A feral's quick guide to being a tree

I recently respecced Resto. Not permanently, I still plan to raid feral as a tank/DPS hybrid. But I wanted to try things out on the healer side. Partly just for fun, but mostly to make me a better tank. I've already learned a couple of useful things. Barkskin really does help the healers out. And it's horribly annoying when the main tank goes charging up the stairs out of line of sight for the next pull. Ugh!

After lots of searching I couldn't find a single, succinct guide to how to play resto. Here's what I figured out on my own, thought I'd share it here in case other feral druids want to try crossing over on occasion. This guide isn't complete or perfect, serious restoration druids will want to look elsewhere for more info. All I've actually played this way was Heroic Violet Hold and Naxxramas/10 (with two other great healers and a well geared main tank), so I don't have a lot of experience.

Talent specification

After literally minutes of research I came up with this 14/0/57 spec. It goes far enough into Balance to grab Nature's Grace and Nature's Splendor, then picks up pretty much all the healing resto talents except for the ones that affect Healing Touch. For this HoT focussed build I had 4 points left over so stuck them in Replenish and Improved Tranquility, those could easily go elsewhere.

Other builds are possible. There's an alternate resto spec focussed on Healing Touch where you spam direct heals. There's also a Dreamstate balance/resto hybrid that allows for some DPS. The build above is what most people see as a classic HoT oriented druid.

Gear

Your gear has three roles. You want lots of Spell Power (and Spirit) so your heals are big. You want lots of Intellect, Spirit, and Mana/5 so you have lots of mana. And you need enough Stamina that you don't die. The details of which stat is best are obscure; I wish I had a Pawn scale for WotLK I trusted. I'm working on the assumption that stacking Spirit, Intellect, and Spell Power is good, in that order. Haste and Crit are also somewhat useful, and while MP5 is nice to have it's awfully expensive. Obviously Hit is useless. In general most caster gear seems to fall into two categories: stuff with Spirit and stuff without. We prefer the stuff with Spirit.

Feral druids should always be on the lookout for healing gear no one else wants. I've managed to accumulate most of a Naxx-ready set of gear just by picking up the scraps that were going to be disenchanted. I also found this resto druid gearing guide to be really helpful for filling in some holes and to figure out what enchants I needed. There's some nice items you can buy with Emblems of Heroism: the Egg of Mortal Essence is a good trinket. Also the Darkmoon Card: Blue Dragon is a bargain: 300g for a Beasts Deck and one of the best mana regen trinkets in the game.

For major glyphs I like Regrowth, Rejuvenation, and Swiftmend. For consumables I've been taking mana regeneration: Flask of Pure Mojo and delicious Rhino Dogs.

Unbuffed in tree form I have 1742 +healing, 16k mana, 310 mp5 when casting (861 when resting), and 10% haste. My serious resto friends tell me that's not bad but that I'd like more mana regen. I also wish I had more health: 15k unbuffed is cutting it close.

Casting Rotation

Now that you're all decked out you just need to know what buttons to press. Don't forget to use Tree of Life form: there's almost no penalty associated with using it, but it's easy to forget it and lose the mana and heal bonuses.

The simplest kind of healing is main tank healing: just keep your brother bear alive. The bread-and-butter for resto druids is maintaining three HoT stacks: Regrowth, Rejuvenation, and Lifebloom x3. Just keeping those up on the tank gives about 1800 healing / second and you have plenty of time left over for other things. What other things? If the MT needs more healing you can fill in with Nourish which is good for 4500 every 1.5 seconds. (I'm told to avoid Healing Touch: it's a bigger heal but is slow unless you spec for it.) If things go bad you have two panic buttons available to you. Swiftmend is totally fantastic for a 6000 point instant heal, just watch the 15 second cooldown and reapply your HoT if you don't have the glyph. And Nature's Swiftness followed by Healing Touch lets you get off one instant giant heal, 8500 or so, although you only can do that once every 3 minutes.

Keeping HoTs rolling on a main tank isn't a full time job. So you have other options. You can always keep a HoT stack rolling on a second tank too. If you need to heal other raid members' ambient damage, then targeted Lifeblooms or Regrowths are good to top people off. Use Nature's Swiftness or a quick Rejuv+Swiftmend combo to try to save the poor warlock who pulled aggro.

But the big new healing spell is Wild Growth, a crazy group heal that's so powerful it's being nerfed. I'm still learning how to use it, but it's the #1 heal on the meters for my resto friends. They seem to use it all the time: if any raid member is taking damage they put Wild Growth on them and figure that some other nearby folks could use the healing, too. It's a "smart" group heal in that it picks 4 other nearby players to also HoT and seems to work pretty well. Blizzard's giving it a 6s cooldown in 3.0.8, which will slow down my friends who are casting it every 3 seconds.

BTW, if you healed before 3.0 came out you may have the wrong instincts. Lifebloom got nerfed hard and is now quite mana-inefficient. Rejuvenation has been buffed and is now the most mana efficient heal a druid has. Nourish and Wild Growth are new and both are useful, although my friends complain Nourish is underpowered and Wild Growth is about to be nerfed.

Addons

Serious healers rely on a lot of addons to help them heal but just a couple will get you by. I use XPerl for unit frames which works just fine as a healer. Most of my guild's healers use Grid instead. Clique is a useful addon for binding heals to clicks without having to change targets. Just shift-left click on a unit frame to throw Rejuvenation, shift-right for Lifebloom. And HotCandy is a nice simple addon for tracking healing buff timers so you know when it's time to refresh something. Finally, Lifebloomer has always looked cool but I haven't tried it.

