Healing heroicsFollow

On behalf of mages who may or may not have druid alts, I apologize for that one jerk's behavior.

The advice here is all good. As a DPS, sometimes-Tree, the comment on learning to think like a healer is right on. It's different.

Being a tree isn't the same constant pace that being dps is. It's about being prepared... a kind of calm zen-like anticipation of the flow of the fight. You'll also notice DPS doing things many DPS do that make life bad for the healer. I'm a better mage having played my druid.


And then comes the massive button mashing when things go wrong, but that gets better too. I really enjoyed learning to heal in battlegrounds and keep a PvP set just to go back there.

There's nothing wrong with PvP gear in principal. If the stats you are interested in go up it's an upgrade. Don't worry too much about where it came from, and decent cloaks are hard to come by anyway.

There is this gem for 25 emblems though. You just have to downgrade them to emblems of Valor from Triumph. It's nicely itemized for a tree, and a strong choice if you aren't going to raid or buy one with Frost emblems.

My first healing switch was from my Druid to my Paladin. It was quite a shock to suddenly have to rely on "Nourish" (aka Flash of Light) to keep everyone up and once you entered heroics, this wasn't enough. It felt like I was Healing Touch healing, something I haven't done for like 20 or 30 levels. Plus, with all the cooldowns I had to keep track of, I just got utterly confused and caused horrible wipes. Going from HoT healing to direct healing is a pretty big step.

I found that the Shaman class is a nice middle way, actually. You get some HoT healing through Earth Shield and Riptide and some direct healing through Healing Wave, Lesser Healing Wave and Riptide as well. And Chain Heal provides a much needed AOE direct heal, something I missed horribly on my Paladin. I actually kind of enjoy this playstyle more than my Resto Druid since you're not staring at full health bars for 90% of the run, but actually have to apply different spells to different situations. On my Druid I'd just faceroll Rejuvenation on everyone (if even that much) and Wild Growth and people would never drop below 90% health (or 95% for that matter). Here I can let people sink a bit and then get them back up with a Chain Heal. Plus, I never get tired of the Chain Heal effect. Yellow laser beam, go!

I've noticed a tendency to stack haste on Shaman healers lately. I'm guessing it's because of Chain Heal spamming in raids. Haste shows up at 1.5:1 compared to spell power, so it must be worthwhile.

I've also noticed that I use Nature's Swiftness much more often than I did on my Druid. Nothing like dropping an instant 20k crit on someone about to die, or an on-the-go Chain Heal for some AOE. Yeah, definitely love the direct healing thing, but it's nice that I can couple it with some proactive healing through Riptide and Earth Shield, I guess (it's sort of a "smart" Rejuvenation).

Would be nice to have Spellpower + Haste be about 3,000 on the throughput side.

On the mana side you may well be required to do 8+ minutes of constant healing without going OOM, so pickup a good mana regen trinket or two if you can.

4t9 helps a lot, RJ criticals are sweet nectar. ;-)

Marrowgar (1st boss) will likely test your gearing for tanks/heals. Pray you have a semi-coordinated group, or at least a good tank; else the raid will become a rep. farming run...

Sunday night our guild decided to take a first crack at Forge of Souls (normal). I have healed it half a dozen times, but nobody else had been in the place. We knocked it out with only one death, and a couple of folks got upgrades (and everyone got much needed emblems). Hooray!

Last night we signed up as a full group for a random normal dungeon and got Trial of the Champion. Again, I was the only one with experience in the place so I gave them a quick run down of the fights. We got through it with only one death and several folks got some upgrades. Hooray!

We're on our way it seems. I can't wait for when we can do random heroics for the frost and triumph emblems. Those will be good times. I'm currently running random heroics in feral to get emblems. Last night I got a group with a fresh 80 pally and fresh 80 hunter (who shared the same name spelled differently, hmmm). Our first healer bailed after reviewing the tank's gear (he had about 26k health unbuffed). Our second healer bailed about 30 sec after joining the group. The third healer stuck it out and we wound up finishing the instance. I died twice due to pulling aggro off of the tank, and the warlock nearly died a couple of times due to the same thing. The healer did more damage on the final boss than the hunter, and let the hunter know about it. Ah well, we got through it and some folks got some upgrades. It's all good I guess.

