Help our guild's druid healer

[Marolen]

So we have two druid healers (although one wasn't in raid tonight) and we just want to get some opinion on one of them. Our best druid healer is fine, we don't have any problems with her healing, but we're wondering about our other resto druid and whether he's performing poorly or what is going on. I'm linking our normal clear up to blast furnace tonight and I know some of the fights are on farm and both heals and dps aren't super paying attention but I was wondering about some of the more healing intensive fights like Kromog and Blast Furnace. Just wanted to hear some opinions. His ilvl is 672 i believe

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...2&type=healing

and then here's a more progression based log where our other druid was present https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...2&type=healing. The druid I'm wondering your opinions' of is Bluze

[otterfluff]

Good Evening! The first thing two things to look at are uptime on Lifebloom and Harmony. Over the span of the 8 boss pulls on the night where both of your druids were present, Bluze had an average of 27% uptime on Lifebloom. That should be near or above 90-ish %. Looking at their Harmony buff, they were sitting at an average of 75%. This should be anywhere from 90% to 100%, as it directly effects the strength of their hots. A little room for improvement there. I didn't get a chance to look at FULL spell usage but I did also notice that he's using SoTF and DoC but then he's using Germination. Thats technically functional but a tad wonky IMO. Incarn and NV work better with Germination for throughput, and then SoTF and Doc pair well with Rampant Growth.

Also. you're four healing heroic with a disc priest and a holy paladin. theres not THAT much to heal on beastlord to begin with unless people are being idiots. Might not be the best fight to analyze pure throughput.

[Dennen]

I haven't played a lot of Resto Druid in WoD so am by no means an expert, but there are a few simple issues that are lowering his performance.

Firstly, Lifebloom uptime is VERY low. On some fights it was as low as 20%, and some of the better ones were still only 40-50%. Ideally being as close to 80-90% uptime is great, but realistically anything above 70-75% is decent. This is important, as not only is it very mana efficient healing, but it procs Clearcasting which means more free Regrowths.

Secondly, he has a VERY low amount of Swiftmend casts - on one 10+ minute fight he cast it once or twice. Swiftmend is a quick and relatively efficient way of keeping up Harmony and as it's instant it can be used as a buffer to keep someone alive, allowing for a more mana efficient spell to be cast.

I've also just realised that he is taking the Soul of the Forest talent... Therefore he should be casting Swiftmend on cooldown (30-40+ on most fights). As he isn't managing this buff correctly (which can be difficult for less experienced players) he should respec into Tree of Life. Tree of Life is often a better talent anyway, especially if he is never casting Swiftmend.

One other area for concern is the high number of Regrowths he is casting, especially given that very few of these are Clearcasted/free due to low Lifebloom uptime. Your other druid rarely casts more than 10-15, but Bluze is often casting 25-35+.

TLDR: Increase uptime on Lifebloom, cast more Swiftmends, use less Regrowths and spec into Tree of Life until he's perfected Soul of the Forest usage.

As otterfluff also mentioned, both druid's uptime on Harmony could improve (90%+ is ideal)

Hope that hoped!

[Fluffytoy]

Take this with a grain of salt since I'm fairly new to reading logs. This is based off Kromog.

It seems his Lifebloom uptime is very poor. That is essential to keep your numbers up. Aim for 95%+ uptime.
Wild Mushroom uptime is very poor as well. Far under 50% - which is a big deal. It's easily one of our better healing abilities.
In a 6.5 minute fight he could easily cast Tranquility twice. There is only 1 cast of it ~1:45 in. It would have been up by 4:45 and perfect to use Sub-30%.
Only 5 Swiftmends were cast. Being he has talented Soul of the Forest this spell should be cast much more.
Regrowth was cast 36 times. I only see 5 Omen of Clarity procs and you should ideally only cast Regrowth for Omen procs. He will get more procs with better up-time on his Lifebloom.
Harmony uptime was decent but not perfect. He could patch those holes by using Swiftmend on cooldown. A few times he went ~15s+ without Harmony.
Nature's Swiftness was only used 2 times in the 6.5 minute fight (Ideally you could use it 5-6 times usefully).

Dying at ~5:30 doesn't help either since sub-30% is very healing intensive. Anyhoozers, that's what I can see quickly from my knowledge of reading logs. I highly suggest he download the add-on WeakAuras 2 and use that WA import (It's on MMO-C, I just don't have time to track it down) that shows Lifebloom, Harmony and Wild Mushroom timers. That alone will help out his HPS. The rest of it is just using his abilities a bit better and cooldowns more often. A massive part of his healing seems to just be Rejuv spam.

[Marolen]

hey all, this was all great and I appreciate it.

