[Resto] Druid Guide & Discussion (6.0.3)

[Pennoyer]

So now we have a use for Healing Touch: Keeping Harmony up a phase without any damage while saving a tiny amount of mana compared to Swiftment. That's an awesome and totally important part of my toolkit
For that it's not even worth keeping the pointless button on the cast bar.


https://www.warcraftlogs.com/ranking...est/#boss=1695
How well did HT server you in a real fight ?

Healing Touch does nothing (except refresh Harmony) that a DoC Wrath wouldn't do better, especially with 6.1. Roughly the same throughput (which is not really relevant because it's only used when high throughput is not required) but lower mana cost and damage on top of it.
Even Wrath casts without DoC can generally be considered superior to HT simply because they are free and if you'd ever consider casting HT then obviously there isn't anything important to heal so you might as well not cast it and use Wrath instead.

I hope you're not referring to heroic Iron Maidens as a "real fight" with regard to healing...

Regarding Swiftmend, I also tend to use it on CD to keep up Harmony and do healing. However, I don't believe this is wholly efficient and Swiftmend can actually end up being a subtle burn on your mana if you're constantly using it like that. I'm trying to get away from spamming it too much and relying on OOC or HT to keep up Harmony when needed. That being said, it probably doesn't really have a huge effect even if you're using it too much.

[Skyfall]

I hope you're not referring to heroic Iron Maidens as a "real fight" with regard to healing...

Regarding Swiftmend, I also tend to use it on CD to keep up Harmony and do healing. However, I don't believe this is wholly efficient and Swiftmend can actually end up being a subtle burn on your mana if you're constantly using it like that. I'm trying to get away from spamming it too much and relying on OOC or HT to keep up Harmony when needed. That being said, it probably doesn't really have a huge effect even if you're using it too much.

Agreed, heroic maidens is an awful fight to look at healing on, but that being said, HT had over 70% overhealing in that first log, and given that he was using DoC, I think its pretty safe to say at least most of those HT's could/should have been replaced with DoC Wraths for pretty much a benefit all around. HT really has two uses. Refreshing harmony/lifebloom in periods of low-to-nonexistant damage, and with Nature's Swiftness on a lifebloomed target if you have more than 20% crit (which you probably dont). Other than that, its not worth it.

[Eiche]

Why would you refresh LB with HT at all? Just let it bloom and then reapply it. The mana cost for reapplying LB is 4.5% of base mana compared to a HT being 10.35% of base mana. There is no reason to not just use the INSTANT cast that is LB for less than half the mana cost over wasting 2 sec and way more mana to cast a crappy HT. LB doesn't stack any more. There is no downside to letting it fall off. I have not done any math, but it could be argued that it is more [THEORETICAL] hps to let it bloom before refreshing it. I don't know how the bloom is calculated along with the refresh mechanic at all. But seriously, just refresh it with another LB cast and throw out another Wrath if you are speced into DoC or not.

HT is a waste of a spell in almost every situation in any real raid. I never use it because every other class is better at spot healing targets than druids are outside of NS. Have your raid frames track absorbs (default and elv do this natively with alternate coloured health bars) to know if your disc has shielded the target and they are a lower priority. If a target drops low, your disc has probably already shielded it before the cast goes off, if they didn't already Penance them and return them to full health with that. If not your shaman has probably casted a Tidal Wave Healing Wave on them with half the cast time and way more throughput. Or the Pally has already casted a Holy Light on them. All those are way better at spot healing low health targets, and that is what those classes are good at.

[Skyfall]

Why would you refresh LB with HT at all? Just let it bloom and then reapply it. The mana cost for reapplying LB is 4.5% of base mana compared to a HT being 10.35% of base mana. There is no reason to not just use the INSTANT cast that is LB for less than half the mana cost over wasting 2 sec and way more mana to cast a crappy HT. LB doesn't stack any more. There is no downside to letting it fall off. I have not done any math, but it could be argued that it is more [THEORETICAL] hps to let it bloom before refreshing it. I don't know how the bloom is calculated along with the refresh mechanic at all. But seriously, just refresh it with another LB cast and throw out another Wrath if you are speced into DoC or not.

HT is a waste of a spell in almost every situation in any real raid. I never use it because every other class is better at spot healing targets than druids are outside of NS. Have your raid frames track absorbs (default and elv do this natively with alternate coloured health bars) to know if your disc has shielded the target and they are a lower priority. If a target drops low, your disc has probably already shielded it before the cast goes off, if they didn't already Penance them and return them to full health with that. If not your shaman has probably casted a Tidal Wave Healing Wave on them with half the cast time and way more throughput. Or the Pally has already casted a Holy Light on them. All those are way better at spot healing low health targets, and that is what those classes are good at.

