Resto Druid Challenge Mode Advice

[cn4463]

I recently completed 9/9 gold for the first time on my mage and now I'm looking to do them on my Rdruid. I've done a bit of research and I'm still confused on whether or not I should gem/flask int or spirit. Just before the servers went down I managed to put together a set with mostly spirit and gemmed/enchanted pure int. I figure I'm going to be healing my ass off and drinking all the time so stronger heals would take precedence over mana regen, that being said I never really had time to observe the healers in my groups so it's hard to say. As far as reforging goes, I went with haste > mastery with the exception of spirit on pieces without spirit.

I'd love to hear from people their experiences with different optimizations and how it went for you and whether or not you feel it's the best option. Any tips/tricks in terms of glyphs/talents would also be great. Thanks

[AvatarM]

My main is Resto Druid and i took 9/9 in CMs. First of all, Resto druids are one of the best healers for CM. Disc priests are better for world records and stuff, but for "GOLD safe runs" Resto druids are probably the best healer in a CM comp.

Tips:
- Reforge 3043 haste cap if your comp has the haste buff. You ll need to enter in a CM dungeon to see whats your haste with CM capped gear. I needed to reforge my gear to 5k haste to stay with 30XX haste in CM.
- You don´t need too much spirit. Go with 7k-8k spirit to be safe when something goes wrong, but if you have a good dps comp, you probably can reforge to less spirit. You dont need to much spirit 'cause you have the amber from the klaxxy rep that recovers mana very fast OoC. As soon you get out of combat, you can use them.
- Displacer beast are good dor most CMs cause you can blink, stay ahead of the party to drink using amber. Its good to avoid some boss abilities too. For Mogushan Palace, you can take +%speed on tier if you are having a hard time on invisibility + jump for 2nd boss.
- Tree of Life is a really strong CD for CMs. Blanket Reju on situations where DPS took a lot of spike damage, so you can swiftmend them as soon as they tke damage.
- HoTW is really strong, use them on bosses with lust and before use it, Ironbark the tank so you can DPS more and heal less.
- With Ironbark with 1 min CD, you can use it on almost every pull. This will be really good in CMs.
- Watch the video guides from other Rdruids in youtube, meanly from Hamlet (EJ forum), you will learn the places you need to use your CDs without having to wipe. See more then one Rdruid doing the same dungeons, you always catch one thing that one druid did that is really good to do, and the other didn´t.
- Don´t glyph WG, glyph 40y Roar instead.
- For itemization, use Spirit/Mastery or Spirit/Haste itens. More sockets a item has, better it is for CMs. If you are willing to re-gem, Int gems are better then mastery cause of HoTW dps, but this lvl of min/max isn´t required to do a smooth CM.
- Use your Symbiosis wisely. If you have a Elemental shaman, for most dungeons, its good to give him solar beam.

Rdruids are really strong for CMs, you already have a 9/9 gold, probably you will not have problems.

[Deleted]

First comment pretty says everything you need to know, just one more general tip, as a healer the key to surviving the nastier trash packs is having a stun/tank CD rotation and for you to be aware when mobs are stunned and when the tank is going to take high damage, getting this perfectly requires a bit of synergy between you and the tank but that will come quickly. Druids are awesome for the reasons that AvatarM said, stampeding roar for invis potions + moving fast between trash and a strong set of CDs as well as HotW (you'll find that a lot of bosses with lust you'll be able to DPS most of the time)

[AvatarM]

My main is Resto Druid and i took 9/9 in CMs. First of all, Resto druids are one of the best healers for CM. Disc priests are better for world records and stuff, but for "GOLD safe runs" Resto druids are probably the best healer in a CM comp.

Tips:
- Reforge 3043 haste cap if your comp has the haste buff. You ll need to enter in a CM dungeon to see whats your haste with CM capped gear. I needed to reforge my gear to 5k haste to stay with 30XX haste in CM.
- You don´t need too much spirit. Go with 7k-8k spirit to be safe when something goes wrong, but if you have a good dps comp, you probably can reforge to less spirit. You dont need to much spirit 'cause you have the amber from the klaxxy rep that recovers mana very fast OoC. As soon you get out of combat, you can use them.
- Displacer beast are good dor most CMs cause you can blink, stay ahead of the party to drink using amber. Its good to avoid some boss abilities too. For Mogushan Palace, you can take +%speed on tier if you are having a hard time on invisibility + jump for 2nd boss.
- Tree of Life is a really strong CD for CMs. Blanket Reju on situations where DPS take a lot of spike damage, so you can swiftmend them as soon as they take damage.
- HoTW is really strong, use them on bosses with lust and before use it, Ironbark the tank so you can DPS more and heal less.
- With Ironbark with 1 min CD, you can use it on almost every pull. This will be really good in CMs.
- Watch the video guides from other Rdruids in youtube, meanly from Hamlet (EJ forum), you will learn the places you need to use your CDs without having to wipe. See more then one Rdruid doing the same dungeons, you always catch one thing that one druid did that is really good to do, and the other didn´t.
- Don´t glyph WG, glyph 40y Roar instead.
- For itemization, use Spirit/Mastery or Spirit/Haste itens. More sockets a item has, better it is for CMs. If you are willing to re-gem, Int gems are better then mastery cause of HoTW dps, but this lvl of min/max isn´t required to do a smooth CM.
- Use your Symbiosis wisely. If you have a Elemental shaman, for most dungeons, its good to give him solar beam.