We had a progression raid tonight that consisted of wiping on H Flamebender a lot and we really felt the druid's heals were below par. Can you all check another log and see if there's anything else to add?

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...1&type=healing

[TEHPALLYTANK]

hey all, this was all great and I appreciate it.

We had a progression raid tonight that consisted of wiping on H Flamebender a lot and we really felt the druid's heals were below par. Can you all check another log and see if there's anything else to add?

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...1&type=healing

Looking at your deaths it seems like your wipes are mostly on people messing up the mechanics.

Wipe 1: Tank is killed partially by molten torrent (it shouldn't be hitting him for 350k), Feral then dies 30 seconds later to molten torrent.
Wipe 2: Warlock stands on multiple weapons and you didn't get the dogs down before firestorm
Wipe 3: Can blame the healers a bit on this one, first two deaths were over long periods of time (16 seconds and 9 seconds) however those two shouldn't have gotten the Singe debuff
Wipe 4: Priest dies to molten torrent, DK tank doesn't get a direct heal over the course of 7 seconds
Wipe 5: Dogs weren't killed in time
Wipe 6: The dog is facing multiple raid members
Wipe 7: Warlock eats a molten torrent, tank doesn't have a CD up for the breath

[Thalur]

We had a progression raid tonight that consisted of wiping on H Flamebender a lot and we really felt the druid's heals were below par. Can you all check another log and see if there's anything else to add?

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...1&type=healing

Looking at Wipe 7 (4:58).
* Only 2 Wild Growth casts. This is the #1 reason why his healing is low - he doesn't use his best healing spell. Especially with the SotF talent, he should be using it at least for every Meteor and during firestorm.
* 25% Lifebloom uptime is really bad. This fight has a lot of tank damage, especially when the Wolfes are out, and there was never a lifebloom on the tanks in these periods (e.g. when they died). Should be close to 100% on this fight.
* Only 3 Mushrooms placed (30% uptime). No mushroom up during firestorm and first Wolf phase. If you soak meteors in melee, Shroom should have 100% uptime. Otherwise, at least for all AoE phases.
* Only 1 use of Barkskin (self CD, at least for every firestorm) and 1 use of Ironbark (Tank CD, at least for every Wolves phase).
* DoC talent used but not a single Wrath cast in the first 3 minutes of the fight. If he doesn't use it, why not take NV or HotW for some damage or healing increase?
* Glyph of Rejuvenation used but only cast 10 HT. (Actually, not casting HT is good, so he's wasting a glyph slot and should change it.)

There is really a lot of room for improvement. The good thing is that Harmony uptime and Swiftmend usage for SotF look good.

[DiNett]

Hi,
I can only say that he is terrible resto druid.
Kromog fight as example.
Spams regrowth like there's no tomorrow.
Tranquility is 715k ..... on kromog... on the boss with huge and constant AoE dmg on raid... seriously?!
Dream of Cenarius is not a good talent, no matter what you will hear from anyone, on fights like Kromog it is a must even. ToL+NV beats that after Rejuvs.
On kromog it is even essential, as 90sec. cooldown used when it is needed.
Uptime on lifebloom is sad, compared with his Regrowth usage it's even more sad.

Not allowed to post any links, wanted to share my kromog normal kill with 60k hps

I think he is sure that he is supposed to use regrowth a lot.
I think he has never tried to google "resto druid guid/tips/howto/wtf"
ToL and NV, at least try watching 'toptier' druid builds.
I would think it's ok to have DoC on hans HC fight, it's so slow on healing, but we usually just respec one to dps for that for more gain.

p.s. Sorry, was so baffled that forgot the help part.

First and foremost let him read any guide, show him what warcraftlogs is to compare his spell usage vs higher ranking druids.
Learn the fights, learn when and what to use. Understand talents and chose accordingly.

[Hildrande]

Not allowed to post any links, wanted to share my kromog normal kill with 60k hps
....
On kromog [NV] is even essential

Please...
Even if you are unable to diverge from the cookie cutter rejuv talents, at least try be aware of there are different ways of doing things, that actually works just fine.
9% of 73k hps from DoC - even with Incarnation - on Kromog Mythic.

[Aleks0410]

Actually, not casting HT is good

I really don't understand this. What are everyone using for their direct heals? Only RG on clearcast and Swiftmend?

Maybe its cus I'm only doing heroics in a 10-12 man group this expansion, so maybe I'm less spammy with rejuv but in my experience there're many cases where chaining a few HTs on a tank seems like a good idea.

Why is HT a bad spell to cast? I know Rejuv is more HPM but it's also much more likely to overheal. I'm not saying HT>Rejuv, i simply dont understand the mentality of HT being "bad".

[Hypasonic]

Just a slow spell likely to be sniped by other healer, reju better all round really but having said that it depends on the fight, for example we're progressing on black furnace mythic and I find myself using HT a lot during P1 just because of the nature of the raid damage.

