As of this expansion, our resto druids have been struggling really hard in m+ … Even though their gear is about ilvl 195-205, they struggle hard to heal m+ above 10.
I know that resto druids are usually rather gear dependent in general, but they are seriously getting torn up about not being able to heal what our other healer classes can handle.
So, here I am asking for some tips and tricks. What do you guys do when healing higher m+ ?
Their regular talent build is the following:
Nourish or Cenarion Ward
Usually Wild Charge
Balance or Guardian affinity
Depends on m+ … But usually Mass entanglement I think?
They’ve tried all - unsure of which one is their to-go.
Nourish is bad, the other 2 talents are a lot better. Cenarion or abundance.
I guess having to look at the armory of one of those druids would help.
I mean 205 should be enough for a 10+, while 195 could be harder i know its only 10 ilvl but the do make a lot of difference.
Also this is not a nice week for healers. Are they runing with the same people is it 100% healing problem ? I mean maybe their hps is fine and the ppl they run with are bad ?
As we all know the druid has little burst healing its mostly hots, so no dmg spikes are allowed. Is their stat priority in the right place ?
Convoke is quite nice burst on a reasonable CD, though. Soul of the Forest + WG is also quite nice, though less strong.
Cenarion Ward.
Balance. Guardian doesn’t help your healing nor damage in any way, it’s purely defensive, and you have bark and normal bear form for that, if need be.
Balance also gets you Typhoon, which is very useful in a lot of situations.
Mass Entanglement if your tank or group needs kiting (Necrotic & Spiteful weeks, mostly, and certain dungeons). Heart of the Wild otherwise.
My pick here is Soul of the Forest, because that allows me to set up some bursts, while Cultivation is a nice aid when everyone’s constantly low on health. Since I try to keep HoTs up, Cultivation mostly helps my tank, and for that, I found Soul of the Forest to be more practical.
If they’re running Dark Titan’s legendary, yeah. Photosynthesis works well with that. Otherwise Flourish is quite strong.
I haven’t healed many 10+ yet, but the few I did, most of our problems were mechanics, not healing. Prideful wasn’t an issue, even when we mismanaged pulls and had a few mobs to kill along with Prideful: if everyone’s within Efflo and WG range (as they should be), then efflo + spring blossom + rejuv on everyone SotF & WG pretty much keeps them alive for the most part. When stacks become higher, I use Barkskin, and apply Regrowths as well. The second SotF+WG will keep them alive. If Prideful still isn’t dead, there’s Convoke and Tranqulity too. I prefer Tranq over Convoke, so I may be able to Convoke offensively after Prideful, but that’s not always an option.
Resto has a lot in their toolkit too: vortex is amazing at keeping stuff in place for a while (Globrog trash and summoned blobs, Spiteful ghosts, Gargons in HoA, and anytime the tank wants to / has to kite). Mass root is great too, and so is root - you can keep a big blob on Globrog rooted for the duration of the fight, the vulpin on Mistcaller, etc. You can Typhoon mobs away (Globrog summoned blobs, Spiteful ghosts, whenever the tank wants to kite / clear necrotic, or to stop otherwise uninterruptible casts).
Also, use Ironbark liberally! It’s nice to place it on the tank on pull, while they don’t have their active mitigation up yet, or whenever you need to move, have instant casts up, but can’t stop long enough to cast.
Nature’s Swiftness is also mighty useful if you want to do some burst: NS into Regrowth, Swiftmend (the same target if need be, or another - I prefer another, so I have the extra +40% crit chance on Regrowth on the main target), then with Soul of the Forest, another Regrowth (or WG, if need party healing) - that’s a significant burst in a short time.
In my experience so far, It’s harder to heal anything if the rest of the group doesn’t know what to do.
I’ve had little luck so far with groups. So I haven’t reached any Mythic +10 yet. But I’ve figured that whenever I get a group with ppl that do their job, (interrupts, cc e.t.c.) besides dpsing, everything goes smooth for everyone even with lower ilvl!
I’ve healed Mythic +5 with ppl that had around 200 ilvl and it was a disaster.
My go to talents for Mythics are…
Cenarion Ward
Wild Charge
Whichever affinity you are comfortable with. I go with balance for the extra range in my spells although druids have mobility and most of our skills are instant, It feels safer to have it.
Heart of the Wild (though you can change this for some extra CCing)
Soul of the Forest
Spring Blossoms
Photosynthesis
Resto Druids are in a pretty good position for Mythic + dungeons. If you know the class and if the rest of the group know theirs I believe you can beat Mythic +10 without healing like there’s no tomorrow!
Nourish is bad, the other 2 talents are a lot better. Cenarion or abundance.
