on were paragons, siegecrafter, and malkorok (aim, purple swirls, I had sc's laser)
and always consider the 30yd stampeding roar glyph it's really really nice
USE BARKSKIN, put it somewhere as easy to reach as wild growth, it's almost always up and it's a lot of damage reduction and track it's cd just as well as you would wild growth

procs: yeah, tracking procs and calling for less raid cds because you know you have int procs can be really nice in 10man, in 25s it's nice because you can stack 'em with tranq (if it isn't a pre-planned one)
but the most important ones to track are free regrowth, fully charged mushroom, and LMG proc

you can set your ui however you want really, I know people that put bars in the left in a tiny spot even, just keep your char clear and be able to do stuff (especially important with a ground targeted shroom) while moving
having too much stuff on one side can make it hard to drop your shroom in certain spots while moving though so the middle bottom and then one side of that (likely right because of chat bar placement is where you should focus health bars, cd's and timers)
some people also like to do stuff like make bars that aren't full light up
other ui tip: Bind your extra action key

as for the looking at the battlefield part: the only time this helped me this whole tier was paragons because of aim and lasers (it's rarely needed), the rest of the time dbm or a boss's energy bar or a debuff (toxic mists, IJ's tail laser, naz's bleed) told me when, you mostly need to be aware of a boss's timers and that you're not standing in stuff or not standing in a bad place to stand (in both the 'hurting you void zone' respect and the will the boss' throwing a rock or desecrate' at me here would be bad perspectives) I guess it'd help to some extent with malkorok too as you could know who needs to be topped off for the next energy
there's usually only a small handful of times since cata when there's only visual queues for damage, even fire on the ground gives a debuff

but now fights are so specific with where you stand thanks to the strength of stacked healing, most movement is just done by following some hunter or ele shammy with a mark on their head (or even better, you have that mark) or occasionally moving out of shit and you really don't even have to be all that aware of where you are and the others aren't too bad, (be very careful of bad yellow and green stuff, blizz refuses to make yellow and green stuff stand out from the ground so be sure to set your graphics so you can see it)

set up your ui to track fight specific debuffs with vuhdoo or grid and make sure to have it able to show timers for certain buffs as well as a timer for lifebloom
if there are boss swingtimers that'd be useful I guess, but really, tanks should just always be topped off in current healing environment, if you need to, just constantly cast regrowth and cancel it if it isn't needed on garrosh, nothing else to do

search curse and google for addons, because if you can think of it, there's likely an addon for it

and limited schedule will suck as you get further, I backup for a friend's 1 day/week guild on my alt and it really sucks trying to do spoils/thok prog at 4-5 hrs/week with wipes on malkorok, you might want to consider saving as early as malkorok if people start getting geared

and as for those protectors wipes, either have rook's tank go really far away or have everyone move close to the bubble's edge before he clashes and get people to not stand in poison and try tree form
other note: have the guy with sha sear be sure to not run into the stack during rook's split phase this will save a lot of mana
make sure to watch the timer for dispels and I assume you're using a normal dispel priority system (i.e. you should dispel group 1 and your partner group 2, if they are in the same group, you get the top 1 and he gets the bottom)

[Deleted]

I won't write an essay, as there really aren't that many things that you can add to your UI to improve - most of the 'skill' simply comes from practice. You need to have a raid frame that shows Lifebloom uptime, who has rejuv on them, and who has wild growth on them. You will also need an internal timer that tracks your trinket cooldowns and uptime, and something to show when your cloak and meta gem proc. You can also make some weak auras to track mana tide/ spirit shell etc. but as you are raiding 10 man this really shouldn't be necessary.

[Hildrande]

Thanks alot for all the input, I'll read it carefully.

Linking your armory and logs would be really helpful...

In the signature.

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the odds of your tank getting deleted in a global is very unlikely. If it does happen, it's more than likely a tank problem and not a healing problem.

18 wipes on 25-man Garrosh, tank deaths was a big problem and made me use Cenarion Ward.

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You will also need an internal timer that tracks your trinket cooldowns and uptime.

Except from using them to maximise dps from HotW at start, and possibly to tranq shields up at Malkorok at pull, I have found no way to utilise trinket procs. The healing needs are there regardless of the procs and I don't see how not having them or having them can affect rotation. An important reason for why I want the Blackfuse trinket. Would be great if you can elaborate abit more on why tracking trinket procs and their cooldowns are usefull.

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You don't want to over do the weakaura/tellmewhen announcements.

I find the cleanness vs informative aspects of the ui really hard to balance. For example, I'm using Icehud for health and mana bars, nicely setup. But during combat I rarely actually look at those bars and use them to get information. I have some large shaking tellmewhen icons that pop up at low HP percentages. I may want to consider ditching Icehud.

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s
as for the looking at the battlefield part: the only time this helped me this whole tier was paragons because of aim and lasers (it's rarely needed)

If your group are good at utilizing the green circle and getting into it then maybe yes. I often move it to wherever people stand.