It looks like a lot of healers use “mouseover” mods and/or macros for healing. The new wild growth bug is making it harder for some druids to adjust to their new healing strategies.

GC addressed the issue here, saying:

This problem does not seem to be universal. Is anyone having it without using mouseover macros?
By design, you can cast WG on any target, even yourself or an enemy.

Now, it looks like the problem is basically this:

1. You target someone (lets say a dead mob from the last trash pull is still targeted, or someone out of your range)
2. You want to choose someone other than your current target as the center of your Wild Growth (lets say you wanted to target yourself)
   
3. You use your mouseover macro or mod’s capabilities to try and get Wild Growth to cast on you
4. You get an out of range error message because WG is trying to target the thing in step 1 rather than what you are mousing over.

Because of the crazy way that I heal (ie. I don’t use mods or mouseover macros), this hasn’t yet really been a problem for me. However, the problem seemed to be so wide-spread that I wanted to make a post about it.

So, what do you do about it? Now that you’ve spent all week fighting with one of your primary heal spells, I wanted to post a macro that Shefki worked out in that same thread:

/cleartarget
/cast [target=mouseover,noharm,exists] Wild Growth
/targetlasttarget

These three lines become a macro where it clears your target, casts wild growth on the person you are mousing over, and then targets the person/mob you were last targeting. This gets around the problem by un-targeting the problematic person. You can just make this macro and use it instead of whatever strategy you use for your other heals. It should be useable along with whatever mod you were using before, and would replace whatever mouseover macro you’ve been using up to this point.

Just use that macro and you’ll be fine until the bug gets fixed. Good luck!

So, with my guild, I’ve been healing Ulduar (25-man and 10-man versions) this week. We haven’t spent a lot of time there, but it’s given me an opportunity to play with my healing spells. Our 25-man was banging our heads against the bugged version of Ingis (before the hotfix, while still dealing with bad server issues that made us cancel the other nights of raiding), so we didn’t get too far.

However, our 10-man skipped straight into Razorscale & Deconstructor after the vehicle boss, and we killed both of them with 2 healers (me and a resto shaman). We even got a couple attempts on Kologarn, where we settled on killing his right arm and then dealing with the adds, but we ran out of time and called it before he died. However, Kologarn is massively huge. His arms are actually targetable. Really intimidating, but a really awesome fight (I won’t spoil what he says when you kill one of his arms…). After Razorscale & Deconstructor, we had the other shaman also help us out on healing, as after the first “wing,” the bosses aren’t really designed to have only 2 healers…

Here are my current Ulduar observations, mostly from healing the 10-man:

• First, a confession: there are places where casting nourish without HOTs on the target is okay. For example, in the Deconstructor’s Tympanic Tantrums on 10-man, sometimes you need a quick burst of damage to prevent death. That’s okay, since it’s a short amount of time you are doing it. If you find yourself doing this for the entire fight on some bosses, please just go back to regrowth spam, since the HOT is very much worthwhile… and then you can nourish & swiftmend the people with regrowth hots on them…
• Also, I had a really bad habit of throwing around single lifeblooms as raid heals on the fights we were learning in 10-man – but I don’t think it was a good idea for me to be doing that. I’m not sure how to break that newly-formed habit, or if it was actually an okay strategy.
• I also used regrowth as like 30% + of my total healing done in a lot of places, but I still wasn’t running OOM. Now, most of regrowth’s healing does come from the HOT portion of it. So, please remember that regrowth as a HOT is still worthwhile. I’m also still running with the regrowth glyph instead of the nourish glyph, so I’m expecting that regrowth % to go down once I have my correct glyphs set up (see previous QQ post about glyph prices).
• I’m not having mana problems. Even when I do dumb things like spam regrowth & roll lifeblooms, I’m not running OOM. It’s possible that we’ve overreacted about this whole mana regen change thing. All I know is that I didn’t innervate myself as often as I did in Naxx. I’m not sure why.
• For one of our deconstructor attempts (I think probably our kill-shot), my healing breakdown looked like: Regrowth (38%), Nourish (21%), lifebloom (16%), rejuv (13%), and living seed (13%). This wasn’t typical for the whole night, however if you are ending up in a primarily direct-healing position a lot, living seed IS actually capable of doing a lot of healing.
• Wildgrowth is dropping lower than living seed for that fight because everyone spread out so much that it wasn’t hitting enough people, but Deconstructor was easy enough that it’s not a big deal. Dreambound Druid has some good advice for dealing with how to target Wildgrowth on a group.
• My high living seed % goes against the observation of the Notabear blog I was reading earlier today, however he does have some observations that may be worth taking into consideration. Notabear was primarily running 25-man, and mileage in different types of content (and for different raiding groups) may require adapting your talents & playstyle to what your specific raiding group needs. I like plugging other people’s work and highlighting that there is no one right way to do things sometimes.
• There were also times where I didn’t feel like I had all the tools I needed to be successful, but that could be due to me being a little bit undergeared compared to my raid group and the fact I’m missing 2 of my glyphs (nourish & wild growth) that I planned my build around. However, I haven’t felt that way in a long time. I really wanted something like a direct AOE heal that I used to have on my shaman (I miss you chain heal!). Wild Growth & rejuvs around the raid just didn’t feel sufficient for dealing with all the incoming damage. I’m not sure if it’s just that (as a raid) we need to get better at learning the strategies for fights.

I also got an e-mail from Jay, asking about the new Idol of the Flourishing Life. Grats On getting it as a drop from your raid!  There are definitely some places where the idol would be helpful, however if I were you, I’d still hold onto the lifebloom and/or rejuv idols for other times where you aren’t relying on nourish. Averna didn’t give this very good reviews when it was first announced,  and I haven’t yet seen any good reviews of the new Nourish idol at all. If you are doing a nourish-heavy healing thing, then it’s probably worth it, but I’m just not sure yet. Mostly, I just get frustrated about the relic system in general.