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Instance Healing
Druids only have three heals: Regrowth, Healing Touch and Rejuvenation. Regrowth is mostly an “uh oh” spell for when someone is taking lots of damage and is low on health. Otherwise, I generally stick with Healing Touch. Rejuvenation is nice for when people are taking light damage and their health is generally staying around 80%. For Healing Touch, it's good to keep two ranks of it handy. Personally, I used to use rank 7, which heals about 1000, but recently I have replaced it with rank 8 in addition to rank 10. The reason being that often times when using rank 7 to heal minor damage, they would take additional damage that could potentially cause problems since now they have taken much more damage than rank 7 could heal. Healing for its minimum combined with a sudden spike in damage is why I decided that rank 8 would be the better choice since its minimum is about 1100. Yes it means sometimes using it I over heal when a tank only needed a 1000 point heal but I have found its made little difference on my ability to conserve mana plus it has the up side that if two seconds in your cast they get hit for another 400 or so damage rank 8 will cover that too.
For Bosses
For most bosses the same healing strategy applies. Start casting early. Why wait to start casting healing touch? It’s slow so try and get ahead of the damage. Most bosses hit pretty hard so if you start casting at about 85% health usually a tank will drop to about 70% by the time your healing touch goes off. I have found that this works very well. With the recent patch that made it so the five second rule does not kick in till a spell completes, there is no reason to not start healing touch early and have it part way through casting for when someone actually does take damage. Also it is nice to have a key bound to “target your current target’s target.” This is helpful on bosses in case the person who ends up with the most aggro isn’t the main tank. It also can give you a clue if the next person who might need a heal is someone other than who you are currently healing. What I like to do is while waiting for healing touch to go off is press that key a few times to check that the boss is still on the tank and if not to get a good idea of who he is going after.
Specifically for the baron in undead side of Stratholme this strategy is very useful. Due to his damage aura causing loss of casting time you really need to being casting early. Chain heal the main tank with the highest rank Healing Touch. After getting a Healing Touch off on the tank, that would be the time to toss a Regrowth on rogues/mages who might have taken a hit or are getting low on health due to the baron’s aura. After that it’s a good idea to go back to the main tank.
For the general in UBRS, the general strategy laid out before works well. The strategy that my guild uses to fight him is that either a warlock chain casting fear locks one of his guards down or pair of hunters continually ice traps it. Then the group zergs the other guard while the main tank with the help of the primary healer hold the general. When the group kills the first guard they then kill the general and finally finish off the last guard. Even with as slow as healing touch is I can usually toss a heal on an off tank if one is needed. The trick with the general is his fire attack erases aggro. This can be very bad for healers. Especially if any one has Regrowth or Rejuvenation on them. I have found that if you stand on the right side of the room, the side furthest from the door, that this is a good place to be to start. Heal form there and watch the general to use his fire AoE and aggro onto you. Sometimes the tanks pick him back up right away but if they don’t I found that dash works well. If he heads towards you shift to cat form and dash across the room towards the furthest wall. I’ve tried shifting into bear to wait for tanks to get him off me but even with 7 thousand armor in bear he kills me too fast. Usually this only happens once since as soon as the group has finished with the first guard they usually then zerg the general so even when he uses his fire AoE chances are someone else will pick aggro due to all the people attacking him. In any case, the general can be rough as a druid if the group cannot hold aggro of you. But that’s their failing, not yours. The generals guards hit for about 800 and mortal strike for nearly 3 thousand on me. As long as your group knows how to keep one of the guards locked down while killing the other one your only worry is the general aggro’ing on you and hopefully this has helped with that.
Oh No! Mortal Strike!
I’ve read a lot about how we have no way to deal with Mortal Strike. That it completely gimps our healing and its all doom and gloom and death from there. Well, that hasn’t been my experience. Yes it can be deadly if it hits someone already at low health because it usually flat out kills them but if you keep everyone topped off at about 85-100% of their hp its shouldn’t be to big of a problem on tanks. On leather and cloth wearers, it tears us apart but we usually don’t have aggro and when we do a good group will pull it off you fast. Now the damage has been done what should we do about it? Cast Healing Touch. Am I crazy? Nope. I have found that the danger from Mortal Strike is that if tanks are not well healed then they might get killed. It has been my experience that Mortal Strike will drop a fully healed tank to about 30-40% health. Wow! What massive damage! But their normal attacks are fairly unimpressive. After that big hit they go back to auto attack, which isn’t very threatening. It has been my experience that after the tank gets hit by mortal strike that they have enough health and defense to easily live long enough for Healing Touch to go off. What about healing being halved by mortal strike? Not a problem. Here is what happens. A mob Mortal Strikes the tank then I see the tanks health drop, I see the Mortal Strike symbol so I begin casting Healing Touch. By the time Healing Touch goes off Mortal Strike has worn off. It seems to only last about 4 seconds but it usually takes me longer than half a second to noticed the damage, target the tank if needed and then start casting Healing Touch. Mortal Strike can be annoying if it happens in the middle of your cast but its hardly a raid ender. To be honest, I don’t think I’ve lost anyone because of Mortal Strike.
