Druid tips'n tricks

[Eepi]

This is not written by me!! I'm just sharing this with you, MMOwned! I got this from Welcome to wowhead.com. [WARNING: This is freaking long!!]

Part 1: Overview, Class Mechanics, Leveling


Introduction
Welcome to Nab’s druid guide. In these posts I hope to create a one-stop resource for the most common druiding questions, using a combination of my personal experience and the best theorycrafting I’ve been able to track down. First, let me tell you who I am and what I am not.

I rolled a druid back in 1.0 and have been playing her ever since. I’ve been feral from day one, which I think gives me a pretty in-depth understanding of feral mechanics, and a pretty good understanding of healing mechanics. I am not a hardcore raider or a hardcore PVPer, as my Armory will attest, but I am pretty darn good at what I do.

What do I do? I have tanked, DPS’d, and healed at every stage from 1 to 70. I’m not a moonkin expert or a tree expert, though I understand a fair amount about them. I’ve done some 25-man raiding and no 40-man raiding (basically, I just don’t enjoy large raids). I do not have a lot of PVP experience, so you will not find in-depth PVP advice here. It may show up once in a while by accident, but this is primarily a PVE guide.

This guide is not The Final Word on druids, just what I’ve learned. Treat it as advice (sometimes very well-informed advice, sometimes less well-informed advice), not rules.

Class Overview
If you’re really new to the druid class, this section is designed to tell you what we can do and what the different druid trees are for. This is not the section that dissects individual talents, just an introductory overview.

What is the point of a druid?
The point of a druid is that we can fill almost any role in the game: main tank, off-tank, healer, melee DPS, caster DPS. Pretty much the only thing we can’t do is provide CC in instances, since our indoor CC (Hibernate) is only useful against beasts and dragonkin, and there just aren’t that many beasts or dragonkin in instances right now. Unlike other hybrid classes like the paladin that have to respec to change roles, a druid can usually perform at least two roles quite well with nothing more than a change of gear. Druids allow you to experience the greatest variety of play styles in the game in a single class, and they provide great “flex” spots in raids and instances. For instance, instead of taking two prot warriors, one of whom will be wasted on single-tank fights, you can take a druid, who can be an extra tank, extra DPS, or extra healer as needed, all in the same run.

What are the druid talent trees?
Aesthetically, balance is the Druid as Nature’s Avenger. Mechanically, balance is our spellcaster DPS tree. Balance provides the highest potential DPS of all the druid trees both in raids and in PVP. Because its talents focus on spellcasting, it hybridizes well with the restoration tree, and even full balance druids can be very powerful healers.

Aesthetically, feral is the Druid as Shapeshifter. Mechanically, feral is our melee tree. Feral covers both the druid tanking talents as well as the core melee DPS talents, giving a feral druid excellent tanking capability and good DPS (though not as good as balance) all in the same tree. The tradeoff for this single-tree versatility is that many core feral talents are deep in the tree, meaning the feral tree is not very friendly to hybrid builds. Feral is more PVE-focused than the other trees, and most druids agree that feral is the weakest tree in arena PVP.

Aesthetically, restoration is the Druid as Nurturer. Mechanically, restoration is our healing tree. Restoration provides relatively few new mechanics to the druid healer, but significantly increases the power of a druid’s existing healing tools. Restoration druids synergize extremely well with other healing classes and are also extraordinarily powerful in arena PVP.

Leveling Feral
I’ve never leveled a druid as anything other than feral, so I will restrict my leveling advice to that spec. I am also not going to tell you where to level. This section is about how.

Feral is, everyone agrees, the fastest druid leveling spec. This is for two reasons. First, it combines excellent survivability with good DPS in a single spec. Second, it lets your mana regen between fights, so you can heal up every fifth pull or so and then let your mana regen again, resulting in almost no downtime.

A common practice for druids wishing to spec balance or restoration is to level as feral until 50 or 60, and then respec once most of their leveling is behind them.

If you plan to respec at 50, I would recommend this as a leveling build:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
If you plan to respec at 60, I recommend this:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

You might think that, while soloing, you won’t attack from behind very much, so 2/2 Shredding Attacks is a waste. For most classes this is true, but for cats (as you can see in my discussion of melee DPS) Shred is light-years better than either Claw or Rake, so you should attack from behind as often as possible. A good opener in cat form is

1. Pounce
2. Shred x2
3. Rip if at 4 CP, Rake otherwise

and POW, the mob is dead before he even gets to turn around. This is why 2/2 Shredding Attacks and 2/2 Brutal Impact are, surprisingly, excellent leveling talents.

Many druids find leveling difficult in their teens. At this level they have only their balance spells and bear form to work with, forcing them to either use all their mana or rely on a form that is not actually meant for DPSing. To these druids, I offer the following encouragement:

• When I was your age, we leveled barefoot in the snow both ways and we liked it.
• Hold out until your mid-20s at least. At level 20 you get cat form, which will make your leveling much easier, not to mention far more fun.

As you will quickly discover, cat form is best when it isn’t getting hit. Being a cat is kind of like being an egg with a sledgehammer: you can dish it out, but you aren’t so good at taking it. This is why a good solid opener is ideal for cat grinding. However, if you have to fight many mobs at once don't be afraid to just shift into bear and outlast them. This can also be useful for farming situations where you're competing with other players for mobs - just tag three of them in bear form and swipe them all to death.

Low-level Instances
At some point in your leveling career you will undoubtedly be called upon to enter an instance or two. Instances are a lot easier than they used to be (in the snow, I tell you! Barefoot!), but they’re still a good place to practice the basic skills that you will need at level 70 such as proper tanking, DPSing, and healing. No need to wait to level 70 to learn to play your class.

Much of the advice I give about tanking and DPSing elsewhere applies to low-level tanking and DPSing as well, except that you don’t have the all-important Mangle. Not to worry. Just take Mangle out of the equation.

For cat form instance DPS, that means your low-level rotation is very simple:

1. Shred to 4 combo points
2. Rip if the mob isn’t being Ripped already
3. Repeat 1-2

Low-level tanking is slightly more complicated. Since you don’t have either Mangle or Lacerate, you must rely on Maul and Swipe. Maul is your highest-threat attack but very rage costly. Swipe is far less threat but better rage management. There are two schools of thought about low-level tanking rotations:

The first school of thought says to try and get as close to the level 70 rotation as possible, which means:

1. Spam Swipe
2. If you’re Swiping every 1.5 seconds and still have extra rage, Maul until you’re out of rage
3. Repeat 1-2

The second school of thought says to just spam your highest-threat ability, which means:

1. Spam Maul
2. If you’re Mauling every 2.5 seconds and still have extra rage, spam Swipe until you’re out of rage
3. Repeat 1-2

Which works best for you will depend rather sensitively upon your gear and your DPSers’ DPS, so I can’t recommend one over the other. I myself had great success using the first (Swipe > Maul) and just making it a rule to always tank 3 mobs at a time, to ensure I had enough rage to do whatever I wanted. Your mileage may vary.

Even as a low-level feral, you can and should volunteer to heal any instance you come across if you have picked up a set of healing gear. In fact, it's worth it to pick up three sets of gear, even as a feral. All level 70 druids should have a DPS set for cat/moonkin, a tanking set for bear, and a healing set for caster/tree, and you might as well get into the habit early. Leveling is so fast these days that you won't build up a complete set for each probably until you hit the mid-50s at least, but you might as well get into the habit early. Low level (i.e., before 57) the stats you want to emphasize in your gear for the different sets are these:

• Cat DPS: agility > strength > crit rating > AP > hit rating
• Bear tanking: armor > stamina > agility/strength (agi and str equally in my opinion, before you can get a feral attack power weapon to take care of your bear form AP)
• Caster healing: +heal > intellect > mp5 > spirit

So how do you heal as a low-level feral? The key is to conserve mana by using your most mana-efficient spell, only when absolutely necessary. You should work to estimate how fast your tank’s HP is dropping and how long it will take to cast a spell that will heal him back to full, and hone that skill. Ideally you want your heal to go off just at the moment that it will heal him to 100% - no more, no less.

For the most part your most efficient spell while leveling is Healing Touch, but that changes as you get more and more +heal gear (and as you get brand-new ranks of spells). The following chart might be helpful:

• AT LEVEL 30:
  Regrowth is already more efficient than Healing Touch
  Rejuvenation becomes more efficient than HT at +250 heals
• AT LEVEL 40:
  Regrowth: +120 heals
  Rejuvenation: +340 heals
• AT LEVEL 50:
  Regrowth: +150 heals
  Rejuvenation: +395 heals
• AT LEVEL 60
  Regrowth: +0 heals (already better)
  Rejuvenation: +605 heals
• AT LEVEL 70:
  Regrowth: +1155 heals
  Rejuvenation: +705 heals
  Lifebloom: +0 heals (already better)

Questions about Druid Mechanics
This section will cover common questions about druid gameplay mechanics. This section is not opinion, it’s fact (or at least as close to fact as the best of the community’s researchers can get us to). If you see any errors, please point me to the research thread where you discovered the error and I will correct it accordingly.

1. What is the defense cap? The defense cap is defined as the point at which a character can no longer be critically hit, even by a raid boss. Although usually tanks treat the defense cap as the same for all mobs, technically speaking the defense cap depends on the level of the mob you're fighting:
   • If the mob is the same level as you, the defense cap is 5.0% crit reduction
   • If the mob is one level above you, the defense cap is 5.2% crit reduction
   • If the mob is two levels above you, the defense cap is 5.4% crit reduction (heroic bosses)
   • If the mob is three levels above you, the defense cap is 5.6% crit reduction (raid bosses)
   For feral druids with 3/3 Survival of the Fittest , that means 2.60% crit reduction from defense or resilience to hit the raid boss defense cap. 2.60% crit reduction solely from defense would require 65 defense, for a total of 415 defense, which is exactly 156 defense rating. But the real answer is to get to 2.60% crit reduction through any combination of defense and resilience available.
2. Wait, so do defense and resilience stack for purposes of determining my chance to be critted? Yes.
3. What is the hit cap? The hit cap for all physical attacks, in any form, depends on what level mob you’re fighting:
   • If the mob is the same level as you: 5.00% = 79 hit rating
   • If the mob is 1 level higher than you: 5.50% = 86.9 hit rating = 87 hit rating
   • If the mob is 2 levels higher than you (heroic bosses): 6.00% = 94.8 hit rating = 95 hit rating
   • If the mob is 3 levels higher than you (raid bosses): 9.00% = 142.2 hit rating = 143 hit rating
4. What is the spell hit cap? The spell hit cap also depends on the level of your target:
   • If the mob is the same level as you: 3.00% = 37.8 spell hit rating = 38 spell hit rating
   • If the mob is 1 level higher than you: 4.00% = 50.4 spell hit rating = 51 spell hit rating
   • If the mob is 2 levels higher than you (heroic bosses): 5.00% = 63 hit rating
   • If the mob is 3 levels higher than you (raid bosses): 16.00% = 201.6 spell hit rating = 202 spell hit rating
5. How is damage determined in cat form and bear form? The DPS of your weapon is irrelevant and always will be. Each of your feral forms (bear and cat) has its own built-in weapon with a speed of 2.50 and 1.00, respectively. The base damage range of those weapons depends solely upon your level, and caps out at 55 DPS at level 70. Your “feral weapons” are of course affected by attack power, haste rating, armor penetration, etc. just like any other melee weapon.
6. What effect does my weapon skill have on my damage/crit chance in cat form and bear form? None whatsoever. You have a special weapon skill called "feral combat skill" that doesn't show up on your character sheet and is automatically maxed for your level, so you never have to worry about leveling your weapon skill. That means you can be level 70, have a skill of 1 in 2H maces, and you will still hit just as hard as if you had 350 skill. Of course, weapon skill affects your melee damage in caster form and moonkin form just as you’d expect.
7. What procs/enchants work in feral forms? Weapon enchants or effects that proc on hit (even if the proc chance is 100%, such as +7 damage to 2H) do not work on weapons in feral forms. Everything else (i.e., stat enchants on weapons such as +35 agility to 2H) does. Enchants or effects that proc on a hit but do not come on a weapon (such as Crystalforged Trinket or Enchant Ring – Striking do work in feral forms.
   
   If this is confusing, think of it this way: while shapeshifted you are not swinging your hammer, you’re swinging your paw. A Crystalforged Trinket adds 7 damage to whatever your weapon is, be it hammer, cat paw, or girlie night elf open palm strike. A Dark Iron Pulverizer can only proc when you hit with your Dark Iron Pulverizer, which you never do in feral forms. Mongoose doesn’t work because you enchanted your weapon with Mongoose, which you aren’t swinging in forms. If you could enchant a ring with Mongoose, it would work in forms.
8. Isn’t it true you have a 0.000000000000001% chance to be critted no matter what you do? Maybe. The truth is that nobody knows. There are a few documented cases of “uncrittable” tanks being critted. Some of those cases can be explained – the tank accidentally hit the “sit” button at the time (default X), making the next hit a guaranteed crit, or the mob had mind controlled a feral druid, giving it the +5% crit buff from Leader of the Pack, or whatever. A very few cases cannot be explained, which means one of three things:
   • You really do have a 0.00000000000001% chance to be crit no matter what you do (unlikely; this explanation sounds suspiciously like a common misconception about floating point arithmetic)
   • They really can be explained by a more mundane cause like the tank sitting down or MCing a feral druid, but everybody involved has either forgotten or didn’t pay enough attention in the first place
   • Some mobs have a higher-than-average crit chance, but we don’t know precisely which mobs or how much higher their crit chance is
   So far, opinion seems to be leaning towards either the second or third possibility.

(Cont.)

