Taking up the leaf at 85

Chaska

Chaska

New Member
Warning: Incoming Wall of Text.

I love being a feather kin. But I have also discovered a wonderful thing in taking up the leaf. I quite enjoy it. During WoLK it was great way to heal. Keep Wild Growth Ticking and enjoy a snack while healing a heroic and, during raids, especially with 4.0.1, we had some kick butt save the day moves. I LOVED going ToL and Regrowthing the raid from the pit of despair up to full green hp bars of hope. Only the Lich King could touch my mana pool.

Then the sundering came. Health pools grew, along with mana costs. I was forced to take time and look at my leaves and decide what I was going to do with them. For the first time, I looked at what it would actually cost for me to cast my separate spells (Tho, no such inspection has happened with my feathers). I did a little trial and error (not too many fatal errors) and learned a few things.

Lifebloom:

The first thing I learned about was the new use of Lifebloom. It used to be that you could put lifebloom on anyone at any time. You would keep one stack of it rolling on the tank and if a raid member really needed the extra hot you'd throw em a quick LB and let it do it's thing. Now LB only ticks on one person at a time (unless, of course, you're in massive tree form). On the plus side, it is of low mana cost. I have found, and forum posters seem to agree, that you should keep a full three stacks of LB rolling on your tank. Also cast your rejuv on your tank after at least one cast of LB to give it the bonus from mastery. After that there is a discussion on uses of the bloom part of the heal. I have found that the use of the talent "Empowered Touch" a bad idea. "Empowered Touch" being a talent that gives a % bonus to Nourish and Healing Touch and will refresh your LB on the target. There were many times that I wish I could have the end result of my direct heal of Nourish/HT and the bloom at the same time but if I used one I'd lose the other. Since speccing out of the talent I feel a lot more at ease and effective as a healer and I know that my LB direct heal will be there to back me up. I highly recommend not having this in your talent tree for at least up to a certain point. What I've read is that after a certain point of gear (Heroic and into the raiding level) it becomes a little more useful to have "Empowered Touch" for keeping people up and conserving mana. At that point, feel free to figure it out as I have yet to reach that level of gear.

Healing Touch:

Take out your spell book, dust off the page, and put it back on your bars! While a fair bit more expensive, and the same cast time as Nourish, HT most definitely has a place in your spell rotation. It is still a big heal and even with the huge health pools it makes a decent jump up in green. I'm still going to be practicing for this to get it more polished but keep an eye out for your Omen of Clarity (another reason to keep LB running) and use that as a great time to throw out your HT. If you have OoC up and the time to cast either Nourish/HT then HT is your choice. Also you may have to give up on waiting of OoC to use HT if the tank's health is low enough. Don't be afraid of your Nature's Swiftness cooldown in a jam, even out of boss fights. I have found that jams seem to space themselves out enough that your 3min cd will have refreshed.

Swiftmend/Wild Growth/Rejuvenation:

The use of these spells hasn't changed too much. I am a little more conservative with Wild Growth. Whereas in WoLK I had it up every second I could, I now wait till moments in battle when party/raid are taking damage. By all means, anticipate them, but not too much. It costs too much mana. It is also a good start for party/raid healing as your rejuv will get the mastery bonus if something else is already ticking.

Regrowth:

This is one of the biggest changes I've had to deal with. This was my main party/raid heal. Regrowth was quick, big and it topped itself off. I also had the mana to throw these any which way I wanted even if it was already ticking. Regrowth is an expensive spell. The first time I turned it to my Massive Tree Self (just like in WoLK) and topped everyone off with regrowths in Cataclysm I found myself a very oom and ineffective healer with 50% of the boss' life still left to go. Word of caution: don't let ToL make you OOM. Regrowth is now that spell you use when you don't have time for HT/Nourish and your Swiftmend is on cd. Regrowth to bring your tank's health to the point where you can top up with another direct heal.

In General:

While healing in general I have had to get used to two things in particular: First, HP bars are not maintaining between 95-100% most of the time. Even if the whole party has their life between 10-50% during and up to the end of the fight, your job was done successfully. Give yourself a pat on the back and sit down for a drink. Second, It's okay to use your bigger cool down abilities. As I said earlier, jams seem to space them selves out fairly well. With each pull taking more time than they used to in WoLK, and a pull (hopefully) only have one jam (if any), your cooldowns are more available to you.

I now apologize for any bad grammar, spelling and use of the wrong homonym as I am prone to do. I'm still learning to rustle my leaves but this is a start :).
 
First, HP bars are not maintaining between 95-100% most of the time. Even if the whole party has their life between 10-50% during and up to the end of the fight, your job was done successfully.
Click to expand...

This is the whole key to Cataclysm healing right here. Unless dps (and even the tank to a certain point) is likely to take large damage soon, it's ok for their health bars to fill up whenever with your cheap heals. If they don't like it, there's always First Aid. As soon as I stopped trying to constantly top off people immediately, I felt like I was in control again.
 
Chaska said:
The first time I turned it to my Massive Tree Self (just like in WoLK) and topped everyone off with regrowths in Cataclysm I found myself a very oom and ineffective healer with 50% of the boss' life still left to go. Word of caution: don't let ToL make you OOM.
Click to expand...

