Resto Druid Tips?

[Kaoticalchemist]

I missed vanilla WoW by a few months and didn't pick up the resto lifestyle until wrath. What is resto like in vanilla? Is it just HoTs spamming and upkeep as per usual or did it play a bit differently?

Thanks guys!

[Draenin]

DOWN-RANK YOUR HEALS. You should NEVER cast rank 10 healing touch outside of a Nature's Swiftness, make sure your hots aren't going to be wasted. Regrowth is a mana hog so don't over-use it, but if you have the consumables and gear for it, It'll be the best thing in the world.

Try to play with healing touch ranks and find one you like and spam it. Rank 3 I feel is good for the basic topping up/healing spell to mitigate damage. If you're planning to raid, talk to the other healers/druids. See if they need more single target healing for tanks, or raid healing for everyone. As certain specialisations favour raid and tank healing.

[euronmisc]

Draenin said most of it.

For 5mans use downranked HT mostly, regrowth and nature swiftness as oh-shit buttons. Rejuv if you feel like it, and have the mana for it.

Raids is the same story, except you can spam more hots in fights with a lot of AoE damage. Don't forget to use innervate whenever it's available and to keep thorns up on the tanks. Also fearie firing bosses!

[Norjak]

http://www.wow-one.com/forum/topic/12549-pve-druid-restoration-guide/
I think the buff work differently on Nost, though. Some of the enchants aren't available yet.

[Doofoos]

http://www.wow-one.com/forum/topic/12549-pve-druid-restoration-guide/

NEVER use Regrowth (except for Vaelastrasz in BWL maybe) since it is a very expensive spell which will result mostly in useless overheal.

What a nonsense

[Taladril]

NEVER use Regrowth (except for Vaelastrasz in BWL maybe) since it is a very expensive spell which will result mostly in useless overheal.

What a nonsense

Not sure why you would say that. It is by far our least efficient spell and spamming it for any amount of time pretty much instantly ooms you. It really is most effective on Vael. apart from that you can go a whole raid and use it less times than number of fingers. Or you could spam it and be the only druid that actually needs their own innervate in raids!

[Doofoos]

Not sure why you would say that. It is by far our least efficient spell and spamming it for any amount of time pretty much instantly ooms you.

Well, because im using Regrowth rank 3 with 5 pieces of t2 and 21/0/30 build (5t2+nature's grace+improved regrowth=1.3 sec cast) 90% of the times on MC and BWL trash, and im one of the most effective healers in our guild For boss fights, obviously, im using Healing Touch.
Point is, all stereotyped clichés and statements like "never use regrowth\druid is a ht spam machine\druids created for battle res-motw-innervate" are not valid at all!

[Taladril]

Well Doofoos, feel happy because I spent quite a bit of time looking into your build. I was intrigued and didn't want to get myself in hot water by saying something that wasn't true. However the consensus on the internet proved to be correct again. Bottom line is play what you want and what works for you. However your build is not optimal because Regrowth as a spell is not optimal for raid spamming.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... eg/pubhtml

Values were obtained on my alliance druid with 0 and with 633 heal and a total spell crit of 7.63%. I used the addon called TheoryCraft which allows me to look at healing values and also input theoretical talent changes to see how values are modified (so I didn't have to respec 4 times). The values in the spreadsheet are average and DO include crit into the average heal.
I started out with base spell capability and put the values on the left. Initially I was surprised cause regrowth looked decent. Not great, but decent. Then I added my full healing gear and you can see how the values really pan out. Now you can compare original no gear to full gear. Realize that there is a lot more +heal that can be gotten. Obviously all numbers will go up, however you can see some increase a lot and others not so much. That trajectory will continue. Especially look at healing touch rank 3 and 4. Both of them increase by over double their initial values! By this level of +heal regrowth has already fallen behind and has not yet doubled like healing touch.
I am not going to turn this into a 3 page dissertation about why we downrank. There is a lot out there to see. Bottom line is that you should see the efficiency of the spells at the end by looking at the heal/mana. This tells you given a certain amount of mana how much health you could restore under ideal conditions. Bigger is better.

