Mooonfire!

For those of you who want an abbreviated summary of today’s post: Don’t use Lifebloom, Lifebloom, Lifebloom as your initial casting sequence and then react to events as they happen.
Instead, use Lifebloom, Rejuvenation, Lifebloom, Lifebloom.

Buckle up and hang on, this one’s a doozy.

I have often played a healing character in games. In Guild Wars I had a rather accomplished Monk (partly due to frustration over players not wanting to take quote-unquote ‘underpowered’ Mesmers).

In Warcraft my first character was a Shaman. Then there was the usual flurry of different characters looking for one I really liked. There was a druid next, and a warlock. A hunter, who I held on to all the way to level 30. Then I rerolled a priest.

At 47, fed up with and frustrated by PVP against Rogues, I re-rolled to a Druid because I wanted more survival ability.

Once I hit Cat Form, I neither slowed down nor looked back. Then, late fifties or early sixties I guess, I decided I wanted to heal. I started slowly and painstakingly collecting healing gear. By the time I hit 70, I was an accomplished healer, and I’d done enough number-crunching that I thought I knew it all.

No.

I am still learning about healing. Here are a few tips.

It can be very tempting to just go tree, wait for the tank to get aggro, Lifebloom x3 and then keep them stacked while using Regrowth as necessary to top off spikes.

Bad idea. Let’s go over this. Every druid knows that Lifebloom is our cheapest spell and Regrowth our most expensive, speaking of heals (no Tranquility) that can be used in tree form.

Assumptions made here:

You are deep enough in the Restoration tree to have Tree of Life, and will be using it.

Your effective +healing is high enough that a triple-stacked Lifebloom single tick is about one-third or better of the initial ‘jolt’ from Regrowth; similarly that each three-second tick on Regrowth is about equal to a single tick of a triple-stacked Lifebloom; finally that Rejuvenation does per tick about twice what a single tick of a triple-stacked lifebloom will do.

You have the +50% chance to crit on Regrowth.

You have Swiftmend.

</assumptions>

Here’s the situation. You stack up the tank, he’s taking predictable moderate damage, lowering slowly but never going below say 85%. Out of nowhere, the tank takes a sharp spike (down to about 65%) right after you’ve cast Lifebloom. You toss out your Regrowth, it crits, topped off and still have call it two and a half seconds before you need to Lifebloom again. Grand. He takes another sharp spike (dropping to 60%) immediately.

You have now got several options:

1. Ignore it and cast Lifebloom on schedule on the theory that the HoT portion of Regrowth will stabilize him.
2. As above, but drop a Rejuvenation on him before re-Blooming so he stabilizes faster.
3. Swiftmend off the Regrowth and hold up the Lifebloom stack.
4. Re-cast Regrowth immediately, wasting the ticks of the HoT on the (reasonably safe) bet that the slam will crit, topping him off completely. You’ll probably be able to race latency and get a Lifebloom off to keep the stack up.
5. Swiftmend the Regrowth and immediately drop another one, then re-stack Lifebloom, counting on the second Regrowth to keep the tank alive until the second stack is built.
6. Nature’s Swiftness a Regrowth onto him and keep the Lifebloom rolling.
7. Rejuvenate and immediately Swiftmend him, then restack Lifebloom.
8. Nature’s Swiftness a Healing Touch, Lifebloom from caster form to keep the stack rolling, and jump back into tree.
9. Rejuvenate him and let the Lifebloom explode, then build it back up as fast as possible.

Now, a quick analysis: If you selected options 8, 4, 6 or 5, please turn in your leaves (or head over to Resto4Life and do some studying).

Option 5 is terrible: You burn off a fresh Regrowth, drop another one (very mana inefficient), and the exploding Lifebloom will likely overheal. Not to mention that you’re then hoping that Regrowth’s HoT will keep the tank alive the near-5-seconds it takes you to restack Lifebloom. Oh, and you just got fifteen seconds of lockout from Swiftmend. The only real positive here is that you still have Nature’s Swiftness cold.