So this left me with the question: When and how should I use ToL. After some practice and time I've come up with a few thoughts.

ToL is probably best used around the end of the raid boss fight when mana is getting low and you have to do the last push too keep everyone alive till the end. First thing you do after is pop your wild growth (if it's not already ticking). You'll be doing extra healing and on two extra targets. Then start getting lifebloom on everyone. Make sure your tanks both have full stacks and dps at least one, more if you have the time to. Obviously, stop to give that extra swiftmend/HT if needed and Keep your wild growth going! It may sound tedious but it will be more effective than it sounds and it won't cost very much mana, LB is cheap. It may also sound a little counter intuitive to be putting all these hots on people when some direct heals are needed. Why I think this will be effective:

  • You're effective healing is gone up by a fair percentage and so your hots will be bigger than they are usually. Which works well with the bigger health pool vision of Blizzard's.
  • You probably have another more direct healer in your raid who is doing their job. Trust them.
  • Your crazy hots everywhere will be preventing party members from going to critical so your direct healer partner will be able to able to focus on those that are.
  • At the end of fights there may be times when all you can afford to cast is LB so why not on everyone.(Note for you 'non-trees' out there: LB can only be cast on one target at a time unless you're in ToL form.)

The other time to use ToL is in Halls of Origination against fire Marrowgar while you're riding a camel so you can get a sweet screen shot.

On a side note...I have an interesting find that people may not know about for Symbiosis (our mastery that allows our heals to do more when there is a hot already on the target). If you cast hot on a target who is not already affected by one hot on the second tick (and every tick after) will actually be larger than the first because those ticks are under symbiosis (wild growth being a sort of exception because each tick is supposed to get smaller). I found it out casting rejuv and watching it. This means we are balanced around having symbiosed hots and our dirrect heals being weaker if we haven't taking the time to cast a hot on the target first.
 
So apparently Elitist Jerks says that the Glyph of Regrowth is basically useless.

I disagree.

That glyph is what has put Regrowth back into my rotation. Regrowth's cost to healing ratio is atrocious and it's 6s hot is pretty weak....but when someone is low health and you throw a regrowth on them and that timer keeps refreshing I have found that that it has been what I needed to keep someone alive in a bind. The refreshing means I'm not spending extra gcds/casttimes during a crunch time which is the only time I use regrowth now. Just sayin.
 
well Jacki, you and myself and many others need to read Elitist Jerks with a grain of salt these days... They are farming hard-mode content and in saying that, their raid tanks have 215k+ health... and their mana regen also allows them to heal until the cows come home. so when they talk numbers they are talking hard-modes now, while us lowly still trying to clear content people have to find what really works, so you're probably right for reg, hard-modes are always different gearing and spell wise =)
 
Awesome job!

Great post Jacki.

Since beginning raiding with you, I have really changed my healing style and it has made me a better player. Thank you for helping me to understand a little more about this "Cataclysm Style" of healing. Learning more about Regrowth Glyph and Empowered Touch have really increased my healing throughput.
 
Well, I mentioned it the other night, so here it is, my update on Tree Healing.

Most things have stayed relatively the same but I do have some new tweaks/ideas that may be found helpful.

We have a new mastery....again....

Harmony: "Your direct healing is increased by an additional x% and casting your direct healing spells grants you an additional y% bonus to periodic healing for 10 sec. Each point of Mastery increases each bonus by an additional 1.25%." What does this mean? If you cast a direct heal (Swiftmend, Healing Touch, Regrowth, or Nourish), you will get a buff that lasts for shorter than the swiftmend cooldown that gives your hots a % of healing boost. What it also means is that, even if direct heals isn't the best option at the time throw one out when your Harmony is about to fall out. What does that mean for your rotation? I have a few tips. Be vigilant and make sure you use your omen of clarity. Just so your on the same page, omen of clarity as a clearcast only effects your cast-time spells, not your instants. Whether or not you need this is the time to throw out your direct heals, when it's free. If you need time, use regrowth, it's free, if you need a bigger heal, use healing touch, it's free. They're both expensive and direct so they're perfect for Omen of Clarity. Swiftmend is beautiful because its instant and direct, it'll help keep the buff going. I also highly recommend, as much as you can, if you have time, make sure your harmony is up with lots of time before you cast tranquility as a % bonus to tranquility....AMAZING! Now, I'm not a huge fan of harmony, but it's there so make the best of it as you can.

That pretty much encompasses my update. I still like having my lifebloom bloom, so I still don't have empowered touch, even tho I am raiding. There seems to be two camps on the issue but I have found my groove in having it bloom and my raid is progressing so that's what I'll keep doing.

Tranquility
One last thing, I must mention my favoritest spell EVAR. Tranquility is now on a 3 minute cool down <3. Keep in mind, if your on tank healing and there is a point where your tank is taking lots and lots of damage so as you have to focus on him/her to the exclusion of all others, do so. Tranquility will not be enough to keep that tank up. Especially because each tick might not even hit him if, at that second, he is not one of the 5 lowest health raid members. Those times are few and far between and don't last terribly long, but I have lost Steve a couple times to learning this fact. But Tranq is still absolutely awesome and with 3min cd, you're laughing!
 
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