[Resto] Druid Guide & Discussion (6.0.3)

[Deleted]

I have come to the conclusion that the following talents/glyphs are pretty much mandatory.

-TOL
-Nature's vigil
-Germination.
-Glyph of regrowth
-Glyph of rejuvenation
-Glyph of wild growth (raids only)
Moment of clarity is a bad choice due to the RNG. sometimes you get 3 procs in a row, sometimes you cast for 90 seconds and dont get anything.

Also, swiftmend is an abomination of a spell and a waste of GCD. You spend 4160 mana for 16314 healing (without mastery..) with only about 10% chance to crit. Meanwhile, regrowth heals for 20k guaranteed + guaranteed living seed for an additional 10k. that is 14k extra healing for only 1500 mana more.. that is almost 2x swiftmend's healing for only 1500 additional mana!

if you gotta save someone, dont swiftmend them. Goodjob blizzard, you have now put a very inefficient spell (heal/cost) on a 15 second cooldown

Wildgrowth makes me sad. it costs the mana of 4 rejuvenations. 4 rejuvenations heal for 75232 (without mastery active). Wildgrowth without glyph heals for 66000. with the glyph it heals for 79200. Therefore, wildgrowth is pretty much only 'efficient' in raids or when you need to slow down the incoming damage so you can top everyone up again with regrowth / rejuvenation.

Tranquility is a HORRIBLE spell in heroic dungeons. It takes too much time to heal everyone up - TOL / Vigil + wildgrowth / mass rejuvenation or regrowth is your panic button. Tranquility is only efficient in raids and even then you may still want to cast TOL/wildgrowth beforehand to get a nice burst healing out of it, since tranquility's healing in general is just... slow

[Zetlizard]

I have come to the conclusion that the following talents/glyphs are pretty much mandatory.

-TOL
-Nature's vigil
-Germination.
-Glyph of regrowth
-Glyph of rejuvenation
-Glyph of wild growth (raids only)
Moment of clarity is a bad choice due to the RNG. sometimes you get 3 procs in a row, sometimes you cast for 90 seconds and dont get anything.

Also, swiftmend is an abomination of a spell and a waste of GCD. You spend 4160 mana for 16314 healing (without mastery..) with only about 10% chance to crit. Meanwhile, regrowth heals for 20k guaranteed + guaranteed living seed for an additional 10k. that is 14k extra healing for only 1500 mana more.. that is almost swiftmend's healing for only 1500 mana!

if you gotta save someone, dont swiftmend them.

Wildgrowth makes me sad. it costs the mana of 4 rejuvenations. 4 rejuvenations heal for 75232 (without mastery). Wildgrowth without glyph heals for 66000. with the glyph it heals for 79200. Therefore, wildgrowth is pretty much only 'efficient' in raids or when you need to slow down the incoming damage so you can top everyone up again with regrowth / rejuvenation.

Tranquility is a HORRIBLE spell in heroic dungeons. It takes too much time to heal everyone up - TOL / Vigil + wildgrowth / mass rejuvenation is your panic button. Tranquility is only efficient in raids.

-TOL
nope, SotF is just as strong, possibly even more.

-Nature's vigil
mostly, but hotw has its uses

-Glyph of regrowth
yep

-Glyph of rejuvenation
nope, not at all

-Glyph of wild growth
well yeah

-Moment of clarity is a bad choice
Right now moment of clarity has a bug with SotF, that allows it to not consume the SotF buff while MoC is active, so you can spam 4 really strong regrowth back to back or 3 regrowths and a WG, quite strong on CMs, so its not 100% bad.

Not moment of clarity related but you can also use NS + Regrowth and it won't consume SotF, allowing you to then consume the SotF on another powerful regrowth or WG.
I've seen crits for up to 148k followed by another for 90k, allowing to keep the tank up with a billion adds.

-Tranquility is a HORRIBLE spell in heroic dungeons.
Gotta remember that tranq is really cheap, and it heals through LoS, so its got its uses for dealing with moderate damage.


