[Resto] Druid Guide - 5.0+

[tangedyn]

Update: After lots of spreadhseet testing SotF seems to be underwhelming. Hamlet has seen a few things:

• The only meaningful use of it is buffing WG, even if it buffs LB it's still unimpressive
• The timing is awkward in the first place, depending on your WG/SM cooldowns (for example, the standard 10 and 15)
• You're locking into using these spells together (or wasting the talent)--you're imposing a constraint on yourself
• Even in the most favorable situation (10s WG, 12s SM), if it beats Incarnation on paper, you've given up flexibility.
• Incarnation is a talent that gives strong numbers and adds a lot of flexibility (it's in the form of a powerful timer).

"For the cost of a constant added constraint in your head of what order to cast spells in, I think you'd need a much stronger benefit than SotF is giving."
I have seen elsewhere druids having a better time with ToL, so for right now I agree unless someone has different numbers.

One more point to add: Taking SotF makes you feel obliged to reforge towards the WG(SotF) haste breakpoints, losing mastery and spirit.

I've quit WoW, so haven't updated my spreadsheets for MoP. I have however updated the haste breakpoint spreadsheet as that was relatively simple and there were quite a few requests for it to be updated. Enjoy!

[Cambria]

Does't it all depend on healing rotation and use of sotf or incarnation or even heart or nature vigil. I think while i agree with ,myrrar that sacrifice other stats for pure haste is not the best course of action would't the 5730 with sotf a much easier limit to reach and keeping some of your other stats and also boost your wild growth use? Also what do you reckon the 3rd glyph should be ? any change in the original thoughts of this guide? Rj vs healing touch vs regrowth? I am now going to test regrowth glyph in 25man enviroment to see how it goes in comparison with rj one who is supporting nourish spam but dont think i will see a vast hps improvement (and will miss the hot portion)

It's not really that sotf is bad. If put in the optimal situation it isn't bad(though there are very few times where will be completely optimal) it barely beats out tree in overall potential effective throughput. Since it comes with negatives and not many positives tree is just better in general. If there comes a point where we are back to balnketing(or tol gets nerfed) it's possible that it will be better.

As of now though, for it to really be worth using you'd have to drop 2 glyphs that are better as a whole for 2 mainly just useful for that, and completely lock yourself into a rotation that may not even the best for the situation, for the talent to be used to it's full potential.

I've been messing with different glyphs a lot. I really loved the Blooming glyph in 5s/challenge modes/so on but when raiding it's just not as exciting because there is just too much other things to do than worry about adding 3 more LBs. If it blooms at a good time though, it leads to an insane amount of free healing.

LB is obviously pretty standard for a lot of fights.

WG, I'm going to try and find some math on. Before it was based on the amount of people you normally heal(much better for 25s than 10s). Since I was more focused/cared about being set up for challenge modes I don't use this one. I assume for 25s it's still the best.

RG I don't use, but I will be using this week. It will probably become a mandatory when looking at numbers from the 3 direct heals. I normally have enough RJs out that I don't need the hot to SM off of.

RJ is pointless. So for 10s, I'd probably do LB, RG, and RB or blooming. 25s, LB, RG, and WG.


The main change I'm seeing from when I did this to now would be like you said, the values of RG, HT, RJ, and nourish.

From the beginning I agreed nourish was basically not worth casting and the numbers show it's pretty accurate. I thought HT was going to be a lot closer to RG in efficiency and throughput in general. Now, RG far outweighs the other direct heals to the point where it may even be worth using with NS(which I didn't support at all in the beginning).

Nourish, even with the buff from a hot, has way too little hpm to be worth casting. Before it was just weak but didn't cast anything so could spam all day. Not the case anymore. Even when there isn't anything to do, it's better to wait until RG or HT wont go to overheal on someone like a tank or just wait to RJ/WG. Inching towards 100% with nourish just isn't efficient right now.

RJ I still think has it's place when WG isn't enough(possible RJ filling will be the cool thing to do again, not there yet with gear though).

[CaseyTheRetard]

WG, I'm going to try and find some math on. Before it was based on the amount of people you normally heal(much better for 25s than 10s). Since I was more focused/cared about being set up for challenge modes I don't use this one. I assume for 25s it's still the best.

WG glyph increases targets from 5 to 6 (20% increase in healing done) and increases cooldown from 8 to 10 seconds (25% increase in CD). In terms of sustained throughput, that's a reduction to 120%/125% = 96% efficiency from unglyphed WG. You lose 4% of sustained throughput, but receive an increase in burst output.

