[Resto] Harder to play and weaker than other healers?

[Rorschachs]

From hardest to easiest in my opinion :

Disc > MWMonk > HPally > Shaman > Hpriest > Rdruid

And considering you are raidig in a 10 man guild, you aren't really that weak and your hps shouldn't be a problem. Druids suck in 25 man not in 10 man.

[Deleted]

Hardest to easiest with disc first, that's cute.

[crunk]

Hardest to easiest with disc first, that's cute.

maximizing rapture procs and spirit shell is about as hard as anything warcraft has to offer. noobs dont roll in and double other healers, only real disc priests do

[Rorschachs]

Hardest to easiest with disc first, that's cute.

Not that disc is any hard. Its just the hardest.

Disc has a lot to track unlike any other healer.

[Deleted]

Yes, I agree making an aura for spirit procs and making sure you press inner focus before Spirit Shell and PoH is very difficult gameplay. Don't kid yourself.

[Rorschachs]

I am not kidding myself mate. For example on heavy aoe phase fights you have to track : Rapture, pom, cascade. You have to use instant holy fire to get ready for your next spirit shell. You have to make sure that you can heal all the groups while chaincasting with poh so you can use spirit shell effectively.

Popping archangel + inner focus + spirit shell isn't really the hard part. The things above aren't hard either. But tell me anything that any other healer class has to do that can potentially be harder than this.

[Bahska]

Hello druids. Two weeks ago, I started raiding MSV normal as a resto druid. My guild wanted to do all the bosses using a two healer setup: Me and a resto shamy. Since I was still new to the resto mechanics when we began, I did not know how to efficiently manage my mana, so I ended up oom-ing when the bosses were on low HP. Still, a few CDs and mana potions saved the day and we did 4/6 last week. This week, we killed Elegon and Will of the Emperor and completed MSV.

In my opinion, I invested 150% of what I can(I'm a decent healer, not a great one) and still did worse than my shamy companion. My hps ranged between 40-55k, while the shamy easily passed 50k on every fight with a heroic weapon. I know HPS is a poor way to compare healers, but my heals simply felt weak and insufficient for the damage the raid received. At Elegon, I struggled to heal the raid in time for sparks incoming damage, and Will of the Emperor was the worst. My raid wiped two times because I was OOM when the bosses dropped below 15%. I blanketed the raid with LB and used innervates at 85% and stuff, but my tank heals were so weak that I had to insert three regrowths before combos to heal my tank. I kept rejuv on both and only Swiftmended mine. Here's my armory:

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...adris/advanced

I know there's things I can improve with my gear, but I did not notice a big improvement after I got into LFR with my 463 loot and got epics. My tank heals are pitiful, and there is nothing I do better than the shamy, save for my quicker reflexes. I played resto and Hpala in WoTLK, and I used to be one of the best healers with those, even at lower item levels. Maybe I only have to adjust to the resto playstyle, but so far, I am not impressed. My tank almost died when I popped Tranquility. Why does a raid CD tick for such a pitiful amount? Even a healing potion is better, for it's an instant 120k HP...

If you have the 5% haste buff in your group drop your haste down as close as you can get to 3043 Put int/mastery (preferably) or int/haste gems in the yellow sockets red full int blue can be either spirit, int/spirit or spirit/mastery
Always Pot/eat/flask int. Reforge crit to either Mastery, spirit or haste. Crit is a waste of stats.
Get your missing belt buckle meta gem (432 spirit 3% crit) and enchants when possible

Maybe try nature's vigil instead of heart of the wild, i found sometimes an extra CD is better and according to the huge nerf in 5.2 its OP.

Grab a fan offhand (Inscription BoE) (476) there pretty cheap nowadays.

Note: Going over the 3043 haste breakpoint with the 5% haste raid buff isn't recommended yet. Its really hard to do currently and you give up to many other stats to accomplish it.

Otherwise i agree with

Druid healing is different slow steady heals rather than health toping spells still druids can manage to be decent tank healers

1.- Keep harmony buff 100% (+10% healing)

2.- Always keep LB on the tank.

3.- For damage spikes NS+HT, Swiftmend, ironbark,

4.- use healing touch on Omen of clarity procs (time allowing)

I use regrowth with Omen of clarity as well specifically if you un glyph regrowth and swiftmend off of it, saves a liitle mana.

Secondly, for Will, you should be rolling hots on both tanks. LB stacks on the one you're assigned to (if you are being assigned one). Then Swiftmends and free Regrowths should keep him up. If not, you have NS HT and non-free Regrowths to fall back on. If he's still struggling, give him ironbark, and ask him if he's using CDs during the gas. Also, if he's constantly getting hit with the cleaves, then that's not your fault.

I also dont use nourish anymore (Found it uses to much mana for very little benefit.
Don't spam rejuv and use wild growth on cd when multiple people are injured.