-Wildgrowth makes me sad.
When used with SotF even in heroics its INSANE, it will heal through any sort of dmg, it has to be the way way to top everyone, as strong as full blown cooldowns.

[Hildrande]

I have come to the conclusion that the following talents/glyphs are pretty much mandatory.

-TOL
-Nature's vigil
-Germination.
-Glyph of regrowth
-Glyph of rejuvenation
-Glyph of wild growth (raids only)
Moment of clarity is a bad choice due to the RNG. sometimes you get 3 procs in a row, sometimes you cast for 90 seconds and dont get anything.

I challenge you to try heal 5-mans with SotF, Rampant Growth and no glyph of Regrowth. It's been done :-P

Whenever I try the Rejuv talents, I scratch my head wondering how other people do it. Working on figuring it out.

Regarding Swiftmend: It's - swift, and castable on the move. Sometimes that matters. And Living Seed rarely works on non-tanks.
Regarding Wild Growth: It's superior to Rejuvenation in terms of HPS.

My two big grudges against Rejuvenation is that it just low on throughput, and the healing takes too long to arrive. Genesis costs too much.

[Alianthos]

I have come to the conclusion that the following talents/glyphs are pretty much mandatory.

-TOL
-Nature's vigil
-Germination.
-Glyph of regrowth
-Glyph of rejuvenation
-Glyph of wild growth (raids only)
Moment of clarity is a bad choice due to the RNG. sometimes you get 3 procs in a row, sometimes you cast for 90 seconds and dont get anything.

I've been doing all Heroics, I have the meta achievement (nice boar), farming CM at the moment (got a couple bronzes, silvers doable when my group has the execution done right).
- TOL : no, I use exclusivly SotF. It's so good. Those huge RG + huge Living Seeds on the tank, man... And those huge WG too. TOL is good but I just believe SotF is too strong to pass right now
- NV : most of the time yes. I've been using HOTW occasionally too.
- Germination : it's very good and it works for CM, no problems. But Rampant Growth is phenomenal too, paired with SotF and unglyphed RG.You pop your hots on the tank, then RG > Swiftmend > RG > Swiftmend... And the tank just doesnt die. Also, if I need to use WG, I always Swiftmend someone, then BAM, +50% WG. Downside : it's very mana intensive. Fortunatly I have all my good spirit items, + spirit flask (MOP) and WoD Mana pots. So it workds
- Glyph of RG : yes with Germination. No with Rampant Growth. Side note : Swiftmend seems to always consume RG hot, which is nice.
- Glyph of Rejuv : no. TBH I dont use Healing Touch, like at all. Maybe with SotF when I want to save some mana, or with NS. So why glyph it ? My glyphs of choices for CM : Rebirth, Stampeding Roar. The 3d one is open. Usually, Glyph of Healing Touch for a lack of a better one (if I can cast it a couple time, having NS back faster is nice).

Try the SotF/RG/Unglyphed Regrowth build. It's so good, honestly.

[Thalur]

Doesn't the character screen include the extra 5% haste stat we gain from gear? I have 517 haste and that gives me 5.17% haste, but maybe I'm being silly.

The haste rating in the char screen already includes those 5%. So when it shows 517 haste rating for you, you actually only have 492 haste rating from gear.
I use Healer Calcs to verify my results. And since that gives me the same numbers I got, I trust them. (Also, it's Hamlet.) 517 haste rating (from gear) should give you 5.43% haste without the haste buff.

Also, going from 0 to 500 mastery gives me a 5.67% mastery increase. With the base mastery, that's a total of 15.66%.

You are confusing mastery % with healing increase %. Going from 0 mastery to 500 without raid buff increases your mastery from 1.1 (or 10%) to 1.1568 (or 15.68%). While this increases your mastery by 0.0568 (or 5.68%), this only increases your healing output by 5.16%. Add the mastery raid buff, and you only get a 4.87% increase.
I would advise you to not view mastery as % values, because you mix up the absolute increase in mastery with the relative increase (which is by how much your healing increases).

