The Warlocks Den - WoW Warlock Discussions
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The Warlocks Den - WoW Warlock Discussions
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| Other Class Discussion For Warlocks that are now playing other classes, or have alts, yet still want to enjoy The Den's atmosphere. |
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March 27, 2009, 03:14 AM
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#1 (permalink) |
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Character Info
Baator 80 Gnome Warlock Khaz Modan US PvE Guild: Sufferance Profile: Blizzard Armory Talent Spec: 0/13/58 |
Questions to Den from a resto druid
Hello, ah potatoes and gravy... lets drop the pleasantries. On the Behest of my Guild's Resto Druid, I've come bearing questions to the warlock, and potentially other inhabitants of this mildly unholy community. What type of healing do you prefer having in a Raid/Heroic? (minor clarification: of Druid spells how do you like to receive it.) Of those who know how a resto druid is played: How do you prefer going about your healing assignments? How would you go about increasing Hps(ignoring better gear outright)? Character: Fanara (armory) Spec: 11/0/60 (WoW calculator) Personal thoughts: Other than getting a Gigaton of manure from the occasional "smart  " person about how much healing she puts out. she does fine, at least for my guilds proformances.(If by chance this seems to be in the wrong place please don't hesitate to move it, and if so delete this line) |
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March 27, 2009, 03:40 AM
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#2 (permalink) |
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Re: Questions to Den from a resto druid
Personaly as a Warlock i prefer the hots rolled on me then the per se flash heals. I like to be able to life tap and still be getting my hp back rather then having the healers scream at me for having 50% hp after they healed me thats just my thoughts on the issue though hope it helps. |
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March 27, 2009, 04:17 AM
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#3 (permalink) |
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Re: Questions to Den from a resto druid
On my resto alt, which is slighty better geared, but with the same spec, I roll hots on tank with nourish as my spam heal, rejuv for party members that have taken damage and are not currently aggro targets and Wild Growth when the party takes AE damage. For the locks on my runs, I usually keep a rejuv on them at all times just so its there when they need to lifetap - only because I really don't have mana issues now, come 3.1 that is about to change with the nerf to Lifebloom. Similar mechanics for hots and dots when looking at increasing effeciency. Don't clip! The only time this is allowed is when rolling lifeblooms on a tank. Also, if they don't have the glyph of swiftmend, I would highly recommend it and don't be afraid to use it regularly. |
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March 27, 2009, 11:00 AM
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#4 (permalink) |
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Character Info
Debuff 80 Orc Warlock Sargeras US PvP Guild: Fenrir Profile: Blizzard Armory Talent Spec: 0/13/58 |
Re: Questions to Den from a resto druid
In heroics lifebloom was practically made for warlocks. If we have floating combat text that shows us when we gain lifebloom then we have 5 seconds to plan a lifetap into our rotation so that we get good use of the heal*. * - Yes I know about the tradeoff of max dps and unnecessary lifetaps. Spare me the lecture. In the average heroic keeping your healer at high mana by getting good use of his heals will result in a fast run just as much as burning all your mana and then lifetapping 5+ times after the boss. Edit: In hind-sight, I realize that this was meant to be a question for healing everyone, not just locks. Here is a general healing guide posted by an excellent healer in my guild forums (Delivix of Sargeras, if anyone was wondering). Keep in mind that this was written in the BT era so a little bit of the info might be outdated (like keeping potions on cooldown) but I think the vast majority of the information is both class-nonspecific and time-nonspecific. Also, note that this was originally written for the audience of raid healers. Generally, healing is going to be a little less intensive in heroics. All credit goes to Delivix for this: Delivix’s General Guide to Healing This is meant as a general guide for all of our healers. One of the problems with having our class leads set up per-class is that many healers who belong to a particular class don’t really get much specific advice for their (healing) spec, so I’m going to try to act a sort of Healer Class Lead since I have some free time, and will post things like this guide which I hope will be helpful. This guide is meant to be general and applicable to all healing classes. It will contain things like rules of thumb, mod recommendations, and common healer problems. Cast all the time One of the biggest mistakes new healers make is delaying between casts, or worse just standing and waiting for someone to take damage, looking at the healing bars. Then when someone does take damage they take the time to mouse over to them, click them, start casting a heal and then complain that their heal never lands there first. You must be casting all the time, at least when not moving (unless you have instants). As soon as you start casting you should be targeting the next person you want to heal. Halfway through you cast (or global cooldown in the case of instants) you should already have your next target selected and be spamming your heal button. Early on this may take quite a bit of thinking and effort. Eventually the decisions of who to heal