[Catokot]

WG glyph increases targets from 5 to 6 (20% increase in healing done) and increases cooldown from 8 to 10 seconds (25% increase in CD). In terms of sustained throughput, that's a reduction to 120%/125% = 96% efficiency from unglyphed WG. You lose 4% of sustained throughput, but receive an increase in burst output.

The glyph also provides a 20% increase in healing done for no extra mana.

[Cambria]

WG glyph increases targets from 5 to 6 (20% increase in healing done) and increases cooldown from 8 to 10 seconds (25% increase in CD). In terms of sustained throughput, that's a reduction to 120%/125% = 96% efficiency from unglyphed WG. You lose 4% of sustained throughput, but receive an increase in burst output.

I know. But in the past overall it was good for 25s, bad for 10s. The extra person was worth it in the end for 25s even with the longer CD. In 10s, it wasn't because you had much less of a chance to hit the extra person. I want to see if that's still the case.

[Maxvla]

The range on WG seems high enough now that it's almost impossible to not hit 6 targets in a 10 man. I am using WG glyph now that I've dropped SotF for ToL.

[tangedyn]

WG glyph increases targets from 5 to 6 (20% increase in healing done) and increases cooldown from 8 to 10 seconds (25% increase in CD). In terms of sustained throughput, that's a reduction to 120%/125% = 96% efficiency from unglyphed WG. You lose 4% of sustained throughput, but receive an increase in burst output.

We've done the maths on this before back in Cataclysm. Yes, if you cast WG on CD, then through the duration of the encounter you will get ~4% more healing from WG unglyphed than glyphed. However, this comes at the cost of spending 25% more mana and 25% more GCDs on WG. If you take into account the extra Rejuvenations you can cast if you glyph WG, then your total throughput way more than makes up for the 4% loss of WG healing.

[pulchritudinous]

does anyone ever have time to use mushrooms in 25 man?
id like to include mushrooms in my healing but i never find the time

[Meleti]

Mushrooms aren't worth using right now. You can pre-shroom before the fight so you get all of their healing in one GCD, but if you're using four GCDs for shrooms it's not going to be very efficient from a HPS perspective.

[Cambria]

Mushrooms aren't worth using right now. You can pre-shroom before the fight so you get all of their healing in one GCD, but if you're using four GCDs for shrooms it's not going to be very efficient from a HPS perspective.

Agree with this. Unless you have time between phases where nothing is happening and you can throw them down they aren't worth using.

[apostoloss]

(mushrooms) ->Actually i do as i learn the fights more and trying to keep my mana without overbuffing spirit stat. Its not bad if you rotate cds (25man) with others as backup (elegon's explosions) combined with sotf+wild growth+sotf is a nice burst esp if you can time it very well. Today i was trying to change my healing abit and notice that in order to increase my hps this happend by using more rejuvs instead of direct healing, like we did in the past . Ofc in order to sustain this you need better gear than mine (466 currently) and perhaps stack spirit . 6% more intellect from talent also helps as it seems . So the old advice keep 3 lb on tanks (or rotate around ) and 3 to 4 rejuv in raids seems to be better than casting regrowth in low health targets (even if you have glyphed for 100% crit effect). Will need more testing though. I might switch to incarnation after playing with sotf since it came out. I am keen to see if it actually makes a difference since the sotf healing style is not that much dynamic and needs to know the fight well and have a well discipline raid who is not running around like headless chickens

[Torty]

One more point to add: Taking SotF makes you feel obliged to reforge towards the WG(SotF) haste breakpoints, losing mastery and spirit.

I've quit WoW, so haven't updated my spreadsheets for MoP. I have however updated the haste breakpoint spreadsheet as that was relatively simple and there were quite a few requests for it to be updated. Enjoy!

Why do you feel obliged to take that haste cap? Any logs/math proving this? I've tried getting there and it was an hps loss. You go from 12 WG ticks to 13 which is slightly over 8% increase to WG. On both our heroic Will of the Emperor kills I've been using SotF. I will take first kill on which I played better than on second one. I've done 31% healing with WG, so that would make a 2.5% healing increase roughly. You would probably have to lose a lot of intellect due to the fact that you won't be able to reach this cap with reforges only, that would make it probaly go way less overall increase or even hps loss.

I've reforged and regemmed to SotF cap after we started getting closer to the kill. On 8+ min attempts I was around 2k less hps than without SotF cap. All other things were unchanged (rotation, talents, healing targets, priorities on my raid role, etc). My swiftmend and shroom numbers went lower and I suspect that was the main reason behind drop in hps.

