Monday, March 1, 2010

Resto Druid raid healing reflections

Even though I had already dipped into some raid healing in last weeks VOA-10 I don’t really consider that true raid healing. However I was able to do some real Resto Druid raid healing yesterday, in an ICC-10. It was just me and a Resto Shaman, and a Holy Priest who switched over to Shadow after the first fight. I still topped the healing meters, but I wasn’t far and away from the Shaman as he was a pretty effective raid healer himself. There really isn’t much to raid healing other than throwing out Rejuvs and Wild Growths for area healing, and keeping the tanks Rejuved and Regrowthed. What I did notice, despite the fact that I have very high Spirit, is that I still have considerable mana issues. I have to use my Innervate whenever it’s up and still ended up using a mana pot on each fight. In looking over my gear I think I probably need to replace my trinkets with MP5 trinkets so I’m going to make it a point to run TOC-25 and 10 every week to grab those two.

I’ve healed ICC-10 on my Holy Paladin many times and never once did I have even a single instance where I had to worry about mana. I’ve mentioned before how out of whack I thought the issue was but the point was driven home during Sunday’s raid. Even with the mana return meta gem in my helm there simply is no comparison between the mana regen of Holy Paladins and that of Resto Druids and I was thinking they should probably give Innervate a 2 minute cool down instead of it’s current 3, but leave the mana return as is.

Outside of that tiny little problem with having to be uber-disciplined with my mana pool, I find Resto Druid raid healing as pleasurable as I do Holy Paladin raid healing. Outside of Wild Growth it’s not all that different from my raid healing days back in BC so I think I’ll continue on with it. It’s truly the beauty of a hybrid class where you can be Caster DPS for 25-man raiding, then healer for 10-man raid the next day and all the while still have a Feral spec for miscellaneous solo dungeons runs.