[Thalur]

I really don't understand this. What are everyone using for their direct heals? Only RG on clearcast and Swiftmend?

To turn the question around: why do you want to cast a direct heal? Of course, if someone needs more healing (from you) than your Rejuvs on him can do. Why does he need the healing? Because otherwise he might die. Is that a situation where you start casting a 2.1 sec HT that will do some mediocre healing? No. If someone needs healing now, you use Regrowth or Swiftmend. If you use HT, either he dies or another healer provided the healing needed. (Or the healing wasn't that important after all.)

There are situations when it's useful to cast HT, but they are rather rare and many resto druids are over-using HT, so I try to generally advocate not using it. It is often a good idea to cast HT on the tank (with Lb) during high tank damage phases, here HT can be seen as kind of pro-active healing (as you have no idea if the healing will be needed when the cast is finished, but better be safe). Casting HT on a non-tank is usually the wrong choice, as mentioned above - either HT is too slow, or Rejuv can do the job better for less mana.

[Aleks0410]

To turn the question around: why do you want to cast a direct heal? Of course, if someone needs more healing (from you) than your Rejuvs on him can do. Why does he need the healing? Because otherwise he might die. Is that a situation where you start casting a 2.1 sec HT that will do some mediocre healing? No. If someone needs healing now, you use Regrowth or Swiftmend. If you use HT, either he dies or another healer provided the healing needed. (Or the healing wasn't that important after all.)

There are situations when it's useful to cast HT, but they are rather rare and many resto druids are over-using HT, so I try to generally advocate not using it. It is often a good idea to cast HT on the tank (with Lb) during high tank damage phases, here HT can be seen as kind of pro-active healing (as you have no idea if the healing will be needed when the cast is finished, but better be safe). Casting HT on a non-tank is usually the wrong choice, as mentioned above - either HT is too slow, or Rejuv can do the job better for less mana.

I totally see what you mean, but then it must be a 10 man vs. 20 man thing. I usually 2 heal (sometimes our moonkin goes resto to 3 heal) normal/heroics in a 10-12 man group. There seems to be many cases where 2x rejuv simply isn't enough to keep tanks stable, which is why I'm often "cancel-casting" HT's back to back since Regrowth spam would be an absolute overkill. HT seems like the ideal choice, because of LB as you mention, but also 'cus what else do we have? I agree Regrowth is the go-to choice for tank saving situations but for steady tank healing HT doesn't seem like a bad spell to me. I sure would feel like I was missing an important tool if I didn't have it. I guess different playstyles is a thing in WoD :P

Also, isn't HT 1.9 sec with current gear?

[theburned]

HT is generally a very weak spell and as thalur mentions it is really only a few cases, myself was surprised to see top druids using it for fights like mar'gok, but thinking about things like arcane wrath where you can predict where the healing will be needed, the person who needs the healing is not in immdiate danger, and will be healed up within 5 seconds, so HT usage is a very good choice, a regrowth would be too expensive, and rejuv would be too slow.

Also consider that MoC is a viable talent and in the cases of very low damage, using MoC proccs and just spamming on the tank is good as it stacks up the living seed.

As for mentions of talent usage, sticking to the cookie cutter build seems like a really bad idea, it is very often not the best choice, though other talent builds can need some change of playstyle thus 1-2 attempts might not be enough to judge its usefulness.

MoC being a very good example, in the start missing a few CC proccs and not utilizing them is common due to mental state of 15 sec one cast rather than 7 sec as many as possible.
the 90 and 75 talents being good examples too, HotW NV and DoC all having their uses for different fights, depending on whats needed, while for the 75 talents you have ToL vs SotF and both are competitive and really depends on the fight.

[Pory]

hey all, this was all great and I appreciate it.

We had a progression raid tonight that consisted of wiping on H Flamebender a lot and we really felt the druid's heals were below par. Can you all check another log and see if there's anything else to add?

A quick look at it shows some easy fixes:

a) He/She needs to improve their up time of Lifebloom. 41% is too low.
b) I don't recommend DoC for a fight such as Flamebender. HoTW is a better talent on this fight, especially during progression.
c) Is he/she going OOM a lot? Based on his/her breakdown of heals, Regrowth needs to be lower on ranking of spells used. I only use Regrowth when I get a clearcast proc or on emergency situations (e.g. Iron Maidens when I'm on the ship and sh** is hitting the fan*).

[Marolen]

Thank you all very much for your responses. You've been much more gracious and nicer than most of the other 'help my heals' threads on other class forums. Unfortunately it didn't work out with the resto druid, but I really appreciate the tips. Hopefully it helps someone else looking for advice on how to improve