and with which exact spell will become intuitive and reflexive, you will not have to think about it at all. This is a good place to talk about mods. To heal effectively you need the following information: - Who is low and exactly how much health deficit each person has - Who has agro, meaning who is being targeted by a mob and to a lesser extent… - Who has a heal being cast on them already In Grid* when someone has agro a little red light appears in a corner of their box. However your mod displays this information it is very useful for choosing who your next heal target should be. During fights with adds you can see when a mob switches off a tank and you can therefor start healing the agro-puller before the mob either gets to them or has his swing timer go off. Many bosses use spells that they have to target that will allow you to preempt heals as well, in those cases the mod should show that person getting agro for a split second. Examples of boss targeted spells include Void Reaver’s orbs, Solarian’s missles and bombs, Winterchill’s frotbolts, Anatheron’s carrion swarms and infernals – really almost every both does something where this information is useful. There are two ways you can interace with a raid UI to heal. The most common way is to have all of your healing spells bound to your number keys (1-5 at most) and any adjacent easy-to-reach key bindings as well. In this case you could target with your mouse and select your targets with one hand using the mouse while clicking the specific healing spell using the other and the keyboard. The other way it to bind all of your healing spells to various mouse buttons like renew to left click, flash heal to right click, shield to mouse wheel up, and so on, and simply spam click on your raid UI. This seems a bit awkward to me but it does have one benefit - you do not actually have to target/select the person you are healing, so you can keep, say, the tank targetted at all times. HPS and Healing Volume The next most common mistake new healers make is not healing hard enough. There are two possible reasons for this which are not mutually exclusive. One is that new healers do not realize they are actually doing a low volume of healing in which case a mod like Recount* will help. The other is they do not know how to in which case mods like DrDamage* and Recount* will help as well as a conversation with a more experienced healer. Although every healing class can cast nothing but their most efficient spells and never fall below 90% mana, new paladin healers tend to be the worst at falling into this habit; they can spam flash of light all day and often do, casting nothing else. You need to have some sense of how hard you are healing in relation to others and how hard each of your spells heal in relation to each other. Firstly install DrDamage*. This mod will update your tooltips for you to show the actual healing amount of each spell as well as many useful values, such as HPS (heal per second) and HPM (heal per mana). Most healers know roughly how efficient and strong each of their spells are intuitively from experience. Whether you do or not this mod comes in handy for comparing different spells to one another as well as different ranks of spells to one another. Next, if you haven’t already, install Recount*. This is the main mod our guild uses for damage and healing data for raids. It is useful to keep Recount set to show the data for ‘healing done’ from the last fight and to take a glance at it after each fight. See how you stack up next to others. If you are doing much less healing that others click on the names of other healers of your same class and see what they are doing differently. Recount will tell you exactly how many of each spell they cast and what percentage of healing came from each spell. This is usually when Shamans realize they have not been casting enough Chain Heals and Paladins realize they have not cast enough Holy Lights. Two rules of thumb to end with here: 1. End each fight with no mana – in the case of trash pulls burn most of your mana early in the fight when most of he mobs are alive and the damage to the raid is highest. 2. Burn enough mana in the first 30 seconds or so in the fight to use a mana potion and keep burning enough mana to use a potion (as well as every ability you have that gives mana back, like innervate, shadowfiend etc.) every time the cooldown comes up. Overhealing and Efficiency After reading the last rule of thumb you must be asking - but doesnt the efficiency of the spell i cast matter? Just burning my mana will leave me dry before my cooldowns are up - should i not be using my most efficient spells? You need to know when to heal efficiently and what to go to max HPS mode, throwing efficiency out the window. In my experience in educating healers they first need to learn how and when to heal hard. It is only after that is achieved that it makes sense to refine their technique to make them more efficient. If you have no idea how to heal hard and burn your mana when you have to, a conversation about efficiency is meaningless. Now would be a good time to adress a common phobia of healers that tend to come from, shal we say, more casual raiding guilds - the phobia of overhealing. Overhealing is neither good nor bad. If you are healing as hard and as fast as you should you will have some overheal. Some of this may be avoidable and unnecessary overheal. If you are at the point where your volume of healing is immensely high this is something you should work on. If your volume is healing is not very high, do not worry about your overheal yet. Also keep in mind that it is worth gaining a higher overheal percentage if you have managed to increase your total healing volume and HPS by any more than that percentage! Remember this rule of thumb: If the spell you are casting has a chance to overheal, the risk is you will waste some mana; if you stop casting to avoid the overheal, there