Here is a small example of how mastery works. Assume a spell heals for 100 without mastery. Say you have 20% base mastery, and 10% mastery from gear (so 30% in total). Now you can see that those 10% more mastery only increase your heal by 8.33%.
Heal with base mastery: 120
Heal with all mastery: 130
Increase: 8.33%
This is often called "diminishing returns" and is applicable for all stats. The more you have of a stat, the less every additional point gives you. For mastery, it's especially bad because of the large amount of base mastery and mastery buff. So haste is not better for hots because of faster cast times (those are mostly irrelevant), but because it increases the throughput of all hots by more than the same amount of mastery rating.

[Deleted]

I've been doing all Heroics, I have the meta achievement (nice boar), farming CM at the moment (got a couple bronzes, silvers doable when my group has the execution done right).
- TOL : no, I use exclusivly SotF. It's so good. Those huge RG + huge Living Seeds on the tank, man... And those huge WG too. TOL is good but I just believe SotF is too strong to pass right now
- NV : most of the time yes. I've been using HOTW occasionally too.
- Germination : it's very good and it works for CM, no problems. But Rampant Growth is phenomenal too, paired with SotF and unglyphed RG.You pop your hots on the tank, then RG > Swiftmend > RG > Swiftmend... And the tank just doesnt die. Also, if I need to use WG, I always Swiftmend someone, then BAM, +50% WG. Downside : it's very mana intensive. Fortunatly I have all my good spirit items, + spirit flask (MOP) and WoD Mana pots. So it workds
- Glyph of RG : yes with Germination. No with Rampant Growth. Side note : Swiftmend seems to always consume RG hot, which is nice.
- Glyph of Rejuv : no. TBH I dont use Healing Touch, like at all. Maybe with SotF when I want to save some mana, or with NS. So why glyph it ? My glyphs of choices for CM : Rebirth, Stampeding Roar. The 3d one is open. Usually, Glyph of Healing Touch for a lack of a better one (if I can cast it a couple time, having NS back faster is nice).

Try the SotF/RG/Unglyphed Regrowth build. It's so good, honestly.

This is the exact spec I currently use for HC dungeons but I was wondering if anyone has done some maths on a raid environment which would put out the most healing (HPS)

Incarn / Germination vs SOTF / Rampant Growth.

SOTF is more sustained and can choose the big single heals or the big AOE heals where as Germination provides decent raid healing with a 30 secs healing cooldown / mana save?

1.If there was constant raid damage to heal with no one in a life threatening situation so just raid healing needed which do you think would put out the best (highest) HPS overall?

2. Do you think with incarnation active this build has the highest HPS possible for 30 secs so best picked when a burst phase is needed?

Thanks

[Hildrande]

I was wondering if anyone has done some maths on a raid environment which would put out the most healing (HPS)

Yes. SotF+RaGr wins for constant raid damage. For 30 second burst I think Incarnation has the edge, since you get 2 more targets for WG during inc it's almost as powerful as the SotF-ed ones and unless you can do some real magic with Swiftmend usage theoretically allowing you 2xRejuv+SwM in 2 GCDs it's going to fall behind. There's also the mana bonus and +15% to all healing.

[Alianthos]

This is the exact spec I currently use for HC dungeons but I was wondering if anyone has done some maths on a raid environment which would put out the most healing (HPS)

Incarn / Germination vs SOTF / Rampant Growth.

SOTF is more sustained and can choose the big single heals or the big AOE heals where as Germination provides decent raid healing with a 30 secs healing cooldown / mana save?

1.If there was constant raid damage to heal with no one in a life threatening situation so just raid healing needed which do you think would put out the best (highest) HPS overall?

2. Do you think with incarnation active this build has the highest HPS possible for 30 secs so best picked when a burst phase is needed?

Thanks

For raiding, I'm going to say that Incarnation will be better. I believe that we (RDruid) are going to be healing the raid, mainly - although we can heal tanks just fine, we are just so good at blanketing / aoe healing. For this purpose, TOL seems the top choice : cheaper and better rejuvs, pairs nicely with Germination + more targets for WG, paired with WG Glyph > excellent raid healing + Insta RG to help for tanks /low HP raiders.