I guess having to look at the armory of one of those druids would help.
I mean 205 should be enough for a 10+, while 195 could be harder i know its only 10 ilvl but the do make a lot of difference.
Also this is not a nice week for healers. Are they runing with the same people is it 100% healing problem ? I mean maybe their hps is fine and the ppl they run with are bad ?
As we all know the druid has little burst healing its mostly hots, so no dmg spikes are allowed. Is their stat priority in the right place ?
I get what you mean. Yes, we usually run full premade, but the setup varies. And no, I wouldn’t say their HPS is bad (quite the opposite), nor that the issues we have when entering 10 or up is by any means their fault, certainly not exclusively their fault. But it is a fact that we are struggling whenever we have one of our druids healing our party - and it is not exclusive to this week.
The primary druid healer that I have in mind tested Nourish once, but she felt like she wanted to use cenarion ward instead, so she swapped back. Damage spikes on tanks is a huge problem, and we’re not quite sure how to handle that yet, but we’re working on some CD rotations. Thank you for your input.
Balance. Guardian doesn’t help your healing nor damage in any way, it’s purely defensive, and you have bark and normal bear form for that, if need be.
Balance also gets you Typhoon, which is very useful in a lot of situations.
Thank you, good point. I think the druid we run mostly with runs balance affinity as main since she likes DPSing between the intervals of damage.
My pick here is Soul of the Forest, because that allows me to set up some bursts, while Cultivation is a nice aid when everyone’s constantly low on health. Since I try to keep HoTs up, Cultivation mostly helps my tank, and for that, I found Soul of the Forest to be more practical.
I know at least one of the druids go for Soul of the Forest as standard choice, I’ll forward this onto them. Thank you!
If they’re running Dark Titan’s legendary, yeah. Photosynthesis works well with that. Otherwise Flourish is quite strong.
Flourish in m+ ? Never considered it, I’ll tell them to try it out - because they do not run the Dark Titan-lego.
Thank you for all of your other tips too! I’ll link this post to them so that they can read it. <3
Tanks are not invinsible, if the damage-taken is too high or you run out of CDs as tank, start kiting. Especially during Fortified weeks some packs are absolutely a pain in the behind. And now we have Necro to make it an additional kite-fest.
Hah, we’re painfully aware. xD Our tank try to kite as well as they can, problem is that our melee DPSers (or my pets for that matter) usually goes splat when they over-threat the kiting tank. XD
I hope Blizz takes a look at the threat-issues tanks are experiencing overall. All of our melee players (except for rogues, of course) are kinda salty since tanks seem to struggle big time holding aggro in general (unless they got great gear, that is).
Well you shouldn’t have to kite forever. Besides, marking a prio target may help and using Misdirect/ToT.
Honestly, I haven’t tanked that many M+ duns yet but this was never really a problem for me. Sometimes one gets loose, but hey, that’s what taunt is for.
(AoE) stuns may also help letting the tank stay in the packs for longer to gain more aggro.
It sounds like it’s not the Druid healers who struggle, imo ^^
I use MD for each and every pull where it is available, so that is not on my end. :] We also have great utility in terms of stuns, snares and slows in general. The issue is usually the initiation - our warriors or enhancement shammies usually can’t even pull off one ability without the mobs turning around to slap them. Unless you’re playing tank DH, then I bet you’ll see what I mean if you start playing with some raid geared warriors or enhancement shammies. xd
… And that is even though they nowdays usually wait a second or two for the tank to pick em up (because they prefer not dying c: ).
And no, healing is not our only concern, clearly. But it is a given fact that our groups usually do much better with other healing classes than druids. When the group demands large amounts of healing (and that is despite all of us using health stones + HP pots + defensives + externals etc), we usually fall short when we have druids. Not even their tranq seem to be quite enough, even though it should be.
We usually run the same routes with all different group setups, and the difference when it comes to pure quality is baffling. At the same time I know resto druids are not supposed to be in a bad position, so I wanted to check in with some druids here since ours obviously already checked the regular sources like m+ logs and general guides. <.<
I just don’t wanna see either of them quit playing druid just because they feel like they are not good enough - because I played with both of them last expansion and I know they are great resto druid m+ healers, so I want to help them figure out if anything can be done about the situation on their end. I seriously don’t know why we’re struggling as soon as one of the druids join the party - they (well, at least one of them) usually have insane amounts of HPS - but the health bars of the group just keep ticking down during certain mechanics and we all just feel so helpless since we don’t know what to do differently and we just wanna give them their confidence back so that they comfortably can do a bit higher keys with us.
