[Resto] Druid Guide & Discussion (6.0.3)

[ryklin]

Howdy fellow treemates, I got two questions about CM/Proving ground Stat priorities and NSHT or NSRG.

1 - I understand for raiding, haste is top, and mastery is below haste for stat priorities. However for CM, I've seen top resto druids running haste + multistrike, or even some crit. So what is the stat you want to go for, and maybe some bis trinket insight as well?

2 - I usually does NS and use regrowth with it, with the glyph, RG is healing more than HT, but is it worth it to neglect the crit possibility from HT for a mega 60k heal?

1. for cm's if all you care about is just gold, go for haste>mastery>multi

if you want server bests, go haste>multi>mastery imo

they avoid mastery in order to increase dps, but it's really not worth it unless you're very competetive, whatever gear you happen to have should be good for golds unless you have a ton of crit (all you do is spam regrowth)

in the WoD cms bosses are very long and generally involve a lot of dpsing, about half of the bosses are mana positive, it's actually kind of pathetic

2. for an emergency heal like NS, I'd think reliability is better than more healing overall

[Xozat]

So what's the BiS looking like right now? I've seen people say one item from a boss is better than another, then somebody says otherwise. Any honest opinions for BiS right now?

[Drefan]

So what's the BiS looking like right now? I've seen people say one item from a boss is better than another, then somebody says otherwise. Any honest opinions for BiS right now?

You'll see many diffrent ones since people have diffrent opinions.
So you'll have to make up your own mind on which list you'll want to follow.

This is my list.
Spirit > haste > mastery > multi >crit > Vers

Weapon: Inferno-flame Staff.
Head: Tier -Living Wood Headpiece.

Neck
After progress upgrade. Haste + Mastery Gruul's Lip Ring.
For progress: Spirit + Multi Talisman of the Fomor.

Shoulders: Tier - Living Wood Spaulders.
Back: Spirit + Haste: Flame Infusion Drape.
Chest: Offset Chest: Unrendable Wolfhide Robes.
Wrist: Squire's Electroplated Bracers.
Hands: Tier - Living Wood Grips.
Waist: Girdle of Unconquered Glory.
Legs: Tier - Living Wood Legguards.

Unsure about Feet. If its the haste + crit or the mastery + multi. They should be extremely close so get the ones you can grab.
Feet Iron-Flecked Sandals.

Smallest upgrade.
Ring for Progress Six-Eyed Band.
For Bis Ukorogg's Corrupted Seal.

Trinkets:
The best trinket is Auto-Repairing Autoclave on all difficutlies.
After that you'll want Elementalist's Shielding Talisman on(HC).

[Deleted]

Howdy fellow treemates, I got two questions about CM/Proving ground Stat priorities and NSHT or NSRG.

1 - I understand for raiding, haste is top, and mastery is below haste for stat priorities. However for CM, I've seen top resto druids running haste + multistrike, or even some crit. So what is the stat you want to go for, and maybe some bis trinket insight as well?

2 - I usually does NS and use regrowth with it, with the glyph, RG is healing more than HT, but is it worth it to neglect the crit possibility from HT for a mega 60k heal?

First off, proving grounds and CMs are very different in how you min/max for them (in WoD).

a) Proving Grounds scale the mobs to your ilvl. I'm not gonna go into how to abuse the system, because it's easy enough for druids in standard 630 gear. Try to avoid having a high ilvl with a shitty weapon.

b) Challenge Modes
Before I go into details, avoid crit as much as you possibly can. Reason: Regrowth Glyph
Avoid spirit as much as possible. Reason: short fights. Manaproblems? Mana pots (+ alchemist stone), get better at mechanics, finish off mobs before moving on to start potion CDs and catch drinking breaks
Haste + Mastery are still the go-to stats if you want to healbot your way to gold.
Haste + Multistrike is chosen for dps / time runs. Reason: Druids can do very good burst damage with Heart of the Wild, while the tank of the group uses mitigation cooldowns to survive. On that note: weapon enchant = haste.
BiS trinkets: alchemist stone (!), and then a number of overbudget trinkets: candle, quiescent runestone, shards of nothing. I use alchemist + shards. Don't use spirit trinkets.

There are three types of damage in CMs:
- Unavoidable damage: There are actually very few healing checks in CMs. Skyreach #2 comes to mind. On these mechanics it's imperative that you are on your toes and bring the HPS required for a kill. You get 1 healing tonic per groupmember, the rest is on you.

- Avoidable damage: I put cleaving mobs, fire on the ground, interuptable casts, dispelable enrages and the like in this category. There is a way to counter these mechanics that is not healing. You realistically won't avoid 100% of the damage in this category, but this is the damage that you are trying to minimize as you first learn the dungeons. You can brute-force heal your way through a certain amount of damage before you get overwhelmed / run out of mana / have to take too many breaks to get gold. Example: if you can consistently get the Ready for Raiding buff on the first boss in Skyreach you are probably doing something right.