1. How do the bear form and dire bear form multipliers work exactly? What effect does Thick Hide have? The bear forms add the listed armor percentage to your base (i.e., 100%) armor percentage. So bear form gives you 100% + 180% = 280% total armor (i.e., take the armor on the item and multiply by 2.8 to find out how much armor you would have wearing that item in bear form). Dire bear form gives you 100% + 400% = 500% total armor (i.e., multiply by 5). Thick Hide applies to both your base armor and the bear armor. So bear form with 3/3 Thick Hide gives you 100% x 1.1 + 180% x 1.1 = 308% (multiply by 3.0. Dire bear form gives you 100% x 1.1 + 400% x 1.1 = 550% (multiply by 5.5).
2. Are armor kits multiplied by bear form? What about armor from agility? Or armor from Devotion Aura? Or Stoneshield Potions? Nope. A light armor kit is 8 armor even in dire bear form. 1 agility is still only 2 armor, even in dire bear form. Only armor actually on an equippable item gets multiplied.
3. What is the armor cap? The armor cap is the point at which you hit the maximum damage reduction from armor (75.00%). The cap depends on the level of mob you’re fighting:
   • For a level 70 mob, the armor cap is 31673
   • For a level 71 mob, the armor cap is 33075
   • For a level 72 mob, the armor cap is 34478
   • For a level 73 mob, the armor cap is 35880
4. What are my stat conversions?
   • 1 strength = 2 AP in all forms
   • 1 agility = 1 AP in cat form only
   • 1 agility = 2 armor in all forms
   • 14.73 agility = 1.0% dodge in all forms
   • 25 agility = 1.0% crit in all forms
   • 1 stamina = 10 HP in all forms
   • 1 int = 15 mana in all forms
   • 79.97 int = 1.0% spell crit in all forms
   • 1.8 spi = 1mp5 not casting
   • 6 spi = 1mp5 casting with 3/3 Intensity
5. What are the Combat Ratings conversions?
   • 15.76 Expertise Rating = 4 Expertise (-1.00% dodge and -1.00% parry)
   • 15.76 Hit Rating = -1.0% miss chance
   • 12.62 Spell Hit Rating = -1.0% spell miss chance
   • 22.08 Crit Rating = +1.0% crit chance
   • 22.08 Spell Crit Rating = +1.0% spell crit chance
   • 15.76 Haste Rating = +1.0% haste
   • 15.76 Spell Haste Rating = +1.0% spell haste
   • 18.9 Dodge Rating = +1.0% dodge chance
   • 2.4 Defense Rating = 1 defense skill
   • 1 Defense Skill = +0.04% chance to be missed, +0.04% chance to dodge*
   • 25 Defense Skill/60 Defense Rating = +1.00% chance to be missed, +1.00% chance to dodge
   • 39.4 Resilience = -1.0% crit chance, -2.0% crit damage, -1.0% DoT damage
6. Does Heart of the Wild apply to all attack power in cat form, or just items with AP on them? All attack power, whether you get it from strength, AP, Battle Shout, Unleashed Rage, enchants – all attack power.

* 1 defense skill also grants +0.04% chance to parry and +0.04% chance to block, but druids can't parry or block in the first place, so we don't receive these bonuses.

Special Mention: Stealth
I mention the stealth mechanics here rather than in the cat form section because stealth is really not a DPS ability, but can be very useful while leveling. Before we begin, I should be clear that stealth is not the same as invisibility (which I won't cover here because druids can't become invisible).

Stealth decreases the range at which players and mobs can see you (and thus, react). Druids have an invisible "stealth skill" called Subtlety that doesn't appear on their character sheet and always increases by 5 for each level (thus at level 70 you have a base Subtlety skill of 350). All characters also have a Stealth Detection skill, which also doesn't appear on their character sheet and always increases by 5 for each level (thus at level 70 you have a base Stealth Detection skill of 350).

At equal levels of Subtlety and Stealth Detection, a stealthed character can be seen 5 yards away. Each 5 points of skill changes that range by 1 yard either way, up to a maximum of 10 yards and a minimum of 1 yard. So for example:

• If a stealthed cat has a Subtlety of 350, a Stealth Detection of 340 could only see him 3 yards away
• If a stealthed cat has a Subtlety of 350, a Stealth Detection of 365 could see him 8 yards away
• If a stealthed cat has a Subtlety of 5, a Stealth Detection of 400 could see him 10 yards away

Keep in mind that Stealth Detection only works for your frontal 180 degree cone. A level 1 cat could sneak up on a level 70 human warlock with Perception popped, Hyper-Vision Goggles, a Catseye Elixir, and a Felhunter out, and still be undetected as long as the cat approached from behind.

The night elf racial Shadowmeld increases Subtlety by 5 points, so effectively night elves have a base stealth detection range of 4 yards. Each rank of Feral Instinct increases Subtlety by another 5 points. Thus a stealthed night elf cat with 3/3 Feral Instinct would have 370 Subtlety, and be detectable by somebody with 350 Stealth Detection from the minimum of 1 yard. A tauren cat with 3/3 Feral Instinct has a base detection range of 2 yards.

There are various other ways of increasing your Subtlety or your Stealth Detection. I refer you to this article for a list.

[Eepi]

Part 2: Bear Tanking


Tanking
This section will cover the subject of druid tanking as completely as I can: theory, practice, talents, and gear. This section is mostly my opinion. Obviously I think I’m right (otherwise it wouldn’t be my opinion) but remember that I am not the All-Knowing Bear God of Tanking.

Tanking Theory: What Do We Do?
A tank has two jobs in a group. The first job is to make sure that no mobs are hitting a healer or DPSer. When mobs are hitting people other than the tank it wastes time and resources at best and will lead to a wipe at worst. Tanks make sure that no mobs are hitting anybody other than tanks by generating the most threat of anybody in the fight (see below).

DIGRESSION: What is Threat and How Does It Work?
This section will explain what threat is and how it works. If you know this already, great. Otherwise, stick around. You just might learn something. Threat is what determines who a mob is attacking. A long time ago people used to think that mobs used some complicated AI to determine who they would attack, and there was no way we’d ever figure it out precisely. Turns out they were wrong on both counts. Mobs don’t use complicated AI, and we have figured it out pretty darn precisely.

Think of threat as an invisible resource you give to a mob by healing or buffing party members and doing damage to the mob. Whoever has given the mob the most threat is the one the mob attacks (see below for more details). If you hit the mob for 100 damage, you just generated 100 threat on that mob. If I hit the mob for 200 damage, I generated 200 threat on that mob. I have more threat than you, so it attacks me. If you hit it for 200 damage, you now have 300 threat on that mob, and it attacks you. Simple as that. Now let’s get more precise.

Every mob in the fight starts off with aggro on somebody. Aggro means who the mob’s target is; that’s why people say you “pulled aggro” if the mob stops attacking somebody else and starts attacking you. If nobody has generated any threat on a mob it will attack the nearest player (this is called “body aggro”). Otherwise it attacks the first person to generate threat against it. From that point forward the mob is on the threat mechanic.

Once a mob is on the threat mechanic (because at least one player has generated threat against it), there are two rules governing how to pull aggro. A player in melee range of the mob (i.e., the mob can melee that player without taking any steps) pulls aggro once it has 10% more threat than the player with aggro. So suppose the tank has 100 threat on the mob. Players in melee range can generate up to 109 threat and not pull aggro. At 110 threat, BAM, they’re the new target. And then the tank has to get up to 121 threat (10% more than 110) to get aggro back. This is known as the 10% rule, and applies to any player in melee range of a mob.

If the player is not in melee range, that player pulls aggro once it has 30% more threat than the player with aggro. So if the tank has 100 threat on the mob, a player at range could generate up to 129 threat without pulling aggro. It doesn’t matter how far away from the mob you are. 6 yards away or 100 yards away, the threshold is still 30%. This is known as the 30% rule and applies to any player not in melee range of a mob.

What about taunting? A taunt has up to three effects:

1. It sets the taunter’s threat equal to whoever has aggro on the mob (note that this is not enough to trigger the 10% rule or the 30% rule.
2. It gives the taunter aggro, violating the 10% rule and 30% rule.
3. It gives the mob a short debuff that forces it to attack the taunter for as long as the debuff lasts, regardless of threat (i.e., it takes the mob temporarily off the threat mechanic).

Some abilities are taunt-like but not true taunts. For instance, the so-called “AOE taunts,” Challenging Roar and Challenging Shout, only have effect #3.

This is why the tooltip for Growl says it has no effect if the mob is already attacking you. Actually, strictly speaking, the tooltip is wrong. If you have 100 threat and aggro, and a hunter has 129 threat, and you Growl, you will still have aggro, but you will now have 129 threat instead of 100.

If the main way to generate threat on a mob is to hurt it or heal it, why don’t the DPSers and healers always have aggro? The answer is to cheat. All tanks have abilities that generate more threat than they otherwise would (and most DPSers and healers have abilities that generate less threat than they should, helping us out from the other end). If you try to keep aggro from a rogue by out-DPSing him, you’re going to fail. This is why it’s important for a tank to know which abilities generate the most threat for their rage cost (TPR): you’ve not only got to cheat, you have to cheat efficiently.

END DIGRESSION

Offensive Tanking Practice: How To Generate Threat
What separates a great tank from a tank that merely got you through the run? A great tank not only gets you to the end of the run, he gets you to the end of the run smoothly. A great tank finishes the instance in 45 minutes and leaves you going, “Wow … I want to run with that guy again!” How can a tank make a run go smoothly? Two ways.

1. First, by being easy to heal. A great tank has geared in advance to make sure the healer isn’t always scrambling to keep him alive.
2. Second, by having high, consistent threat per second (TPS). A great tank generates so much threat that the DPS can jump in right from the start, and the healers never even think about pulling heal aggro. A great tank knows how to use his rage to generate the maximum possible threat, resulting in not only high TPS but smooth TPS that isn’t threatened by a few big crits from a mage or a rogue.

So which abilities do generate the most threat? Turns out druids have it easy. There is one simple priority order for single-target tanking that all druid tanks must memorize for all mobs, bleedable or non-bleedable. In order from the most TPR to least: Mangle > Lacerate > Maul. In other words,

1. Mangle if the cooldown is up.
2. Lacerate if it isn’t.
3. If you can get off one Mangle and three Lacerates every 6 seconds and still have rage left over, spam Maul until you’re out of rage while repeating 1-2.
4. Repeat 1-3.

Swipe can replace Lacerate if you have extraordinarily high attack power (your Swipe has to land for about 336 after-armor damage before Swipe is better TPR than Lacerate).

Multi-mob tanking is somewhat harder. Swipe is our main tool for holding aggro on multiple mobs. Swipe spam is good enough to hold aggro on three mobs in some circumstances. Swipe does not generate any extra threat (see Offensive Tanking Math, below). This means it generates threat purely through damage dealt. Depending on how hard you're getting hit, this might not be enough to out-aggro your healers. The usual way to do "Swipe spam" is to:

1. Spam Swipe
2. Spam Maul on your main target
3. When tanking more than three mobs (which is difficult for a druid, but possible) change targets frequently to be sure all the mobs in the pull are getting Swiped.

Simple enough, if it works. If this is not enough to keep aggro on the off-targets, land some Lacerates (or even some Mangles) on the off-targets. A mouseover Lacerate macro can help, by casting Lacerate on your actual target unless your cursor is hovering over a live mob. This lets you use your Lacerate button like normal, but simply point at an off-target you want to Lacerate. Here's the basic macro:
#showtooltip
/cast [target=mouseover,nodead,harm][] Lacerate
Some offensive tanking tips and tricks:

1. The first thing you hit your main target with after the initial pull should be a double Mangle/Maul combo unless you have a super compelling reason not to. Mangle/Maul offers two benefits as an opening combo:
   1. It's the maximum amount of threat you can get in the space of a single hit. This gives you a nice threat lead over your DPS so they can open up immediately, which is worth violating the normal rule that says Maul is the last use of your rage.
   2. It gives you some insurance against misses, parries, and dodges - if one ability doesn't land, the second one almost certainly will, so you're virtually guaranteed to land with a high-threat ability right off the bat.
   To perform a Mangle/Maul combo, target the mob and hit Maul before it's in range. This will cast Maul the instant the mob comes in range (which is also when you hit Mangle).
   
   
2. Pick up 3/3 Intensity. You can then use Enrage before a pull and have enough rage to hit the mob immediately with a double Maul/Mangle combo. Your Enrage also then becomes a good tool for using mid-fight if you find yourself temporarily out of rage.
   
   
3. If you do lose aggro, use Feral Charge to catch up with the mob. You can then Growl (which is a true taunt) to regain aggro immediately, and give the mob a good Maul/Mangle combo to make sure it doesn’t forget who it’s supposed to be hitting.
   
   
4. Remember that Challenging Roar is not a true taunt. It forces the mobs off the threat mechanic, giving you temporary aggro for 6 seconds, but that’s it. If you don’t generate enough threat to get aggro on the mobs for real during those 6 seconds, they’ll go back to whatever they were doing when the 6 seconds are up. This makes Challenging Roar of limited use for trying to tank a huge pack of mobs.
   • On the other hand, if Growl is resisted, Challenging Roar can give you enough time to land a Maul/Mangle combo on the mob, which will probably boost you to the top of the threat list all by itself.
   • You can’t use Challenging Roar to get aggro on a huge pack of mobs, but you can use it effectively in AOE situations all the same. Wait until your AOEr is in trouble (e.g., the mage has blown all his snare cooldowns and the mobs are beating on him). Then hit Challenging Roar. Presto – the AOEr has 6 seconds of breathing room for a cooldown to finish, or just to get some more distance.
5. There are a number of different ways to pull, all of which are valid. The different pulling strategies trade mana for extra initial threat, so you decide to balance maximal threat (and thus control of the fight) with drinking time. In order of increasing mana intensiveness:
   • From bear form, pop Enrage, and pull with Feral Faerie Fire.
   • Shift into bear form to get rage from Furor, pop Enrage, and pull with Feral Faerie Fire.
   • Starfire your main target, shift into bear form, pop Enrage, and hit with Feral Faerie Fire.
   • Wrath your off-target, Moonfire your main target while the Wrath bolt is still traveling, shift into bear form, pop Enrage, and hit with Feral Faerie Fire.
   • Hurricane an entire pack, shift into bear form, pop Enrage, and hit with Feral Faerie Fire.
6. Demoralizing Roar does not generate a lot of threat. Do not use it as your primary tool to keep aggro against multiple mobs. However, it can be used to pick up a spawn or an add (something that is coming into the fight fresh, with no threat built up yet) without having to hit it.
7. If you have a free special attack due to an Omen of Clarity proc, try to use it on Mangle or Lacerate rather than Maul. Remember that Maul costs about 8 rage in lost autoattack rage whether you pay 10 rage to use the ability or not, so OoC only saves you 10 rage on Maul, whereas it saves you 15 rage on Mangle and 13 rage on Lacerate. The difference is not critical, of course, and not worth seriously interrupting your TPS rotation for. However, if it just means delaying hitting the Maul key for a moment, it's worth it to save the extra rage.

