An Ex-Gnome Tank's World

Timber!

April 14th, 2009 Posted in Dungeons, Healing

So, what are my initial thoughts on healing as a resto druid? Having spent some time yesterday, as promised, healing my way through instances rather than facing the quest grind, I specced tree and put on my very best (read: probably pretty awful) quest healing greens I’d picked up along the way.

First up was Draktharon Keep. Admittedly at 77 I’m probably a little high for the instance, but my gear sucked and I thought it best to start out with something easy-ish. And we ended up with a level 80 druid tank (though not one that was particularly well geared).  About the only time I struggled at all with the healing was when we had 3 groups pulled at once. I had a bit of problem decursing on the second boss but nothing too bad. A nice ego-boost, at least after I’d looked at the healing meters and verified that yes, it was all me.

Then, a much fairer challenge. Gundrak. This time the tank was an average-geared 76 paladin. Everyone was around an appropriate level. And here there was a sign of a little bit of a challenge. The first boss, in particular, we downed, but only just – I died before he did and only my HoTs were enough to keep the tank up. Other than that, a pretty short and successful run again. But what have I learned?

  • I really, really need to get a click-casting mod and learn how to use it. There were a few times when I tried to heal the wrong person because I just wasn’t targeting fast enough
  • Coupled with the above, I just wasn’t fast enough on decursing / poison cleansing as I should be.
  • I need to pay more attention to my health. I was often too busy looking at everyone else’s health bars to notice my own sinking down.
  • I wholeheartedly and unreservedly apologise to any healer for whom I’ve tanked and consistently run out of LoS, or pulled when there isn’t really enough mana.

Anyway, Ulduar appears to have finally materialised on my doorstep so it’s back to the plate for me. No doubt I’ll come back to the healing soon, but I’ve already learned a lot about tanking from this other side, and there’s no doubt more to go.

  1. 4 Responses to “Timber!”

  2. By Fleischmann on Apr 14, 2009

    Grid + Clique is one of the most powerful combos out there. However both do take quite a bit of setting up and getting used to (can’t tell how many times on my priest I went to select someone and ended up Penance-ing them). I’ve gone to just using Grid without using a click-cast addon as it makes healing a little less boring :P

  3. By A on Apr 14, 2009

    Make sure you get the grid my hots extension, it can do things like count your lifebloom stacks and change colors when the hot is about to run out on people.

    Download decursive rather than trying to decurse using your normal unit frames. Its good for the fights where you need to be decursing/depoisoning, and when you dont you can just drag those miniframes out of sight.

  4. By Neoumbra on Apr 24, 2009

    Hey, I recently dual spec’d my Shadow Priest Holy and found Healbot to be a really good addon. I’m sure people will down play it as a good tool, but take it from me. Out of the box it is a fairly simple addon to use. Most of my important spells were pre-loaded (by class I guess). Left click a name and boom flash heal, alt left click and hello abolish disease. Very simple click combos with alt, shift, or ctrl as modifiers.

    To be fair I never used Grid or Clique, but it sounds like the Drool is a side project and won’t get much play time with the new content. I would recommend healbot for its simplicity and ability to just pick it up and put it down.

  5. By Dysmorphia on May 12, 2009

    This is a month old so you probably found something already but in case you’re still looking here’s some advice from a fellow tree healer:

    1. For poison and decursing, Decursive is a great mod.
    2. Grid is a pain to set up but Resto4Life has a nice guide. http://www.resto4life.com/2008/06/25/grid-thinking-within-the-boxes/
    3. You can use Clique or you can write your own mouse-over macros, which IMO are quite nice to have. Even if you D/C and your raidframe addon disappears, you’ll be able to heal fine with them.
    4. Healbot is very nice out-of-the box, and works very well for 5-mans, quite well for 10, but starts to feel like a screen hog at 25. You can adjust it so the bars are smaller but at that point you might as well switch to Grid anyway
    5. Whatever you do, you need some kind of raidframes that track hots. The default UI just doesn’t cut it for trees.

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