I said to use it to refresh lifebloom and harmony simultaneously when everyone is at or near 100% health and you're just sitting there casting wrath. Theres no more mana efficient way to do both of those things without an OoC proc. The bloom would just be mostly overheal, and you'd still need to cast a swiftmend or something in addition to the lifebloom to keep up harmony, which both costs more mana and puts it on cooldown (which is doubly bad if you're using SotF). Saying that other classes are better at spot healing low health targets is obviously true, but also pretty much irrelevant to what I was talking about there.

[Thalur]

Healing Touch does nothing (except refresh Harmony) that a DoC Wrath wouldn't do better

There's one significant advantage of Healing Touch: You can choose who gets the healing. While that doesn't make it a good spell, its healing is much better than a DoC heal that randomly heals someone in the raid, instead of the player that needs it.

[Tiberria]

There's one significant advantage of Healing Touch: You can choose who gets the healing. While that doesn't make it a good spell, its healing is much better than a DoC heal that randomly heals someone in the raid, instead of the player that needs it.

If anyone REALLY needs healing, you will be casting something stronger than DOC Wrath or HT in the first place, so I wouldn't say that the ability to choose the target when comparing those two particular spells is really that significant.

[Absinth92]

If anyone REALLY needs healing, you will be casting something stronger than DOC Wrath or HT in the first place, so I wouldn't say that the ability to choose the target when comparing those two particular spells is really that significant.

Exactly. You'd be using Wrath-spam DoC to heal in low-damage situations. In those situations, choosing your target doesn't really matter. Usually it's just a tank taking little bits of damage. So the smart heal is only going to heal them- the person you'd choose with HT anyway.

[Arctagon]

Isn't NV better than DoC for most situations, though?

[Deleted]

It's anecdotal, but in low damage phases 'smart' heals seem to shit all over targeted heals, even instants. It strucks as most obvious when I DoC'd my way through LFR once. I was obliterating the other healers on the meters (LFR duh!). But even against non-afk healers your 'smart' heals seem to snipe the incoming damage before your spot healers process where the damage is occuring.
For random low damage I'd take DoC over HT any day.

[Tiberria]

It's anecdotal, but in low damage phases 'smart' heals seem to shit all over targeted heals, even instants. It strucks as most obvious when I DoC'd my way through LFR once. I was obliterating the other healers on the meters (LFR duh!). But even against non-afk healers your 'smart' heals seem to snipe the incoming damage before your spot healers process where the damage is occuring.
For random low damage I'd take DoC over HT any day.

When you think about how they work, this is to be expected. For a directed heal like HT, you have to choose the target before a ~2 second cast time. For DOC Wrath, the target is selected after the cast is completed and the Wrath hits. It's also guaranteed to hit a target that is <100% HP as long as one exists in range. The end result is that DoC Wrath and similar dumbed down smart heals tend to outperform player targeted spot healing during low damage, both because they are less easily sniped, and because there isn't "human error" involved in the target selection.

- - - Updated - - -

Isn't NV better than DoC for most situations, though?

NV is only strong if you are spamming Rejuv or some other type of single target healing while it is up. It doesn't copy WG or any other AoE heals, so if your spell selection is focused around using WG/SoTF-WG as much as possible (which generally involves limiting the mana expenditure on Rejuv, etc.), it's going to perform significantly weaker. NV also probably isn't strong enough to make it worth going out of your way to dump a bunch of mana spamming Rejuv during its' duration either.

With a WG heavy playstyle, it's only going to be stronger than DoC in situations where fight mechanics/overall healing requirements are so high that you don't have the spare time to cast Wraths with any significant frequency.

[Arctagon]

While that makes sense, we usually have Rejuvs up and ticking on targets almost always, and for fights with phases with heavy raid damage, one is not going to cast Wrath. If DoC Wrath spam is only ever used during times of low damage, it isn't going to do a lot of healing.

[Deleted]

When you think about how they work, this is to be expected. For a directed heal like HT, you have to choose the target before a ~2 second cast time. For DOC Wrath, the target is selected after the cast is completed and the Wrath hits. It's also guaranteed to hit a target that is <100% HP as long as one exists in range. The end result is that DoC Wrath and similar dumbed down smart heals tend to outperform player targeted spot healing during low damage, both because they are less easily sniped, and because there isn't "human error" involved in the target selection.

Yeah, that's why I'm pointing it out. All the damage>healing calculations are (probably) done server-side, so you don't even see the damage on your raid frames before it's healed up by DoC or its equivalents. It doesn't even need taking into account lag or human reaction times / human error for DoC to automatically snipe it.
The point that is arguable is just how good the target selection is, and from my experience the pure RNG target selection beats the player cast spot heals - probably by virtue of being super responsive (for lack of a better word).

