Circle of Healing questions & answers!

I was tagged by Angelya of Revive & Rejuvenate (which is a great name for a healing blog, by the way), so here are my answers.

1. What is the name, class, and spec of your primary healer?

Leafie, restoration druid.

2. What is your primary group healing environment?

10-person raids. I do some 5s on Leafie but only as many as I am forced to do to cap out Valor for the week. Though I did a lot of 5s healing early in Cata to gear up for raiding.

3. What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why?

Lifebloom. Nobody else has anything like it! It’s so cool to spread Lifebloom around on the raid and watch the health bars all jump up when it blooms. Also I love the bloom sound.

4. What healing spell do you use least for your class and why?

Regrowth. Expensive to cast; the weakest “flash heal” of any of the healing specs. The talents that boost it are lackluster, so nobody has them. It’s cast only on ClearCasting procs and even then only when I don’t want to wait for the bigger blast of Healing Touch.

5. What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why?

Mobility used to be the hands-down answer to this question back in Wrath. It’s still true today but we are no longer the jump-n-hot class any more. Right now I’d say that sustained high-throughput AOE healing is our strength. The three-minute cooldown on Tranquility is a huge deal.

6. What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why?

No damage reduction cooldown to give away, unlike all the other healing specs. Also, we lack strong single-target burst. I can heal the entire raid quickly & effectively, but I can’t heal a tank up fast without sweating. I particularly notice this on Alysrazor when trying to get a tank back up into a safe zone after Gushing Wound falls off.

7. In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you?

I have no idea because I no longer raid 25s. I raid the 10s, where personal responsibility is much more demanding and every single player has to be good.

In the 10s, the best assignment for me is minding a tank while healing the raid. In my usual raid team, we usually figure out which tank the holy pally is healing primarily and which tank is getting my Lifebloom stack. From there we’re flexible because cross healing is the norm in 10s.

8. What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why?

I think holy pallies make good partners for resto druids. The two styles are quite different from each other so they complement each other.

9. What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why?

It’s never the class I hate. It’s always the player. Growl.

10. What is your worst habit as a healer?

Casting Wild Growth as a nervous twitch. Until I got some significant raid gear, this was running me out of mana.

11. What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing?

When somebody says after a wipe that “the healers need to be watching for this or that.” We already are, I guarantee you. If somebody didn’t get enough healing, we know it, and we know whether it was because they ran out of range, or should have been using a cooldown, or were standing in crap, or if we just plain missed it. We take it seriously when we lose people.

12. Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other healers for PvE healing?

Yes. Sometimes I worry that the druid is overpowered just now, but then I remember that we have no way to reduce incoming damage. We have to make up that difference with sheer throughput, which skews the meters. With a discipline priest, you don’t take the damage to start with, which is so much more powerful than the ability to heal it after the fact. But we’re in a good place right now, much better than we were at the start of Cataclysm.

13. What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer?

Did my assignments live y/n? Also, I’m finding that making video recordings of raid fights has been amazing for figuring out what I’m doing right and wrong. It’s so much easier to look at a fight when you’re not in the middle of the stress of playing it. You can see if you were standing in the right places, moving the right ways, reacting fast enough to events, keeping various spells on cooldown & so forth. The videos have also been helpful in evaluating my user interface setup. I highly recommend this to everybody. The Macintosh WOW client has video built right in— press a shortcut key and boom, you’re recording yourself.

14. What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class?

That all we do is raid heal. Lifebloom is such a powerful tank healing tool. I can keep up a tank all on my own under significant damage (Nefarian in phase 1, for instance).

15. What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn?

The Lifebloom stack timing. Every 7 or 8 seconds, you’ll be returning to the tank to refresh the stack somehow, usually by casting Nourish. Your attention cycles around from the tank to the raid back to the tank on a timer, almost.

16. If someone were to try to evaluate your performance as a healer via recount, what sort of patterns would they see (i.e. lots of overhealing, low healing output, etc)?

Overuse of Wild Growth, a tendency to use Nourish when I should have gone for a bigger heal.

17. Haste or Crit and why?

Haste. Druid hots benefit from haste at predictable breakpoints, and we need gobs of it to hit them. I am slightly surprised this question doesn’t ask about Mastery. Maybe it’s still too weak for most of the healing specs? Right now I am, no joke, reforging for Mastery instead of Haste. I seem to be doing pretty well and not going too crazy because of slow cast times, so maybe it’s working.

18. What healing class do you feel you understand least?

Shamans. I’ve never played a shaman past level 10 or so. I have only the vaguest idea about how their healing works.

19. What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing?

I use mouseover macros heavily. Every single one of my cast-on-others spells is triggered by a mouseover macro. In addition to that, I use a Pitbull 4 layout that I designed myself and have been working on for some time. The goal of the layout is to have healthy, safe players shown in quiet, non-obtrusive frames. The frames get more attention-demanding as the player takes damage. The default state of a frame is to fade into the background when all is well.