Defensive Tanking Practice: How Not to Die
Now we know how to create high, consistent TPS. But how do we make ourselves easy to heal?

There are two things that will kill you as a tank: slow grinding damage and big spike damage. If you're dying to slow grinding damage it's because your long-term DPS intake from mobs is higher than your long-term HPS intake from your healers. This means that you don't have the gear to tank the fight, your healers don't have the gear to heal the fight, or both. Either way, stop trying until somebody gets some upgrades.

This means, in practice, a tank is going to die either to spike damage or to something that isn’t his fault (e.g., a healer fell asleep at the keyboard, so the tank got ground to death). There are three sources of big spike damage: crits, crushing blows, and spells. A crit deals 2X damage. A crushing blow deals 1.5X damage. A spell deals however much damage the spell deals, and can never crit or crush.

You should never die to crits (which deal 2x damage), because you can make yourself crit-immune (see mechanics section of part 1 of this guide for the exception). To make yourself crit-immune to a raid boss you need (as you know from the mechanics section) a total of -5.6% chance to be critted. So much for crits.

What about crushes? Warriors and paladins can become temporarily immune to crushing blows. Druids cannot*. You will always have a 15% chance to be crushed by a raid boss, no matter what you do. You cannot stack enough dodge, enough defense, or enough resilience to become crush immune. Your only defense against crushing blows is to stack armor and hit points enough that they don't matter. A crushing blow on a druid can and should be the same as a regular hit on a prot warrior. That’s your protection against crushes.

Your only defense against magic spike damage is AOE avoidance from Predatory Instincts (if the spell is AOE) or lots of hit points. Warriors and paladins innately take less damage than normal from spells; that’s their defense against magic spike damage. Ours is just to have lots and lots of HP.

Thus, the sources of survivability once you are crit-immune are:

1. Dodge (from agility, defense, and dodge rating) - helps with slow grinding damage
2. Armor (from armor) - helps with crushing blows and slow grinding damage**
3. Hit Points (from stamina) - helps with all forms of damage

As a result of the above three bullet points, my [very strong] personal opinion is that a druid should stack armor and stamina first, and agility second. This doesn’t mean that dodge is bad. Dodge is good. Dodge is our friend. The more dodge you have, the less hard your healers have to work, and the more they will love you. Without enough dodge your slow grinding damage will be too much for your healers, and there’s nothing more discouraging than fighting your way to a boss only to discover you don’t have the gear for the fight.

HOWEVER, it also sucks to be three minutes into the boss fight and get two-shotted by back-to-back crushes because you didn’t stack enough armor and HP.

* Technically you could stack so much dodge that you would be crush-immune, if you had access to all the gear in the game. However, such a set would not be a viable tanking set. Its main problem is that you would dodge so often that you wouldn't have enough rage to keep aggro on the mob, so your DPS would be absurdly slow. If you had a really really well coordinated group you could probably do it, but in all likelihood your DPS would pull aggro just from autoattacks unless they deliberately downgraded their gear.

** I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that armor has diminishing returns, and dodge doesn’t. Please never say that out loud. Go read this instead.

Offensive Tanking Math: Threat
For those of you who want more detail, here are how the major druid abilities break down in terms of threat at level 70. If you want a more complete list for all the classes, see here:

• Bear Form and Dire Bear Form multiply all base threat generated by 1.3. 5/5 Feral Instinct increases this multiplier to 1.45.
• Mangle generates base threat equal to 1.3 times the damage inflicted. It is a druid’s highest-threat ability.
• Lacerate does 285 base threat plus 20% of all damage it deals.
• Maul does base threat equal to damage dealt plus 322. This makes it a druid’s second highest threat ability.
• Swipe does base threat equal to damage dealt.
• Demoralizing Roar generates base threat equal to 42.
• Feral Faerie Fire and Faerie Fire generates base threat equal to 108.
• All damaging spells generate base threat equal to the damage dealt.

Why is Maul third in priority even though it does more threat than Lacerate (and, seemingly, more than Mangle)? Even though Lacerate is the lowest threat of the three primary druid tanking abilities, it is second in priority because, being an instant attack instead of next melee, it is more threat per rage than Maul.

Let's assume that Mangle hits for 500.

• Mangle hits for 1.15 times white damage plus 155, for 15 rage (talented). So if Mangle hits for 500, our white hits are for 300.
• Maul adds 176 damage to the next attack, for 10 rage (talented). So our Maul would hit for 476.
• A normal white hit from a bear of 300 damage generates 8.47 rage.

Now let's look at a 2.5 second window of time where we could either Mangle and get off one autoattack, or Maul once.

Mangle + Autoattack:

• Mangle once for 500 x 1.3 = 650 base threat
• Spend 15 rage
• Autoattack once for 300 x 1.0 = 300 base threat
• Gain 8.47 rage
• Total base threat generated: 950
• Total rage spent: 6.53
• Total base threat per rage: 145.48

Maul

• Maul once for 476 + 322 = 798 threat
• Spend 10 rage
• Total base threat generated: 798
• Total rage spent: 10
• Total base threat per rage: 89.8

For this reason the Mangle + autoattack combo will remain better total threat unless your autoattack hits for 200 or less. However, Mangle + autoattack is better TPR unless your autoattack hits for 140 or less (which is very low for a level 70 bear). So the rule of thumb for basically all bears is Mangle over Maul if you have to pick one. Similar math can be shown for Lacerate vs. Maul, which is why the rage-limited priority for a bear is Mangle > Lacerate > Maul.

Offensive Tanking Math: Rage
It's common to hear people talk about boss fights as giving a tank "unlimited rage." Obviously that's not true; all fights give a tank a finite and [theoretically] knowable amount of rage. But as you can now figure out, there's also a finite amount of rage that a druid can actually use. A "full on" single-target tanking rotation for a druid would be:

• 1 Mangle and 3 Lacerates every 6 seconds and
• 1 Maul every 2.5 seconds (assuming no haste effects)

This works out to exactly 14 rage per second (RPS). More rage than that is not bad per se, but it's not very useful either since at 14 rage per second a druid can be using a special ability every single global cooldown and every single autoattack.

Knowing that 14 RPS is the magic "unlimited" number leads to some interesting observations. As you know, Primal Fury will grant 5 rage every time any bear attack crits, and all druid tanking attacks can crit (this is the most significant effect of Lacerate having an initial damage component - the crit might only hit for about 40 damage, but it still procs Primal Fury). If a bear has a crit chance of about 25%, this leads to an average of 1.33 rage per second (because a full-on bear lands an attack roughly once per second). That's 1.33 RPS from Primal Fury procs (more or less depending on crit chance).

What about rage from damage dealt? Maul generates no rage from damage, of course, but autoattacks generate a surprising amount. Here is the formula for rage generated through white damage dealt at level 70, which is quite simple:

[(7.5d / 274.4) + (fs)] / 2

where

• d = damage dealt
• f = 3.5 for a normal hit, 7.0 for a critical hit
• s = weapon speed (always 2.5 for a bear assuming no haste)

So take a bear whose autoattack hits for an average of 300. That's

[(7.5 x 300) / 274.4 + (3.5 x 2.5)] / 2 = 8.5 rage

which in turn is 3.4 rage per second (actually 4.3 RPS when you factor in 25% crit chance). That's a significant amount given that the maximum RPS is only 14.0.

The formula for rage generated through damage taken at level 70 is even simpler:

2.5d / 274.7

Since you might be curious, this means that in order to gain 8.37 RPS (the amount our example druid needs to get up to the magic 14) our example druid would need to be taking 918 DPS exactly, after all defenses were taken into account.

Here's another interesting question: since a druid going all-out generates no rage from autoattacks (because every autoattack is a Maul), how much DPS would he need to take to reach 14, assuming only 1.33 RPS from Primal Fury procs? The answer (math omitted) is 1390 DPS, quite a bit more than if the druid isn't using Maul at all.

Oh, and in case you're feeling really hardcore, here's how to scale these formulas for lower levels than 70. Replace the 274.7 number with the following:

(0.0091107836 x Level^2) + (3.225598133 x Level) + 4.2652911

Tanking Talents
A full tanking build would look like this: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft. There are some common feral talents missing from that build, but this is how I would maximize a druid for PVE tanking. The core tanking talents are:

1. 5/5 Ferocity – necessary to lower the cost of our abilities enough to keep up with realistic amounts of rage.
2. 3/3 Feral Instinct – changes the bear form threat multiplier from 1.30 to 1.45. That’s a huge boost.
3. 1/1 Feral Charge – this ability is our main way to catch up to mobs that got loose. Use it on mobs you lost aggro on, as an interrupt against spellcaster mobs, or against far away adds. A very versatile tool.
4. 2/2 Shredding Attacks – Lacerate is second in the single-target tanking rotation, so anything that reduces its rage cost is a must-have.
5. 2/2 Primal Fury – This is an important source of rage, and the key to our off-tanking prowess.
6. 1/1 Feral Faerie Fire – it doesn’t generate a lot of threat, but it does let you pull from bear form. And the armor reduction doesn’t hurt either.
7. 5/5 Heart of the Wild – +20% stamina is a lot. It also stacks multiplicatively with the bear form stamina modifier and Survival of the Fittest, meaning a fully talented bear gains 54% extra HP per point of stamina.
8. 3/3 Survival of the Fittest – the stat bonus is small, but the crit reduction is huge. You need this to become uncrittable.
9. 1/1 Mangle – our biggest, most efficient high-threat attack. You can tank without this but your TPS will drop dramatically, which is always dangerous.

Aldor or Scryer?
A word on the choice of the Aldor vs. the Scryers. Neither of the factions provides any gear that can't be replaced, and neither provides any recipes that you absolutely must have, unless your guild dictates it according to some Master Crafter Plan, and can't be persuaded after you copy and paste this section. The one thing they do provide that you can't replace or buy is inscriptions. This means in my opinion, for feral druids especially, that the choice of faction should predominantly be based on the choice the tanking inscriptions (the cat inscriptions are essentially interchangeable, but for what it's worth cats favor Scryers).

If you take a look at you'll see that the Scryer inscriptions favor defense and the Aldor inscriptions favor dodge:

• Inscription of Warding (honored Aldor) - 13 dodge rating (0.69% dodge)
• Inscription of the Knight (honored Scryer) - 13 defense rating (0.22% crit reduction, 0.22% dodge, 0.22% miss)
• Greater Inscription of Warding (exalted Aldor) - 15 dodge rating (0.79% dodge), 10 defense rating (0.17% crit reduction, 0.17% dodge, 0.17% miss)
• Greater Inscription of the Knight (exalted Scryer) - 15 defense rating (0.25% crit reduction, 0.25% dodge, 0.25% miss), 10 dodge rating (0.53% dodge)

All the inscriptions give exactly the same value in terms of item points. But as you can see, the Scryer inscriptions give significantly more crit reduction, and only the Scryer inscriptions give crit reduction at honored reputation.

It's true that the Aldor inscriptions give more long-term damage reduction. However, as you can see, if you can use the crit reduction, the Scryer inscriptions give nearly the same long-term DR. For this reason my personal preference for druid tanks is to go Scryer. The extra defense on the greater inscription can make the burden of finding crit reduction easier at the higher tiers of gear, and the fact that the regular inscription gives any defense at all means that a tank can be uncrittable with no defense gems even in all blues (i.e., even without Earthwarden). Of course, if you have a lot of resilience on your tanking gear and therefore don't need the extra defense from Scryer inscriptions, the Aldor inscriptions would have provided more damage reduction overall. You should consider where you plan to stop - if you don't ever expect to see your druid in full Tier 4, Aldor may be the way to go for you. But I consider the Scryer enchants the better choice for early tank gear (pre-Kara blues) and later tank gear (T4-T6).

As a side note, it's well worth grinding (or buying) yourself to exalted with your faction of choice, and especially worth it for the Aldor druid, to open up another source of defense. There are exactly six true druid tanking shoulders in the entire game (S1-3, T4-6), so it's not as if you'll be re-inscribing a constant stream of upgrades.

Tanking Gear
I don’t personally believe in tank points, or any other system that tries to rate tank gear on a single continuum of best to worst. The trouble with tank points is that they’re usually predicated on a long-term analysis so, e.g., 1% dodge means you take 1% less damage overall. That’s fine for a long-term analysis, but as I’ve already discussed, tanks get killed for short term reasons. However, if you must have a comprehensive listing of tank gear to use as a reference, go get Rawr.

As always, I advocate understanding the mechanics and making your own decisions. Here’s what the various tanking stats do for you:

1. Dodge (from agility, defense, and dodge rating) - helps with slow grinding damage
2. Armor (from armor) - helps with crushing blows and slow grinding damage
3. Hit Points (from stamina) - helps with all forms of damage
4. Attack Power (from strength and AP) – helps with TPS from autoattack and Mangle
5. Crit chance (from agility and crit rating) – helps with TPS from all attacks and provides extra rage from Primal Fury procs
6. Hit Rating (from hit rating) – helps with TPS by making all attacks less likely to miss, and makes Growl and Challenging Roar less likely to be resisted
7. Expertise (from expertise rating) – helps with TPS by making all attacks less likely to be dodged and less likely to be parried. Twice as effective as hit rating at increasing TPS, but does not affect taunts.

A word on Hit Rating/Expertise.
While it is true that you do 0 TPS when dead, you might as well be dead if you can't keep aggro. Hit Rating and Expertise are relatively unimportant midway through the fight. DPS is usually conservative enough that it's trying to give you about a 10-20% TPS lead, which means that after a few minutes you've got enough of a raw threat lead to cover a string of misses, parries, and dodges (blocks will reduce the damage the mob takes, but the attack still "landed," meaning it still dealt damage and the innate threat of Lacerate and Maul was still applied).

Early in the fight is another matter. Early in the fight you don't have a raw threat lead to speak of (or else you're telling your DPS to hold off until you've established one, which is safe but tedious). The DPS will still be trying to give you a 10-20% TPS lead, but that's in the long term. In the short term you might get several misses/dodges/parries in a row, or they might get a few crits in a row, and then DPS has pulled aggro in the short term, and you aren't doing your job.