Playing in PuGs is double difficult with RDruid because it’s tough to recover the whole party when mechanics are ignored. Don’t let that get you down, it’s a normal experience! If somebody gets deleted it means they messed up and they normally stay quiet. Don’t waste Convoke on a party that isn’t paying attention .
Personally I found the most useful guide to be Yumytv’s YT video, in terms of how it is structured and how much I learned from it.
Dark Titan’s Lesson is my fav lego. It really upped my HPS and with 2 Lifeblooms I can always have both of the Photosynthesis talent buffs up. The downside being 1 extra GCD required.
I normally use these talents for M+:
15 - Cenarion Ward (keep on the tank on CD to get into the habit of using it).
25 - Tiger Dash or Wild Charge. (WC more versatile but I like either).
30 - Balance Affinity (convenient ranged DPS + Typhoon).
35 - Depends on group comp. HotW for me!
40 - Soul of the Forest (predictable and frequently in use. Opens an extra buff you can line up).
45 - Spring Blossoms.
50 - Photosynthesis (essential with Dark Titan’s Lesson lego but I used to before I crafted DTL anyway).
Also remember Nature’s Swiftness. I used to forget about it at the start! People frequently complain about RDruid’s lack of single target healing. But if you layer the Swiftmend Soul of the Frest buff with Nature’s Swiftness you can get some insane insta Regrowth crits every 1 min that will save a low health party member.
It sounds like they might need to anticipate damage a bit better and precast Rejuv on the party before large spikes. Wild Growth will do a lot more healing on targets with HoTs running because of our mastery. Panicking is not good: you will forget to keep up your Lifeblooms, lose Photosynthesis, waste Swiftmends and a lot of mana on Regrowths. Trust the HoTs, learn the damage patterns and obviously the party should help out the healer by avoiding as much damage as possible. In higher keys, no healer can outheal all personal mistakes.
If melee often gets aggro at the start of the pull, they should get a Rejuv at the start of the pull, so they can be saved with a Swiftmend (even though this is clearly not the healer’s fault).
And this is the most important thing to remember. You can also do creative stuff like a quick regrowth on someone after the rejuvs are out > swiftmend > buffed wild growth. If it’s still AOE chunking and convoke is on CD, get all the HoTs out, cast tranquility and pray
For me mythic +8 what i like to play is cenarion ward wild charge soul of forest overgrowth germantion spam why its how i alsof heal in pvp photosynthesis i yust dont like it rejv regrowth and lifebloom healing i do like to spam rejv germantion regrowth wildgrowth swiftmend whit legendary swiftmend makes the hots longer or the legendary wildgrowth gites 40% heal i keep cenarion ward up on tank and lifebloom on dps and when cw is off lifebloom tank keep spamming rejv germ alsof 40% wildgrowth 3 targets regrowth or rejv is nice also but i like swiftmend legendary alot keep nature swiftmend regrowth macro ready for quiz up heal works best for me
Feral is usally the best for the dps it offers, but outside of that it doesn’t really matter
I usally have heart for extra dps or mighty bash for an extra interrupt
Just avoid incarnation and you’re fine, i’d reccomend Cultivation
Good, overgrowth works too, just avoid inner peace
Good! all on that row works
The forums gonna tell you this alot btw because they think nourish hits for like 600 healing for some reason, i switch from nourish & cenarion ward alot and it doesn’t matter as much as people think it does, depends on the affixes aswell
How you heal also depends on the tank you have, so thats something to take into consideration!
Just wondering, with 45y range on healing spells are we able to outrange some aoe abilities? I know Thrash ability from that golem mobs in HoA has 40y range, so we can “remove” one target to heal just by keeping distance.
TBH, I mainly took Balance due to Typhoon, and because being in melee is more dangerous than being in range, and I’m not on a level yet where I can start focusing on damage as a priority. The spell range increase is just a nice bonus, which usually means I can drink a second or two longer.
Tiger dash is garbage, simple dash does everything tiger dash does and wild charge is much more versatile for movement.
Boomie is better than feral because it has typhoon and better convoke burst alongside being ranged.
You use either mass entangle on weeks where more kiting is required or go hotw for more damage, mighty bash does nothing but waste a dps interrupt that you sniped with bash.
Soul of the forest is better than cultivation especially if you don’t have high mastery.
Again overgrowth is garbage, spring blossoms is an extra mastery stack on everyone and also very efficient healing.
Flourish works on higher keys because people want to save convoke for dps and use flourish on prides instead. If you’re not running keys where healer dps is an issue then you shouldn’t go flourish.
Germination is just a garbage talent for anything outside pvp.
Nourish requires way too much mastery to do the same healing as cen ward does and cen ward also provides another mastery stack. You are right however that our first talent row has the lowest impact on our performance.
Its actually funny how almost everything you said was wrong,
.