is a chance your target will not get enough heals and die! The question is, what is that chance? This is not something that is worth quantifying. Sometimes several healers will be casting a heal on the same target; if that target happens to be a tank overheal is almost always welcome. If the target you selected to heal next is full long before your cast goes off and the target is not likely to take more damage before your heal lands, it may be worth cancelling your cast and saving your mana. You can only judge from experience and the type of heal you are giving them. Eventually the goal is to strike a balance between efficiency and HPS that will give you both extremely high healing volume and mana longevity. Before you can worry about efficiency though, to reiterate this point, learn to heal as hard as you can and go into that mode when the raid is taking heavy damage. Our problem at the moment from newer healers is that the healing is not hard enough when it should be. Last edited by Debuff; March 27, 2009 at 11:07 AM.. |
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March 27, 2009, 11:00 AM
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#5 (permalink) |
Character Info
Evilyne 80 Human Warlock Garona US PvE Guild: The Sesame Street Gang Profile: Blizzard Armory |
Re: Questions to Den from a resto druid
I'm with Kins, as to prefering HoTs over the flash heals. I think by now most healers understand that my health will be sapped when that little blue line disappears. |
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March 27, 2009, 11:19 AM
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#6 (permalink) |
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Character Info
Aily 80 Human Warlock Doomhammer US PvE Guild: Arisen Profile: Blizzard Armory Talent Spec: 53/1/17 |
Re: Questions to Den from a resto druid
Debuff is that guide actually telling people to be concerned about "healing done" from recount? Seriously? I would say none of that matters as long as everyone lives through everything of course. But to say you should forgo any efficiency and heal hard is crazy. I suppose it's been a long time since I really healed anything on my priest but that still seems to not make sense to me. Last edited by SINisterW; March 27, 2009 at 11:24 AM.. |
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March 27, 2009, 11:38 AM
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#7 (permalink) | |
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Character Info
Debuff 80 Orc Warlock Sargeras US PvP Guild: Fenrir Profile: Blizzard Armory Talent Spec: 0/13/58 |
Re: Questions to Den from a resto druid
Quote:
Just like recount isn't the end-all-be-all for dps, it is not for healing, I recognize that. However, to suggest that it doesn't have any worth is wrong, in my opinion. Also, he is not saying that the only thing that matters is being able to heal hard. let me requote a portion of the guide:[/quote]Eventually the goal is to strike a balance between efficiency and HPS that will give you both extremely high healing volume and mana longevity. Before you can worry about efficiency though, to reiterate this point, learn to heal as hard as you can and go into that mode when the raid is taking heavy damage.[/quote] In the end, yes you will need to be striking a balance. But what new healers need to realize is that the slow and lazy healing that they got used to when they we leveling, questing, and healing dungeons on the way up is a style that they need to branch out of. It is far easier to learn how to heal efficiently than it is to learn how to heal heavily when your group is taking substantial damage. This guide is saying that you need to learn how to vary your healing throughput before you worry (excessively) about maximizing efficiency. Again, let me also reiterate that this guide is written primarily with raid healing in mind (and during the t6 time, in particular). Heroic healing generally requires less throughput and even the current 25 mans and very easy to heal so you may not see this as very applicable right now. But when Ulduar and beyond come out, healers who have not developed the skill of being able to heal hard will start underperforming again. |
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March 27, 2009, 01:07 PM
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#8 (permalink) |
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Character Info
Carlinda 80 Gnome Warlock Daggerspine US PvP Guild: Crimson Dragoons Profile: Blizzard Armory Talent Spec: 53/0/18 |
Re: Questions to Den from a resto druid
To the OP's first question: I love HoT's over flash heals. A resto druid I used to raid with even created a macro to alert the locks in the raid when they had full HoTs so they could lifetap away. I don't think it's necessary to throw the whole arsenal around at the locks, however a good renew every once in awhile, especially later on in some fights when your mana pool is getting more and more difficult to replenish. I'm always one happy lock when a Resto Druid is assigned to healing my group.  Other than that, I've never played a druid so I'm not going to pretend to know the answers to the other two questions, but good luck! |
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March 27, 2009, 01:56 PM
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#9 (permalink) |
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Re: Questions to Den from a resto druid
