Reflections From The Pond

So, a druid healer who is not a tree, is that any good?

Well, the jury is still out on that one but I did perform some crime scene investigations last night.

Exhibit A: Heroic Drak’Tharon Keep.

The group: Me, leafless druid, a DK tank, a rogue and two hunters.

My compadres were dressed in a mix of epics and blues and my own gear was a mix of lvl 70 and lvl 80 epics, with a few blue Northrend quest rewards and dungeon drops thrown in for good measure.

My stats (unbuffed): 1351 bonus healing, 10% crit, 259 mp5 while casting, 716 Intellect, 568 Spirit and 13 956 Mana.

Preparations: Healbot prepped, some time spent considering general spell rotation ideas. Glyphs chosen were Swiftmend, Rejuvenation and Nourish.

Let me tell you about the wipes.

Wipe 1

The Ghouls pulled from the second room into the small passage are not nice.

Wipe 2

The Ghouls are still not nice.

Wipe 3

King Dred and his henchies are not very nice either, especially when everyone is doing the headless-chicken run around.

And that was it. No more wipes. There were a few deaths and some very very terrifying moments when I was sure I would lose our DK tank but somehow I miraculously managed to keep him up, with amazing luck and a benign providence and his using his cooldowns and me employing the tested method of panicky clicking and swearing. Oh, and a very liberal use of Swiftmend and Nature’s Swiftness.

Let me tell you about the spells I used.

Rejuvenation was a favourite, after various enhancing talents it ticked for about 1250 every 3 seconds for 18 seconds. Used on every party member, including the tank and the hunters’ pets.

Regrowth I used almost exclusively on the tank, with a direct 3,5 k heal and a 750 tick every 3 seconds for a total of 27 (!) seconds.  The tank also got a lot of Nourishes chucked his way along with Swiftmends. Nourish was also the spell mostly used on the other party members if I felt the Rejuvenation would not suffice.

The Healing Touch was exclusively used after a Nature’s Swiftness as a oh-shit heal.

I popped Tranquillity  in the latter parts on two of the boss fights and it really is a truly amazing heal!

Lifebloom, the spell I had thought I would use a lot, having heard our resident Tree talk about rolling stacks of these on tanks and others, was actually mostly forgotten. I tried to put up a few stacks occasionally but I usually lost rack of them and they bloomed.

The heals proportions in the whole run, trash and boss fights were as follows:

Now, I am not saying these are the optimal spells to use, I suspect they are not but I am totally new to the druid way of healing and still learning :-)

The amount healed felt a bit so-so after being used to my shamans regular >10 k heals and 18 k crits, but it seemed to be adequate for the most times. (And horribly inadequate at a few crucial times though :-()

What I really missed was a real group heal that is not on a 4 minute cooldown, for the trash pulls especially. WTB Chain Heal or Circle of Healing. (I know a resto druid can get Wild Growth but the whole point of this experiment is to see if I can get a viable resto druid build without the Tree of Life, the prerequisite for Wild Growth.)

Let me tell you about my mana regeneration.

At times I felt I was running a bit low on mana, but this should be taken with a grain of salt coming from me, the compulsive mana-regeneration freak. (I still feel uncomfortable popping a Frost Wyrm flask instead of the Pure Mojo one on my Ulduar-raiding resto shaman.)

I used a mana pot twice only, and I never used Innervate. Not because I felt I didn’t need it (and I actually didn’t but I usully get itchy when I see half my mana bar gone) but because I had totally forgotten I had that spell.

I never had to stop healing because I was oom and the trash pulls went pretty fast because I did not need to sit down and drink between every pull. Given that I was running without any Intellect or Spirit buffs, no Blessing of Wisdom or Mana Spring totem and no Replenishment, I think my mana regen is actually pretty good.

Let me tell you about my glyphs.

Glyph of Swiftmend is absolutely amazing. Popping a Swiftmend for an instant 4+ k heal, and still have 15-25 seconds left of ticking heals is a bliss.

Glyph of Nourish was rather good too. I usually had a Rejuvenation and a Regrowth ticking on the tank, which meant an extra 12% heal for him, and most of the time when I used Nourish on a dps they already had a Rejuvenation swirling around them, so 6% extra for them.

Glyph of Rejuvention is of more dubious use. Of the in total 447 Rejuve ticks that went off during the run only 27 were when the target was below 50% health. I might have to rethink using this one, and replace it with something else. The question is with what.

So, what do I need to improve?

I must get more spellpower. Either directly or indirectly from stacking Intellect, so I need to do some research on which is best and where to get it. (I think I have Spirit on every damn thing I wear!)

I must fix me some macros! The Swiftmend was a bit of a hassle to use, since I needed to target the one I wanted to use it on. Mouseovering on Healbot was not good enough, so I need to fix that.

I must work out some figures for which spells work best in which situations. I am a bit worried about my not using Lifebloom a lot, but it might be due to me being a total noob when it comes to druidy healing.

And I need to get some more practice.

But all in all, not a bad run and not a bad try. I am not discouraged yet! :-)

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