Is it your fault? Well, kind of. You can't control their crits, but you can control your misses through Hit Rating and Expertise. How much do you need? Depends on your tolerance for risk, but consider the following:

• The 10% and 30% rules mean aggro is easier to keep than to regain. The easiest way to keep aggro is never to lose it.
• With 0 HR and 0 Expertise the odds of Maul or Mangle (the usual big-threat openers) not landing against a raid boss (=miss/dodge/parry) is roughly 20%. But the odds of both missing is about 4%. This is why a Maul/Mangle combo opener is so important.
• After the initial opener you probably don't have the rage for constant Maul/Mangle or Maul/Lacerate combos (if you do, then great; you're pretty well insulated). That means, without Hit Rating or Expertise, you're dealing with a 20% chance that you'll go for a few seconds without a single yellow attack landing.

The cheapest way to reduce that ugly 20% number is to stack some Expertise. But Hit Rating is a lot easier to find. I myself reduce the 20% number to about 15% (same as pelf, if you read the comments below) and find that feels a lot more controllable than tanking "raw."

A Word About Gems
It is an Inviolate Druid Rule not to gem for defense until you have at least enchanted your bracers with defense and your chest with resilience. My strong personal preference is to also inscribe your shoulders for defense before using gem sockets for defense.

You can't really consider the question of gems without also considering the question of enchants at the same time. Consider the following alternatives:

1. Head -Glyph of Ferocity vs. Glyph of the Defender
2. Chest - Major Resilience vs. Heavy Knothide Armor Kit or Exceptional Stats
3. Bracer - Major Defense vs. Fortitude or Stats
4. Sockets - +8 defense vs. +8 agility or +12 stamina or +4 agility/+4 hit rating

Notice a couple things about the list up there:

• Your chest enchant slot gets you either 0.38% crit reduction or 10 stamina
• Your bracer enchant slot gets you either 0.20% crit reduction or 12 stamina
• Your sockets get you either 0.13% crit reduction or 12 stamina

Stats in sockets are pretty much interchangeable; none of the tanking gems let you beat the system (e.g., 2x +4agi/+6stam = 1x +8 agi + 1x +12 stam, and 8 defense rating costs the same as 8 agility or 12 stamina). However, not all enchants are created equal. From a tanking perspective, +12 defense to bracers gets you a lot more than +stats to bracers, as does +resilience to chest compared to a heavy knothide armor kit. Which would you rather have? +8 defense from a gem and +10 stamina from your chest? Or +15 resilience from your chest and +12 stamina from a gem? The answer is obviously the latter.

I prefer the tanking inscriptions to the DPS ones. Neither crit rating nor attack power are critical stats for tanks, whereas the defense from inscriptions can free up gem sockets to carry stats that are more critical, like agility, hit rating, or stamina.

Glyphs are another question, since Glyph of Ferocity offers hit rating (which is good, but hard to come by) in exchange for two sockets' worth of defense. Personally I decided on my glyph last, and managed to come up with enough defense without wasting gems (or even enchant slots) that I could take Glyph of Ferocity (since I'd rather have that hit rating than some extra dodge).

As for which gems to pick, my personal opinion is to go for Solid Star of Elune all the way if you can, but you already know I have a personal bias for stamina over agility. I also have a personal bias for armor over both, so my personal tanking gear tends to run low on stamina but high on armor, which I try to make up for with extra stamina gems. Remember though that unless you must gem for defense, your sockets should only be spent on:

• Stamina
• Agility
• Hit Rating

The exact combination of gems is, as I said, immaterial. Unlike healing gems, which let you "beat the system" if you go with combination colors, all possible combinations of tanking gems work are equal in terms of item point values and sockets required.

What should I have going into Karazhan?
Tanks often worry about whether they can handle Karazhan. As I said, I don’t believe in ultra-rigid listings of tank gear. However, here’s my personal preferred standard pre-Karazhan starter package. Everything here can be gotten without setting a foot in Karazhan and without any particular arena skill, although some of it is more labor-intensive than others. I include badge rewards and arenas because some players don’t have the time or the guild to do Karazhan right away, but do have the time to do lots of arenas or heroics. If you had the time to get all the epics in this list you’d be ready to jump into T5 tanking immediately. Even if you only get all the blues, you’ll be good to go through Curator at least.

• Head – Stylin’ Purple Hat, Cowl of Beastly Rage, Vengeful Gladiator’s Dragonhide Helm
• Neck – Strength of the Untamed, Necklace of the Juggernaut, Brooch of Deftness
• Shoulders – Shoulderpads of Assassination, Merciless Gladiator’s Dragonhide Spaulders
• Cloak – Thoriumweave Cloak, Slikk’s Cloak of Placation
• Chest – Heavy Clefthoof Vest, Vestments of Hibernation, Vengeful Gladiator’s Dragonhide Tunic
• Bracers – Umberhowl’s Collar, Vindicator’s Dragonhide Bracers, Band of the Swift Paw
• Gloves – Verdant Gloves, Vengeful Gladiator’s Dragonhide Gloves
• Belt – Manimal’s Cinch, Tree-Mender’s Belt, Vindicator’s Dragonhide Belt, Waistguard of the Great Beast
• Legguards – Heavy Clefthoof Leggings, Vengeful Gladiator’s Dragonhide Legguards
• Boots – Heavy Clefthoof Boots, Vindicator’s Dragonhide Boots, Footwraps of Wild Encroachment, Boots of Natural Grace
• Rings – Iron Band of the Unbreakable, Ring of Unyielding Force
• Trinkets – Argussian Compass, Badge of Tenacity
• Weapon – Braxxis’ Staff of Slumber, Earthwarden
• Idol – Idol of Brutality, Idol of Terror

[Eepi]

Part 3: Cat DPS


Melee DPS
This section will cover melee DPS (i.e., cat form) as completely as I can: theory, practice, talents, and gear. This section is mostly my opinion. Obviously I think I’m right (otherwise it wouldn’t be my opinion) but remember that I am not the All-Knowing Cat God of DPS.

Cat Theory: Ripping Faces Without Getting Noticed
Before we start, we need to be clear on what the job of a DPS class is. It is not to do as much DPS as humanly possible. That’s easy. The job of a DPS class is to do as much damage as possible without pulling aggro. That’s hard.

What this means is that good DPS pays attention to the fight, and to any add-ons available to help (such as Omen, my threat meter of choice). The skill of a DPS player is measured not by how much damage he did overall, and not by how much damage per second he did, but by whether he got as close as he could to the threat cap without going over it.

Imagine a tank who has generated 1000 threat on a mob, and two DPSers. DPSer A has an innate ability that reduces all base threat he generates by 29% (as cats do). DPSer B does not have any threat modifiers at all. Both are melee DPS, and so subject to the 10% rule (see Part 2 of this guide).

DPSer A generates 1300 threat on the mob in five seconds (260 DPS).
DPSer B generates 1099 threat on the mob in five seconds (220 DPS).
Who did better?

The answer is DPSer B. Even though he did 40 less DPS than A, if he had generated 1 more point of threat he would have pulled aggro. He did the very best damage he could safely do under the circumstances. DPSer A, on the other hand, stopped 92 threat away from pulling aggro. That’s extra damage he could have safely dealt, but didn’t. And of course it would be even worse if DPSer A generated 1400 threat on the mob in 5 seconds (400 DPS) – sure he did 400 DPS, but he also just pulled aggro.

Again, A may have helped his party more (he did more damage), but he helped less than he could have. B helped less but did the absolute best he could do, given his class and spec. B would not be doing anybody any favors if he decided to do more damage (and thus pull aggro) to be more "helpful." That's not helpful, it's dumb.

Of course in real life you’d have to be extraordinarily gutsy to go over 100% of the tank’s threat, even though technically you can. Most DPS stops at 90% of the tank’s threat, just to be safe. But the point is that good DPS knows how to do maximum safe damage and never pulls aggro.

Remember: at best, DPS that pulls aggro wastes healer time and mana (and possibly messes up his own rotation). At worst, DPS that pulls aggro dies. And as we all know, you do 0 DPS when you’re dead.

Cat Theory: Efficient Face Ripping
Like all druid forms, cat form is relatively simple in that it doesn’t have a lot of buttons to choose among. However, we still want to do the best DPS that we can.

A cat’s resource is energy. That’s obvious, but we need to think about resource as an energy that is expended, even though it replenishes very quickly. Think about it: we autoattack for a given amount of DPS, and we gain energy at a fixed rate. How do we increase our DPS? By using the abilities that do the most damage per energy. So which abilities are those? Well, let’s look at them, using level 70 values and assuming a feral build and the Mangle debuff (+30% damage to all bleeds):

1. Claw: 192 damage, 40 energy: 4.8 DPE
2. Rake: 241.8 damage + 9.1% of AP, 35 energy: 6.9 + 0.26% AP DPE
3. Mangle: 352 damage + 11% of AP, 40 energy: 8.8 + 0.27% AP DPE
4. Shred: 640.9 damage +21% of AP, 42 energy: 15.3 + 0.50% AP DPE
5. 4 CP Rip: 1162.2 damage + 31% of AP, 30 energy: 38.8 + 1.03% AP DPE
6. 5 CP Ferocious Bite @ 40 energy: 972 damage + 15% of AP, 40 energy: 24.3 + 0.38% AP DPE

As you can see, no matter what your attack power is, a cat’s most efficient attacks are Mangle, Shred, and Rip. What does this mean? To maximize DPS, NEVER use anything other than Mangle, Shred, or Rip. Obviously Shred is more efficient than Mangle by far, so a cat’s DPS rotation for all mobs in all instances is:

1. Mangle if the mob doesn’t have the debuff
2. Shred to 4 CP*
3. Rip if Rip is not on the mob

Doesn’t matter if the mob is bleedable or not, that’s the way to maximize your DPS. If a mob is bleed-immune, just cut out step #3 and waste the combo points. Do not use Ferocious Bite. Why? See below.

What’s so bad about Ferocious Bite? We all like seeing big sexy FB crits, but as you can see from the numbers above a 5-point FB isn’t even close to even a 4-point Rip. But that’s not the main point. Remember that our main attack is Shred, which costs 42 energy. But we gain energy in ticks of 20. So here’s what happens if you use Ferocious Bite, starting from 100 energy:

1. Mangle
2. Spam Shred to 5 CP
3. Ferocious Bite ==> we now have 0 energy
4. Wait 4 seconds ==> we now have 40 energy (can’t start Mangle + Shred combo over yet)
5. Wait 4 more seconds ==> we now have 80 energy
6. Mangle ==> we now have 40 energy
7. Wait 0.5 seconds ==> we now have 60 energy
8. Shred

In other words, because FB sets your energy back to 0, you have to wait 8.5 seconds after every FB before you can Shred again. If you look at the efficiency numbers again, you’ll see that Ferocious Bite isn’t even that much better than Shred, particularly at high levels of attack power. So the interruption to your Shred cycle just isn’t worth it. Only use Ferocious Bite if you’re fighting the last mob in the pull and FB would actually kill the mob.

* Why Rip at 4 combo points rather than 5? Because Rip uses 6% of your attack power per combo point, up to a maximum of 24%, plus a flat damage boost. So at 3 combo points you're getting 18% of your AP + 696, 4 combo points you're getting 24% of your AP + 894; at 5 combo points you're getting 24% of your AP + 1092 (using the level 70 numbers). In other words, you get more going from 3 combo points to 4 than you get going from 4 combo points to 5. This doesn't mean a 5 CP Rip is bad, just that you should only do it by accident.

There are two ways to think about why. The most commonly stated reason is that you might crit on that fifth combo point, meaning you just "wasted" a combo point. There's some truth to that.

The second, less commonly heard reason is to ask what you're getting for your combo point. Even if you could never crit, you pay 42 energy for one combo point from Shred. The question you have to ask yourself is where you want to put that combo point. Look at the level 70 numbers - in the 5th CP slot, that combo point gets you 198 damage. In the 1st CP slot, it gets you 300 damage plus 6% of your AP. So do you want that combo point in the fifth CP slot or the first? Most cats choose the latter when presented with the question in that way.

Again, 5 combo points aren't bad - if you get to 5 accidentally, that's great. But it shouldn't be your goal to Rip at 5.

Cat Practice: How to Kill Stuff
We’ve now already answered our main question: which buttons do we push in what order? To recap:

1. Mangle if the mob doesn’t have the debuff
2. Shred to 4 CP*
3. Rip if Rip is not on the mob
4. Do not use Ferocious Bite unless it will finish the pull

Some other tips and tricks:

1. If you’re lucky enough to be paired with a bear form druid, let him apply Feral Faerie Fire. It’s extra threat that you don’t want and he does. Just be sure to communicate with your bear, so the debuff is up.
   
   
2. Similarly, if you’re DPSing with a bear tank, let him apply Mangle. Mangle(Bear) buffs your Shreds and bleeds just like Mangle(Cat). But Mangle is a bear’s best ability and a cat’s worst. So you can let the bear Mangle for you and you just Shred away.
   
   
3. Cower removes 830.7 threat from a mob if it lands. If you use threat meters, you know that’s not a lot. Moreover, it costs you 20 energy to do it. This means you should not rely on cower to save you if you pull aggro. It isn’t like Vanish or Feign Death, which reduce your threat to 0. Don’t rely on Cower – don’t pull aggro in the first place.
   
   
4. There is one key difference between a rogue and a cat: rogues are a lot more survivable. If a rogue pulls aggro he has all sorts of things he can do to save himself. Cats do not. Don’t pull aggro.
   
   
5. If you have 5/5 Furor, you can make a macro to powershift. Powershifting is the process of instantly going from cat form to cat form, and hence gaining the 40 energy from Furor. To powershift, wait until you have 0 energy, then hit your macro. Here’s the basic macro:
   /cast Cat Form
   
6. Remember not to refresh your Rip before it expires (the last tick of damage is when the bleed expires). The point is not to keep Rip constantly on the mob, the point is to constantly be getting the maximum damage from the 30 energy it costs to cast Rip. As you get more comfortable with your own timing and latency (and as you get more and more combo points from upping your crit chance) you can learn when to hit the Rip button so that the new Rip starts just after the old Rip expires.
   