So if we admit that TOL is better, I think you have to go with Germination, the synergy is just too good.

For your questions :
1. INC would be miles better I believe, you can blanket all your raid with cheap and super efficient Rejuvs, and cast large WG (extra targets). SotF would only bring to the table a bigger WG (+50%) every time you use Swiftmend.
2. Yes, for sure.

INC seems better for raids. SotF is tighter for 5m. BUT for certains raid fights (like the Butcher I believe) with MASSIVE tank damage, I'll be going SotF for sure. I really like that we are able to chose viable options and builds, depending on encounters.

Hope that helped !

[Deleted]

1) Glyphed Regrowth vs Healing Touch - they largely seem to fulfill the same role to me. Is there any use of HT if you glyph Regrowth?

HT is more mana efficient. Regrowth's direct heal is slightly higher than a non-crit HT, but HT gets +20% crit on the target of your Lifebloom. Assuming the additional healing from Regrowth's guaranteed Living Seed isn't overhealing, my Regrowths heal for about 35k total. My HTs heal for 20k on a non-crit or 40k on a crit, which is about 30% of the time on the tank, and costs almost half the mana.

HT: 3.3k mana - 20-40k healing, 10-30%ish chance of Living Seed (~10k)

Rg: 6k mana - 25k healing, 100% chance of Living Seed

Unfortunately, the Living Seed is often wasted.

[Asrialol]

The haste rating in the char screen already includes those 5%. So when it shows 517 haste rating for you, you actually only have 492 haste rating from gear.
I use Healer Calcs to verify my results. And since that gives me the same numbers I got, I trust them. (Also, it's Hamlet.) 517 haste rating (from gear) should give you 5.43% haste without the haste buff.

Haha, indeed. So I was infact being silly.

You are confusing mastery % with healing increase %. Going from 0 mastery to 500 without raid buff increases your mastery from 1.1 (or 10%) to 1.1568 (or 15.68%). While this increases your mastery by 0.0568 (or 5.68%), this only increases your healing output by 5.16%. Add the mastery raid buff, and you only get a 4.87% increase.
I would advise you to not view mastery as % values, because you mix up the absolute increase in mastery with the relative increase (which is by how much your healing increases).

Here is a small example of how mastery works. Assume a spell heals for 100 without mastery. Say you have 20% base mastery, and 10% mastery from gear (so 30% in total). Now you can see that those 10% more mastery only increase your heal by 8.33%.
Heal with base mastery: 120
Heal with all mastery: 130
Increase: 8.33%
This is often called "diminishing returns" and is applicable for all stats. The more you have of a stat, the less every additional point gives you. For mastery, it's especially bad because of the large amount of base mastery and mastery buff. So haste is not better for hots because of faster cast times (those are mostly irrelevant), but because it increases the throughput of all hots by more than the same amount of mastery rating.

I see your point indeed. Think I'll update the guide to make it clearer that haste is the better stat. Been reading around and stuff today and it seems to be pretty clear on that.

[Hildrande]

So if we admit that TOL is better, I think you have to go with Germination, the synergy is just too good.

The big advantage the Rejuv talents have over the RaGr+SotF combo is increased mobility. You can do almost everything you need to do on the move. And there's the 30 second burst, which will fit nicely into many encounters.

Assuming 25% haste - to scale the HoTs appropriately compared to the static heals in terms of HPM: An 18 sec rejuv gives you 342%*1.25=428% spellpower for the cost of 3024 mana, empowered glyphed WGs gives you 280*1.25*6*1.5%=3150% SP healing for 12080 mana. That's 0.14 SP/mana for rejuvs and 0.26 SP/mana for +50% WGs. That's a large difference. If we add in SwM and ReGr without seed, it's 3150+350+323(because of base crit)=3823% for the cost of 12080+5962+4160=22202, healing per mana becomes 3823/22202=0.17 which is still higher than the Rejuvenation option.

+50% Wild Growth is simply a more efficient way of turning mana into healing than Rejuvenation.