Resto druids are way better currently in 10 mans, and are very good aoe healers as well as tank healers once you get use to it (and sort your gear/stats out) you'll be fine, best of luck.

[Deleted]

That's "complicated" for heavy AoE? A 25 second cooldown, 10 second cooldown and cast a PWS every time you have a few spirit buffs to capitalize on rapture scaling? Disc priest has about the same skill ceiling as resto shaman if even. Resto druid being played to it's full extent is certainly more difficult, and it's a shame it (and not to mention pretty much every other healing spec) is less rewarding than the running joke that is discipline at the minute.

But hey, if it's what you've found most difficult that's completely down to you.

[Rorschachs]

That's "complicated" for heavy AoE? A 25 second cooldown, 10 second cooldown and cast a PWS every time you have a few spirit buffs to capitalize on rapture scaling? Disc priest has about the same skill ceiling as resto shaman if even. Resto druid being played to it's full extent is certainly more difficult, and it's a shame it (and not to mention pretty much every other healing spec) is less rewarding than the running joke that is discipline at the minute.

But hey, if it's what you've found most difficult that's completely down to you.

+ tracking evangelism and holy fire cooldown. And as disc you are at least required to know the fights.

Resto druid is incredibly easy. Maybe just to me because I have raided with it for over a year but I dunno.. Wg on cd, swiftmend on cd and rejuv. This is pretty much all you do on aoe damage phases. Other than that, there is no need to really use healing touch or nourish(you can use nourish from time to time to top people, but you can also not do it and nothing will change). Healing touch is close to never better than regrowth. It is better to use sometimes, but you can just unbind it and you will be fine.
You can have %100 uptime on harmony if you just use swiftmend on cd and lifebloom is just a tank rejuv.

I agree with the part that playing resto druid to it's full extent seems hard but believe me it's not. I was doing way better healing than any other resto druid I have raided with and I was thinking the same. But obviously it was just too hard for some people to rejuv rapidly or hit wg on cd and that was what set me apart.

[Deleted]

You're required to know the fights? Doesn't every competent healer in a heroic raid setting? Correct me if I'm wrong but a good resto also has to manage shrooms, depending on what talent they take weaving in damaging abilities, lifebloom raid nukes, maintaining tanks & utilizing tranq correctly. I'd list their short cooldowns because you seem to think that adds some sort of difficulty past using your eyes.

[Dracodraco]

Disc is not harder than resto druid. Not by a large margin. The main issue here, is that all of a disc's spells are fire-and-forget.
You say that you have to track Cascade and PoM - thing is, it hardly matters who you cast them on, and after spending the GBC, they just do their thing, all on their own. PoM can be compared to WG, in this case.

A "good" resto druid has to be aware of swiftmending the correct target to get full uptime on effloresence (while it can be used to top someone off quickly, for example during arcane phase on feng on a velocity target, it is far better spent on a player that's stacked, as effloresence will get to tick more). You also have to make sure to use it on cooldown, which means you have to predict what target you want to swiftmend.
A "good" resto druid pre-places shrooms in lulls of damage, to get slightly more burst healing for raidwide AOE's.
A "good" resto druid has to know when to use a hot (rejuv) to heal a target, and when to use a direct heal - if the target is just going to be overhealed after 2 ticks of rejuv, without ever taking more damage, you might aswell nourish for half the mana. Vice versa, if you have to nourish twice in a row on a target, you should have thrown a rejuv instead.
A "good" resto druid has to make use of things like Nature's Vigil (if taken over HOTW due to need for burst healing) and Treeform as throughput cooldowns - disc's througput cooldowns are both just clicked pretty much on cooldown (excluding needing to use them at a specific time, such as Zorlok's force and verves in P2 - I'm pretty sure they're 50 seconds apart, so you'd have to delay Spirit shell quite a bit to cover 2x FNV's?)

This means that a resto druid has to know the fight, and when to expect damage spikes, far more intimately than a disc priest - the druid has to judge if the damage that comes will be big enough to warrant hotting up. The priest just shields, because he'll always be first in line to deal with the damage, which means it'll hardly be more advantageous to NOT heal.

I can assure you, anyway, that disc is far too easy to play, as I've witnessed this reset - we had to bring in my resto druid alt for shekzeer heroic, so I jumped on my disc priest for the 10 man alt run, with a resto druid (old main, rerolled shaman a few weeks back).
My disc had 481 average - this was literally the first time I played it in a raid setting that was not LFR.
The druid had 492 average - he has played druid as a main since he joined us in firelands (and probably before that, but I obviously wouldn't know), and for 10 heroics till he rerolled this tier, keeping an average of the 90th percentile and maintaining top 20 ranks on 6 of the 9 heroics he healed on the druid. What I'm getting at, is that this guy is by no means a scrub - but compare his far superior healing experience, and his far superior gear, to these logs:

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-z9h0x0qslnlst9ii/

If I can come that close to his output, while completly neglecting to PoM for 99% of the evening and mostly just spamming holy fire/smite (more than 20% of my healing from the smartheals it gives) in lower gear, with no experience, then yea. It is extremely easy to pick up, no questions about it. If resto druids are harder is down to one's personal opinion, but right now, I'd say it deffo holds true - a resto druid has to work double as hard as any other healer to keep up.