   
7. Energy ticks every 2 seconds in cat form whether you need it or not. This means that you can time your initial attack to go off right before an energy tick, even if you're at 100 energy. Doing so means you get an energy tick right after your initial attack, effectively lowering the energy cost of that attack by 20 energy.
   
   
8. The most important thing to a druid's DPS is more energy, which makes abilities like Omen of Clarity and two-piece Tier 4 exceptionally good for sustained DPS. If you get an OoC proc, ideally you'll use it on a Shred, since Shred costs the most energy of the three abilities you're using (this shouldn't be hard, since you also Shred most often). However, it's more important not to interrupt your DPS cycle than to use OoC on a Shred as opposed to a Mangle. If the Mangle debuff is down, go ahead and burn OoC on Mangle.

Cat Talents
A full-on PVE DPS cat build would look like this: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft, with 5 talent points left over to spend wherever you want. If this looks remarkably similar to the full-on PVE tanking build, that’s because it is. Here are the core cat DPS talents:

1. 5/5 Ferocity – anything that reduces the cost of Mangle (and, until you get Mangle, Claw and Shred) means more DPS. Moreover, it’s pretty clear that Blizzard designed the optimal cat DPS rotation around having this talent, so not having it will screw with your energy management something fierce.
2. 3/3 Sharpened Claws – as will become clearer below, cats never have enough crit chance.
3. 2/2 Shredding Attacks – Shred is our main attack in PVE DPS, so it needs to be made cheaper by any means possible. 1/2 Shredding Attacks is useless, but 2/2 SA makes the energy regen numbers click into place.
4. 2/2 Primal Fury – the more combo points you have, the closer you are to keeping Rip up 100% of the time. And Rip, as you know, is by far our most efficient special attack.
5. 5/5 Heart of the Wild – it’s a subtle thing, but this talent is actually the key to our scaling. Not many people know this, but Blizzard actually fixed the scaling issues cats were having in T5 and T6 with this one talent.
6. 1/1 Leader of the Pack – again, you need more crit. I don’t care how much crit you have. It’s not even close to enough.
7. 1/1 Mangle – this ability may be the worst of your big three, but it’s still better than Claw and Rake. And it has the all-important +30% to Shred and bleed damage buff. It’s not our hardest-hitter, but this ability defines the entire cat form.
8. 5/5 Naturalist (honorable mention) – something else not many people know is that, mechanically, cats scale better than any other class in the game (whether our gear is holding us back is another question). This talent is one of the reasons why.
9. 5/5 Predatory Instincts (honorable mention) – cats should have massive amounts of crit chance, and this talent makes all that crit more valuable. It’s also valuable for periodically reducing the inevitable damage melee DPS tends to take.

Cat Gear
Here’s what your various cat stats do for you:

1. Attack power (from strength, agility, and attack power): autoattack and all abilities hit harder
2. Crit chance (from agility and crit rating): autoattack, Mangle, and Shred hit harder; Rip is up more often due to more combo points
3. Hit rating (from hit rating): decreases the chance of all abilities to miss
4. Expertise (from expertise rating): decreases the chance of all abilities to be dodged and to be parried. Since cats attack from behind, this is exactly equal to hit rating in terms of increasing DPS. Twice as good as hit rating when attacking from the front (e.g., soloing)
5. Haste (from haste rating): decreases the time between your autoattacks only. People often say this is bad for druids, citing figures like 60% of our DPS coming from special attacks. This is both true and not true. Haste gets better for us the higher our attack power, because the higher our attack power the greater the percentage of our DPS comes from autoattacks. At what point, if any, do you start caring about haste? Don't ask me that. Just go use Tossk's DPS gear calculator.

Unlike tank gear listings, I do believe in DPS gear listings, because the difference between the short-term and long-term analysis (at least in PVE) is very small. Which means I am going to point you to the most complete, most nuanced, most accurate source of cat DPS gear there is: The Druid Wiki » ToskksDPSGearMethod. Seriously. Just go there, and use the gear generator. It’s better than anything else available as of January 2008. Certainly better than anything I could tell you. Yes, it's better than Emmerald (because it's customized for you). Yes, it's also slower than Emmerald, and is thus less of a quick-reference guide.

What’s all that text and the big confusing graph at the top of the page? Let me break it down for you:

If you think about it for a moment, you’ll realize attack power and crit chance are complementary stats. The more AP you have, the bigger your crits, and thus the more valuable your crit chance. And a crit is double damage, and regular damage is defined by your AP. So crits essentially make your AP work double for you (more than double with 5/5 Predatory Instincts). Thus, the bigger your crit chance, the more extra mileage you get from your AP.

Now think about it for another 30 seconds or so and you’ll realize that if each stat increases the other, there’s got to be some magical balance line where a given amount of extra AP is worth the same (in terms of increasing your overall DPS) as a given amount of extra crit. In fact, there must be a whole bunch of these points, for different amounts of AP or crit. After all, AP and crit each have a “cost” to put on an item. This line would tell you how to get the most bang for your buck. Of course that line would only be valid for a given attack rotation. But cats, as we know by now, only have one attack rotation. But if you could stay at that magical line, you’d be getting the absolute most out of your item points.

The big graph you see on Tossk’s page is a map of the balance line between AP and crit. The way the graph works is this: find your AP and your crit chance on the graph. If that puts you above the line (as it almost certainly does), then you have too much AP for your crit chance – your DPS would be higher if you could take some of the AP on your gear and translate it magically into an equivalent amount of crit. If you’re below the line, the opposite is true: you have too much crit, and not enough AP.

Of course you can’t actually just trade in AP for crit, much as you might want to. What the graph really shows is that the optimum mix of crit and AP for a cat is insanely crit heavy. Think about it: if you have just 2000 AP (which a cat can achieve without a single epic), you ought to have 46.00% crit chance. I don’t know what your crit chance was when you had 2000 AP, but mine was nowhere near 46%.

And what that means is that all cats who can equip feral attack power weapons (which will give you plenty of AP right there) should focus their gear heavily towards agility, which is the most efficient source of extra crit. This is the real reason you will hear cats say “agility >>> all.” It has nothing to do with all the different things agility gives you; it has to do with the fact that you don’t have enough crit.

Aldor vs. Scryer
A word on the choice of the Aldor vs. the Scryers. Neither of the factions provides any gear that can't be replaced, and neither provides any recipes that you absolutely must have, unless your guild dictates it according to some Master Crafter Plan, and can't be persuaded after you copy and paste this section. The one thing they do provide that you can't replace or buy is inscriptions. This means in my opinion, for feral druids especially, that the choice of faction should predominantly be based on the choice the tanking inscriptions, which are more varied than the DPS inscriptions. However, for those of you who are determined to make your choice based on the DPS inscriptions:

The two factions' inscriptions add up to exactly the same amount of item points, so you don't need to worry that one faction has objectively more value in their inscriptions than the other. The only question you need to ask is whether you want your inscription to emphasize critical strike chance or attack power.

If you've read this far, you know that the mathematical answer to that is almost certainly that you don't have enough critical strike chance. For this reason almost all cats should prefer the Scryer inscriptions.

Why almost all? There is a school of PVP thought that goes like this:

1. PVP is all about crits
2. Except [high level] PVP is full of people at or near the resilience cap (-25% chance to be critted)
3. Therefore PVP is no longer all about crits
4. PVP is all about hitting hard without relying on crits
5. Therefore PVP is all about armor penetration and attack power

I'm not a PVP expert so I can't really comment on that school of thought. However, if it seems persuasive to you, then you may prefer the Aldor inscriptions for PVP. I don't care how persuasive it seems to you for PVE purposes, though - for PVE you want more crit chance.

[Eepi]

Part 4: Healing

Healing
This section will cover the subject of druid healing as completely as I can: theory, practice, talents, and gear. I go over tree healing, Dreamstate healing, and low-level healing. This section is mostly my opinion. Obviously I think I’m right (otherwise it wouldn’t be my opinion) but remember that I am not the All-Knowing Tree God of Healing.

Healing Theory: Who Lives, and Who Dies?
Some healers are of the opinion that as long as the boss goes down, it’s okay that raid members died. There is some truth to this, and in any case player deaths are often not the healer’s fault. However, the best healers make it their creed that Nobody Dies. These are the healers who are the most fun to play with, who most free other players to concentrate on doing their jobs and allow other players to trust that, so long as they do their job well, their healer will keep them alive.

Of course, even the best healers recognize that sometimes you have to choose between letting one group member die. This decision might come suddenly: two players are taking damage, and about to die, and you have time only to heal one. Or it might be more subtle: your tank is really pushing your HPS, but your melee DPS is taking a slow but steady trickle of damage. You could heal the DPS with some quick heals, but that might mean you don’t have enough mana to last the whole fight for the tank. What do you do?

The real answer is that you heal whoever will contribute most to winning the fight. Most of the time that means healing the tank first, but it might also mean healing a fellow healer (very occasionally it will be better to heal a DPSer first, such as when the boss is very low on HP and can be kited, you’re down to your very last heal, and you can either heal the tank or the hunter). When it comes to choosing different DPS to heal, the rule is the same but the application can be trickier. This kind of healing requires you to know who each of your DPS is, and how each of them can contribute to this particular fight at this particular moment. For instance, your mage might have twice the DPS of your rogue, but if the mage is out of mana and you have to choose, you should probably heal the rogue first. If the mage has mana left and you don’t need a rogue’s abilities for this particular fight, you should probably heal the mage. This need to keep track of your party’s resources and abilities throughout the fight is one of the things that makes healing such a satisfying challenge.

Healing Theory: What is a Tree Good For, and How Often Should You Water It?
A healer has only one job in a group, but it’s an unusually complicated one: he must prevent everybody (yes, everybody) from dying. Before we get into how a healer does that, it’s worth asking why. There are two reasons why healers keep everybody alive: first, because most players get frustrated when they die repeatedly, and that makes the game less fun; and second, because his other group members are the ones who actually kill mobs.

Think of a healer (or more specifically, a healer’s mana bar) as a walking battery of hit points that can jack into other players and transfer some of his reserve HP to them. Once you think about your mana in this way, you can realize the two great dimensions of healing: hit points per second and hit points per mana.

Hit points per second (HPS) is how fast you can transfer your reserve HP into a player’s HP bar. Hit points per mana (HPM) describes how many reserve HP your mana bar represents. Different healing spells have different mana efficiencies, so your choice of healing spells determines just how many hit points are really crammed into that mana bar. Obviously it does you no good to have 50,000 HP in your mana bar if you can’t hand it out fast enough to make a difference. At the same time, it does nobody any good if you can transfer 5,000 hit points per second but doing so will run you out of mana midway through the fight.

The healer’s role is designed to make you trade off between HPS and HPM. For the most part, Blizzard has designed the healing spells in the game so that high HPS results in low HPM, and vice versa. So how do you know when to sacrifice one for the other?

In general, HPS is more important than HPM. If you can keep your group alive now, it might not matter that you’re out of mana later. But if your group dies now, it will do you no good to have mana when they go down. However, as a matter of practice, this means you should use your most mana-efficient heals first, and then move down the list until you’ve found a heal with the maximum HPM for the necessary HPS. This is good advice for any healer, but it’s particularly literal advice for druids, since three of our five healing spells are heal-over-time (HoT) spells. We can literally start our HoT with the best HPM ticking, then move to the next-best HPM, and so on.

So how do our spells stack up in terms of HPM?

Healing Theory: Healing Spells
A druid has four main healing spells and one talented healing spell (Swiftmend).

It's obvious that a full HoT rotation looks like this:

1. 3x Lifebloom stack, refreshed every 7 seconds
2. 1x Rejuvenation, refreshed every 12 seconds
3. 1x Regrowth, refreshed every 21 seconds

Keeping that rotation up, in practice, usually leaves 1-2 GCDs free to do other things like toss out a Lifebloom or Rejuvenation for a raid heal, or decurse, or whatever. Slotting in Healing Touch to that rotation is possible but often pretty tricky.

The question for fights that don't call for all-out HoT rotation is which heals you should prioritize over which. That boils down to the question of which heals give you the best HPM.

The discussion that follows assumes a full resto build (i.e., no relevant resto talents), that your crit chance is negligible except for talents, and that all spells are cast in Tree of Life form if possible. The conclusions are the same for all druids, but the numbers will be a little different. I will ignore Swiftmend for the moment, since that’s a special case.

First a few facts:

• Healing Touch receives 100% of your +heals (120% talented)
• Regrowth receives 100% of your +heals (120% talented) - 79% to the HoT, 21% to the burst (94.8% to the HoT, 25.2% to the burst talented)
• Rejuvenation receives 80% of your +heals (100% talented)
• Lifebloom receives 94.6% of your +heals (114.6% talented) - 51.8% to the HoT, 42.8% to the bloom (62.16% to the HoT, 51.36% to the bloom talented)

So at level 70 (I’ll discuss low-level druid healing under the Practice section below) your three old-fashioned heals have the following HPM, where H is your +heals (including the bonus aura from Tree of Life form):

• Healing Touch: 3.47 + 0.0016H
• Regrowth: 4.72 + 0.0021H
• Rejuvenation: 3.99 + 0.0038H

Lifebloom is a little different, since it can be stacked. Here is the HPM of Lifebloom for various uses:

• 1x Lifebloom incl. bloom: 5.46 + .0072H
• 3x Lifebloom over 21 seconds incl. bloom: 3.73 + 0.0071H
• Rolling Lifebloom: (1.71HT - 1.71H + 900.9T - 900.9) / (176T)

where T is the number of times you cast Lifebloom.

"Rolling" a Lifebloom means keeping 3x Lifebloom on the target at all times, ideally refreshing exactly every 7 seconds (actually doing so requires a good deal of practice and familiarity with your own latency, so in practice most druids give themselves a second or so of leeway, I think).

If you plug those formulas into an Excel spreadsheet and mess around (or plot, if you're more Excel savvy than I am) with the variables for H and T, you'll find that a rolling Lifebloom stack becomes increasingly efficient, plateauing at a level determined by H (your +heals). But what's really interesting about that exercise is that the numbers for a rolling stack always come out to better than any of the other options.

For a non-resto druid, of the three traditional healing spells, Regrowth overtakes Healing Touch in efficiency at 1300 +heals; Rejuvenation takes the lead at about 800 +heals. For resto druids Regrowth is already better than Healing Touch, and Rejuvenation becomes better than Regrowth at 430 +heals.