It's probably a good idea to check the warlock's spec first. As affliction, I usually life tap after a haunt, so whatever health I lost is covered by haunt+SL+fel armor, no healing is needed unless I took extra damage from external sources. I have a tree alt, so my preference for assignments: Tank healing - keep rejuv and LB up. RG is a powerful tank heal, especially when glyphed, don't be afraid to spam it to keep him alive. Sometimes I cast RG on the tank before a fight if I know he'll take a lot of front-end damage so I can benefit from the glyph right off the bat. Swiftmend is good if you need to put out a good heal right away, or while on the move, and NSHT is reserved for saving lives. Raid healing - despite the cooldown, Wild Growth is still good, even though there's still some topping up to do with your other spells if heavy raid damage is involved. I usually toss a rejuv/LB for the occasional RSTS attack, the HoT should be sufficient if you know they won't be taking anymore damage for a while. IMO a really good way to increase HPS is through knowledge and experience of the encounters itself. Knowing when and how much incoming damage your raid members will be taking helps a lot in planning and deciding which heal to use. For boss encounters, set up a focus frame with the boss as the focus - for example once you see a boss start casting anything nasty you should be precasting heals if you know the tank has to eat it. Coordination with the other raid healers is also crucial, but a little more tricky if you're raiding with healers who like to snipe or just heal everything with a deficit. Being able to see incoming heals on your unit frames is a must, and sadly I haven't been able to set up Grid to show it properly. |
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March 27, 2009, 02:54 PM
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#10 (permalink) |
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Character Info
AballahSonDi 80 Human Warlock Alexstraza US PvE Guild: StormpikeShocktroopers Profile: Talent Spec: 56/0/15 |
Re: Questions to Den from a resto druid
A lot of this has been stated above, but I will through my .02 in as well. I am going to assume we are talking raid healing only. Heroics...ehh any decently geared healer can blow through them. As a raid leader I have kept one thing consisting when chatting with healers about performance. HPS while a great measure doesn't matter at all if your tank/raid is still dying. I have healers that do a considerable lower amount of HPS but still get the job done and usually with mana left over. I think in my mind the biggest thing for healers is mana management, for druid especially managing mana and when to use your inervate(spelling?) and on whom. Being an effective raid healer as about making intelligent split second decisions. For example: Caster A and Offtank B are both taking massive damage. It is to the healer to decide who to save and have a sound reason for why. I recall back in the BC days of Kara one of the most difficult things to make the healers understand was that in some fights (specifically the Shade of Aran) it was more important to keep a dps class up over the tanks. It took many of our healers weeks to get the knee jerk reaction of auto heal tank turned off in that fight. Healers IMHO need to be smart with quick reaction and decision making time as often these are the choices you have to make. Another example that applies specifically to Warlocks. Healers have it figured out, when the blue bar goes boinko we go suicidal on ourselves. I think most raid healers have this concept down pat, drop a hot on the lock say 15-30 seconds into the fight and let him worry about when to utilize life tap. If the lock is killing himself even when you have been hotting him maybe you and that specific player need to work something out. Back to my example: In naxx 10 I was taking the guild through for there first attempt at Hegian. I explained that it was possible to actually do this fight with a tank, dps, and a good healer(not that I really wanted to try it that way). So first attempt in the door on the first "dance" phase we lose everyone except 1 heal, 1 tank, and 2 dps. Things aren't looking good right... second or third dance we loose the other dps. Now it is me(dps), a tank, and a healer and this is where being a decision making healer comes into play and a good bit of teamwork between three people. So instead of me just life tapping away whenever I felt like it, we had to coordinate. We took our time and broke down the phases to when the tank needed healing and when I would need healing and how we could help the healer in between times to conserve mana cause we knew this was gonna be a long fight. In the end (and I kid you not like 17 minutes later) we got him down. The healer was completely out of mana, I was out of mana and health, and the tank was down to about 15% health. The point to this wall of text being that for healers to be succesful they need to understand how other classes work in less than ideal situations. That healer had to know when I was going to need to hit some hard lifetaps(we even timed out a rotation for me and the tank to trinket because we were starting to have threat issues as he was doing more to stay alive than generate threat) or when I was going to be able to keep myself alive through a disease by channeling drain life. As for tanks you have to learn how to work with the other healers around you. For a Druid even if you are not healing MT there is nothing wrong with 2 seconds before soft enrage(enter special ability here) stacking some hots on the tank before switching back to raid or OT. Essentially this will allow the other healer time to recover in case something goes wrong. Again knowing when and where to use your inervate is also very important and depends on the type of fight as to who you will use it on. In conclusion I think the important things to remember are the following:
Sorry folks think I might have got a bit long winded here. Hopefully I stayed on topic enough to actually answer some questions. LR Also...Cast Bars you have to know what the boss is getting ready to cast. Everyone should have this but it is especially important for tanks and healers. Last edited by AballahSon; March 27, 2009 at 02:56 PM.. Reason: Added last sentence. |
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