Moonglow spec Healing touch rank 3 is almost 9.6 health per mana.
Regrowth spec healing touch rank 3 is 8.7.
Regrowth spec Regrowth rank 3 is 5.3. This is only slightly better than rejuvenation!
As a spammable spell, this is a far less effective option. Even feral hybrid spec (the lowest of the 4 on average) has a healing touch efficiency of 8.5. So let me iterate what may not be the obvious point. A feral hybrid has the capability of healing more than a regrowth spec if they heal with healing touch and you heal with regrowth.

Points to be made: The values are ideals. This makes the regrowth numbers in real life so so much worse. I added both the heal and the hot together for efficiency. This presumes that not a single part of the heal is wasted. This is so far from the truth when healing in raid happens. I'd bet at best half of that hot is lost, not to mention some overheal of the basic heal. Probably the reality is that 80% of the hot would be lost. It effectively makes regrowth along the same heal amounts as healing touch rank 3, except it's 3 times the mana cost.
Second point: you are obviously trying to stack haste so you can make regrowth super fast. That's great, but it still will max out at 1.5 seconds cause that's when you hit the global cooldown that all spells are affected by. In exchange you are losing out on swiftmend, full rejuvenation capability, one point in gift of nature, lack of interrupt, and lowered threat. This is just not worth it at all. Just do a swiftmend build. It's more efficient with stronger heals. All you lose is the crit spell haste.
Last point: https://xkcd.com/386/

PS Play how you want with the build you want. Enjoy it. I don't care. I play the feral hybrid build so I know I am less than optimal, but I enjoy tanking and easier grinding. But it is important to know what you lose because there is optimal and not optimal.

[Doofoos]

Wall of text about healing spells mana efficiency.

I know that Healing Touch is the most mana efficient spell, and Regrowth is very unefficient (you can easily check it in SWStats without any special calculations and theorycrafting), but that's not the point.
Point is, that for 90% of the time (on trash), im using most mana-unefficient healing spell, and im still compete with priests and shamans for top1 healer place in our raid.
All i want to say that druid healer is not limited by only 2 builds and only Healing Touch spam, as it was mentioned before in the guide.

Just do a swiftmend build. It's more efficient with stronger heals.

I used 1\19\31 Swiftmend build months ago, and usually was in top5 healers list in our raid, but then one of our druids leveled to 60, gather pre-raid, came with 24\0\27 build and wrecked every healer, including priests and shamans! I was impressed and decided to respec in to that build as well. After BWL release, people started to get nice gear, priests start to heal even better, and it was harder and harder to compete with them even with 24\0\27. So i've decided to try 21\0\30, and became top1-3 healer again! Even without 5 pieces of t2 on that moment! It is simple impossible to compete with BWL\T2 geared priests in Swiftmend build. And if you can't compete with them, you became a "motw-innervate-battleres" tool and nothing more.

PS Play how you want with the build you want.

I want to play in 1\19\31, in my opinion it's the most versatile build for most versatile class in the game. But for this moment, i want to show others what druids are capable of.
PS And about "hot-overhealing". All i said before included only efficient heal stats from swstats+raidstats analyzing. As you might know, hot's on Nostalrius are not working for targets with 100% hp, and not overhealing at all, thus this is impossible to see amount of their overhealing. Therefore, amount of "Raw healing" for such druid is very, very lowered.

[Syrma]

There are several things I want to point out.

- I really like Taladril's analysis...There was nothing wrong with it really, although I wanna give some credit to Doofoos too.

- Doofoos seems like he knows what he's doing. He mentioned right away "For boss fights, obviously, im using Healing Touch.". So this whole debate could have ended there, since Doofoos acknowledged the fact, that he is aware of the inefficiency of Regrowth.

- I play on Kronos, so I was unaware of the fact, that DOTs does not overheal at Nostalrius, so the overheal might not be that big with spamming 1.3s Regrowth. Unfortunately that does not make it efficient.

- I don't wanna say harshly that trash healing is unimportant, but it kind of is...but anyway let's get to my final point.

- What I think - the very fast speed of the cast is what makes it viable (again...on trash healing, where mana does not play any role). Since other healing classes have faster heals, it is by default much more difficult to squeez in a slower HT. So yes, I can very well see you be a top healer on trash, but in my eyes it is not really that important.

Hope this made some sense.