- "Oneshot" damage: This is a sub-category of avoidable damage. The difference is that no one can possibly heal through those mechanics. Very obvious example: the void elementals in Shadowmoon Burial Grounds. I never tried it, but 2 waves of both casts going off should decimate any group.

Why am I telling you this?
As a healer you only have to cover #1 and a bit of #2. Even the hardest healing checks can be healed in haste/multistrike gear. So as a healer you have some choices if YOU can't heal YOUR GROUP through the dungeons:
- get better at the dungeon, as a player and as a group
- replace people that you know you will never be able to carry to your desired medal
- switch to haste/mastery gear (I never tried it, but you should even be able to switch gear during the run, so after you did your HotW burst, you can switch to your haste/mastery gear for the next pulls)

[lxfjohnson]

Thank you Erzengel and ryklin, that really helped clear up CM gearing for me!

[Deleted]

I think the response to the 4pc is a bit of an overreaction. It's not op or anything and it shouldn't be. You can't really say that in most of the cases you wouldn't have time to get the buff before you used wg to heal nuke dmg. And if you don't have time for it you just don't use it. If other healers got more op bonuses then that is the design fail imo. But too op set bonuses have been a problem since wotlk.

[Tiberria]

I think the response to the 4pc is a bit of an overreaction. It's not op or anything and it shouldn't be. You can't really say that in most of the cases you wouldn't have time to get the buff before you used wg to heal nuke dmg. And if you don't have time for it you just don't use it. If other healers got more op bonuses then that is the design fail imo. But too op set bonuses have been a problem since wotlk.

It's hardly an overreaction. The set bonus is not worth trying to use, because - even ignoring the fact you are forced to cast spells you wouldn't otherwise want to cast to activate it - you are spending more than twice as much mana as you are saving. It's not a weak set bonus - it's a set bonus that actually reduces your throughput/healing/efficiency if you try to use it. A weak set bonus would be one that only gave you a small bonus; this one is an actual active downgrade.

As far as your argument about other healer set bonuses; you are wrong; Blizzard has already said they aim for 4 piece bonuses to be worth about 5%-7% extra throughput, and the other healer set bonuses are tuned pretty close to this level. It's the Druid set bonus that is the outlier. Unless you want them to nerf every other healer's set bonus to actively weaken their healing when they try to use it, they need to fix ours.

[Jayjayhey]

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Dunno about the rest of you, but I'm not going to be casting Healing Touch anytime soon folks.

[Deleted]

you are spending more than twice as much mana as you are saving.

Assuming your HT heals for zero.
I haven't tried it so maybe you are right. My assumption came from highmaul where you could easily just tankheal a little bit in between heavy raidhealing phases

[nightfalls]

I haven't tried it so maybe you are right. My assumption came from highmaul where you could easily just tankheal a little bit in between heavy raidhealing phases

How much of that is effective tank healing versus sniping from your tank healing classes?

If you really needed to heal the tank, you'd be using Regrowth.

[Deleted]

How much of that is effective tank healing versus sniping from your tank healing classes?

If you really needed to heal the tank, you'd be using Regrowth.

That sniping thing is such a weak argument since there could be a million things why "tank healers" miss out on healing (due to mechanics). But it already came up regarding DoC on this thread so whatever. And of course normally you wouldn't go with HT for healing tanks but once it buffs you it might not be a bad choice.

[evkO]

WarcraftDevs is tooltip for Glyph'd Wild Mushroom fixed in 6.1? More importantly, is the mana cost for Glyph'd Wild Mushroom fixed?

It is working properly in 6.1, and we'll investigate the tooltip. Thank you for the heads-up!



Only I didn't know that? with glyph 8640 mana cost, without 6912 mana cost... facepalm blizz.

[baskev]

Yup our tier set sucks in looks and bonus.
If you look at all other healers there bonusses are related to spells the use allot or a decent amount. While our bonus is related to a spell that you only use 1 time a minute 6 to 8 times per raid because of how the tier set works.
So thats 6 to 8 times per raid you get a 25% cheaper heal. And the 2 set.....there are some fights it will be usefull and powerfull instant and free. But lets behonest...normaly of you need to use 2 healing touches in a row...something is going wrong. And the 2 set might sound nice. But i first would like to see if it works on all spells. And its still 1 time per min..

[Deleted]

You'll see many diffrent ones since people have diffrent opinions.
So you'll have to make up your own mind on which list you'll want to follow.

This is my list.
Spirit > haste > mastery > multi >crit > Vers

Weapon: Inferno-flame Staff.
Head: Tier -Living Wood Headpiece.