Mushrooms aren't worth using right now. You can pre-shroom before the fight so you get all of their healing in one GCD, but if you're using four GCDs for shrooms it's not going to be very efficient from a HPS perspective.

Again, any math/logs behind this statement? On Feng, Spirit Kings, Elegon you can preplant them while there's no raid damage going. On Will of the Emperor I just use them rotationally. Also, shrooms are not 4 GCDs, it's 3.

There are 2 public resto druid heroic Will of the Emperor logs up at the moment.
1: http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-lo...=11521&e=12246
2: http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-hw.../?s=702&e=1444
You can see 2 totally different playstyles. Mine shrooms on cd with intellect gemming, SotF SM+WG and HotW. And Mjay's heavy rejuv with a lot of spirit, ToL and NV. He's done 3 million more healing than me while his raid recieved 23 millions more damage and they had 5 healers vs our's 6. I've also done 4.4 mil damage compared to his 300k. At the moment of kills I was using 471 ilvl gear set, while he was roughly 479 judging by the items he aquired recently. Sadly, our first kill is private and my tactic clearly outperformed his on that one.

I'm questioning the statements about SotF and shrooms being bad right now ;p At least on stand-still-and-heal fights with intensive raid damage both of them are very viable. I would need more testing for Rejuv-centric builds when I get more gear, but I suspect SotF-Int-wg-sm scale better than ToL-Spi-rejuv due to the spellpower coefficients being way higher on SM and WG and Spirit not providing as many additional Rejuvs as people think it does.

[Ashrr]

I'm questioning the statements about SotF and shrooms being bad right now ;p At least on stand-still-and-heal fights with intensive raid damage both of them are very viable. I would need more testing for Rejuv-centric builds when I get more gear, but I suspect SotF-Int-wg-sm scale better than ToL-Spi-rejuv due to the spellpower coefficients being way higher on SM and WG and Spirit not providing as many additional Rejuvs as people think it does.

I don't have any math but I don't think people are explicitly stating that SotF is bad. In fact, it's probably the other way around.

The "problem" with SotF for me is that I can maximize its potential only when I have the luxury of playing the role most suited for a resto druid: raid support. From a 10 man perspective, this almost never happens. I'm tank / spot healing just as much as the other guy so I can't really guarantee using the GCD after a SM for a WG. No idea how it is in 25 man, but maybe this is an issue when you drop a healer?

SotF is the talent I badly want but can't have. Congratulations on your kill BTW Nice to see that druids are viable even in 25 man as opposed to all the reports I've been hearing.

[Keiyra]

I'm questioning the statements about SotF and shrooms being bad right now ;p At least on stand-still-and-heal fights with intensive raid damage both of them are very viable. I would need more testing for Rejuv-centric builds when I get more gear, but I suspect SotF-Int-wg-sm scale better than ToL-Spi-rejuv due to the spellpower coefficients being way higher on SM and WG and Spirit not providing as many additional Rejuvs as people think it does.

As the poster above me mentioned, i really think it comes down to whether you are doing 10 man or 25.
Shrooms for example, the only 25 ive done is lfr, but even in that scenario, the healing they do is actually fairly impressive - with so many targets it wasn't unheard of for me to get 10-15% of my healing done from shrooms in 25 lfr. But in a 10 man, the time required vs. healing gain is much less favorable. Sure there are niche moments here and there were you can squeeze them in, but most of the time its just not worth the effort for so little healing.

SoTF, in a 25 man, you're likely full time on raid duty with the exception of LB maintenance. To get the most out of SoTF it does lock you into that SM->WG rotation that just isn't always advantageous in a 10 man, where as in a 25 you're almost always likely to have 6 targets that'll get a good chunk of healing from it.

As with all things - they aren't bad, they are situational. Its all about using what works for you, in your specific circumstances.

[wolvers]

Mushrooms aren't worth using right now. You can pre-shroom before the fight so you get all of their healing in one GCD, but if you're using four GCDs for shrooms it's not going to be very efficient from a HPS perspective.

I agree, you can't drop a cast for it or use them rotationally. But in 10-man Feng, it used to be of a little help.



BTW, the symbiosys bonuses for tank changed again, can you Myrrar update again you first page post?

[Thalur]

BTW, the symbiosys bonuses for tank changed again, can you Myrrar update again you first page post?

They didn't change. It's just the PTR 5.1 patch notes so you won't be seeing it on live for couple of weeks/months.

[Cambria]

I agree, you can't drop a cast for it or use them rotationally. But in 10-man Feng, it used to be of a little help.