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Healing Strategy
Written by Guest on 2005-07-05 08:56:48
In regards to the previous comment, rejuv is a suitable alternative to renew, but regrowth for flash heal not quite.
A druid's mana pool is already sizably smaller than a priests, and though the instant half and casting time of regrowth is similar to flash heal, regrowth costs a TON more mana, because you are also paying for the HoT half of regrowth as well.
Typically in 5-man's I throw a rejuv first on the Tank when he gets to around 85%-90% and as its wearing off/he drops down to 60-70% I throw on a Regrowth. Throwing rejuv first lets him build aggro and hold the mobs better than if I started with a Healing Touch, at least from my experience. Then depending on whether Regrowth critted or not (50%) I'll start casting a rank 7 or rank 10 Healing Touch. If he's not down to at least 85% by the time I'm close to finishing casting, I'll sidestep/abort the cast, then immediately begin casting again and sidestepping as needed.
I think as a druid the fact that you have TWO HoT's that stack is something every druid should take advantage of. I've found that many times, after you've dropped both a Regrowth and Rejuv on a tank, it's enough HoT to match the damage he is receiving, which means you dont have to cast for a while and can make up a significant amount of mana in full regen mode.
Another tip for 5-manning that I have found to be very useful which is touched upon in the Cat's cower ability. On my main caster bar, as the last hotkey (the "=" key) I bound to a macro that shapeshifts into cat and also targets nearest enemy. Then on my cat bar as the "=" key I have /cast cower(rank 3).
I typically stand back a little ways from the main fray, so if I happen to aggro a melee class, then they will coming running to me and away from the battle, this gives me time to shapeshift into cat, and the shapeshift cooldown to wear off, and by the time he reaches me, I have my cower ready to fire. The macro makes it so once you see a mob come running at you, just press "=" as many times as you can until you see the "!!!" above his head and he goes running back to the battle.
Only drawbacks to using cat/cower is that it won't work on casters and ranged mobs. Cower has a super low radius (5 yards). Also, the target needs to be in front of you for it to work, but this shouldnt be too much of a problem for 5 manning, since most fights are pretty controlled (its the 15 man raids that mobs tend to run around everywhere, besides in 15 man's aggro shouldn't be too much of a problem, there's so much DPS floating around). And the last thing of course is that it only works on single mobs. If you manage to pull aggro from 2 mobs, you will cower the closest one off you, then have to wait a painstakingly long 10 second cooldown to cower again. If you have 10 seconds to wait in battle for a cooldown without your party getting heals, they don't need you there. So I typically pop back into caster throw some heals around and just yell 'aggro!' and if in 10 seconds a warrior/shammy hasnt pulled him off you well then first of all you have a gimped group, but then you can cat/cower again.
Taking a look at the numbers side of things, a Priest's fade costs 275 mana at lvl 60, with cooldown of 30 seconds and lowers threat by 820. Druid's shapeshift costs 55% of base mana, (which from my experience at lvl 60 is around 600-700 mana) cooldown of 10 seconds, and lowers threat by 600 (equivalent to the lvl 50 priest fade).
The priest's fade is a ton more mana efficient, is instant cast, and works for multiple mobs. The druids cat/cower takes about 2 seconds all in all to pull off, costs significantly more mana, works for only 1 melee target, but can be cast every 10 seconds.
If a Priest fades and it fails, hope his PWS will last long enough for someone to pull the mob off him. If a Druid's cat/cower fails, hit dash and kite the mob around the room yelling "ahhh aggro help!" or don't because MT's really hate it when you run and you have aggro, they say run to them (yet when I run to them it seems like all that happens is I die closer to where they are as opposed to farther, silly tanks) Honestly though, most mobs can't catch you running at 150% run speed, but remember during those 10 seconds your party is receiving no heals. Either way, both classes are in a bit of a jam should their aggro reducing abilities fail.
| Opposite Approach?
Written by Guest on 2005-07-05 05:00:18
Your method works and has a logic to it bu I instance heal mainly with Rejuv to stabilize things or gain ground for those no longer being hit, using Regrowth for emergency low health or to stack on top of Rejuv and HT mainly either with NS in an emergency or a lesser HT to stack on my HOTs or another Druid's casts. My top Rejuv with + heal gear and 3 TP is a consistent 270 per tick or 90 hps which is pretty efficient, but I used this method earlier as well and I prefer to be pro-active and have heals banked against future damage rather than chasing after only damage that already happened. Oddly, my method as Druid is similar to my method as Priest, but with Rejuv sub for Renew, Regrowth for Flash Heal. Would be interested in others' experiences. . |
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