28 January 2011

Reactions to resto druid healing

I'm being more aggressive about jumping into heroics what with the desire to get phat lewts and raid. I've respecced a million times (and imagine I will again when the talent changes go through) and my spec looks like so nowadays:


It was not as hard as I anticipated to relearn 3 stacks of Lifebloom, and I quickly got used to refreshing it with Nourish - I practice by trying to keep one stack on a tank for the entire dungeon. As you can imagine, it gets rather frustrating when people go AFK or do lengthy strat discussions :P

I even got used to the bonus triage of Clearcasting procs, with Healing Touch or Regrowth on hurting party members, or to refresh the tank's LB if nothing else. What I am still struggling with is Rejuvenation - it's all I have when on the run and in need of single target heals! When Efflorescence and Wild Growth are on cooldown I often find myself spamming it in addition to Nourish, but hopefully the coming talent change will make that less punitive. At least I no longer accidentally use LB and screw up my tank hots.

WG is useful now that I let myself use it when necessary. Efflorescence, on the other hand, remains a colossal disappointment. I hate using it on DPS and seeing them all kindly cluster in it, only to get some pathetic ticks that still require more attention from me. I want to like it, and I want to use it, but it's just so disappointing right now.

Cleansing is good and bad - I love having a magic cleanse but get annoyed when I waste it on a debuff that's already cleansed or fallen off. And especially in fights like Asaad it's a huge mana drain. The first time I see a debuff I let it tick and read the description to see if I can get away with healing through or ignoring it.

Tranquility I'm trying to remember more often - I always feel a little embarrassed when a boomkin pops it in a crisis situation and I remember I have it. Tree form, on the other hand, I remember I have but neglect to use because when the shit hits the fan, I'm too OOM to handle all the mana-use of insta-regrowths and LBs galore. Speaking of ToL, I'm a little relieved that they are making it so you can't maintain multiple LB stacks via Nourish rotation. To be frank, I was disappointed that the method was so effective, because I didn't want to have to adopt a 2-spell rotation in order to be competitive.

I'm trying to tweak my addons to be more informative - I recently discovered that there is a new GridStatusRaidDebuff for Cataclysm raids, and if you check Detect New Debuff it will show any debuffs you come across (before checking that I could not get it to display as either a center icon or border indicator). Watching my party's debuffs makes me want to micromanage them... I also added some new power auras (or tried to - it won't recognize my "ToL active" icon and duration, and I even tried Beru's export with no luck. Tips?) for Barkskin use and CD, Thorns CD, and procs like Heartsong, my +Int glove tinker, and my trinkets. I don't want those last ones to be visible all the time, but I am curious as to how and when they are proccing at the moment. Will get some exports for you soon!

2 comments:

  1. The craziness that is gridstatusraiddebuff. Now they have separate imports for raid debuffs from every expansion. I guess if you don't want BC buffs, don't download them.

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  2. I actually didn't use it at all during BC, but I'm kind of thinking I might not get the wotlk package again unless we start running ICC as a guild again...

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