BTW, the symbiosys bonuses for tank changed again, can you Myrrar update again you first page post?

Yeah, I'll change it when they update it.


As for sotf, again:

It's not a bad talent, but it's not as good as tree. Even in perfect, 100% perfect scenarios, it barely outdoes tree in possible effective throughput but has to much streamlining of spells to make it pass it.

• Both in 10 and 25 you'll be WGing on CD and SMing on CD. So trying to say 'it's better for 25s' doesn't work....at all. In 10s it will still almost always hit max people unless you place it badly.(Wg a random person in the corner).
• The SM + WG CDs are clunky. They don't fit together. So actually using it to it's full potential you won't be using both on CD as you should and it puts you into a hole of either changing the way you heal to fit soul or wasting the talent often.
• Even in a perfect situation which would literally never happen, it barely does more than tree while cutting out any and all flexibility you had in a raid.

For it to be better than tree it needs to not have the ridiculous restrictions it has. To maximize it's potential you'd need to be glyphing to HT and using it, which would most likely end up in a throughput loss.

Unless you are seriously just blanketing, which no one should be at this point, number wise, flexibility wise, and overall usefulness is just not as good as tree.

Shrooms:
As everyone says constantly, shrooms are fine if you have nothing else to cast on certain fights. They are not worth 3 gcds for the tiny amount of healing they do, and you definitely should not be using them rotationally. In those 3 gcds you could have cast multiple other types of spells. Showing logs where they are fight for you proves nothing. Showing logs where when you didn't use them as much you didn't do as much healing also proves nothing. Having all the top druids and theorycrafters saying 'shit, these suck' does.

Between LB, SM on CD, WG on CD, something on CC, something with NS, tranq, Tree, Vigil(or heart), (even if you space them out) throwing 3 RJs out in that amount of time will lead to more healing. As with all aoes, there is the 6 person soft cap, and the healing is just...way too low. If you are between phases, everyone is 100% or high enough health in general, and you're just sitting refreshing LB it's a great place to use them. Shrooms have their place as always, but other spells are worth your gcd time if people actually need healing.

How I use shrooms is if there isn't anything to cast or whatever heal I'm about to heal will probably be mostly overheal(slow times) I'll throw a shroom. Once I have 3 and there is spike dmg I use it. It doesn't make a dent in their health but for no gcd no point not using it. I absolutely never put a shroom down when something else can be cast, it's not worth it.

Maximizing effective throughput is good, but raid stability and preventing deaths is more important. When people are low and you have a mass AoE like that it's going to give you throughput, but not useful throughput. The tiny amount of healing they do to everyone isn't really that helpful compared to...pretty much anything else you can cast. Since it has no gcd when you already have 3 it's obviously good to use, but not worth not casting other spells for(aka, putting it in your rotation, or not casting something like a RJ) and really....really should not be used during a important phase/time(putting them down), only in between when you have nothing else to do.

[Etapicx]

Mushroom is good use.... for Wild Charge movement :-)

[Torty]

It's not a bad talent, but it's not as good as tree. Even in perfect, 100% perfect scenarios, it barely outdoes tree in possible effective throughput but has to much streamlining of spells to make it pass it.

• Both in 10 and 25 you'll be WGing on CD and SMing on CD. So trying to say 'it's better for 25s' doesn't work....at all. In 10s it will still almost always hit max people unless you place it badly.(Wg a random person in the corner).
• The SM + WG CDs are clunky. They don't fit together. So actually using it to it's full potential you won't be using both on CD as you should and it puts you into a hole of either changing the way you heal to fit soul or wasting the talent often.
• Even in a perfect situation which would literally never happen, it barely does more than tree while cutting out any and all flexibility you had in a raid.

For it to be better than tree it needs to not have the ridiculous restrictions it has. To maximize it's potential you'd need to be glyphing to HT and using it, which would most likely end up in a throughput loss.

Oh, do I love posts like this. Post random stuff without any thought process behind it and no practical implementation, make it look legit and hope people trust you just because you have fancy name on forum.

1. I don't know who that was directed to, probably not me, so will just skip it. Never touched 10m in my posts as I don't raid it.
2. SM + WG are not clunky. Just because you say so, it doesn't make them clunky (oddly enough). They do fit together pretty nice. I suspect you don't know about PvP set existence judging by your ignorance about clunkyness. SM has 13 sec cd, after you use WG, it already has ~11.6-11.7 left on it. Next time you use SM, you only wait a split second before using WG.
3. P3 Elegon, WotE, Garajal, Stone Guard. Have you even played this tier at all?