[Myrrar]

That's not due to druids being hard though, that has to do with druids sucking.

Ignore how much throughput classes put out and look at all the things each spec needs to do to play perfectly in any given situation. Druids are easy, but they're easy because they don't have the same amount of options(skills, spells, CDs) so less decision making, they don't have as much to keep track of as other classes, they just are a very simple class.

Now, you can be a pretty bad disc, hpally, or rsham and beat a pretty good rdruid easily. That's not a skill problem though.

We've just lost too much with the talent tree changes without gaining enough, and tbh, that's probably a big reason we aren't great healers atm. If you want to be a competitive healing druid you need to be pretty solid at your class, but how much healing you can put out compared to others means nothing when looking at easy and hard since classes aren't balanced.


You either talk about:
1. A class is easy or hard to pick up and do ok with.
2. A class is easy to beat other healers, carry raids and so on or not.
3. A class is easy or hard to master in any type of boss fight, mistake, situation

All 3 of these are very very different things.

[Volitar]

IMO Resto Shaman is the easiest healer and Disc is the hardest. Disc has to predict all the damage and not just react to it like the other healers. Oh, and before people think I'm saying Disc because I'm a Priest I've only been Disc one time for a random heroic!

[nightfalls]

Discipline raid healing isn't really that hard. You get a rapture tracker for your rapture, and you can just use POH mainly. A lot of what people are saying - fight knowledge, mana/resource management, cooldown tracking - are common to (gasp) all healers (and ironically, common to DPS and tanks also). But here's a good reason (as others have stated) as to why I'd say some healers are harder than others. (and harder, not worse):

Prayer of Healing - 30 yd range
Prayer of Mending - 20 yd range
Cascade - 40 yd range
Atonement - 40 yd range (smart heal)

Compare this to...

Holy Radiance - 10 yd range
Daybreak - 10 yd range
Holy Prism - 15 yd range

Efflorescence is only a 8 yd range, but all the other druid abilities are quite easy to use. Obviously good swiftmending sets good druids from bad ones. Shamans I think have bigger ranges on Healing Rain (15 yards?), and HST is 40 yd, Chain Heal is smaller, etc.

Granted this is only a part of it, but I think when it comes to raid healing (what a lot of people are talking about here) it does show that some specs require a lot more pre-planning than others.

[Rorschachs]

Disc is not harder than resto druid. Not by a large margin. The main issue here, is that all of a disc's spells are fire-and-forget.
You say that you have to track Cascade and PoM - thing is, it hardly matters who you cast them on, and after spending the GBC, they just do their thing, all on their own. PoM can be compared to WG, in this case.

A "good" resto druid has to be aware of swiftmending the correct target to get full uptime on effloresence (while it can be used to top someone off quickly, for example during arcane phase on feng on a velocity target, it is far better spent on a player that's stacked, as effloresence will get to tick more). You also have to make sure to use it on cooldown, which means you have to predict what target you want to swiftmend.
A "good" resto druid pre-places shrooms in lulls of damage, to get slightly more burst healing for raidwide AOE's.
A "good" resto druid has to know when to use a hot (rejuv) to heal a target, and when to use a direct heal - if the target is just going to be overhealed after 2 ticks of rejuv, without ever taking more damage, you might aswell nourish for half the mana. Vice versa, if you have to nourish twice in a row on a target, you should have thrown a rejuv instead.
A "good" resto druid has to make use of things like Nature's Vigil (if taken over HOTW due to need for burst healing) and Treeform as throughput cooldowns - disc's througput cooldowns are both just clicked pretty much on cooldown (excluding needing to use them at a specific time, such as Zorlok's force and verves in P2 - I'm pretty sure they're 50 seconds apart, so you'd have to delay Spirit shell quite a bit to cover 2x FNV's?)

This means that a resto druid has to know the fight, and when to expect damage spikes, far more intimately than a disc priest - the druid has to judge if the damage that comes will be big enough to warrant hotting up. The priest just shields, because he'll always be first in line to deal with the damage, which means it'll hardly be more advantageous to NOT heal.