So my point is the DoC mechanic is actually quite good at landing a good portion of its healing. Not implying DoC is good compared to the rest of the tier.

[Astraios]

So, stat priorities:

Haste has negligible healing effect on WG/tranq.

Haste is generally strong because it has exponential scaling on rejuv, but a large amount of logs I've seen are weighted significantly more towards WG/tranq with rejuv closer to 15-20% healing. Doesn't this shift stat weights away from haste? Until we can get larger amounts of haste later in the expansion, I feel like haste is a relatively weak stat, and in no way should it be a definitively better than something like crit or multistrike.

[Keiyra]

So, stat priorities:

Haste has negligible healing effect on WG/tranq.

Haste is generally strong because it has exponential scaling on rejuv, but a large amount of logs I've seen are weighted significantly more towards WG/tranq with rejuv closer to 15-20% healing. Doesn't this shift stat weights away from haste? Until we can get larger amounts of haste later in the expansion, I feel like haste is a relatively weak stat, and in no way should it be a definitively better than something like crit or multistrike.

You do realize that WG scales extremely well with haste because its a hot right? Rejuv, Shroom, lifebloom hot and WG all benefit from HPS and HPM gains from haste. The only thing that doesn't scale very well with haste is Tranq. Haste is a a very strong stat

[Astraios]

You do realize that WG scales extremely well with haste because its a hot right? Rejuv, Shroom, lifebloom hot and WG all benefit from HPS and HPM gains from haste. The only thing that doesn't scale very well with haste is Tranq. Haste is a a very strong stat

Last I checked, and last I read, WG isn't working correctly with haste, as in how rejuv works. My testing and what I read on forums was that WG gains another tick somewhere around 900 haste +raid buffs, and doesn't gain a partial tick past that, presumably until you get to another +14% haste~

Assuming WG is working as intended, and tranquility is the only part which doesn't benefit from haste, 15-25% of our healing, give or take, isn't affected by haste, which still significantly devalues haste over the course of a fight, which puts it more in the range of crit/multistrike when rejuv is only accounting for 20% or less on a majority of fights.

[Keiyra]

Last I checked, and last I read, WG isn't working correctly with haste, as in how rejuv works. My testing and what I read on forums was that WG gains another tick somewhere around 900 haste +raid buffs, and doesn't gain a partial tick past that, presumably until you get to another +14% haste~

Assuming WG is working as intended, and tranquility is the only part which doesn't benefit from haste, 20% of our healing, give or take, isn't affected by haste, which still significantly devalues haste over the course of a fight.

#1, WG was hotfixed to scale with any haste value a while back...so your info about needing the 900 haste for 1 more tick is outdated

From the Jan. 7th 2015 hotfix:
Druid
Restoration
Wild Growth's healing should now smoothly increase with Haste instead of having breakpoints. Total healing for the ability will vary slightly depending how much Haste the Druid had previously; with healing increasing slightly for most Druids.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/165...y-12-2-12-2015

#2 yes Tranq being 20% of our healing not affected by haste does lower its value - but the huge percentage of healing from WG+Rejuv+Shroom+LB hot which doubly benefits from haste (HPS and HPM) vastly outweighs the loss. (as well as haste being an excellent stat for DoC if talented)

In short, Haste is still our best output stat (with mastery being very good as well) - its much better than crit/ms/vers. To suggest that it is a weak stat is so wrong as to be derisible.

[nightfalls]

That is true, but looking only at absolute total healing.

Do you value your burst healing every 3 minutes more, or your total output? Keep in mind raid CD's such as tranq typically will overkill the damage being taken by the raid, especially if they are being stacked (which they should be, in general).

Also, for burst healing haste > all other stats, outside of tranq purely. So while the tranq itself might benefit less during your HotW super-tranq, the rest of the 45 seconds of HotW benefit more.

[Astraios]

#1, WG was hotfixed to scale with any haste value a while back...so your info about needing the 900 haste for 1 more tick is outdated

My bad, thanks for the update.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/165...y-12-2-12-2015

#2 yes Tranq being 20% of our healing not affected by haste does lower its value - but the huge percentage of healing from WG+Rejuv+Shroom+LB hot which doubly benefits from haste (HPS and HPM) vastly outweighs the loss. (as well as haste being an excellent stat for DoC if talented)

In short, Haste is still our best output stat (with mastery being very good as well) - its much better than crit/ms/vers.

