Numbers to aim for as a Tree healerFollow

First step will be to get the 4t9 bonus, you'll love those RJ crits.

Then there's the idols, you'll want both Awakening and Flaring Growth. Some variety of trinkets would be great too, ideally ending up with two good mana-regen trinkets and two good +spellpower ones. Purified Lunar Dust (frost badges) and Ephemeral Snowflake (H-HoR) make a strong starting set of trinkets. After that gear becomes a mix and match, depending on luck with drops and what not. There's nothing wrong with the pieces on the AH if you have the gold lying around, but you should be able to assemble a set without shopping there.

Stat-wise, about 3,000 Spellpower + Haste will be good enough to do ICC-10, and make anything less then that trivial. You'll also want enough mana to last through about 10 minutes of fighting. How much regen that is number-wise will depend on your raid group.

Tank healing and raid healing generally gear the same, but you'll be putting talent points in different places. Tank-healing will look more like this, Raid healing more like this, with the 3 points in Celestial Focus (balance tree) a popular choice for a 25 man raiding build. There's more on the pros and cons of different talent points in our sticky, and there's a pretty big degree in flexibility with them, depending on your role in the group and whatnot.

Pushing your haste up is the conventional gearing goal in the beginning. Spec'd the way you are now you'll soft-cap at 856 haste. Haste and Spellpower are approximately equivalent for increasing your output, and honestly you can gem either. Reaching the haste soft-cap is much more critical in 25-man raids then for 10 mans. Spellpower, spellpower/haste, and spellpower/spirit are the typical combos of choice for gemming.

Once you get geared you should be able to have enough mana regen from your meta gem, the awakening idol and trinkets. However while gearing you may need to focus on pieces with spirit, or (in a worst case scenario) gem Mp5/spirit to give you enough mana to last through a raid encounter. However, once you get a few pieces of gear, you'll probably find yourself with way too much mana, and eyeballing some boomkin pieces.

EJ clicky

Me clicky (causal raider, 10-man build).

The snowflake procs off of periodic heals. It apparently has a short internal CD, but will return a heap of mana when you get HoTs rolling on everyone.

Since you've managed to heal most of the level 80 instances on regular mode you should be ready to try heriocs as a next step. You can always start out with H UK, or something else easy to get your feet wet.

However if you don't have some guildies to run with, the random thing could be a bit of a pain. I mean, some people will want to run with heavily over-geared healers, and you may have to put up with the gear-based insults and stuff from time to time. There's no reason you shouldn't be able to do heriocs with a proper group though.

Short answer:

In 5s and 10s it doesn't matter so much.

Long answer:

Each spell's healing power scales differently in respect to haste, spellpower, and critical.

You can download the Treecalcs spreadsheet, the link is on the bottom of the first post here. Input your stats and gear, and it will give you an idea how much the next additional point of haste, spellpower and critical will affect the different spells. Next look at your recount/WoL numbers and get an idea which spells you use most, and which stat that spell(s) is affected by most. Stack that stat.

If you are really ambitious you can do some serious number-crunching here, taking into account different encounters, spell mixes, etc. (isn't math fun ).

My opinion:

I'll tend to focus more on spellpower, because things like haste gems and enchants will have to be re-done if I get pushed over the soft-cap by a new piece of gear.

Items with both haste and spellpower make me all happy inside.

The Snowflake trinket is godly for mp5 issues. I see it has an eternal cooldown, though I'm wondering if that is really the case. During a regular heroic run (Old Kingdom), I checked my Recount add-on for fight statistics and it showed (as Replenished) to have returned just as much mana as the Replenishment effect we were running with (<3 Ret Paladins). About 6k mana returned through that trinket and 6k through Replenishment.

I've tried tossing a Wild Growth on a full team (+ pet, I have it glyphed) and it seemed to return 11 mana on each hit, each time (second), in other words, no internal cooldown. You'll also notice that the animation is up pretty much constantly if you roll HoTs on people. I'll have to do some more calculation on it once I am actually able to log in, but it's definitely a good (and relatively easy to get) mp5 trinket.

Wild Growth costs 800 mana (give or take) and it returns 11 mana every person it hits and it ticks for 7 seconds, hitting every second. Let's say you've got it glyphed and hit 6 people (full group plus pet). That's 66 mana every second for 7 seconds, giving you a total of 462 mana back, meaning Wild Growth effectively only costs 300-ish mana. A low-cost and long duration heal like Rejuvenation (with the Awakening glyph) might even return more mana than it costs.

