I’m having an imaginary argument with a fact checking maniac that’s either scalding me in my inaccuracies and wrong assumptions or anger at the uselessness of my previous post.
Not only am I going to agree with you, I’m also going to explain why, maybe I’ll somehow make sense this time.
Critical strike doesn’t have anything to do with omen of clarity. It was unrelated and random for to not further clarify my reasoning.
Truth is, despite some relativating healers out there, and blizzard claiming everything is fine and implicating we need to l2p, healing is not “fine”. It’s become something more complicating than I expected, and it’s quite hard to explain and not sound like you’re a whining dreadful healer.
Let’s start over. I’m not claiming to know any answers, I’m just trying to explain what I did. I was never one of the standard druid forum posters. When they were throwing lifebloom on 2 targets at a time, I was still using downranked healing touch. When they swapped to rejuvenation and nourish, I was using lifebloom. When they were using wild growth spam, I was using lifebloom rejuvenation and glyphed healing touch. When people were stacking crit, I was stacking haste. So it’s safe to say I was always stubborn, but I was able to do my job.
So this time it’s probably not any different this time. And it’s not the first time my way of healing was to be thrown into the garbage bin and be reinvented, but it’s still different enough to imagine other people would have difficulty to adjust to or understand.
So, let’s track back. It used to be about stats, spells, style, a little bit of spec, a large chunk of paying attention and casting the right heals on the right people. It’s still like that, but with the difference that when you have all of that right, you’ll still be out of mana before even 1 mob goes down. Even when you have excellent crowd control, dps and tank, you’ll still be struggling more than you were you used to.
So I mentioned omen of clarity. It’s a randomly proccing buff that will give you 1 free cast of spells that are not hots within a small period of time. And even though everyone loved the talent, it wasn’t something you actively pursued in using, but usually you would have use for it – as you were casting a heal every 2 seconds.
In this expansion however, the more spells you use, the faster you wipe. You need to actively seek out ways to heal more with less mana using spells. In TBC I would argue, the more spellpower, the more my lifebloom scales. I would love to say that again, but truth be told I’m afraid that on a short term schedule the difference you would need to compensate for is more than I could bridge at the moment.
In terms of stats, what would bring the biggest numbers on the short term, is to “double” (it’s probably 1.5x) the healing numbers as much as possible. In my view, critical strike rating seemed the fastest way to achieve that. Sure it’s unpredictable and you can’t count on it at all, but if it works, it works. And that would be 1 less heal to cast.
To come back to omen of clarity for the zillionth time. Here’s the deciding part that will actually make the difference: be actively aware of every single heal you cast where and when. Limiting the amount of unused healing (ea overhealing) is something you should be striving towards. It’s not only the not topping everyone off we need to be disciplined about, but looking at the state of your manapool, and waiting for omen of clarity when you can, has become part of my routine.
It reminds me of a video I saw about a guy (day9) about the best way to get into the routine of playing starcraft. Build probes, look at your credits, spend it, look at the minimap, build probes, look at your credits, spend it, look at the minimap, etcetera. Constantly adding more tasks to the routine and getting it normalized. In the world of Warcraft, this seems to be true as well each time.
The routine seems to look something like this:
- keep at least 1 lifebloom on the tank when you’re in combat
- is there anyone hurt, dont heal just yet
- do you have mana
- who’s being hurt the most and who’s dying
- if theres no imminent death, do you have omen of clarity
- heal with healing touch or regrowth on priorities if possible
- keep a hot up on people under 60%
- don’t overwrite your hots
- don’t top it off unless you know the encounter requires it
- is there any stuff you need to run out to or avoid
- emergencies of a dying tank refer to spamming all heals in order; have a hot up, cast regrowth or healing touch, again, again, refresh hot when needed, or apply more, use swiftmend or nature’s swiftness when up
- aoe heal appropriateness, apply swiftmend or wild growth on the right person, go tree of life
- if at 50% mana, and nowhere done, cast innervate
- start over and do all of these things preferably within 2 seconds, even though you probably won’t even be casting anything just yet
Something like that anyway…