Option 8 is better, but not much better- it burns your 3-minute panic button in Nature’s Swiftness, drops you from Tree form so your Lifebloom doesn’t hit as hard and costs more, and then you spend another global cooldown and 600+ mana getting back into Tree where you should’ve been in the first place.

Option 6: Why is this option bad? Well, you keep the Lifebloom up but you still lock yourself out of your panic button for three minutes and stomp down a fresh Regrowth HoT before it has time to work.

Option 4 is similar in that you stomp down a fresh HoT. If the slam doesn’t crit and top off the tank, you could be in trouble (leading to a whole new branching tree of possible panic options to try). On the plus side, if you successfully beat the latency to the Lifebloom button, this isn’t terrible and your tank is probably still alive (too bad you’re sucking back all this mana). If you don’t beat the latency, and the Regrowth doesn’t crit, Lifebloom’s explosion may top off the tank (meaning you can stack it back up while the HoT keeps him stable- hopefully). The major losses with this strategy are time and mana.

Option 7 is sort of middle of the pack. You’ve just locked off your Swiftmend, the tank is topped, but now you need to restack Lifebloom while hoping Regrowth’s HoT keeps him alive. Positives here: You still have access to Nature’s Swiftness, and this is easy on your mana pool.

If you selected options 1 or 3, well, these aren’t terrible options. It’s possible that option 1 will allow your tank to stabilize, and it’s possible that after Swiftmending, option 3 won’t get any more spikes for a few seconds. There are better choices, though:

Option 2: A good solid choice. If the tank continues to take spikes, both your Panic options (Nature’s Swiftness and Swiftmend) are still available to you, and it’s quite possible that the three ticking HoTs you have on the tank at this point will heal him right up.

Option 9: Not a bad idea. The combined force of the three HoTs should keep the tank stable long enough for a heavy bang off the Lifebloom. You can then stack it back up and, if you’re still looking shaky on the health-bars, drop a Swiftmend onto the tail end of the Rejuvenation or your current Regrowth.

So what’s the problem here?
Well, most of the listed options are either mana-intensive, cause overheal, or burn off cooldowns. Worse, they require that you spend several seconds dealing exclusively with the tank- not good if your other groupmates are taking damage.

So here’s a better way.

I used to heal with Lifebloom, Lifebloom, Lifebloom, see where things went from there. The Curator fight in Karazhan recently taught me that this is just a bad idea.

Here’s a better one:

Lifebloom, Rejuvenate, Lifebloom, Lifebloom. Keep Lifebloom stacked, drop Rejuvenates as needed.

What does this do?

At a tiny amount of increased mana budget, this gives you some amazing panic utility. Tank takes a spike and looks like the incoming damage is ramping up? Regrowth, resume rolling. Groupmates take some damage? Tank has three HoTs on him, you can spare them a cooldown or two between Lifebloom refreshes for some Bloom action of their own. Had to focus on the groupmates and the Lifebloom blew? Restack it. Tank’s taking damage faster than you can restack? Swiftmend, resume stacking.

Notice that nowhere in there did I mention Nature’s Swiftness, meaning this sequence leaves it open for even worse panic situations (”Those hits hurt for how much?”).

This sequence really shines in long, single-target predictable damage fights such as, say, the Curator. You can react to what’s happening to the tank and still have lots of time and mana to pop at groupmates who get Hateful bolts or unfortunate proximity to those stupid flares.

Ideas? Thoughts? Drop a comment.

One Response to “On healing.”

1. Sheryal Says:
   February 14th, 2008 at 5:23 pm

   Thanks for the informative post. I was having a doozy of a time healing curator and will give it a shot using your method. The tank healing I had down but the group heals i was using 1 lb each person and if it was the add tanker was dropping an extra lb on him on the second pass. Since I last did curator I gotten several equipment upgrades so healing Kara in general will be easier. Went from 1130 to 1480+ to heal.

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website