I can assure you, anyway, that disc is far too easy to play, as I've witnessed this reset - we had to bring in my resto druid alt for shekzeer heroic, so I jumped on my disc priest for the 10 man alt run, with a resto druid (old main, rerolled shaman a few weeks back).
My disc had 481 average - this was literally the first time I played it in a raid setting that was not LFR.
The druid had 492 average - he has played druid as a main since he joined us in firelands (and probably before that, but I obviously wouldn't know), and for 10 heroics till he rerolled this tier, keeping an average of the 90th percentile and maintaining top 20 ranks on 6 of the 9 heroics he healed on the druid. What I'm getting at, is that this guy is by no means a scrub - but compare his far superior healing experience, and his far superior gear, to these logs:

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-z9h0x0qslnlst9ii/

If I can come that close to his output, while completly neglecting to PoM for 99% of the evening and mostly just spamming holy fire/smite (more than 20% of my healing from the smartheals it gives) in lower gear, with no experience, then yea. It is extremely easy to pick up, no questions about it. If resto druids are harder is down to one's personal opinion, but right now, I'd say it deffo holds true - a resto druid has to work double as hard as any other healer to keep up.

The thing is, the 20k healing you are doing with using nourish instead of rejuv is such a little change that it doesn't even matter. And Tracking pom and cascade isn't the real difficulty with disc priests, trying to make the best use of archangel in certain encounters like heroic garalon is imo. And I am not saying by any means that this is hard, but it can be annoying to do.

I figured out over the years that you shouldn't be scared to overheal as a resto druid. Ofc you shouldn't overheal like a moron and go oom, or rejuv someone for just 2 ticks but you know what I mean.

Now, you can be a pretty bad disc, hpally, or rsham and beat a pretty good rdruid easily. That's not a skill problem though.

Agreed. You also have to play to your full extent to even compete. It was like this even in cata. But the thing is, playing a resto druid to its full extent isn't really hard and playing classes like hpala and disc to their full extent just means doing things right. Not spamming more hots.

Not being able to deal with heavy aoe damage phases and having to just rejuv and regrowth people when your wg and swiftmend are on cd is not difficulty, it is lacking and is an issue of the class.

[Deleted]

IMO Resto Shaman is the easiest healer and Disc is the hardest. Disc has to predict all the damage and not just react to it like the other healers. Oh, and before people think I'm saying Disc because I'm a Priest I've only been Disc one time for a random heroic!

Uh pretty much every healer now has at least some form of premeditated heal to plan for large amounts of damage.

And trust me, smart heals + HoTs is fucking terrible take it from a monk

[Juvenate]

Discipline's difficulty and learning curve doesn't really have to do with the spells they cast. It has to do with the fact that to get the most out of the spec you have to know when big damage is coming before it hits. No other healer has to do that to the extent of a Disc Priest.

---------- Post added 2012-12-25 at 07:52 AM ----------

Uh pretty much every healer now has at least some form of premeditated heal to plan for large amounts of damage.

And trust me, smart heals + HoTs is fucking terrible take it from a monk

I would argue that Monks can be more difficult to play. Yes, RM is a smart heal that jumps around, but I think Chi management makes up for that a bit. Looking at 25-man encounters the majority of Shaman healing is all smart healing. Healing Rain, Healing Stream Totem, and Healing Tide Totem make up the vast majority of their healing. It's really the only way for them to stay competitive.

[Torty]

There's absolutely nothing you need to know about encounter, damage distribution or anything like that as a resto druid to produce good hps (compared to other druids, of course). I hate the design of the class, it's braindead, requires close to 0 skill and annoys me a lot, because there's almost no difference between very good druid and an average one.

Here's the screenshot of my rankings in this tier: http://i.imgur.com/rBQ1F.jpg (most of them are heroic 25). You can randomly check druid with rank #100 and see the same spell distribution, harmony/lifebloom uptime, etc. The only difference would be overheal percentage.

There are some resto druids applying and there's no fucking way to tell if they are good or average. They all have 100% harmony, close to 100% lifebloom, a lot of WG/SM and rest rejuv with RG/HT/N/Tranq for the rest that hardly even affect total hps. I honestly can't understand how class design like this went through developers. Then you have paladin/priest applicants and you can actually tell, if they are playing properly or slapping their dick on the keyboard while watching TV.

tl;dr: you can't be a terrible druid if you have over 50 IQ. Bind 5 spells and you are already good, gratz.

[Deleted]

Sorry but every healer needs to know when damage is coming to be effective, discipline just has the advantage of putting out an obscene amount of shielding before it actually hits. I'm not going to argue about monks because I play one so I'd clearly be bias.

[Juvenate]

Sorry but every healer needs to know when damage is coming to be effective, discipline just has the advantage of putting out an obscene amount of shielding before it actually hits. I'm not going to argue about monks because I play one so I'd clearly be bias.

If you played a Disc Priest like a Holy Priest you wouldn't be maximizing your effectiveness. Other healing specs just watch bars go up and down and react to them. Disc has to plan ahead to maximize its healing potential.