It's pretty crazy.

I've got a question about spell power values, though. Currently, self-buffed, I'm at around 2600 healing power in Tree of Life form and all that jazz. I'm 5p T9 (I know, I know, get the helm?) and I've got a GS of barely 4900, if I remember correctly. 3000 spell power seems like a lot, if you're not counting in Tree of Life and such. I barely see that on anyone these days, even the 6k GS healers I've come across, so I'm assuming the 3000 spell power is actually 3000 healing power while buffed and in Tree of Life form.

It should be worth noting that you can start ICC10 with less, as long as you don't plan on doing a full run. I healed at least the first boss with less gear than I'm wearing now. And heroics barely need anything these days. I'm /facerolling them with ease in my current gear.

As for haste, is it primarily used to lower the global cooldown, or do people pick up the Rapid Rejuvenation glyph these days? I ran with that glyph for some time, but the lowered duration of Rejuvenation messed up my rotations, so I decided to do away with it. And it's been a while since I saw people recommending Celestial Focus. You need to dump a lot of points into Balance to get that haste bonus and with Nature's Grace already bumping me over the soft cap, I'm wondering if those points aren't better spent on mana efficiency in the Resto tree, through Revitalize or one of the mana cost reduction talents (forgot their names).

Finally, my gear. I know, the cloak needs some work. I'm gathering honor to buy the PvP one (cheapest and fastest upgrade available) until I can afford the Frost Emblems. Right now I want to get Lunar Dust first, though.

Dinged 80 last night and now have my talents set up like I want them for now, I favored the talents that would benefit me and my playstyle most in 5 man content because I dont' know how often, if ever, I will be doing raids, if that changes I will adjust my talents accordingly.

Anyway, have a look if you want and let me know if this is good enough to start doing Heroics (doubtful). Thanks again.

Other than lowering the global cooldown, I'm having a hard time seeing the effective use of haste on my Druid. Especially since so many spells are instant casts or 1.5-second casts. My Shaman collects haste like crazy, but that's because Chain Heal is on a 2-second cast timer, if I remember correctly. With enough haste, mana and mp5, you can spam Chain Heal for sexy HPS.

My Druid, on the other hand, with the high mp5 and overall mana efficiency, seems more focused on spell power. Currently I can roll Rejuvs and WG on a 10-raid for something like 5 minutes before having to use Innervate and a mana pot. Of course, lacking the additional haste makes tank healing a *****, since Regrowth and Nourish seem to take forever (until either crits and procs Nature's Grace).

There are other uses?!!

Naw seriously though, it's an odd stat. Sometimes it seems it's hard to appreciate it unless you are blanket healing 25s. I mean keeping RJ on like 15 people instead of 11 because of haste in an aura-like fight; that's sweet. In 10s it really frees up time in the rotation to do other things; of course most of those other things have a lower HPET then RJ. So sometimes it seems to be giving me more time to do less efficient healing.



That spell really needs a warning label: For Emergency Use Only. Any other use prohibited by law, and punishable by a fine of up to 100g.



The force is strong with this one.

Dosgamer, do yourself and everyone else a favor and sell the hilt instead. It's worth around 8-10k gold on my server. The weapon you get out of it is good, but not worth 10k gold. Get the dagger from Garfrost in Pit of Saron heroic. It's pretty good and should last you into some of the heavier raids where you can get weapons equal to the Battered Hilt reward.

If you never run as Feral the feral weapon would be a waste. The 1 Hand Healer weapon, even though it doesn't have spirit, is still awesome, just make sure the off-hand you use has spirit on it.

Also, Spirit is a great resto druid stat, but it's not so great that we gem for it because spell power is better and straight MP5 is better, so... go with the 1 Hand weapon for your healer you'll get much more use out of it.

I don't see why not....I guess just wait and see if you can get your hands on another hilt and then try starting the quest. If it starts then yes you can, if you can't then no. <shrug>

BTW, been pounding through Heroics like crazy since I started this thread (figured I'd try them out and see how I did) and finally got my 4T9 bonus last night. Been a nice ride, now I don't really know what to aim for, been trying to change my secondary spec to feral but don't want to til I get a respectable DPS set. Anyway just an FYI and bragging. Thanks for the help so far.