Regrowth vs. LifebloomFollow

I have recently started running raids with my tree as a guest in a new guild. In my guild runs, I had always been the strongest healer by quite a margin. In this new group however, I am consistently outhealed by this girl, Crianna. Not by a whole lot, but a couple of percentage points every time. I've never topped her.

There are a few gear choice differences between us. I stacked Spirit primarily, with int and spellpower secondary. She has gone for spellpower and haste. Her gear is also a bit better than mine. I still have a pvp trinket and several badge/heroic/crafted epics, while she is mostly in raid gear.

But what I really want to know about is spell preference. I rely heavily on Lifebloom. Generally LB, Wild Growth, and Rejuv are my top three spells. The only times I use Regrowth are when I want all three hots ticking on the tank, or if someone takes sudden spike damage, I'll throw on a Rejuv to hold them steady and then cast Regrowth. For Crianna, Regrowth is almost always her top heal. Wild Growth beats it out on splash damage heavy fights, but mostly she uses Regrowth, Wild Growth, and Rejuv.

I've never really been comfortable using Regrowth as my primary heal. I don't like letting the tank's health get low enough to make the initial heal effective, and the other hots have better hpm ratios. Also, I like the "set and forget" mentality of hots. I can load the tank up as the pull is coming in, then switch to raid healing. I only have to use three GCD's per 20 seconds to keep the tank hots rolling, and the rest of the time can be spent responding to other damage.

With the impending nerfs to both Lifebloom (higher mana cost) and Regrowth (talented crit chance halved - though the change to Living Seed might make up for it), I'm trying to decide whether to try to change my healing style. I'm sure that once I get the Idol of Awakening, I will be relying more on Rejuv for raid heals anyway.

Edited, Apr 7th 2009 3:40pm by Laecy

The main thing to look at is if people were dying. If you're tossing a rejuv and/or lifebloom on someone that takes some splash damage and the other druid winds up a regrowth, you're going to get topped in healing done. You'll get 1 tick in (maybe) before the regrowth fills the person up and the HoT portion of the regrowth and most or all of your spells are wasted.

For this reason, it's important to know who is healing which members and pay attention to what you're doing. Too many healers get into this everyone-for-themselves mindset where taking your raid from 6 down to 4 healers for 25 Naxx is difficult because suddenly people are dying. It's not that your 4 well-geared healers can't handle all the incoming damage, it's that they're all healing over each other.

When you have healers that actually pay attention to assignments and don't try to step on each others' toes, there's a lot more effective healing to go around)

4-healer example (using the 4 healers that showed up the last time we were light on healers)

for Patchwerk, we usually have one holy pally heal hateful #1 with beacon on MT, another holy pally heal hateful #2 with beacon on MT, resto druid rolling hots on all 3, and resto shaman chaining off the MT

for Sapphiron, we have one paladin with a gear set stacking spell power and haste that beacons the main tank and FoL spams around the raid while the other (in crit/int gear) heals the MT. Druid WG the melees and rotate rejuv's around the raid while the resto shaman chain heals through blizzard if it hits a few people.

For these same fights, 5-6 healers are usually the norm due to the "large amount of healing" needed. It's not that there's too much damage, it's that 3-4 people are healing over each other because they either want to top meters or just don't know better or trust the other healers.

Ignore healing done meters.

Honestly, it sounds like she's missing part of the point of being a tree. My next question would be ;who has more overhealing?


HoTs ftw

Personally, in ToL form, Regrowth is my bread-and-butter; for the tank at least. (That said, I hadn't heard about the nerf to Imp. Regrowth *cries*). Personally, I dislike stacking Lifebloom, but that's me - I consider Lifebloom and Regrowth to be each-0there's antithesis. That is to say, Regrowth is Direct heal then HoT, wheras lifebloom is the other way round. Put the two on top of each other, and you have two direct heals thrown in there.

As for splash damage, then I do tend to use lifebloom. Regrowth if a biggie is needed.

But yes, you certiainly do want to arrange healing and not heal over each other. This will be getting even more important in 3.1, with the mana regen nerfs coming out and efficiency becoming important.

How do you figure? You have more crit and haste then she does. She does have better gear. Perhaps that alone is putting her over you on the meters. Also, if you are overlapping each other in healing, he regrowth will make 90% of your hots wasted when cast on the same target. Also, why am I seeing no references to Nourish? I love that spell and when 3.1 hits, I'll love it even more. Rolling life blooms used to be the norm, but the soon-to-be-here patch will change a lot of things about druid healing. Mine as well start getting used to it now.

Because with a ~50% crit rate on RG, and a bit of haste, you get the average cast time on RG down to just over the 1.5 sec GCD (assuming you have Nature's Grace). RG heals for more + has a HoT. Since the GCD becomes rate-limiting, Nourish becomes less effective (see the mmo-champion link in my previous post for a better explanation...).

Though, like you mentioned, this is supposed to be fixed by the new glyph and other changes in the next patch, and I'll be interested to see how things compare then.

spelling edit....

Edited, Apr 8th 2009 12:34pm by someproteinguy

Lifeblooms are slowly becoming obsolete, and with 3.1 around the corner and a considerable change to the functionality of the spell in regards to it's efficiency, will rapidly become so post 3.1.

Regrowth can easily become a primary factor in a Druid's overall encounter healing primarily because it is still our most efficient healing spell. Even with the nerf coming to crit chance, you're still going to see Regrowth top the meter with the addition of Nourish.

You're going to start seeing very few Druid's using lifebloom, or just using it situationally. As it is, I'm trying to ween myself away from it because it's simply not going to be a very efficient way of healing. It will be a situational spell. The problem is Blizz is balancing lifebloom so that a Druid has no incentive to roll on multiple tanks. However, especially in 10-man content, slow-rolling a single tank and wasting the GCD's to cast the spell is going to leave your tank with slow production of HPM coming in from you because you're wasting your time on a spell that A) Is now high maintanence B) Isn't worth the slow build up of coefficient vs. mana usage and C) You cannot predict the bloom's usage...therefore you cannot rely on it often to counter spike damage.

With the addition of the Nourish Glyph, and the efficiency of Rejuv and Regrowth, it's a whole new game of healing for Druids. We'll still have "some" mobility, and WG is extremely efficient for splash damage (especially for melee around the tank on small hitbox bosses). But you're going to see a lot less LB rolling and a lot more Multi-HoT Nourish buffing going on. That means single HoT's to boost Nourish, and letting them expire for mana return on that costly LB.

Dunno how much it'll help but here's a stat sheet from an OS+1 and Half Naxx run we did earlier this week with my guild.

http://wowwebstats.com/4b2wycgkeu1w1 (For whatever reason it is missing thaddius and noth)

As you can see from the raid tab, I had the most effective healing (of the 5), most %healing, most decurses and least %overhealing -- but alot of that doesn't mean anything.

Lifebloom is a mere 13% of all of my healing.

Normally I'm assigned to offtank/s during raid nights. I can more easily hold up two sets of hots on the tanks while I'm wildgrowth spamming the rest of the raid, which leads to a high whildgrowth healing %, it's also better to cast Regrowth on random teammates to get a better% chance to proc natures grace, plus the hot afterwards helps mitigate any damage still incoming.

But look at set fights, like Gluth for instance. Lifebloom is far more healing during that fight then the others, because I can easily keep it rolling on both tanks and the kiters in the back at the same time. Yet on Sartharion+1 its so low it's not worth mentioning. IMO it's about adapting to the encounter and not putting all your eggs in one basket or the other.

Regrowth is my spell of choice because, well, for now, it's just that good.