3. Tank and raid healing advice– (Updated 5/20/2013 for 5.3)
General healing advice:
- There are primarily two focuses for healing (focusing primarily on tanks, or raid healing with keeping HOTs on the tanks). With the toolset we have, over-specializing (ie. only healing your tank and never using wild growth, or raid healing without keeping up lifebloom on the tanks) ends up being detrimental to your group.
- Our direct heals are still important (especially for tank healing), but the druid class’ primary healing done is still HOT-based.
- You will use swiftmend for Efflorescence procs as an AOE heal, and you want to use Swiftmend every time it comes off cooldown. In addition, lifebloom should be on one tank target at all times (even when assigned to raid healing).
- You prime your Harmony mastery with a direct heal once every ~20 seconds. Since Swifmend is a 15 second cooldown and activates your mastery, just using swiftmend on cooldown should be enough.
Read part 1 of this guide about how our healing spells work.
Raid healing (most common healing style for druids):
- Use ironbark on your tank during times where the tank is taking heavy damage – remember that you should coordinate this some with your other healers and the tanks.
- Roll 3x lifebloom on a single tank. You can use direct heals (regrowth, nourish, or HT) to refresh lifebloom on your tank or refresh it directly with lifebloom. With the lifebloom glyph, you can swap your 3x stack to another tank during tank-swap fights.
- Use your swiftmend every time it comes off cooldown. Keep in mind that the efflorescence effect on harmony only heals up to 3 targets at a time, so it can be used effectively on small groups of people or even just one without losing too much effectiveness. You still don’t want to use swiftmend on targets at full health, as that can be too much overhealing, so choose a wounded target likely to be stationary for the next 7 seconds (this may often be the melee group or sometimes even your tank).
- Put Rejuvenation on your tanks and use rejuvenation on light to medium-wounded targets in your raid group. You can also use rejuv proactively to try to get several rejuvs sprinkled around the raid group on people likely to be taking damage in the near future (and to set up who you may want to swiftmend). Also, since the value of HOTs are determined by the buffs when they are cast, if your mastery falls off, it won’t affect remaining ticks on HOTs you have already cast. Your rejuvenation over-healing now increases the amount of healing done by wild mushrooms, so it isn’t as bad to put it on high-health targets now if you are using shrooms.
- Use wild growth as often as you can afford to depending on your mana.
- You won’t use much in the way of direct single-target heals for this role, since your frequent swiftmend casts should provide most of the direct healing you need, but there are fight-specific mechanics that require or favor direct heals. Regrowth works well with OOC procs if you take the regrowth glyph.
- Set up shrooms on specific stack points before burst AOE phases and bloom them when needed. This is a situational spell you won’t use very often in the fights due to the high amount of setup time. However, if you let the shrooms charge up to full capacity from rejuv overhealing, it should be more useful. The only drawback is that the setup time and wait time is problematic in fights with heavy movement.
- Tranquility is also nice to use for heavy burst phases, since you should get several uses per boss fight during heavy AOE times. This is especially true for 25-mans, where your tranquility now scales with raid size.
- This healing style will evolve a lot in various encounters, so you have to be able to adapt to the situation (fast reflexes). Keep in mind that in MOP, the most important thing at the start of an expansion is conserving your mana so that you’ll have mana for the fight.
Tank healing tips:
- Use ironbark on your tank during times where the tank is taking heavy damage and you want to reduce the damage they take.
- Put a 3 stack of lifebloom on the tank you are assigned to, and don’t let it fall off. Nourish, Healing Touch, and regrowth will refresh LB’s duration (and refreshing LB with a direct heal will give you the Harmony mastery buff). Use the lifebloom tank-swap glyph so you can shift your lifebloom from one tank to the other without having to re-stack it.
- Put rejuv on all the tanks & refresh as needed. Use a mix of direct heals as you find best suits the encounter and your group’s needs: Healing Touch when big damage, Nourish when little damage, Regrowth as an emergency spot-heal. With the regrowth glyph, it ends up being better to cast regrowth over nourish or HT. You can still swiftmend the tank, because if he’s standing still, he will benefit from the large burst heal and your efflorescence proc (and if melee are close, it will hit them, too). You can also use swiftmend, Wild Growth, and rejuvs to help out your raid with AOE healing even as a tank healer.
- Use Nourish when you need a mana efficient heal (to conserve your mana resources and reduce over-healing) during times where your tank isn’t taking that much damage. Try to use Nourish on tanks that already have a HOT on them. However, with the changes to rejuv, you should also be using rejuv on your raid members instead of spamming nourish at times of low tank-damage.