Heh - I was tanking a Pit of Saron (regular) last night on my DK with a healer who freely admitted he was drowsy because he had just got back from the methadone clinic! It explains why a few times I pulled, died, then turned around and saw the healer just standing there doing nothing. We ended up finishing it, after he promised to pay attention and concentrate. I still made sure I could see him moving before each pull!

I'm doing it backwards. Started with a pally and went to a druid. With my pally, I just had to make sure my shield and bacon were on the tank at all times and flash of light when over 70% HP or so. If the DPS takes a spike(or gets feared out into damage in FoS for example), holy shock is pure win. If you can manage to use your insta-crit abil, its an instant shock + FoL, or reduced time on your holy light. As far as group heals go, just make sure you judge mobs as they come up(since you get haste anyways) and don't be afraid to use holy light early. If its glyphed, you'll heal everyone by a bit at least. Remember your first holy light will be slower than the rest too. If you're low on mana midfight, divine plea + wings to keep your healing up.

I found pally healing really easy, but druid is another level of easy altogether. Innervate has no healing debuff, so you can use it anytime. Instead of an insta crit, I get nature's swiftness for an insta heal, which I much prefer. Instantly being able to heal or heal+hot is just too awesome to describe, not to mention insta rebirth. The group-wide hot makes any non-spike AoE damage laughably easy to manage. I haven't found a great use for bloom yet though, except if I know I'm going to be stunned by a boss. I find it really mana intensive, even after getting restored a bit. Lastly, your mobility as a druid is a lot higher, so that the movement feels much more fluid.

Chain heal is also the coolest looking heal in the game, hands down. ;-)

But ya lifebloom. Other than stabilizing tank health, I'll also try to use to even out damage spikes. The idea is to have it bloom soon after the spike hits, or just after a new phase in a boss fight. Some places I've found it useful:

-on the tank(s) near the end of bonestorm on Marrowgar in case there are problems regrouping
-on the tank before he jumps to the other airship in case the healer has issues getting over there
-time it to go off soon after a tank taunts on something like Saurfang or Northrend beasts
-before the debuff explodes on that trash just before deathwhisper.

Really anyplace you know there's going to be a damage spike in a few seconds (DBM timers can be helpful with this kind of thing). My use of LB usage usually goes up the more times I see an encounter, as I get used to the timing of the things and such or whatnot.

But really, it's a hard spell to use, and usually isn't more then a couple percent of my healing done, unless I'm stuck tank-healing on a fight for some reason. :S

Clearcasting procs for free mana rock though! :D

Actually, we were doing Sindragosa attempts the other night and the mob is so big that if you WG the tank, the melee are too far away to get hit by it. To play safe, I always target one of the melee for WG.

Darn tanks get all the luck. I'm DPS, and nobody EVER gives me bacon :(

Thanks Tusk,

I have used a couple of different add-ons in the past (used to do some 10-man raiding back in TBC) because they were required, but in general I prefer to play without them. It's just a personal preference. If our guild were serious about doing heroics then I would suggest that we all get some of the add-ons you suggested, but at present we just aren't (too much RL stuff going on keeping people from logging in long enough to try some runs). My pug heroic runs are really helping me learn the fights better, though, so if and when we do start running them again as a guild I will be better armed to tell them what to expect. /salute!

My tree and resto-but-not-tree hotkey setups are very similar (intentionally) so that if I want to do some dps in the easier instances I can do so without having to memorize an entirely different set of hotkeys. I never mouse-click hotkeys (they are always numbers on the keyboard) and I rarely have to switch to another set of hotkeys (shift-2 then 4 for my poison cleanse, then shift-1 to get back to my main set of hotkeys). I use the standard gui to tell me what hots I have running (by knowing the icons and scanning the character panes) and I just hit the hotkey and mouse click the character pane to cast without needing to adjust my primary target (which is typically the skull mob). It's pretty easy stuff, and I've never felt the need to run any add-ons so far.

I probably shouldn't mention that we don't use vent either, eh? *grin*

The biggest frustration I have as healer is waiting for the global cooldown, and as kitty dps it's my energy refresh rate hehe. /salute!

Meh, Grid is overrated.

I use mouseover macros and just hit 1-5, depending on the heal I need. It also enables me to right-click avatars without casting heals and whatnot. Useful for stuff like whispering people with crap names, or uninviting people.