With haste not increasing the # of WG/shroom/LB casts/minute, it does not exponentially scale with them like it does with rejuvenation. Those are limited by CD/duration, and not by ability to cast them. All haste could possibly buy is more rejuvenations, which most logs and my personal experience does not seem to support as spirit is the main limiting factor for my ability to cast more rejuvenations. I can grant that during periods of sustained high throughput, haste is likely the best stat, assuming tranquility isn't being used and mana is a non-issue. However, in fights where mana actually matters, which isn't all of them I grant, I don't see haste being "much better than crit/ms/vers". Napkin math gives me (with my gear/raid buffed) 1% raw healing increase for:
Mastery 110 rating
Multistrike 120 rating
Haste 115-130 rating depending on how much you value rejuvenations exponential scaling (I shrunk the amount needed for 1% raw HPS by 10% assuming that's the HPS increase I get during a fight for the exponential scaling on rejuv) and after reducing it by 20% accounting for tranq
Crit 135-140 rating depending on how large a contribution regrowth makes to my healing.
Versatility 136 rating

I'm sitting on 440 crit, 842 haste, 1325 mastery, 841 multistrike. I'm stacking mastery with my enchants and gems, which definitely seems to be the best at the moment, and it will likely take awhile before other stats overtake it. That being said, there is an under 10% difference between mastery, multistrike, and haste, and that's when I have an equivalent amount of multistrike as haste. So, I can agree that crit/vers are bad, costing 15-25% more for a 1% healing increase when I have almost none. But multistrike is very close to haste. All in all, mastery seems king with haste being roughly equivalent to multistrike due to the power of tranquility. Another interesting note is the fact that versatility seems equivalent in power to crit, with the obvious added bonus of personal damage reduction.

These are all weights not taking into account my weapon enchant/trinket procs in my average stats, however as most trinkets give spirit or int and not secondaries as passive stats, this seems reasonable. It's important for me to note that yes, these are all for my own stat weights, but I think the comparison is still interesting whenever the general consensus of druids would make me think the difference is significantly larger.

- - - Updated - - -

That is true, but looking only at absolute total healing.

Do you value your burst healing every 3 minutes more, or your total output? Keep in mind raid CD's such as tranq typically will overkill the damage being taken by the raid, especially if they are being stacked (which they should be, in general).

Also, for burst healing haste > all other stats, outside of tranq purely. So while the tranq itself might benefit less during your HotW super-tranq, the rest of the 45 seconds of HotW benefit more.

In realistic healing scenarios where raid CD's are being lined up for each burst of damage, if each healer were maximizing their raid CD, then other healers shouldn't need to be spamming rejuvenation etc. SotF WG+mushroom+ wrath spam should provide plenty of healing to keep a raid alive during anything when any healer is using a raid CD. So, the question I have, is how often in this tier is your raid experiencing damage patterns where you are required to deal high HPS, but your tranq (and every other raid CD) is on CD, which then requires you to spam rejuvenation for "burst healing"? I'm fairly confident that if you are indeed using very large amounts of rejuvenation for this kind of burst healing, then there is a fairly high chance that you're also rocking more spirit than I am. At which point, haste's exponential scaling with rejuv becomes much weaker as it must be matched by some portion of spirit as well.

Also, like you said, tranq almost always picks the entire raid up to 80-90% over the course of its 8s, and very rarely will someone die during tranq. So why do people use HotW during it other than padding healing meters (other than extreme scenarios, such as every other healer being dead)? In terms of keeping your raid alive, I would imagine it is significantly safer to use HotW for another 2 or 3 damage bursts than it is to make your tranq, which will likely already top the raid, stronger.

[Keiyra]

Haste 115-130 rating ...

I'm not sure how you are getting that value from napkin math. Ignoring any special valuation for hots, 85.71 rating is 1% hps increase. Tacking on a 20% Tranq penalty and you are still looking at 102.85 rating for a 1% increase. Still better than the other non spirit options.


I meant honestly - unless you are only casting tranq every 3 mins and then sitting on your thumbs....the rest of your healing benefits greatly from haste in terms of HPS and HPM (only swiftmend, and RG - which is normally free anyway - don't benefit from the HPM aspect of haste) And no one but celestion is hard casting HT...

Seriously what are you casting the rest of the time, that makes you think haste isn't a good output stat? (btw there is nothing wrong with going for mastery - its a solid stat, its your presumption that haste is a weak stat that we are having a contention with) Link a log - you'll prolly find that 65-75% of your healing benefits from increased HPS and HPM from haste (The rest being 20-25% tranq 5-15% swiftmend/RG/HT/YG)

[nightfalls]

Yeah, your "napkin math" is pretty much completely wrong.