If you manage to eat expiring Rejuvenations the WG option becomes quite abit more effective. On the other side there's Incarnation, but SotF+RaGr can give you hard hitting life saving heals. One question is how beneficial those last 3 seconds on Rejuvenation actually are and what their overhealing-percentage is likely to be. The Rejuvenation route don't really have any rotation requirements, perhaps making it more suited for mechanic-heavy fights.

Wild Growth is a smart heal, has much higher HPS and gives you the healing sooner. Wild Growth might overheal for more if not all the raid is low on health - or Rejuvenation might overheal for more because it takes so long time to tick in.

If my spreadsheeting is correct, for a 6-minute encountcer (360s) at ilvl685 we will have around 700k mana to play around with. Let's say there's constant raid damage, and you only use the Regrowth+Swiftmend+Wild Growth combo - that's 22202 mana per sequence. For the 6 minutes you will have mana for 700k/22202=31 of those sequences, and since it can be cast every 10th second there should be room to do that, unless there's long periods of quietness.

One reason to choose the Rejuvenation talents is that movement phases and movement encountes might be the ones hardest to heal and also where we as druid has our competitive advantage.

If you want to be good at druid healing, maybe you should master playing with both talent strategies?

[Krazyito]

Here is a 'smart cast' macro that you can use if you want.

#showtooltip
/use [@mouseover, combat] Rebirth; [@mouseover, nocombat] Revive

And to be honest, all the long macros seem siliy with the 'dead' 'nodead' 'help' etc..

'help' and 'harm' should really only be used in the macro if the button changes to different spells when targeting something. For a macro that only has the one spell, you really only need [@mouseover][][@player]. The game won't let you cast a Swiftmend on a 'dead' or 'harmful' player/mob.

Personally, I just use [@mouseover] in all my macros and then target myself if i need to heal myself.

And for wild growth, you make the spell not as useful with that macro because you can still cast it on an enemy to use it around it.


An example of where 'help' / 'harm' would be used is:

#showtooltip
/use [@mouseover,help] Rejuvenation; [@mouseover, harm] moonfire;

That changes between two different spells based on what my mouseover target is.

[Zetlizard]

Well I'm not sure which of those tags fixes it, but when you try to heal someone with a regular mouseover macro and he dies a millisecond before you click on him, the spell will change from casting on keyboard click to cast on mouse click or something like that.

Hard to describe, but really annoying.

[Deleted]

The big advantage the Rejuv talents have over the RaGr+SotF combo is increased mobility. You can do almost everything you need to do on the move. And there's the 30 second burst, which will fit nicely into many encounters.

Assuming 25% haste - to scale the HoTs appropriately compared to the static heals in terms of HPM: An 18 sec rejuv gives you 342%*1.25=428% spellpower for the cost of 3024 mana, empowered glyphed WGs gives you 280*1.25*6*1.5%=3150% SP healing for 12080 mana. That's 0.14 SP/mana for rejuvs and 0.26 SP/mana for +50% WGs. That's a large difference. If we add in SwM and ReGr without seed, it's 3150+350+323(because of base crit)=3823% for the cost of 12080+5962+4160=22202, healing per mana becomes 3823/22202=0.17 which is still higher than the Rejuvenation option.

+50% Wild Growth is simply a more efficient way of turning mana into healing than Rejuvenation.

If you manage to eat expiring Rejuvenations the WG option becomes quite abit more effective. On the other side there's Incarnation, but SotF+RaGr can give you hard hitting life saving heals. One question is how beneficial those last 3 seconds on Rejuvenation actually are and what their overhealing-percentage is likely to be. The Rejuvenation route don't really have any rotation requirements, perhaps making it more suited for mechanic-heavy fights.

Wild Growth is a smart heal, has much higher HPS and gives you the healing sooner. Wild Growth might overheal for more if not all the raid is low on health - or Rejuvenation might overheal for more because it takes so long time to tick in.

If my spreadsheeting is correct, for a 6-minute encountcer (360s) at ilvl685 we will have around 700k mana to play around with. Let's say there's constant raid damage, and you only use the Regrowth+Swiftmend+Wild Growth combo - that's 22202 mana per sequence. For the 6 minutes you will have mana for 700k/22202=31 of those sequences, and since it can be cast every 10th second there should be room to do that, unless there's long periods of quietness.

