Cataclysmic Healing: Drood

Chuggin' along, healing heroics, flailing with limited success at raid bosses (Nomnomtron still refuse to fall over).

There's a lot of moaning about on the various fora concerning how hard this expansion is on healers. I think I've made my stance pretty clear on that (it isn't really, assuming your group can collectively outwit a catfish), but as I recently got my druid to 85 and started healing the odd normal dungeon to gear up for heroics I realised one other large factor that may be influencing my position.

My main, being a shaman, has many more tools to help out of the group is less than stellar; short cooldown interrupt, offensive purge, and a potentially long-duration CC (taking this opportunity to once again say how much I hate that I'm forced into enhancement subspec, making these utilities less reliable than I'd like). Add some totems that sometimes help (earthbind, grounding), and I'm actually pretty confident of my ability to cover for DPS or tanks that may lack in several departments. There are limits, of course, but just being able to take up a little bit of the slack helps immensely whilst pugging.

Of course, I don't have the priestly ability to move people out of fire, but such is life.

Now, I consider my resto druid. Being able to remove poisons is a lovely thing, and cyclone and roots are useful in a pinch. But that's basically the extent of the utility provided. Now if I end up with a group of marginal window-lickers, all I can do is heal through the uninterrupted spells/undispelled mob buffs/un-CC'd caster mobs setting fire to my face from afar...

Oh, and battle res. My experience with this from an outsider perspective is that it gets used to raise a DPS in the middle of a raid boss fight, therefore preventing me from reincarnating later when I take a fire bath.

Basically, I feel that I lack tools as a druid. All I can do is heal, and I'm not even convinced I enjoy that under the new healing regime. The joyous mobility of druid healing now comes with a hefty mana price-tag, whilst simultaneously punishing the use of any cast-time heals on a target without a HoT thanks to the mastery. Synergy: you are doing it wrong.

Underlying all this is the nagging suspicion that neither healing spec is actually that great when it comes to raw throughput. However, I'm absolutely positive that my (in)competence and gear are far larger factors in determining success right now. By the time such theoretical concerns as maximum sustainable throughput become significant, things will be patched to Hades and back.

Taking a positive stance, kitty is still lots of fun. Mmm, bleeds.

Slowly It Grows

Whee! This is going to be a scatterbrained post, even more so than usual.

Darkmoon Faire is still a slightly odd place to me, but I took the plunge and transferred a load of alts over. All my significantly levelled characters are now on one realm again, which is nice.

Now I just have to decide what to do with the bleedin' things. I sorta-decided to farm Frost emblems on as many as I could be bothered, and focus on gearing up one at a time. As the mage and enhancement shaman are adequately geared in their main specs, the druid seemed a logical place to put some effort in!

I'm really enjoying my tree, but in a moment of complete insanity I decided to buy dual spec and cobble together a tanking build. Argh! I really didn't enjoy bear-tanking up to level 75, so who knows what possessed me. I'm hoping that it will provide a valuable contrast to the warrior, who is currently hoarding Rested XP in the Thrallmar inn, and that the rage-management experience from there will help me enjoy the big bear butt a little more. It'll be a while before I'm willing to actually tank, though - she currently only hits 28k health in bear form. More than enough to tank your average heroic, but pugs these days positively sneer at any tank who's not rocking up to the plate with at least 35k. I suppose there's no reason not to, as that's easily achieved with emblem gear.

So, tree is running out of things to spend emblems on now and can start collecting bear gear. Hopefully I can snag some tasty bits of offset gear from ToC and the ICC dungeons on the way, too.

Some notes on druid specs: There seems to be a lot of wibble going on about how useful Living Spirit is to raiding trees compared to spending points in Empowered Touch, and how it might be more useful to an undergeared druid. I'm honestly confused by this. It's a percentage increase to spirit. It scales near-perfectly with gear (things like Solace aside, MP5 isn't common in tree gearing), and that cuts both ways. A newly dinged tree might indeed want extra regen with a small lump of throughput, but they'll also have a low amount of spirit. Per talent point, 5% of a small number is a smaller number.

So basically, if you're on the low end of the gear scale LS might be tempting, but it's also a relatively low absolute boost to regen and spellpower. Granted, points spent in Empowered Touch are also weaker because it affects only the spellpower portion of the healing done by those spells, and with lower spellpower the base amount unaffected by the talent will be a larger chunk of the total.

I don't think it's a bad talent by any stretch, but I don't really see the logic in saying it's significantly better for those with lesser gear.

For reference, I've been running with 1/3 LS, 2/2 ET basically since dinging 80 in blues and greens. I wish I had talent points to pick up Living Seed as well, but hey ho.