I run Decursive but only for the “bong” sound it makes when somebody gets a condition I can cleanse.

20. Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why?

The reign of primary stats in Cataclysm means that I stack intellect early and often. There’s no point doing anything else. Intellect double-dips for my mana pool and my regen. I would also note that gems and enchants contribute a smaller overall percent of your stat budget than you think, even with the burly Cataclysm gems. Stacking via gemming does less than it used to.

Tagging… Gnochi! Tell me all about disco priests!

Bear runs

My guild ran several ZA bear runs yesterday, with a variety of compositions. Two of the runs were successful. A couple more ended with the timer expiring in the middle of the lynx boss fight. One ended in an ignominious wipe on the trash before the bear boss. I healed a few of those, including one of the successes and the wipe. Here are my notes.

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Druid healing on Chimaeron.

Somebody on my Twitter stream was asking about druids in the Chimaeron fight. The first time I was there I wondered what the heck Blizzard expected us to do on that fight, since the only heal fast enough to save a caustic slime victim (Regrowth) was too expensive to spam for the duration of the fight. It’s still true, so druids should be doing something else. But what?

The fight

The bare-bones outline of the Chimaeron fight:

• The Bile-o-tron gives you a buff that makes any damage that would kill you take you to 1HP instead, so long as you’re over 10KHP to start.
• Chimaeron debuffs the tank with Break.
• Periodically he will do a Double Attack that hits his target with two very large hits in quick succession. You need to have a tactic to handle this or you’ll be losing tanks.
• Periodically he’ll throw Caustic Slime at 2 raid members. This would one-shot them save for the buff. It can splash to nearby players.
• Periodically he will cast Massacre, which is TURD, aka Totally Unavoidable Raid Damage.
• A random subset of these massacres knock the Bile-o-tron offline and cause Feud, through which he continues to throw slimes, only you do not have the life-saving buff.
• At 20% you enter phase 2. This is a straight burn phase because nobody can be healed. If you have mana left, you’ll be doing DPS.

The tactics

The generally-used tactics are these:

The main tank holds the boss and piles up break debuffs. The second tank is a double attack soak tank: he or she taunts the boss just before double attack. The main tank takes it back afterward.

The raid spreads out to avoid splitting damage from Caustic Slime. Because it won’t kill you (1HP!) there’s no sense in splitting the giant damage. That would just give you extra targets to have to heal up, which is a waste of mana. Somebody must be assigned to healing these victims asap. If your raid has good positioning discipline, there will be only 2 to heal. (This is another one of those encounters where melee is a liability.)

For Massacre, the raid stacks up to maximize the benefit of aoe and group healing spells. It stays stacked during Feud because slime damage must be split while the life-saving buff is missing. This is when raids cycle damage reduction cooldowns and big heals.

During phase 2, pop Heroism/TimeWarp/Whatever and burn like mad. There’s no point to healing. Evasion tank, dump aggro, use all your survival tricks when he’s on you. Also, maximize his travel time to his next target. We love our bear tanks in this phase because a nice avoidance string can keep them alive for a long time while everybody happily does damage.

The healing

What do druids do in this fight? My usual raid make up has 1 holy paladin, 1 discipline priest, and 1 resto druid. The healing usually goes this way: I keep the main tank fully hotted and keep an eye on the off tank, who usually needs the big bomb heals. The off tank is the one raid member whose health has to be kept high. The holy paladin beacons the off tank and heals the raid after slime hits. I use Wild Growth on cooldown to ease the raid healing burden. If OOC procs I hit low health people with Regrowth; if not I throw Rejuv on them as a death-delaying buffer to give the holy pally time. (If not straight tank healing, that’s my role in most of these fights: a buffer. I give the other healers time to wind up.) The disc priest smites the boss and pays attention to the off tank. Everybody uses aoe healing on the massacres: Efflorescence plus WG plus Regrowth as you get procs. We cycle big cooldowns on Feuds. Because my raid usually has 3 druids (bear MT, moonkin, me), we also have a Tranquility rotation for Feuds.

I save tree form for phase 2, for the fast Wrath casts. Tree is 4 a spam moonfare LOL. I almost always have 0 mana left entering phase 2, however, if I’ve paced myself properly.

I have one other tip for this fight. Make sure your raid frames show people below 10K health differently from other people. Those are the urgent healing targets. The Low Health debuff is present on them, so you can use that as a handy trigger for display.

Chimaeron is a one-shot for us (unless something silly happens) and we have the Sound and Fury achievement for most of the guild now. So this approach works. I’m sure others do as well. This fight is mostly a quick-reflexes fight for healers, followed by periods of massive multitarget throughput. Holy priests probably rule on Massacres.

Aside: The word has got a Greek origin, so the ch is hard.

First 4.0.6 raid.