Rdruids are really strong for CMs, you already have a 9/9 gold, probably you will not have problems.

[cn4463]

My main is Resto Druid and i took 9/9 in CMs. First of all, Resto druids are one of the best healers for CM. Disc priests are better for world records and stuff, but for "GOLD safe runs" Resto druids are probably the best healer in a CM comp.

Tips:
- Reforge 3043 haste cap if your comp has the haste buff. You ll need to enter in a CM dungeon to see whats your haste with CM capped gear. I needed to reforge my gear to 5k haste to stay with 30XX haste in CM.
- You don´t need too much spirit. Go with 7k-8k spirit to be safe when something goes wrong, but if you have a good dps comp, you probably can reforge to less spirit. You dont need to much spirit 'cause you have the amber from the klaxxy rep that recovers mana very fast OoC. As soon you get out of combat, you can use them.
- Displacer beast are good dor most CMs cause you can blink, stay ahead of the party to drink using amber. Its good to avoid some boss abilities too. For Mogushan Palace, you can take +%speed on tier if you are having a hard time on invisibility + jump for 2nd boss.
- Tree of Life is a really strong CD for CMs. Blanket Reju on situations where DPS took a lot of spike damage, so you can swiftmend them as soon as they tke damage.
- HoTW is really strong, use them on bosses with lust and before use it, Ironbark the tank so you can DPS more and heal less.
- With Ironbark with 1 min CD, you can use it on almost every pull. This will be really good in CMs.
- Watch the video guides from other Rdruids in youtube, meanly from Hamlet (EJ forum), you will learn the places you need to use your CDs without having to wipe. See more then one Rdruid doing the same dungeons, you always catch one thing that one druid did that is really good to do, and the other didn´t.
- Don´t glyph WG, glyph 40y Roar instead.
- For itemization, use Spirit/Mastery or Spirit/Haste itens. More sockets a item has, better it is for CMs. If you are willing to re-gem, Int gems are better then mastery cause of HoTW dps, but this lvl of min/max isn´t required to do a smooth CM.
- Use your Symbiosis wisely. If you have a Elemental shaman, for most dungeons, its good to give him solar beam.

Rdruids are really strong for CMs, you already have a 9/9 gold, probably you will not have problems.

This info is great! Thanks heaps for typing that out for me. Not going to lie I'm quite nervous about healing for the first time, DPS seems like a breeze in comparison. Hopefully servers come back up before I have to go to work so I can see for myself.

---------- Post added 2013-05-21 at 05:47 PM ----------

First comment pretty says everything you need to know, just one more general tip, as a healer the key to surviving the nastier trash packs is having a stun/tank CD rotation and for you to be aware when mobs are stunned and when the tank is going to take high damage, getting this perfectly requires a bit of synergy between you and the tank but that will come quickly. Druids are awesome for the reasons that AvatarM said, stampeding roar for invis potions + moving fast between trash and a strong set of CDs as well as HotW (you'll find that a lot of bosses with lust you'll be able to DPS most of the time)

Will do mate, thanks for the tip.

[Slippykins]

Hamlet (Arawethion) did some great Resto Druid PoV Gold Challenge Mode videos - some pretty good tips in there, no doubt.

You can find them by searching "Arawethion" on Youtube. Definitely worth the time to go through them.

[Aleks0410]

I recently completed 9/9 gold with my Rdruid so here are my two cents.

Forget spirit. As Hamlet mentions in one of his videos, you pretty much want to get rid of as much spirit as you can (because of the Amber from Klaxxi, as Avatar already mentioned). I did Shado-Pan Monestary with about 3600 spirit (which was probably a bit on the low side, but still totally doable). I reforged everything into mastery completely ignoring haste and spirit.

About haste, I'd say ignore that as well. WG and SM are still nice, but IMO Regrowth is your most important spell in CM's. You're going to spam it on the tank in dire situations so an extra tick of WG or SM probably isn't what's going to keep him alive. Others might disagree on this though.

