Archive for category Resto Druid

Healing addons for Anub’Arak 25 heroic

Posted by Cows in General, Resto Druid on September 29, 2009

On our original kill we didn’t use any special addons for this fight.  However this week someone has created a very useful addon appropriately called ‘Penetrator‘ which marks everyone in the raid who gets penetrating cold with a raid marker.  Combine this with GridStatusRaidIcons, which allows you to show raid markers in grid, and you have a rather powerful method of defining which penetrating cold target a given healer should heal.

I recommend using the modded version of GridStatusRaidIcons which can be found here, this version was modified to increase visibility of raid markings when used in the center icon position in grid – the normal version has rather translucent icons which can be hard to see on top of certain class colours.

You end up with something like this in grid when the raid gets penetrating cold, along with the rather pleasing whisper from whoever is running the addon :)

WoWScrnShot_092709_205309

I’m not sure how useful this is for any of Anub’s versions other than 25man hardmode, as with the other 3 versions you can pretty much just have a normal raid healing strat of ‘heal ppl when they go low’ and just win. But since the idea behind 25man hardmode is to keep the whole raid hovering on as low hp as possible – the healer assignment needs to be refined so that the 5 penetrating cold targets get a 6k+ heal (or bubble) each, in under 2 seconds. We tend to run 4 healers – either 2 druids and 2 priests or 3 priests and 1 druid.  In the latter example each priest is assigned 1 raid marker to heal and keep alive, and the resto druid (in this case me) takes 2 due to max hasted, glyphed and specced healing touch being a super-fucking-fast 7-10k heal. The priests also have the secondary task of throwing a bubble at the druid’s 2nd target just to help with the first tick as that can sometimes come faster than 2 seconds and thus cause a death.

This certainly is a very nice addon, every now and then you notice it fails to put a marker on someone but this is not often and usually not a problem as the person who’s marker failed to appear just heals the unmarked guy who should have had it.

Just to confirm, only 1 person in the raid needs to have the Penetrator addon installed and activated. And this person must have assistant so they can mark – it should also ideally be the person with the least latency in the raid as this can make the difference between having marks placed instantly or after a delay.  All the penetrating cold healers should then have Grid StatusRaidIcons installed to allow them to see the markers in grid. It should also be noted that the addon only uses the markers you see in the screenshot – namely: moon, triangle, circle, star and diamond.  The only downside to this addon that we noticed when using it to kill anub last night was that it seems to wipe all other markers off whenever it sets new ones. By this I mean that even markers that it doesn’t use (cross, skull) appear to be removed from whatever they are assigned to as soon as a new batch of dots have their markers applied. This means you cannot use markers to identify between burrower adds for interruption and have to use positional based targeting instead – although this didn’t seem to be much of a problem for us.

The phase 3 healing in this fight is still very stressful, but this addon at least takes a small part of that away.

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Druids without mana issues

Posted by Cows in Resto Druid on September 24, 2009

Don’t exist.  Fact.

However if you ever read any resto druid related forum posts, either official or mmo-champ, you’ll find vast numbers of them.  The usual situation is some new druid asking about meta choice or  something.  Someone comes along and explains the guys choices with the theme that spellpower is king but regen is also needed, and throwing away cheap regen (like the mana restore meta IED) is a bad thing etc.

And we know what happens next, some compete fuckwit comes and posts along the lines of:

“LOL NOOBS I NEVER RUN OUT OF MANA EVER EVER EVER NOOBS LOL JOHN MADDEN LOL”.

I’m paraphrasing of course, but you get the idea.  If a resto druid ever tells you he/she never has any mana problems then there are only two options to consider:

  1. They are actually retarded, perhaps playing wow is something their doctor suggested to help them cope after losing 1/2 their brain in an unfortunate schmelting accident.
  2. They exclusively play content which is beneath their gear level, and somehow can’t comprehend that this might be the reason that they find it so easy and not that they’re just so awesome.

So yeah you could gem exclusively spellpower, take no regen gear at all, take the spellpower meta and still not run out of mana.  This is providing you’re in something like full tier8 running Nexus.

The problem is that even if these people somehow break every rule that I know of pertaining to resto druids and WoW, and actually are never running out of mana on content which is at their gear level – then why don’t they ask why?  Invariably this will only be because they’ve gemmed massively for regen, int, spirit instead of spellpower and measure their performance solely on how much mp5 they have while casting.  Why would you do that?  Any mana you are left with at the end of a fight is essentially wasted, the ideal situation is to balance your regen with spellpower to the extent that  you maximize your throughput while maintaining some kind of buffer with with mana, but not so you are regening so much that you end a fight on 1/3 or more mana.