So this means a high-level druid's healing protocol (excepting a Dreamstate healer; see below) is basically:

1. Roll Lifebloom stack
2. Rejuvenation
3. Regrowth
4. Healing Touch

DIGRESSION: How Does Threat Work for Healers?
This section assumes you already know what threat is. If you don’t, go read the discussion in part 2 of this guide and come back.

Are you back? Did you actually read part 2, or did you just keep reading? I’ll wait, really.

One of the things all healers dread is seeing all those big bad mobs the rest of the party is fighting barreling straight for them. The dread of pulling “heal aggro” is so strong that there are lots of myths running around about what heal aggro is and is not, so let me set the record straight here.

There are only two rules about healer threat that you don’t already know (assuming you actually did read part 2):

1. Actually healing 1 HP generates 0.5 points of threat
2. Heal threat is divided equally among all mobs that are presently able to attack a player

Okay, I lied. There’s also one rule of druid threat you don’t already know:

1. The end burst of Lifebloom (but not the HoT) counts as your target’s healing, not yours – and therefore your target’s threat, not yours.

That’s it. That’s the great mystery of healer threat. Let’s look at some implications:

One implication of the above is that HoTs do not generate less threat than direct heals. Let me give an example: your tank is taking 300 damage per second. Over 3 seconds, he will lose 900 HP. If you wait for 3 seconds and then heal that 900 HP with Healing Touch, you healed him for 900 HP, which is 450 threat. 450 threat over 3 seconds = 150 TPS. Now suppose you had a rolling Lifebloom stack on the tank instead, so every second he heals 300 HP. Over 3 seconds, he will lose 900 HP, and gain 900 HP in three chunks of 300. But you still healed him for 900 HP, which is 450 threat. 450 threat over 3 seconds = 150 TPS.

Which brings us to another implication: critical heals are not aggro magnets. Refer to #1 again. Let’s say your tank is missing 1000 HP. You cast Healing Touch, which crits for 5,000,000 HP. How much threat did you just generate? You could have healed 5,000,000 HP, but you actually healed 1000 HP. 1000 HP actually healed = 500 threat. How much threat would you have generated if you didn’t get a crit and only healed for 1000 HP exactly? 500 threat.

What this means for healers is that you shouldn’t worry about critting, you should worry about how much HP is missing from your target. Since hit points actually healed translate to threat, it follows that hit points that have not yet been healed translate to potential threat. If the tank is missing 8000 hit points, that’s 4000 threat that you don’t have but you’re going to have (unless you just don’t heal him, in which case you have other problems). You need to be aware of that 4000 threat lurking in the background; your threat meter will not (and cannot) keep track of it until it actually happens. It isn’t the crit heal that drew aggro – it was the fact that you failed to account for all that missing HP that you still had yet to heal.

Of course, you do have to heal missing HP; that’s what you’re there for. Which brings us to another implication: healer threat is essentially fixed. No healing class has an ability that permanently removes threat; the best we can do is take talents like Subtlety that reduce the rate at which we build up threat. But beyond that, the only variable in our TPS is how many hit points per second we’re healing.

If you find yourself pulling heal aggro, it is imperative that you make your groups understand this fact. Generating less threat as a healer means healing less, period, end of story. Assuming you believe that Nobody Dies, you have no control over your threat. But there are ways in which your group can reduce your threat:

1. The tank can get better gear (or wear more mitigation gear at the expense of some TPS gear), meaning you have to heal him less.
2. DPS can watch their threat more closely so they don’t get hit as often.

#2 is the big one. To a DPSer, getting a spot heal here and there is no big deal. They might even like it – it’s proof that they’re right up at the threat cap, and hey, if they go over once in a while, that’s the cost of optimal DPS, right? But to a healer, those spot heals are extra threat that they didn’t need to generate.

Speaking of which, remember the 10% and 30% rules? Guess what – they apply to healers too. This means a smart healer will never heal in melee range of a mob unless he has some very good reason to do so. You might as well put yourself in the 30% rule if you have a choice, since it will raise your threat cap.

Finally, you don’t have to fear multi-mob pulls as if they were signed healer death warrants. Let me give an example: suppose a tank is tanking a single mob, who hits him for 8000 damage. You heal him for 8000 HP, which is 4000 threat (3200 threat if you have 5/5 Subtlety, but let’s ignore that for now). 4000 threat to whom? To the one mob in the fight.

Now suppose your tank is tanking eight mobs, each of whom hits him for 1000 damage. You heal him for 8000 HP, which is 4000 threat … divided eight ways. So each mob actually only gets 500 threat. Which means (because of the 30% rule) your tank only has to generate 385 threat per mob to keep them on him.

In practice of course that’s easier said than done from the tank’s perspective, unless the tank is a paladin. But the point is that it can be done, because of the way threat is divided in multi-mob situations. So you needn’t feel the need to demand that all mobs but one be CC’d every single pull. The threat mechanic works for you in multi-mob pulls.

Speaking of CC, how does that deal with threat? Crowd-controlled mobs don’t receive threat from anybody while crowd-controlled. “Crowd-controlled” here means “unable to attack.” Obviously that includes mobs that have been sheeped, shackled, etc. It also means rooted targets, as long as they can’t attack from where they’re standing. So ranged mobs can’t be CC’d by roots, but melee mobs can, so long as nobody is standing in melee range of them (if somebody is in melee range they aren't considered CC'd, and you will build aggro on them). A mob might pick up a few bits of heal aggro here and there between applications of CC, but for the most part, if a mob is consistently CC’d you don’t have to worry that it will run straight for you when the CC breaks.

Most hunters have to let their CC target run around a little bit, owing to the difference between the CD and the duration on Freezing Trap. Smart hunters will have a mouseover Distracting Shot macro* to make sure that the mob runs towards them when the freeze wears off. If your hunter doesn't, be careful. You don't want to have a HoT ticking on him when the freeze wears off that will cause the mob to run to you instead of to him. Either make him get a macro, or only heal him while his CC target is actually frozen.

* Basic mouseover Distracting Shot macro:

#showtooltip
/cast [target=mouseover,nodead,harm][] Distracting Shot

Healing Practice: High-Level HoT-Based Tank Healing
Druid healing radically changes character at level 64, when you get Lifebloom. I’ll discuss this high-level druid healing first. By now you know what a high level druid’s healing priority is. To recap:

1. Roll Lifebloom stack
2. Rejuvenation
3. Regrowth
4. Healing Touch

Notice that as you move down the priority list you’re adding more and more HoTs to your target. This isn’t because HoTs are better or worse than burst heals; it’s simply the natural result of using your spells from most HPM to least. This will maximize the size of your HP battery and let you last your longest in combat.

As I said, HoTs aren’t better or worse than burst heals, but they are different. Recall from my tank section (part 2 of this guide) that tanks are concerned about two types of damage: slow grinding damage and big spike damage. Each type of damage has a corresponding type of heal: HoTs correspond to slow grinding damage, and burst heals correspond to big spike damage. This makes a resto druid an excellent choice for a tank healer, since we have the best overall HoT capability of the healing classes, and our most efficient heal (rolling Lifeblooms) requires the target to be taking constant damage or it’s wasted.

What about spike damage? The truth is that we aren’t set up to deal well with constant spikes. The danger of spike damage is not actually the first spike – it’s the possibility of a second spike while the tank is already low on HP. This means that a healer who doesn’t react quickly to spike damage is playing a dangerous game with his tank’s life. Unfortunately, a druid’s ability to react quickly to spikes is limited. A non-resto druid must rely on Regrowth (which may be too small a burst heal) and Healing Touch (which is plenty big enough, but may be too slow). Fortunately, this is where the resto tree comes to our aid.

Swiftmend addresses the problem of Regrowth being too small by taking the HoT portion of the spell (or Rejuvenation) and turning it into a burst heal. Nature’s Swiftness is not a heal by itself, but it can be paired with Healing Touch, the biggest but slowest heal in the game, to produce a very powerful fast-reaction burst heal.

Both of these spells are on cooldowns, so you should avoid relying on them. Before you use either Swiftmend or NSHT, you should have a full HoT rotation going on your tank. That will maximize their HPS intake, which in turn will minimize the number of times you really need to use one of your burst heals.

When should you use Regrowth + Swiftmend vs. Rejuvenation + Swiftmend? In general, Regrowth is our least mana-efficient spell (see the mechanics section, part 1 of this guide, for some more detail). This means that in general you should prefer Rejuvenation + Swiftmend, unless you judge that a bigger health “patch” is necessary (and judging how big a patch is necessary is the skill that you are trying to develop), since Regrowth starts out as a bigger HoT. However, Swiftmend receives 100% of your +heals when applied to Rejuvenation and only about 70% when applied to Regrowth, so it Swiftmend + Rejuvenation scales with gear better than Swiftmend + Regrowth. At about 713 +healing, your Swiftmend + Rejuvenation becomes not only more mana efficient, but a bigger patch heal as well. Thus, as long as you have more than about 713 healing, you should never Swiftmend a Regrowth as long as you can help it.

Incidentally, the fact that HoT-based healing is well equipped to deal with grinding damage but poorly equipped to deal with spike damage is what makes us such desirable healers to pair with a priest or a paladin in a raid healing situation. A two-healer combo of a priest or paladin to provide burst heals and a druid’s fast-ticking Lifebloom stack to cover the gaps between casts can provide a tank with a powerful, constant stream of heals, which is just what raid tank healing calls for.

Healing Practice: High-Level Dreamstate Tank Healing
Many new high-level druids are excited to switch to HoT-based healing, only to jump into their first heroic and discover that their HoTs just can’t cut it and they’re constantly shifting out of tree form to cast Healing Touch. These druids sometimes feel cheated, as if the conventional wisdom about HoT-based healing is actually just an elaborately crafted lie. To these druids, I say: depending on what you’re trying to heal, you should probably have about 1000-1300 +heals before HoTs will really do what they’re supposed to. And in the meantime, there’s Dreamstate.

“Dreamstate” is the name given to a number of builds (example) based around buffing Healing Touch in every way possible. There are actually a lot of ways to build a Dreamstate build, but the key talents you need are 3/3 Lunar Guidance, 3/3 Moonglow, and 3/3 Dreamstate. This build is pretty well suited to balance DPS, but its main point is to make Healing Touch as cheap and as powerful as possible.

In addition to those three key talents, successful Dreamstate healers must learn how to downrank. Downranking is the practice of deliberately using less than your highest rank of a spell, in order to take advantage of its lower mana cost, while making up for its lesser punch with your +heal gear.

Ever since Blizzard decided to put out truly large amounts of +heal gear into the game, downranking has penalized the percentage of your +heals your downranked spells receive (think about it, imagine if you could cast rank 1 Healing Touch for 25 mana in 1.5 seconds and get 120% of your +1600 heals. You could heal an entire raid with 1000 mana). The penalty gets even steeper if you learned the spell before level 20.

This means a Dreamstate healer has three or four ranks of Healing Touch on his bar, in addition to his usual HoTs. The “small” heal is usually Healing Touch rank 5, the first of the “full-fledged” HTs. Rank 13 probably belongs there too, for the times when a really big heal is needed. And then one or two ranks midway between the two can fill in the gaps.

Here’s a table of the HPM of the various ranks of Healing Touch at level 70, assuming 5/5 Gift of Nature and 2/2 Empowered Touch, , ignoring crits and with no mana reduction talents (which will obviously make these numbers somewhat better by an equal amount across the board):

1. Rank 5: 671.55 + 69.77% H; 2.49 + 0.0026H HPM
2. Rank 6: 899.8 + 81.09% H; 2.69 + .0024H HPM
3. Rank 7: 1130.8 + 92.40% H; 2.79 + .0023H HPM
4. Rank 8: 1444.3 + 103.7% H; 2.92 + .0021H HPM
5. Rank 9: 1821.6 + 115.03% H; 3.04 + .0019H HPM
6. Rank 10: 2266 + 122.6% H; 3.15 + .0017H HPM
7. Rank 11: 2719.2 + 132.0% H; 3.40 + .0017H HPM
8. Rank 12: 2834.7 + 132.0% H; 3.46 + .0016H HPM
9. Rank 13: 3247.2 + 132.0% H; 3.47 + .0014H HPM (different from the number given previously because I’m ignoring crits right now)

You can plug your own +heals into the value for H and figure out how much you can expect each rank of HT to heal, and how much HPM you’ll get from it, with a four-function calculator and a piece of scratch paper. The real point of the exercise though is to figure out which rank best fits your need for a mid-size heal (or two).

Thus armed with a selection of HT ranks and the proper spec, a Dreamstate healer alternates casts of different ranks of Healing Touch to keep his tank topped off. Good use of a Dreamstate build requires being able to judge how much HP a tank is going to be missing when he finishes casting Healing Touch in 3 seconds, and being able to select the proper rank of HT accordingly.

As you can tell from the chart above, a Dreamstate build does not give you the same mana efficiency as the HoTs of a full resto-specced druid at level 70. What Dreamstate does do is give you better HPS, which is important if you find your +heal gear is insufficient to provide the needed HPS from HoTs. Once your +heal gear is powerful enough to provide adequate HPS with the occasional Swiftmend and NSHT, though, you can switch back to the more “normal” HoT rotation for better mana efficiency.

Preemptive Healing
One final note about Dreamstate and mana efficiency. Other healing classes learn what is called “preemptive casting” or “preemptive healing.” To heal preemptively, a healer begins casting a long-casting heal (such as Greater Heal or Healing Touch) whether his target needs it or not. If the target has taken enough damage by the time the cast is almost finished, the healer does nothing and lets the heal go through. If the target has not taken enough damage for the heal to be worth it, the healer cancels the heal by moving slightly or with a /stopcasting macro.

The advantages of preemptive healing are twofold. First, by cancelling heals that would be largely wasted, the preemptive healer improves his mana efficiency (you aren't considered to be "casting" for mana regeneration purposes unless you actually finish a cast; see the Mana Regen section below). Second, and equally importantly, by beginning a heal before the target has taken damage, the preemptive healer can react more quickly to damage spikes, even when using big, slow heals.

