Vaal's Guide to Instance Healing as a Druid

Instance Healing
Druids only have three heals: Regrowth, Healing Touch and Rejuvenation. Regrowth is mostly an “uh oh” spell for when someone is taking lots of damage and is low on health. Otherwise, I generally stick with Healing Touch. Rejuvenation is nice for when people are taking light damage and their health is generally staying around 80%. For Healing Touch, it''s good to keep two ranks of it handy. Personally, I used to use rank 7, which heals about 1000, but recently I have replaced it with rank 8 in addition to rank 10. The reason being that often times when using rank 7 to heal minor damage, they would take additional damage that could potentially cause problems since now they have taken much more damage than rank 7 could heal. Healing for its minimum combined with a sudden spike in damage is why I decided that rank 8 would be the better choice since its minimum is about 1100. Yes it means sometimes using it I over heal when a tank only needed a 1000 point heal but I have found its made little difference on my ability to conserve mana plus it has the up side that if two seconds in your cast they get hit for another 400 or so damage rank 8 will cover that too.

For Bosses
For most bosses the same healing strategy applies. Start casting early. Why wait to start casting healing touch? It’s slow so try and get ahead of the damage. Most bosses hit pretty hard so if you start casting at about 85% health usually a tank will drop to about 70% by the time your healing touch goes off. I have found that this works very well. With the recent patch that made it so the five second rule does not kick in till a spell completes, there is no reason to not start healing touch early and have it part way through casting for when someone actually does take damage. Also it is nice to have a key bound to “target your current target’s target.” This is helpful on bosses in case the person who ends up with the most aggro isn’t the main tank. It also can give you a clue if the next person who might need a heal is someone other than who you are currently healing. What I like to do is while waiting for healing touch to go off is press that key a few times to check that the boss is still on the tank and if not to get a good idea of who he is going after.

Specifically for the baron in undead side of Stratholme this strategy is very useful. Due to his damage aura causing loss of casting time you really need to being casting early. Chain heal the main tank with the highest rank Healing Touch. After getting a Healing Touch off on the tank, that would be the time to toss a Regrowth on rogues/mages who might have taken a hit or are getting low on health due to the baron’s aura. After that it’s a good idea to go back to the main tank.

For the general in UBRS, the general strategy laid out before works well. The strategy that my guild uses to fight him is that either a warlock chain casting fear locks one of his guards down or pair of hunters continually ice traps it. Then the group zergs the other guard while the main tank with the help of the primary healer hold the general. When the group kills the first guard they then kill the general and finally finish off the last guard. Even with as slow as healing touch is I can usually toss a heal on an off tank if one is needed. The trick with the general is his fire attack erases aggro. This can be very bad for healers. Especially if any one has Regrowth or Rejuvenation on them. I have found that if you stand on the right side of the room, the side furthest from the door, that this is a good place to be to start. Heal form there and watch the general to use his fire AoE and aggro onto you. Sometimes the tanks pick him back up right away but if they don’t I found that dash works well. If he heads towards you shift to cat form and dash across the room towards the furthest wall. I’ve tried shifting into bear to wait for tanks to get him off me but even with 7 thousand armor in bear he kills me too fast. Usually this only happens once since as soon as the group has finished with the first guard they usually then zerg the general so even when he uses his fire AoE chances are someone else will pick aggro due to all the people attacking him. In any case, the general can be rough as a druid if the group cannot hold aggro of you. But that’s their failing, not yours. The generals guards hit for about 800 and mortal strike for nearly 3 thousand on me. As long as your group knows how to keep one of the guards locked down while killing the other one your only worry is the general aggro’ing on you and hopefully this has helped with that.

Oh No! Mortal Strike!
I’ve read a lot about how we have no way to deal with Mortal Strike. That it completely gimps our healing and its all doom and gloom and death from there. Well, that hasn’t been my experience. Yes it can be deadly if it hits someone already at low health because it usually flat out kills them but if you keep everyone topped off at about 85-100% of their hp its shouldn’t be to big of a problem on tanks. On leather and cloth wearers, it tears us apart but we usually don’t have aggro and when we do a good group will pull it off you fast. Now the damage has been done what should we do about it? Cast Healing Touch. Am I crazy? Nope. I have found that the danger from Mortal Strike is that if tanks are not well healed then they might get killed. It has been my experience that Mortal Strike will drop a fully healed tank to about 30-40% health. Wow! What massive damage! But their normal attacks are fairly unimpressive. After that big hit they go back to auto attack, which isn’t very threatening. It has been my experience that after the tank gets hit by mortal strike that they have enough health and defense to easily live long enough for Healing Touch to go off. What about healing being halved by mortal strike? Not a problem. Here is what happens. A mob Mortal Strikes the tank then I see the tanks health drop, I see the Mortal Strike symbol so I begin casting Healing Touch. By the time Healing Touch goes off Mortal Strike has worn off. It seems to only last about 4 seconds but it usually takes me longer than half a second to noticed the damage, target the tank if needed and then start casting Healing Touch. Mortal Strike can be annoying if it happens in the middle of your cast but its hardly a raid ender. To be honest, I don’t think I’ve lost anyone because of Mortal Strike.