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…

It’s a ungrateful task. But let’s not dwell.
I’m not here to give another one of those rants we’re probably all familiar with since cataclysm came out. It happened, we’re going to have to deal with it, which is somewhat doable…

Lightbulb moment

The lightbulb moment where I knew I had to change something, was the moment I got kicked out from a random pickup group in heroic shadow fang keep. How glamorous.

It was not because I wasn’t trying hard enough, or was under geared, but I had the wrong take on things. Already knowing haste was going to be useless for some while, and discovering that mastery was even a worse of a mistake, there was something I hated throughout all expansions that was going to be needed.

The old days

My take on thing all the way from 1 to 80 was that spellpower was my friend. It scaled and I could fit it fine in my healing style. And then came wrath of the lich king where I learned to know my now useless friend mister Haste. We had some amazing times raid healing, being able to respond as fast as possible on any kind of deadly event.

Whether it was a large chunk of whiny druids or blizzards insane image of Druids, the Druids using spirit and crit were in luck, because that’s where they headed for this expansion. No more extreme diversity, everyone has to deal with the problem of having too much hp to heal, too little mana and lousy mana regeneration to do it with.

so?

What I bowed my head down to was that i needed to do every little thing to be able to heal as long as possible, not necessarily the fastest or biggest heals. I regemmed everything to spirit, and refitted every bit of armor that had haste or mastery on it to spirit or crit. But I also raided the auction house for cheap elixirs and food for spirit.

But It doesn’t end there. It won’t be enough still.

Then how?

1. Keep your cool
2. Wait for, and use every bit of omen of clarity proc you get
3. Throw nourish away

But then again I guess that every Druid still does it differently. Because for some nourish is the spell to use… I wouldn’t know how, other than that it’s cheap enough to spam, as I haven’t seen it being able to heal enough to prevent dying tanks. Maybe that will come with stacking more intellect, but it’s not something I can do at the moment. Maybe I’m wrong.

So, yeah, the one thing I was never able to trust because of its unpredictability; crit, is now something that keeps my party alive…

I managed to make a simplistic one that just lists all the players in your area that are affected by Efflorescence, and even display a bit of the healing done by it.

It should be active on Curse.com soon, though I don’t know when…

It’s on Curse:
- here’s florenicon
- and here’s manawarning

Anyway. I’ll probably start posting some sc2 things here as well, seeming wow theorycrafting is on a break in my head.

Watching some random starcraft cup stream and playing with iPod touch.

A large part of the druid restoration spec is to cast hots raid-wide, and lots of them. Since this trinket reduces the mana cost with 42, with every so much casts, you get a free cast where without the trinket you could not.

However, since I no longer had another item to buy from frost emblems, except for offspecs, I decided to actually calculate what I would gain or loose with replacing Spark of Hope with Purified Lunar Dust.

The differences, obviously, +100 spirit and -42 mana per cast, against 179 spellpower and chance to gain 304 mp5 for 15 seconds.

I’ll negate my first calculation in favor of getting the numbers from comments on wowhead that say you’ll effectively get an 76 mp5 average during ‘a’ fight. (assuming ~1ppm: 15 seconds  / 60 seconds = 0.25, 0.25*304=76)

To get the numbers from Spark of Hope, I turned to a log from World of Logs to get the number of casts. I copied the number of hits and crits of regrowth, ht and nourish of a Marrowgar fight, together 65. And then the number of ticks of rejuvenation divided by 18 and Lifebloom by 8 (both not entirely accurate), which is 48. Together an estimate of 113 casts in a 3:40 fight (220 seconds).

For the mp5 over time; 220/5=44 times regen

Mana gained by Spark of Hope: 35 * 44 + 42 * 48 =1540 + 2016 = 3556

Mana gained by Purified Lunar Dust: 76 * 44 = 3344

Difference: 212 mana

So you can imagine, I’m not entirely convinced if Spark of Hope should be replaced. However, the extra spellpower Purified Lunar Dust is beneficial to every spellcast as well, and should of course not be overlooked. But I can’t exactly measure that and put that somewhere in this calculation, as I cannot predict how much less I will have to heal because of it. Is it together at least 1 cast so I won’t notice the 212 mana difference? Or what about the fact that Spark of Hope prevents you from having to wait for mana regeneration, which may be important depending on the type of fight and circumstances.

In any case, I will definitely give Purified Lunar Dust an honest chance to prove itself. Should I conclude I cannot adjust to the shift of stats, or come to fights where I have to cast more often than usual, I will rethink and adjust accordingly per fight.

There’s only 1 I can actually remember to use.

Van Randomness

ManaWarning

My friend started telling that a Resto Druid in their guild got shoven off from the regular raid group because another Resto with lesser gear performed better than the first one. I think that says a lot about how much it matters how you actually play your druid, and I think I’ve been talking about that ingame quite a lot as well for various reasons. It’s not that people don’t know it, it’s more to convince myself perhaps that I’m doing pretty ok. But even more perhaps to try and spread awareness of that, not that I expect anyone who doesn’t get it to visit blogs like this to figure out what the rest of the druid/healer community thinks or is doing.

So here it is; when it comes to healing, gear matters less than playstyle. I’m not gonna say “skills” here, because when it comes to skills I’m pretty clumsy myself. It’s more about knowing to look beyond certain boundaries you or others may have set around you. Knowing that even though there are other healers around, you should heal like you’re the only one there – within limits. You don’t have an infinite manapool, but especially when it comes to druids, you have the ability to heal “everyone”. I’m not saying you should heal everyone up to 100% and keep it there, but you can help other healers out by hotting up a few people when you see fit and your tanks healthbar allows it.

There’s an easy indication even without special meters to know who knows how to heal in a raid: the contents of the mana-bar. If you’re a healer and you’re putting out a lot of healing, sometimes even struggling, and you see another healer with a full mana bar – there’s something wrong (and no, you cannot regenerate mana That fast). Despite the role or assignment that healer has, his focus should be always to help the raid survive and progress as a whole. And I have to admit, I have seen this thing happening in a few raids in Ulduar and Naxxramas. Which is frustrating to say the least.

Another sign to indicate something’s wrong, which happened to me as well a few times, is that your HPS or healing done in Recount is recorded higher than your usual average output, and the others registered as considerably less. Now, this doesn’t mean of course that your usual output is all you can do, you can do that high HPS number you see if needed – but it shouldn’t be happening. Healers should be around the same average numbers, which would indicate they all had a share in the survival of the raid, and not just 1 of them.

I know that when it comes to resto druids, we all have our different styles in playing our role, and if I were to say you should do this or that; I would be completely wrong in most cases.

But suppose you were a resto druid that’s afraid of being thrown out of the raid team (because you want to see and experience content, not because you’re addicted to purple pixels) – I can perhaps ask you to seek out what more there is You could do for your raid with the current gear you have on you. What things can you squeeze into your way of healing that might benefit the raid, what other tools would be useful for that; talents, glyphs, addons, actionbar layout, hotkeys? And if all fails you could investigate what kind of gear and stats you should be aiming for.