HoT-based healers do not really need to learn to preemptively heal. Preemptive healing isn’t really a meaningful concept when discussing druid HoT rotations, which are mostly composed of instant casts anyway. For Dreamstate healers, though, who rely on long-casting 3-second Healing Touches, it’s a critical discipline.

Healing Practice: Low-Level Burst Heal-Based Tank Healing
Tank healing as a low-level druid is very different matter from high-level healing. This often confuses non-druids, so it’s important that you know the difference to set them straight (particularly when they’re telling you to do something that would be a bad idea). The most common misconception people make about low-level druids is to think that because they have the best and most HoTs in the game, they should always use the HoT-based healing style described above. This is not true.

All healers are responsible for maximizing their HPM for a given amount of required HPS. That is the one rule that describes all healing rotations, for all healing classes of all specs. It just so happens for druids that at low levels most of the time this rule dictates using Healing Touch rather than Regrowth or Rejuvenation. This is because Healing Touch starts off as more mana-efficient than either Regrowth or Rejuvenation, but the latter two spells scale better with gear. To get a rough idea of how they scale (and thus which spell you should prefer at any given point in your low-level career) see the end of this section.

Healing Touch is excellent HPS if chain-cast, and at most low levels is our best HPM, but it also costs a very large amount of mana to cast at all. This means that in order to take advantage of its efficiency, you have to judge how much it is going to heal and time your casts so that it goes off just as the tank is missing that amount of HP. No matter how efficient the spell can be, it does you no good to be paying the mana to cast 6000-HP heals every time the tank is only missing 1000 HP. And if you judged wrong, and you’re about to overheal your tank? Cancel the cast, just as described above in the Preemptive Healing section.

Especially because Healing Touch is so slow to cast, getting the timing right for HT-based heals can be quite tricky. It is, however, a good skill for any healer to have, and one that you should practice. It will give you a good sense of what different amounts of DPS on a tank look like, which is a critical skill for Dreamstate healing and will serve you well even when you transition to HoT-based healing.

Difficult as timing Healing Touch can be, in most low-level encounters with most low-level tanks it is quite possible. Occasionally, however, a low-level tank takes some spike damage that catches you by surprise, and you have to react faster than a 3-second Healing Touch. In these situations you can, in order of preference:

1. Preemptively heal
2. Use the NSHT combo
3. Cast Regrowth + Swiftmend or Rejuvenation + Swiftmend
4. Cast Regrowth + Rejuvenation

One last note about low-level healing: just because Healing Touch is your most efficient spell doesn't mean it's the only spell you should ever use. No healer gets to stick to their single most efficient spell all the time. For a low-level healer, Rejuvenation and Regrowth are inefficient uses of mana, but they do serve a very valuable purpose: they buy you time. Just like a HoT rotation acts as a buffer in multi-healer fights, your own HoTs can act as a buffer for your Healing Touches. Depending on who your tank is, you may well find as a low-level healer that you need to use all three of your healing spells to make it through the fight.

The reason I don't advocate doing that all the time is because you never know what might happen. Yes, trading HPM for a little extra HPS even when you don't need to can make your job easier. Yes, as long as you make it to the end of the fight and everyone's still alive, you've successfully healed the fight. Here's the key from my experience: you don't know when the fight will end. Yes, it looks like you're fighting the last mob. But what if somebody tab-targets something they shouldn't have and pulls adds? What if somebody gets feared? What if you forgot that there are stealthed mobs patrolling this area of the instance? What if the tank disconnects and all of a sudden you're healing somebody else for all you're worth?

You never know when something's going to go wrong, but you always want to do your best to be prepared for it when it does. That means keeping your eyes and channels of communication open, and not using mana just because you can. Don't skimp on mana usage - don't underheal because you're paranoid that you might get ambushed. But don't waste mana just because you're lazy, either.

Healing Practice: High and Low Level Non-Tank Healing
What about non-tank healing (“off healing,” “group healing,” or “raid healing”)? Raid healing is a different ballgame from tank healing – whereas tanks are expected to take constant damage, everyone else in your raid is expected to take only occasional damage (if they are taking constant damage in a fight that doesn’t require that, and few fights do, then they’re doing something seriously wrong).

As always, your task while raid healing is to find the right balance of HPM and HPS. Remember: Nobody Dies. Sure, that rogue wasn’t supposed to get hit. And he certainly isn’t supposed to get hit again when he’s low on health. Even so, he might, and you need to plan accordingly. However, there’s usually a third dimension to raid healing: GCD management.

The global cooldown, or GCD, is the name given to the 1.5 second delay between casting most spells. Since druids have no spells that heal more than one person (except for Tranquility), every heal cast on one person is 1.5 seconds that you aren’t casting a heal on someone else. Raid healing as a druid requires carefully queueing your heals so that nobody is left un-healed too long. In general, a single Lifebloom or Rejuvenation makes a good “spot heal” for raid healing purposes, because usually the main requirement for raid healing is that you not be tied up with a single person for too long. However, if it takes a longer heal such as Regrowth (or a less mana-efficient heal, such as Rejuvenation) to heal a group member to full, it may be worth it so you don’t have to worry about them any more.

What about Tranquility? This spell is usually scorned by druids, which is somewhat unfair. The way to think of Tranquility is not as a group heal but rather as a group panic button. To understand how Tranquility should be used, consider its characteristics:

1. Ten minute cooldown
2. Affects your five-man party only, and only if they are in range while you channel it
3. It gets you higher HPS faster than the HPS you can get in an equivalent amount of time stacking Lifeblooms, but less HPS than a full HoT rotation

In other words, Tranquility is your answer to emergencies when GCD management would make it impossible to get sufficient HPS rolling on your entire five-man party. There is really only one situation that this ever comes up: in a five-man normal or heroic instance, when the entire pull has fallen apart and everybody in the party is tangling with their own mob (hopefully because they’re doing their jobs and protecting you from all those loose mobs). In this situation, and this situation only, Tranquility is often enough to turn the tide.

As a side note, this is why the talent Improved Tranquility is what it is. Ordinarily, Tranquility does not produce enough threat to pull aggro anyway, but Tranquility isn’t meant to be used in ordinary situations. If you have to use it at all, there might (and there might not) be a lot of mobs loose who have very little threat on them. A single hit from any one of those mobs will end your Tranquility channel in a hurry, which means you have to pop Barkskin before you can start channeling Tranquility – which in turn is an extra 1.5 seconds before you can hit your emergency button, and of course the whole point of an emergency button is that you can do it fast. Improved Tranquility means you can hit Tranquility immediately without fear that your channel will get interrupted. Does this make it worth taking? Well, probably not. There are usually better things to spend talents on than a button you only push when the whole pull has gone to hell in a handbasket. But at least you understand the talent now.

A Word on Mana Regen
I should say a word or two here about mana regeneration: what it is and what it’s good for. First off, let’s start by observing a simple fact: mana regeneration regenerates mana over time.

Obvious, right? The reason I mention it is that mana is mana is mana, and sometimes healers forget that. 1mp5 will give you 1 mana every 5 seconds. 1 intellect will give you 15 mana. Which is better?

The answer depends on how long you expect the fight to last. If the fight lasts for only 30 seconds, you will have gotten 6 mana from your 1mp5. In the case of a fight that short, you’d much rather have had the 15 mana from the 1 intellect instead. But what if the fight lasts 5 minutes? Then your 1mp5 gets you 60 mana, which is much better than 15 mana.

You see the point? No fight (unless you’re constantly getting mana burned for some reason) asks, “How much regen do you have?” The real question is, “How much mana will you have to work with over the course of the fight?” Whether you start with all your mana up front or get 40% of it over the course of the fight is irrelevant. Low-level encounters often take less than 75 seconds (even many low-level boss fights), which is the break-even point for 1mp5 vs. 1 intellect. This means that low-level druid healers are often better served by focusing on intellect than on mp5 or spirit.

High-level druid healers, who routinely face fights that are longer than 75 seconds, are another matter entirely. In long fights, the best way to maximize your total mana over the fight is mana regen rather than upfront mana from intellect. So I might as well explain how regen works:

Although it is conventional to refer to mana regen in terms of “mp5” (mana per 5 seconds), there are actually two different mana regen timers that tick independently of each other. One is the mp5 timer – mp5 regenerates mana every 5 seconds, no matter what you’re doing. The other is the spirit timer, which regenerates mana every 2 seconds, and does change based on what you’re doing.

Specifically, the question is whether you finished (not started) casting a spell within the last 5 seconds. If you did finish casting a spell within the last 5 seconds, you are considered to be “casting” (also “in casting” or within the “five-second rule,” or FSR). Without talents, your spirit-based mana regen stops while casting (see below). A more intuitive way to think about it is this: every time you finish casting a spell, you stop your mana-based regen for 5 seconds.

If this alarms you, it should. After all, we cast spells pretty often. There are three ways to get around the problem of casting halting our spirit-based mana regen. One is not to rely on spirit at all, and instead try to stack mp5, which regenerates mana whether you’re “casting” or not. Another is to try to cast less frequently than every 5 seconds, to give your spirit-based regen a few ticks to kick in. The third is to get 3/3 Intensity, which reduces the stop to merely a 70% stop to our spirit-based regen.

Let me put this into numbers:

1. 1mp5 has the same item cost as 2.5 spirit
2. 1mp5 = 1mp5 while casting
3. 1mp5 = 1mp5 while not casting
4. 1 spirit = 2.5/4.5mp5 = 0.56mp5 while not casting
5. 2.5 spirit = 1.4mp5 while not casting
6. 1 spirit = 0mp5 while casting normally
7. 1 spirit = 0.17mp5 while casting with talents
8. 2.5 spirit = 0.42mp5 while casting with talents

As you can see, mp5 gives a moderate regen while casting and not casting. Spirit gives a small bonus while casting, but a large bonus while not casting.

Some other healing practice tips and tricks:

1. Do your best not to refresh your HoTs early. It’s better to refresh a Lifebloom stack a second or two early than to let it expire, but spells only reach their maximum efficiency when allowed to tick for the longest possible amount of time between refreshes. Regrowth and Rejuvenation should be allowed to expire completely between refreshes.
2. It is sometimes said that Innervate is “spirit-based,” which is false. Innervate quadruples your out of casting mana regeneration and adds it to your regular out of casting mana regeneration, for a total of 5x out of casting regen for the duration of the spell. Since 1mp5 increases your mana regeneration by 1mp5 both in casting and out of casting, Innervate gives you 5mp5 from 1mp5. The reason people call Innervate “spirit-based” is because mp5 gives a moderate boost to in-casting and out-of-casting mana regen, while spirit gives a small (or no) boost to in-casting regen and a large boost to out-of-casting mana regen, so Innervate benefits more from spirit than from mp5.
3. Who should your Innervate go to? Think of Innervate as a reserve mana bar you can hand out, just like your actual mana bar is a reserve HP bar you can hand out. You want to give that extra mana bar to whoever will benefit the raid most. This rarely means DPS casters, since the size of your Innervate mana bar depends on how much mana regen the target has, and most DPS casters have pretty poor regen compared to healers (ir also rarely means holy paladins, for the same reason). However, don’t be selfish about your Innervate even if you’re a healer yourself. It might be that another healer (such as a priest) has higher +healing than you, and would therefore make that extra mana bar go farther than you could make it go. If you can make the best of use the mana then by all means give it to yourself, but don’t use it on yourself just because it’s “yours.” Try to find out how your other healers are geared before the run starts, so you can know who your first-choice Innervate target is.
4. Shifting out of a form does not trigger the GCD, and neither does Nature’s Swiftness. This means you can make a simple macro to drop out of tree and cast NSHT on the first press, and shift back into tree on the second press:
   

   /cancelform [stance:5]
   /cast [nostance:5] Nature’s Swiftness
   /cast [nostance:5] Healing Touch
   /cast Tree of Life Form

5. Speaking of NSHT, remember that it's only an instant combo if you're standing still. The fact that Healing Touch suddenly has an instant casting time does not mean it can be cast on the run like other, "real" instants. Is this dumb? Probably. Do you just have to deal with it? Absolutely.
6. If you expect to use mana potions during a fight, drink them as soon as you’ve used one pot’s worth of mana. Remember, you don’t care when you get the mana; mana is mana. But by drinking as soon as you’re sure none of the pot will be wasted, you maximize your flexibility to drink additional pots later on.
7. If you’re using Tree of Life in a raid, you should probably be in the tank’s group. Your aura only gets applied to people in your 5-man party, but it increases healing received by those affected whether they get the heal from inside the group or from without.
8. The five-second rule is triggered by channeled spells (such as Tranquility) but does not apply after you have just finished a channeled spell. You’ve already been penalized enough by being in casting for the duration of the channel. It also does not apply to spells that do not require mana to cast, such as spells cast with an Omen of Clarity proc.
9. Because healers would rather be subject to the 30% rule than the 10% rule, it’s ordinarily stupid to melee as a healer when not casting (besides, have you seen what happens in melee range? People get hurt up there!). However, if for some reason you have Omen of Clarity (e.g., you’re a feral druid who is healing at the moment), you can use Omen of Clarity when you’re literally out of mana in the hopes of getting a free cast.
10. If you pull healer aggro, there are a number of ways you can save yourself until somebody comes to your aid:
    • Keep doing what you’ve been doing, and don’t waste time defending yourself. This is the best option if you know that someone is going to rescue you before the mob splatters you.
    • Shift into bear form and hope to live long enough for someone to rescue you. If you do this, don’t attack the mob while waiting for rescue unless you can literally kill it with just one or two hits (Bashing it to buy yourself some more time is okay, but remember to stop autoattacking!). Remember that in bear form your threat is multiplied. You shift into bear form to gain armor, but you don’t want to make it harder for people to pull aggro off you. Never assume your tank has his taunt available to save you. He might have to regain aggro the hard way.
    • Cyclone or Hibernate the mob and get some distance so you can Cyclone again if need be. This is the best option if all your potential rescuers are busy and need a few seconds to come to your aid. But remember that if you Cyclone a target your rescuers have to wait until it's un-Cycloned before they can actually take care of it.
    • Pop Barkskin for the damage reduction and pushback immunity and keep doing what you’re doing. This is the best option if you know you’re going to be hit once but help is already on the way.
    • Pop Barkskin and heal yourself. This is the best option if you might be hit more than once but help is already on the way.
    • Run towards the tank. This is the best option if the mob has not reached you yet and you can lead him to the tank without getting into melee range of the mob. Do not run towards the tank if you will get splatted before you reach him.
    • Whatever you do, do not run away from the tank. It just makes it harder for people to catch up to you and rescue you. This is a natural urge, and one that grips people all too often (yes, we all panic playing WoW, even though it’s just a game). Resist the urge to run away at all costs.
    Keeping track of whether help is on the way as well as tracking all those fluctuating health bars can be quite challenging, of course, but skills like this are what make healing more than mindless button pushing.