Edit:  By the way looks like the Wild Growth target out of range bug has been stealth-fixed in 3.2.2.  Still seems to bug when the target is dead though – but this isn’t as big of a problem as the OOR was.

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Natural Perfection for PVE?

Posted by Cows in Resto Druid on September 10, 2009

As any pve focused resto druid will tell you, Natural Perfection is not a talent you should be taking.  You might get away with taking it if your job is totally tank healing or something, but even then you’d be better off taking almost anything else with those 3 points, but basically it’s useless in pve.

However possibly not any more.

14k Crit NourishNow that rejuv crits with 4 set t9, in order for it to be better hp/sec than t8’s set bonus you need it to crit around 2 times per rejuv, so thats 2/6 (1/3). So ideally you want to have as near to 33% crit as possible – but realistically the higher the crit the better. Especially since what else are you going to take? Haste? Not past the soft cap thats for sure, and since the soft cap is ridiculously easy to get to these days, you’re better off swapping out some haste for crit once you’re hitting it.

So back to Natural Perfection, is 3% crit worth it? Well it may well be worth thinking about because if you assume the spec is for rejuv heavy fights where you hardly cast any Nourish at all (Beasts, Jaraxxus, Twins and Anub’Arak hardmodes), then you don’t really lose anything. You take 3 points out of a useless Living Seed, remember you’re not casting anything other than rejuv, wild growth and the occasional swiftmend/natures swiftness healing touch here so it’s not going to proc, and put it in natural perfection instead.

You end up with something like this. I’m running with this currently for those specific hardmode fights I mentioned, giving me a buffed 26% crit. Like i said you don’t really lose anything here from the standard spec. Then for primary spec I’m using my old favorite, for more nourish heavy fights and all round versatility – gotta love those 14k nourish crits to get you out of a jam.

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Twin Val’kyrs Hardmode 25

Posted by Cows in Resto Druid on September 8, 2009

It does matter if you're black or white

It does matter if you're black or white

This fight will be the first cockblock for a lot of guilds in CC25 Hardmode, no doubt about that.  You need a decent strat to get this down, we pretty much facerolled the first 3 fights easily and ended up here with 45 tries left.  Took a fair few tries before finally killing it @ 31 tries left.  Most of those pulls were down to there being zero information about this fight available at the time.  So, unlike guilds right now, we had to do some trial an error pulls until we locked down a strat which worked.  Once we had the strat it only took 3 attempts to kill it, so yeah not as hard as anything like pre-nerf Firefighter or pre-nerf Freya3 (lets not go there) but the first really hard fight in cc25.

The difficulty of this fight for guilds on it right now is somewhat amplified by the fact that even if you do watch a video detailing a strat, it’s still reasonably difficult to execute as it requires everyone in the raid to be very self aware the entire fight.  If you’ve not killed normal mode yet I’d recommend you have a look at Bellweather’s post on the normal fight @ 4healz.  Just remember the main thing that makes normal mode a lot easier is that you can pretty much ignore the balls and just heal through the damage.  But on hard you really can’t and have to work out a strat to deal with them.

The hint is: “Ethnic diversity”

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Ey mon, you come get da druidoo

Posted by Cows in Cataclysm, Resto Druid on September 8, 2009

Troll Forms?

Troll Forms?

You can pretty much tell this was an afterthought knee-jerk decision to giving Worgen the ability to become druids.  At least Worgen druids kind of makes sense with the lore, I mean they’re basically just big puppies anyway which is kind of nature attuned or whatever.  But then they clearly realized “Oh shit we’re going to have to give horde a 2nd druid race to balance it out”.  And it clearly couldn’t be goblin, I mean, can u imagine a greedy little green fucker giving a crap about nature and plants and stuff.  Not to mention goblins are all about the technology, big explosions and shit aren’t exactly mother nature’s best friend.  Who else on horde side could it be?  What a surprise that yet again the horde ends up as an afterthought.

So it had to be troll, not really sure what I think about this to be honest.  I’m leaning toward indifference from a resto standpoint mainly because troll racials don’t suddenly make my tauren obsolete in pve, a plus haste racial doesn’t make much odds for resto with the soft cap being easily reachable.  However for boomkin the berserk racial must be pretty friggin sweet, if I was a boomkin raider right now I’d be seriously contemplating a race change once Cataclysm comes out.  That is of course, if they even allow you to change race to one of the newly unlocked class/race combos right at cata’s launch – which apparently they may not.

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