Neck
After progress upgrade. Haste + Mastery Gruul's Lip Ring.
For progress: Spirit + Multi Talisman of the Fomor.

Shoulders: Tier - Living Wood Spaulders.
Back: Spirit + Haste: Flame Infusion Drape.
Chest: Offset Chest: Unrendable Wolfhide Robes.
Wrist: Squire's Electroplated Bracers.
Hands: Tier - Living Wood Grips.
Waist: Girdle of Unconquered Glory.
Legs: Tier - Living Wood Legguards.

Unsure about Feet. If its the haste + crit or the mastery + multi. They should be extremely close so get the ones you can grab.
Feet Iron-Flecked Sandals.

Smallest upgrade.
Ring for Progress Six-Eyed Band.
For Bis Ukorogg's Corrupted Seal.

Trinkets:
The best trinket is Auto-Repairing Autoclave on all difficutlies.
After that you'll want Elementalist's Shielding Talisman on(HC).

I'm curious, why the Elementalist's Shielding Talisman is better than the Chew Toy from Darmac ?

[Rucati]

Question about the 4pc set:

If it counts NS healing touches, and the 2pc gives allows you to cast 3 spells with Nature's Swiftness, would you be able to NS two Healing Touches and get the 4pc proc? It's probably not ideal, and it still isn't as strong as the other healers bonuses, but at least you could benefit from it without losing healing like you would if you tried to hard cast two Healing Touches.

Of course, this is still only usable once per minute, and on top of that it could force you to use NS at times when you don't really want to, plus it's even worse in that you'd have to use NS on Healing Touch instead of Regrowth, but I'm just tossing out ideas to see if it could ever be useful... I feel like it's probably the only way to take advantage of the bonus, but even then I'm not really sure it'd be better than using offset pieces for the stat bonuses.

[Tiberria]

Question about the 4pc set:

If it counts NS healing touches, and the 2pc gives allows you to cast 3 spells with Nature's Swiftness, would you be able to NS two Healing Touches and get the 4pc proc? It's probably not ideal, and it still isn't as strong as the other healers bonuses, but at least you could benefit from it without losing healing like you would if you tried to hard cast two Healing Touches.

Of course, this is still only usable once per minute, and on top of that it could force you to use NS at times when you don't really want to, plus it's even worse in that you'd have to use NS on Healing Touch instead of Regrowth, but I'm just tossing out ideas to see if it could ever be useful... I feel like it's probably the only way to take advantage of the bonus, but even then I'm not really sure it'd be better than using offset pieces for the stat bonuses.

Yes you can activate the set bonus with 2 of your 3 NS casts. However, RG is close to 50% more total healing per cast than ht so you probably lose as much or more from doing this than you can hope to gain from activating the 4 pc.

[freernnur5]

I'm curious, why the Elementalist's Shielding Talisman is better than the Chew Toy from Darmac ?

Also curious where does Everburning Candle fit into the list of these trinkets?

[stormgust]

So apparently our 4T17 isn't bad, it's that it favors a different healing style:

This is an interesting case where different healers favor different healing styles, & some fit the set bonus, while some don’t.

[Tiberria]

So apparently our 4T17 isn't bad, it's that it favors a different healing style:

Here is the Twitter link, so you can flame away at the response https://twitter.com/Celestalon/statu...09278394564608

It isn't an "interesting case that favors different healing styles". It's an interesting case where Celestalon shows that he has no understanding of how the spec is played. It doesn't "favor different healing styles". It's a case where a set bonus is designed as a trap to try and push players into a suboptimal playstyle that is subjectively and objectively both inferior and an across the board loss.

[Thalur]

It isn't an "interesting case that favors different healing styles". It's an interesting case where Celestalon shows that he has no understanding of how the spec is played.

This has nothing to do with how the spec is played - the problem is that his math is wrong. Let's consider a scenario (like mythic Imp P1) where you want to put out AoE healing while conserving mana. Let's exclude overheal (both from HT and from WG). I use SotF because I have numbers for that. Here is what you might do in that scenario:

a) with new 4p setbonus: 2x HT + SM + WG
Base Mana cost: 20.7% + 13% + 28.31% = 62.01%
Healing done (from my log): 94k + 46k + 506k = 646k
HPBM% = 10,417.67 (healing per 1% base mana spent)

b) without using the set bonus: SM + WG
Base Mana cost: 13% + 37.75% = 50.75%
Healing done: 46k + 506k = 552k
HPBM% = 10,876.85

So, by using the 4p bonus, we reduced the HPM by 4.22%. This means, it is less effective to use the 4p bonus than just to cast WG, even though I'm fully accounting for the HT healing. (Without SotF, HPM is reduced by 1.5% when using 2xHT+WG compared to just WG.)

So, Celestalon's claim is wrong and using 4p is indeed a loss in efficiency, even if you fully need the healing from the HTs.