[Eepi]

Tips and tricks continued

1. Where should you stand? Unless you’re deliberately trying to outrange some enemy ability, I recommend the following:
   • As a general rule, about 15-20 yards away from the tank – comfortably within the maximum range of Feral Charge, Intercept, and Intervene, and comfortably outside the minimum range of those abilities. This way you are never so far away or so close that the tank actually has to run to you, but also far enough away to give an alert tank a few seconds to notice that he's lost aggro (also far enough away that he can see that a mob has detached itself from the pack). You don’t want the tank to have to run to get to you, ever. He isn’t faster than the mob, and the mob has a head start.
   • If your tank is a paladin whose reflexes you trust and the mobs aren't quite instant death on legs, consider standing just outside the edge of Consecration. This way you’re out of melee range of the mobs being tanked, but any mobs that come for you will always be receiving threat from Consecration as well, minimizing the effort needed for the tank to regain aggro even if his taunt is on its cooldown. That way you might just save yourself even if your paladin is a little slow on the draw popping Righteous Defense.
   • Remember that although your tank is your best defender, all the rest of your group is responsible for keeping you alive as well. If you have somebody else who can keep you alive, use them! Stand on the mage so he can use Frost Nova to keep you alive. If the hunter isn't CCing, ask him to put down a Freezing Trap for you to hide behind. Remember: you need to know what every member of your group can do.
   • In all cases, obviously, the tank should be between you and the mobs, as well as any potential mobs that might add. This might mean standing somewhere other than where you just came from, but it would be foolish to place yourself so that you are closest to any potential adds or patrols.
2. Do keep Faerie Fire up on targets that are being DPS’d. It’s an appreciable damage boost, but more importantly it’s a TPS boost, and thus makes you safer.
3. Don’t use Moonfire on targets that are being DPS’d unless you have an extremely good reason. Your DPS is much more likely to pull aggro than it is to make much of a difference in the fight.
4. In theory of course everybody is looking for adds, but because you aren’t actually engaged in combat you are uniquely well suited to keep a lookout (this is another one of those “great vs. good” healer skills). If you see adds, say something! You very well might have been the first one.
5. When do you use Rebirth? Two circumstances:
   • When it will actually save a wipe. In a raid situation you might want to ask your raid leader to authorize use of a battle rez. Ultimately, however, it is your responsibility to keep track of the fight well enough (and know everybody’s abilities well enough) to know when Rebirth will make a difference and when it will just add more to your target's repair bill.
   • If there is another rezzer in the group (one with an out-of-combat rez) who is already dead, and the pull is looking like it’s going to be a wipe, you can cast Rebirth on the other rezzer and tell them not to accept until after the group has wiped. Then the other rezzer can accept the resurrection – presto, instant wipe recovery. Just like having a soulstone.
6. Is your group taking the minimum damage and you're still pulling heal aggro? This often happens to healers just as their tanks enter heroics, where mobs suddenly hit a lot harder than tanks are really prepared for. If you've done all you can to reduce your heal aggro and you're still getting pasted, consider splitting the healing load with another healer for those problem pulls. The total amount of threat produced by the fight may be fixed, but it doesn't necessarily have to all be your threat.

Healing Talents
The actual resto tree is fairly lean, leaving room for lots of optional talents. This means there is a wide variety of possible resto builds available. For full raid healing it’s entirely permissible to spec into every single healing talent in the tree:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

In fact, though, you can have all the critical healing talents by level 50:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Full Dreamstate builds require more talent points, but as discussed above they have a lot of variety in them as well. Two possibilities:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

A discussion of the key healing talents follows:

1. 5/5 Improved Mark of the Wild – This is not a great talent, but Furor is of little use to a resto druid. Improved Mark of the Wild provides only +5 to all stats at level 70 compared to the unimproved version of the spell, but your group would rather have those +5 stats than not.
2. 3/3 Intensity – A must-have for all healing druids. Even if your mana regeneration strategy focuses on mp5, you’re going to end up with a fair amount of spirit. This talent makes that spirit work for you even while casting.
3. 5/5 Subtlety – Another must-have for healers. Remember that you have no way to lose threat, and no personal control over how much HPS you put out during a fight. Your only way to control your threat is through this talent.
4. 3/3 Improved Rejuvenation – This talent stacks additively with Gift of Nature, but it’s still a large improvement to our secondary spell. Most non-trivial fights will require at least a Lifebloom stack and Rejuvenation, so you’ll get a lot of use out of this talent.
5. 1/1 Nature’s Swiftness – One of our major ways to address spike damage. Necessary for serious healing builds.
6. 5/5 Gift of Nature - +10% to all healing done is a no-brainer. Stacks additively with Improved Rejuvenation, so a fully talented Rejuvenation has a 1.25 multiplier, not 1.265.
7. 5/5 Improved Regrowth – healing spells crit for only +50% effect, and Regrowth can only crit on its initial burst, so this might seem like a poor talent at first glance. The +50% crit chance, however, has a surprisingly large effect on the mana efficiency of Regrowth, which is especially important since Regrowth is only used on the hardest-hitting fights, where mana efficiency is most crucial. Necessary for HoT-based builds.
8. 1/1 Swiftmend – Our other major spike damage patch. Necessary for HoT-based builds.
9. 5/5 Empowered Rejuvenation – If you’re this far into the restoration tree, you’re building a HoT-based build. Despite its name, this talent applies to Lifebloom, Rejuvenation, and Regrowth. It would be silly not to take this if you have the option.
10. 1/1 Tree of Life – This form can be a little confusing to new druids. Note that “healing over time spells” means any spell with a HoT component – i.e., you can cast all your heals except for Healing Touch. If you’re using Tree of Life at all, it’s because you’re confident that your gear can sustain a HoT-based healing rotation, so the loss of HT is not a big deal. Coupled with the natural mana efficiency of a HoT-based rotation, Tree of Life form can produce some incredible efficiency numbers.

And honorable mention:

1. 3/3 Living Spirit – You might think this is a critical complement to Tree of Life, with its spirit-based +healing aura. It is a good complement to the tree aura, and if you’re taking tree form you should probably take this talent too. I don’t list it as critical because the tree aura requires 4 spirit to add 1 healing to targets affected by the aura, and this only increases spirit by 15%. In other words, it adds an extra 0.0375 healing per spirit to your tree aura (and 0.025 mp5 per spirit while casting, with Intensity). So even if you had 1000 spirit (which nobody does), this talent would only add 37.5 healing to your tree aura. Now, that’s better than adding 0 healing, and you probably have nowhere better to spend your talent points at this point. But you can hardly call that critical.

Healing Gear
First off, let’s discuss the cloth vs. leather issue. I know what you’re thinking: “I’m a druid, I should wear leather.” The thing to remember about leather is that it’s just another stat. You’re a healer. You aren’t supposed to get hit. If you are getting hit then something is terribly wrong. It would be foolish to wear leather that’s inferior for your job and instead gear yourself planning for things to go terribly wrong.

Now, that’s not to say that leather is bad. If two pieces of healer gear are equally good for you and one is leather, obviously you should take the leather over the cloth. But don’t make your healing capacity suffer because you refuse to wear cloth. Your job is to heal, not to get hit. True, you don’t have the same kind of control over your TPS that a DPSer does. But the truth is that there are few instances where wearing leather over cloth will save the day for you. Your first line of defense is your group. Your second line of defense is your CC. Armor is only your third line of defense. A good way to think of it is this: priests have to wear cloth. You get to.

Now that that’s out of the way, how should a druid prioritize different stats?

The theoretical answer is to prioritize +heals until you can meet the HPS requirements of your point in the game, and then prefer mana regeneration stats. Now that’s not necessarily very helpful, since oftentimes the HPS requirements of a fight are beyond the capabilities of any one person, and you’re expected to heal as part of a team. Still, the point is worth making, because there is such a thing as as too little HPS, particularly when healing normal 5-mans and heroics. If you can’t transfer your HP fast enough to keep the tank alive, it really doesn’t matter how much mana you have. And to a certain extent +heals double as extra mana, since more powerful heals make your mana go farther than it otherwise would. So for solo healing I would recommend as a general priority:

1. +heals
2. Mana regen*
3. Intellect
4. Spell crit
5. Armor (i.e., leather vs. cloth)

When it comes to raiding, where healers work as a team on a fairly regular basis, opinions differ as to whether +heals or mana regeneration is more important. Personally I am of the opinion that even raiding druids should prioritize +healing, since our best spells are so cheap to cast anyway, and when working as part of a team a raiding druid’s spell rotation tends to be restricted to Lifebloom and Rejuvenation. So my personal recommendation for raid stat priorities would be the same as for solo healing:

1. +heals
2. Mana regen*
3. Intellect
4. Spell crit
5. Armor (i.e., leather vs. cloth)

* Mana Regeneration: mp5 vs. spirit
Tree druids often wonder about whether they should get their mana regeneration from mp5 or from spirit. I don’t think there’s a single mathematically correct answer to that question for all situations, but the following observations may be helpful. First, some facts about itemization costs:

1. +1 heal costs 0.455 itemization points
2. 1mp5 costs 2.500 itemization points
3. 1 spirit costs 1.000 itemization points
4. 1 intellect (=15 mana) costs 1.000 itemization points

And now let's expand that a little bit:

1. 2.5 spirit costs the same as 1mp5
2. 1mp5 is worth 20 mana from Innervate
3. 2.5 spirit is worth 27.8 mana from Innervate
4. 1 spirit is worth 0.16mp5 for a druid with 3/3 Intensity
5. 1 spirit is worth +0.25 heals per healer for a tree without 3/3 Living Spirit
6. 1 spirit is worth +0.29 heals per healer for a tree with 3/3 Living Spirit

There are two ways in which spirit is better than mp5: it provides more mana from Innervate, and for tree form druids only, it provides +heals. It’s important to remember that the +heals provided by spirit are applied to each source of healing. In other words, the more healers you have, the better your aura.

So, is spirit a replacement for mp5 for trees? The question can be phrased a different way: given all the “extras” a tree gets from spirit, if we translate 2.5 spirit to its usable components and look at the itemization point values of those components, do we end up with more itemization points than 1mp5? Strictly in terms of itemization costs, assuming you get to use your Innervate on yourself and you actually use it during the fight, and assuming you have 3/3 Intensity, spirit is the better “buy” for a tree even without 3/3 Living Spirit. It works out like this:

0.25 heals is 0.11375 itemization points
 0.16mp5 is 0.400 itemization points
 7.8 mana (the extra mana spirit gets you over mp5 from Innervate) is 0.52 itemization points
 (0.11375 + 0.400 + 0.52) x 2.5 = 2.584375 itemization points, compared to 2.500 itemization points from 1mp5

You should take that with a grain of salt, since there is such a thing as a minimum mp5 requirement just as there is such a thing as a minimum HPS requirement for any given fight. But so long as you don’t ignore mp5 completely, and as long as you get to keep your Innervate, trees can probably feel safe preferring spirit to mp5. If you don’t get to keep your Innervate, even with all the extras a tree gets from spirit, you should probably weight your mana regeneration in favor of mp5.

* Mana Regeneration: mp5 vs. intellect
What about Dreamstate healers? A Dreamstate healer gets + 0.25 heals per intellect, and 0.10mp5 per intellect (which is itself worth another 2 mana per Innervate). Should a Dreamstate healer prefer intellect to mp5 for mana regeneration? We can look at the question the same way we did for spirit, but comparing intellect this time. Remember that 2.5 intellect costs the same as 1mp5.

Once again, from an itemization cost standpoint only, the answer seems to be yes. The itemization point calculation works out like this:

0.25 heals is 0.11375 itemization points
 0.10mp5 is 0.250 itemization points
 17 mana is 1.133 itemization points
 (1.133 + 0.250 + 0.11375) x 2.5 = 3.7425 itemization points, compared to 2.500 itemization points from 1mp5

Again, take this with a grain of salt. What the above calculation shows is that the “extras” a Dreamstate healer gets from intellect make 2.5 intellect worth more itemization points than 1mp5. That’s actually pretty obvious, since 2.5 intellect is worth the same itemization points as 1mp5 without any extras. Most of the itemization points in the above calculation are from the raw mana provided by intellect, which as we know diminishes in value compared to mp5 in any fight over 75 seconds long. Thus, for short fights, intellect is clearly better for a Dreamstate healer than mp5. But we already knew that; intellect is better than mp5 for all healers in short fights.

A more useful comparison might be to compare the value of the extras from intellect alone. In that case the itemization point calculation works out like this:

 0.25 heals is 0.11375 itemization points
 0.10mp5 is 0.250 itemization points
 2 mana is 0.133 itemization points
 (0.11375 + 0.250 + 0.133) x 2.5 = 1.241875 itemization points, compared to 2.500 itemization points from 1mp5

What this suggests is that for long fights where you get to keep your Innervate, a Dreamstate healer can treat 5 intellect as roughly the same value as 1mp5.

[JadoJodo]

Would you guys stop posting these...Everyone here knows about Wowhead.com, and is fully capable of reading it there for themselves. Furthermore, most of us have been playing WoW for quite some time and are fully aware as to how to play our class. Nice try.

[Ferag]

Good info, but leeched guide. No rep cookie for you.

[Ferag]

Would you guys stop posting these...Everyone here knows about Wowhead.com, and is fully capable of reading it there for themselves. Furthermore, most of us have been playing WoW for quite some time and are fully aware as to how to play our class. Nice try.

QFT Thank you for posting this comment.

[Lyricalwarfare]

Woooooo unedited wall of text-leeched guide!

[Couwae]

Do you not know better? Please do not copy paste, and all that block of text hurt my eyes.. THE LIIGHT!

[Smeems]

Copy Pasta has been out of date for three days

[xpandax]

its a good guide, gotta love wowhead