We had a lovely raid last night. We had our pally off tank on duty tonight and an unholy DK who joined us back in the ICC days but took a while to get ready for raiding in Cataclysm. (Oh, real life! How annoying you are.) So our group was a bit different from the usual, but it was just as happy and effective as always. We cleared BWD except for Nefarian and BOT except for Cho’gall with only the usual bosses giving us trouble. One of the newcomers had some trouble on our first Atramedes pull. And we got sloppy with distributing DPS on our first Twilight Council pull and entered phase 2 with the boss at 30%, resulting in a 3% wipe. Oof.

Two players were ranked on two different encounters each when I uploaded the log last night. We’re now down to 3 ranked as more guilds weigh in, but I still thought that was good work.

Here’s the weird thing. The three healers were neck and neck all night. The holy pally won the numbers race eventually, as expected. Our priest only fell behind because he was dutiful and went holy for Chimaeron, which was not the right choice, to everyone’s surprise. Discipline is rocking right now.

Resto druids are healing more than they were. I had mana problems all night, however. On some encounters I was watching the Innervate timer tick. OOC procs were maybe down, which might be why I struggled on mana. I would have to look at the numbers. Or it might have been that shortened Wild Growth cooldown, which put me back into the business of buffering the raid and not just one tank. Tree form is now painfully short, but still worthwhile as a mana efficiency cooldown.

It felt like healing as a druid, even more so than when they chopped Rejuv’s cost on live a couple of weeks ago. It’s still not the fluid, mobile class it was in Wrath, and I do still miss that healing class, but oh well. Blizzard is determined to follow its plan to the bitter end.

Nefarian. Ugh.

I expect to see Nefarian again this week. We have figured out phase 1 and are now struggling to figure out how to get out of lava and onto a pillar with an overhanging lip in 3 seconds, before the adds on top of the pillars wipe the raid with yet another kill-everyone ability that needs to be interrupted instantly. Yeah. Not fun. Getting out of the water has always been hard in the WOW engine, always, and that’s normal non-killing-you water with normal non-overhanging ground. Add lava & a pillar designed to make it harder and you’re in purely sadistic raid encounter design territory. And I don’t mean sadistic in any interesting way. I mean that the transition is poorly designed. It’s unforgiving in the obnoxious way, not unforgiving in the challenging way the Lich King encounter was with the buff at 5 and 10%. That felt right even though it was hard.

At least we have 1 more interrupt in the raid than we did last week, now that our holy pally can train Rebuke.

Overall I think tier 11 is merely bleah as a raid tier, back down to the level of TOC. There are only a few encounters I think are interesting after 6 weeks of doing them. They all have fairly nasty execution demands for interrupts and burst AOE healing, which gets tedious after a while.

Cataclysm reputation items, Wowhead filters, and you!

I was wondering what I had done wrong: I knew I was supposed to grind up my reputations and then upgrade to Purplez(tm) to be Ready For Raiding. But then I got there and discovered that the only purple I could buy was Belt of the Untamed from the Twilight Highlands faction. And I already had Lightning Lash, thanks to a generous guildmate, so it was sort of pointless. I felt let down. Also, I realized I’d been wearing the wrong tabard. My path through had been awesome for my kitty set, though.

Let’s think about this properly and set up a nice Wowhead item filter to do all the work for us. Here are all the faction items of interest to a resto druid. Not a huge list.

From this list we deduce the following optimal reputation path for a caster druid:

• Complete the Mount Hyjal quests to reach revered with Hyjal.
• Run Vashj’ir until you get access to the Earthen Ring rep vendor. Buy tabard. Flee zone.
• Complete Deepholm to unlock the Therazane dailies & earn Earthen Ring rep.
• Commence grinding Therazane dailies.
• Run Twilight Highlands until you have access to the faction dailies. Commence grinding.
• Once at 85, put on the Earthen Ring tabard and wear it until you’re revered. Do not on any account attempt to finish Vashj’ir questing unless heavily medicated.
• Once at 85, head to Tol Barad and grind dailies. Do not spend any of your commendations on rep. If you didn’t get Soul Releaser from any of your HOOboy runs, you can buy a weapon at revered. But don’t. Save your commendations for the Mandala of Stirring Patterns at exalted. In patch 4.0.6 this will be changed to proc int instead of mastery, thus making it useful to a resto druid.
• Once you’re revered with the Earthen Ring, swap to your Twilight Highlands faction tabard. Wear that until exalted.
• You’re probably done with Therazane now, but if not, wear that next.
• Don’t bother with Ramkahen until you’re done gearing and feel the need for a camel.

At that point you should fill out your set with justice badger items from this list.

There! Now you have learned from my mistakes. Now excuse me, I’m off to go invent the Cataclysm raiding drink for my guild. Last tier’s drink was the Icy Winds of Northrend (featuring vanilla vodka). This tier’s drink is going to be the Sonic Bomb, I’m pretty sure.