Make sure you make good use of Ironbark, especially now after the 5.3 change.

You might have noticed Druids gemming for Mastery over Intellect. For CM's, don't. Intellect will give you stronger spells (even 2:1 ratio) because your gear is downscaled. This may only be a minor boost so if you don't have a "CM gear set" (which I'd assume you don't) then you might want to leave your mastery gems as they are

To keep this disgussion going; has anyone considered reforging into Crit to boost your dmg output? I tried this myself, and, as mentioned, was fine with 3600 spirit. I've considered reforging Mastery to Crit as well when going for better rankings but I'm not sure this is a wise tradeoff Any thoughts?

[Alzu]

Like some others mentioned, spirit is worthless. I favour mastery over crit because you're not there to deal damage. Otherwise you'd be a disc priest.

[cn4463]

Hamlet (Arawethion) did some great Resto Druid PoV Gold Challenge Mode videos - some pretty good tips in there, no doubt.

You can find them by searching "Arawethion" on Youtube. Definitely worth the time to go through them.

Awesome videos, watching them now. Thanks!

[manamonster]

Doing CMs as resto druid was much easier than on other healing classes. I've done it has disc priest & resto shaman .... resto druid was a breeze with tree form.

I healed it in my moonkin gear gemmed for straight crit with reforged in to spirit / mastery. It was pretty easy as a resto druid, just be ready to Regrowth all day.

[Deleted]

I've just started and we're on 6/9 gold, and many correct things have been said. Tho I'd like to add one thing: if you are not aiming for the leaderboard in any case, it is not necessary to reforge at all if you have a decent ilvl of 485+ (means a few gems).

I did not reforge in any way, only thing I change from my raiding environment is SotF => ToL and Vortex <=> Bash occasionally. I also use SR-Glyph instead of WG obviously. Everything else is pretty much the same, I got like ~7.4k spirit and ~1.7k haste (which ofc really sucks!) and ~25k spellpower. Nevertheless for a standard gold-time that's way enough, if you have a decent group and know what to do.

Everything said is correct tho, if we'd be aiming for better times or stuff like that I'd totally go with zero spirit/haste and max mastery. But in general you will "survive" and beat gold-times by having good CD-usage from every member, and not by having 1k haste more or less.

[Deleted]

For me resto druid was very easy in challenge modes.
I didn't care about my gear, i was mostly in MSV LFR gear and blues. A few pieces under 463 even. I did not have best enchants, i had mastery on bracer, windsong on weapons etc.
It was my alt, so didn't put too much effort on him.

My best tip for challenge modes are theese 2

1: Spam regrowth. Since you will (YOU SHOULD) be using the klaxxi mana thingies, it doesn't matter if you waste all your mana on one trash pack, you'll get full mana, or atleast enough for next trash/boss (MOST OF THE TIME) within 5 seconds or something like that.

2: Communicate with your tank, make sure you know when he got no cooldowns, this is when you pop ironbark/tree form. Don't use any of your big healing cd's if the tanks has cooldowns up, you need to keep em rolling.

[GrieverXIII]

Hello, so i will probably jump in Challenge Modes on my Rdruid alt soon and there's a few things i'm not certain about. Specially as far as gearing goes. Considering CMs are all about short but intense fights, should i bother with spirit that much? Specially since i can amber after every packs. Also does Haste plateaus really matter in that environement?

Also, having trouble figuring if HotW or Nature's Vigil is better as far as last talent goes. Could use some overall tips if you guys feel generous too haha ^^.

Will be my 5th character with Challenge Modes done, but first time as a Healer :/.

[Deleted]

Get used to your regrowth button! Don't be afraid to use it a lot. Also make your tank call out for your IB. As far as talents go, I would take HotW. I do not think that NV can help you a lot compared to the dps that HotW can put out during a time where your tank is invincible with vengeance or something. Either your tank gets bursted down (dies because you are limited on globals) or he survives. 10% increased healing doesn't help that much.

[Alzu]

Please, there is a similiar thread just on page 2. Try to use the search function before making exactly the same threads. http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...ge-Mode-Advice

But to give you some tips: Go HotW, minimize the amount of spirit, get Restorative Ambers from the Klaxxi, don't be afraid to spam Regrowth.

[GrieverXIII]

Did a research but aparently i missed that thread, i'm sorry, if a mod could merge my post with it, would be much appreciated. Thanks for the tips tough .

[Deleted]

When I did it, I reforged all my spirit and crit into haste and mastery. You can pretty much rest between each pack if you're quick with your ambers, so spirit is not important at all. Tank-damage is very high, so just use ironbark on cd and spam regrowths.