One reason to choose the Rejuvenation talents is that movement phases and movement encountes might be the ones hardest to heal and also where we as druid has our competitive advantage.

If you want to be good at druid healing, maybe you should master playing with both talent strategies?

You are correct, it does appear to be very efficient. But.. how are you going to cast the SOTF / wildgrowth / swiftmend combo when you are out of mana? you need atleast 20k mana for that and it goes down pretty fast in the first raid tier.

On the other hand, TOL is only good for spamming rejuvenation every 2 seconds when you are completely out of mana tho. 30% decrease in manacost is like 1000 mana. If you cast 20 rejuvenations in that 30 second timeframe you only save 20k mana, i wonder if the extra healing from TOL in those 30 seconds (2 casts per bossfight on average ) outperforms SOTF

[Hildrande]

i wonder if the extra healing from TOL in those 30 seconds (2 casts per bossfight on average ) outperforms SOTF

On average Incarnation gives you 9.5% more healing from Rejuvenation, and will not outperform SotF in HPS genereration. In the real world burst healing is usually very handy. It will depend on the fight.

[Deleted]

Incarnation is just as much for the instant Regrowths. You can't really quantify its value in HPS, you usually can't with cooldowns vs. permanent passive effects. Half its value is in the ability to put out maximum burst healing while moving. Measuring the numbers isn't really going to lead to any sensible comparison. Maximum possible burst healing is full HoTs + glyphed Regrowth spam, and you can do that on the move with Inc. That's incredibly valuable, and then there's the improved Rejuv and WG which simply pushes this talent to the top as it gives you not only burst healing but also better sustained healing and saves you mana. There's frankly no competition for raiding.

[Durtnasty]

Does anyone here pvp as resto? Thoughts?

[Deleted]

To be honest i dont see talents and glyphs being that mandatory. What makes this expansion great is you can talent and glyph to your playstyle and make it work.
At this moment i use this:
Talents: Soul of the Forest, heart of the wild and Germination
Glyphs: Healing touch, Rebirth, Rejuvenation (changing rejuv to regrowth)

Heroics are a breeze in general, somethings challenging but fun. did 1 CM, was not to special although mana became an issue now and then and we made some mistakes.
Regarding swiftmend, swiftmend + regrowth for a fast big heal works like a charm (especially if i would glyph regrowth for guaranteed crit...). when the entire group needs healing swiftmend on tank + wild growth is nice to .
Downside to my talents and glyphs seems to be mana, tend to get low on mana at times but never wiped due to oom in heroics.

cant link yet, but if you want to see my armory: Urithar Bronzebeard

[Deleted]

Whenever I try the Rejuv talents, I scratch my head wondering how other people do it. Working on figuring it out.

My two big grudges against Rejuvenation is that it just low on throughput, and the healing takes too long to arrive. Genesis costs too much.

I don't completely agree that Rejuvenation is low throughput. I'm not sure what other spell we have that you'd compare it to, but it does a fair amount of healing for its mana cost and cast time (similar healing to Healing Touch, which has a longer cast time), and it serves its purpose as a spell that keeps the group/raid stable through sustained damage.

As far as Germination is concerned, it's been by far the best talent for me. I view Rejuvenation and Germination as tools with which I can gain time. Since they last 18 seconds, that's around 15-16 seconds I can spend doing something else while the spells keep people alive. An example would be an HC or a Challenge Mode where the tank is taking a lot of damage. If another group member takes a hit, I can use Rejuvenation x2 and quickly be back on the tank.

[Hildrande]

I don't completely agree that Rejuvenation is low throughput. I'm not sure what other spell we have that you'd compare it to,

Wild Growth, Regrowth (but only really on the tank), Lifebloom and any spell cast with the SotF bonus. Plus the fact that there's only room for 1, sometimes 2, Rejuvenations on a target, and if that's not enough, SotF+RaG gives you better options than the Rejuvenation talents. Swiftmend+doubled rejuv is more throughput than a single rejuv, for example