Fun

Of course the whole point of trying out a different spec is to have fun. I've really enjoyed the challenge of learning a new play style. Healing is totally different from tanking, focussed narrowly on people's health bars instead of managing where the mobs are. It's also a different kind of stress, being responsible for everyone staying alive, and I think I wouldn't like doing that full time. But now when I have my Hero Bear moments I'll appreciate a little more that the tank really has very little to do with staying alive in a boss fight, it's all about the healing corps.

Comments

[Felkan]

I, too, have often wondered why Resto don't list numbers like Ferals. Are they afraid of giving away some sort of secret? They always respond with "it depends on our build, etc." Guess what? We know that. It is true for every spec and every class. So give us some parameters (assumed spec, fight length, etc.) and then give us the dang numbers.

Did you use mouseover macros to heal? I know many healers do as they find it faster than click-n-heal. Maybe show the macro for NS+HT?

[bob]

Healpoints does a pretty good job estimating the worth of items.
http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/heal-points.aspx.
I am feral but had to heal pre TBC on some fights during raids and this addon has been useful for a long time.

[Flyv]

Felkan, I don't think there's any great conspiracy. I've seen several different gear ranking systems for resto druids, I just don't trust any of them. Mostly because they're pre-Wrath. The mana regeneration formulas changed radically and the healer theory nerds don't seem to have fully processed the new system. Also, it's hard to reduce mana and +heal into a single scale, much like it's hard to reduce health and dodge to a single scale for bears.

bob, thanks for the pointer to Healpoints. I read through the code and it looks quite sophisticated. Not just a simple ranking scale, it gets deep into your talent and spellbook to figure out both power and endurance. I'll give it a try.

[MTR]

I've done a little tree healing recently and my experiences and research pretty much match yours. The spec of choice seems to be 11/0/51 with a lot of variation in the last nine points. I've also been frustrated by the lack of clear gearing information. Resto4Life and Elitist Jerks, my favorite sources, are very vague.

My biggest problem was the lack of emergency abilities. Swiftmend is great, but you need a big hot ticking on the target, so it's really only for tanks. Nature's Swiftness has a long cooldown. If two dpsers grab aggro in the same fight I can't save the second one.

I set up Grid, which takes a little effort but I found it very worthwhile. On the other hand, I used mouseover macros rather than Clique. There are just too many things I want to cast. If somebody is using Clique I'd be curious to know what button presses you use. I tried HealBot, but it wouldn't run correctly for me, though others are apparently using it without any trouble.

I know I make two big mistakes. First, I simply cast the wrong spell sometimes. That's just a matter of practice and getting used to a new set of hotkeys. Second, I tend to develop tunnel vision and focus on just a few people's health. I've died a couple of times without realizing I was taking damage because I was so absorbed in the tank's health bar. Grid helped tremendously for this since it gives me small, centralized health bars for everybody and I can quickly see who needs help.

[Flyv]

I played with Healpoints some. It's very interesting, if a bit mysterious. It seems to be doing very detailed simulations of your spells. One downside is the calculations are a bit unstable: the value of +4 spirit is not 4x the value of +1 spirit. Sometimes adding +1 spirit has no extra Healpoints value at all. But the calculations are sophisticated and assuming the math is at all correct, I think it'd be a useful addon.

I did my best to pull a Pawn scale out of Healpoints by setting the calculator to a 6 minute fight using Regrowth, then looked at the value of +10 int, +10 spirit, etc. The relative values of stats feels roughly right to me although I think it undervalues Haste. Probably most accurate if you're near my stats already.

( Pawn: v1: "Healpoints": Intellect=2.549, RedSocket=48.94, CritRating=0.44, Mana=0.057, MetaSocket=278, HasteRating=0.035, BlueSocket=49.03, YellowSocket=48.99, SpellPower=2.823, Spirit=3.219, Mp5=5.706 )

[Arslin]

Flyv, nice article. I am also looking to dabble in the resto side of things. One other comment is that the resto gearing guide you have linked is content that was stolen from WOWInsider. The url to the real article is http://www.wowinsider.com/2009/01/06/shifting-perspectives-gearing-your-restoration-druid-at-80/

[Flyv]

Arslin: eww ick ick ick! I fixed the link. I have some scummy gold thief/seller stealing my blog content too, it's awful.

[Splintered]

I use Grid + Clique (have always been resto, yes, am a sucker for punishment, at level 69 now) My keymaps are as follow, and it seems to work pretty well for me

Alt + R. Click = Rejuv
Alt + L. Click = Lifebloom
Ctrl + L. Click = Regrowth (Which, IMHO,when paired with Improved Regrowth and Living Seed, is truly FTW)
Ctrl + R. Click = Healing Touch
Ctrl+Alt + L. Click = Swiftmend
Ctrl+Alt + R. Click = Wild Growth

By the way, Living Seed has been fixed, as far as I can see, and procs after damage now. Since my regrowth crits hit for about 3000 (at the moment), I'm seeing 1K Living Seeds, which come in very handy when the tank is being spanked.

:)

[Melwyn]

Thank you so much for this easy guide. I just bought my dual-spec today, and decided to go feral/resto in spite of the fact that I've got NO EXPERIENCE whatsoever in playing resto. I'm afraid I've been feral from the day I used my first talent point, and I'm worried I'll turn out to be a totally hopeless healer. (We'll see!) But this is exactly what I was looking for--written without too many of the abbreviated terms for spells and casting lingo that I clearly don't know yet. Perfect! Now I know where to start, and I'm not so intimidated! Thank you!