You don't NEED to use HT glyph. That's a ridiculous thing to say. It provides so little for SotF, it's not even funny. It also makes almost all your clearcast procs wasted due to going overhealing because of slow cast time. Sure, it's a slight HPS increase if you don't need utility glyph like 30 yard roar or 100% rebirth, but saying 'required' is kinda strange, to say the least. I'm not surprised here again, because you've probably never even played SotF.

Unless you are seriously just blanketing, which no one should be at this point, number wise, flexibility wise, and overall usefulness is just not as good as tree.

I was blanketing during whole Stone Guard, Garajal and WotE encounters (literally from start to end, excluding time when I was dpsing in HotW), so did other healers in our raid. Glad to hear we did it wrong.

Shrooms:
As everyone says constantly, shrooms are fine if you have nothing else to cast on certain fights. They are not worth 3 gcds for the tiny amount of healing they do, and you definitely should not be using them rotationally. In those 3 gcds you could have cast multiple other types of spells. Showing logs where they are fight for you proves nothing. Showing logs where when you didn't use them as much you didn't do as much healing also proves nothing. Having all the top druids and theorycrafters saying 'shit, these suck' does.

'Theorycrafters' are those guys that still progress through LFR and put stuff in their spreadsheets after everyone in top20 already did it for 2-5 weeks? Yeah, I remember it was the case with t12 reforging (2 or 3 weeks after heroic progress started), t13 reforging (more than a MONTH to start discussing going spirit). I also remember how my post on EJ about pre-nerf shrooms got deleted. I was doing stable 100-130k hps on beta, while people reported 50-70k hps on some encounters and whined about going oom. Need to be good at math to copy stuff from proper druids. I also remember first edition of this very guide having max mana meta gem, no PoP in its then ridiculous state and a couple of other funny things I can't remember already. These guys look like someone worth believing to. Will probably read them 1 month later when they finally realize that pvp set is strong. Maybe you will even include it later on, who knows.

I'm 7th resto druid in the world to kill Will of the Emperor heroic. Does that count as top druid or my name has to be 'Owld' or 'Emmab'? Then please link me posts of Owld, Emmab, Legaccy, Viveca, Медсс or Lunayunaa saying that shrooms are shit and suck. I think I missed those somewhere in between strong theorycrafters' and lfr heroes' posts.

Maximizing effective throughput is good, but raid stability and preventing deaths is more important. When people are low and you have a mass AoE like that it's going to give you throughput, but not useful throughput. The tiny amount of healing they do to everyone isn't really that helpful compared to...pretty much anything else you can cast. Since it has no gcd when you already have 3 it's obviously good to use, but not worth not casting other spells for(aka, putting it in your rotation, or not casting something like a RJ) and really....really should not be used during a important phase/time(putting them down), only in between when you have nothing else to do.

That might be something new to you, but maximizing throughput usually leads to less deaths due to people being higher health in general. That's how people heal on cutting edge progress. You try to keep everyone as high hp as possible to prevent random spikes gibbing people. If I do more hps with shrooms, I will use them. Not instead of clutch NS+HT/RG of course and not in front of spells I know are stronger (sm, wg, lb), but I will use them rotationally. That's what every proper druid would do. I have serious doubts about you being one after this post, and arrogance comming from it with literally nothing to back it up just makes it worse.

Some numbers again:
shrooms on my kill had 16.7 HPM and 34k healing per global.
rejuv 13.4 HPM and 129k healing per cast.
If you still think you would go for stronger and less effective heal with your gear, good luck with that. Hope you can last for more than 6 mins with that playstyle. I'm going with more mana efficient heals whenever it's appropriate.

[Cambria]

You're so ragey that I don't agree with you you are taking anything I say and turning it around to fit you. Not even worth arguing with.

Theorycrafters are those guys that do top end content and actually know the math behind their numbers. Anyone who tries and knock theorycrafters are people who think different based off their own failed theories in their raids that disagree what everyone else says, so they knock them.

Play the way you want and fuck everyone that disagrees is a really poor way to play. Pretending that the way you do things is the best way for every raid to do things also shows you must be very new to top end raiding. Top end raiding means you play with a group of people who play as close to perfectly as possible. Everything changes when you play like this. Every single tier I've written this guide I've had to completely change how I wrote it because the way I did things was completely different to how normal progression players should be playing.

No normal progression druid is going to see good numbers with shrooms. No normal progression druid should be seeing better numbers with Soul than Tree. It's fairly obvious you are so obsessed with your own progression that you can't see outside your little walls. Been there, got over it years ago.