Etiquette

People always say it, but it's true....being polite and courteous, even in an online game where you'll likely never meet any of the people you interact with in person, can go a long way.

Generally, I try to ascribe to these simple rules when interacting with other people.

• Use correct spelling. No, really. Just use it. I know sometimes there isn't time or you really don't know how to spell "innervate" (it's not exactly common vernacular), but generally, try to spell things. It doesn't hurt to spell out the entire word either...will it really take you that much longer to type "you" as opposed to "u"? Some people say excessive abbreviation is an indication of a lazy player -- I'm not sure that's really true, but I know I don't like it because it looks dumb and because it makes me feel like I'm playing with a 12-year-old.
• If you are LFM for something, specify in your LFM message what exactly you are looking for (what class, spec, what instance, how much is cleared, and how far you intend to go).
• If you are LFG for something, do not say you are 3k dps if you are not really 3k dps. You don't really need to advertise yourself as "fucking dps yo." Yes, I see you are a warlock. Did you think you might be asked to tank?
• I understand that everyone's brand of humor is different, but if you really must be crass or lewd or overtly sexual or racist or whatever, at least try to make it not interfere with the progress of the group. I don't really want to wait around 15 minutes while 24 other people recover from the story of how you contracted herpes.
• When asking a person's spec, do it politely.
  
• If you're running a raid, do it professionally. State the rules outright and abide by them. Set the example and make everyone else abide by them. If someone isn't meeting your expectations, tell them so they can improve. If they still do not meet the requirements, replace them nicely.
  

Of Idiots and Aspects

My guild was able to field an entire Naxx-25 full clear on Valentine's night. That's fairly impressive...and sort of sad.

I haven't been raiding as much lately, which is partially due to real-life constraints and partially because both mage and druid need only 25-man upgrades but I can only realistically do one per week. The mage has a lot of second-best-in-slot items; the druid seems to be able to perform at the same level with lesser levels of gear (she's still in a few blues). But since I actually had plans on Valentine's Day, I missed this week's Naxx-25.

I've been busy gearing up my protection pally, who I think is finally at a level where her gear no longer makes me cringe. She's ready to main-tank Naxx-10 and has already done VoA and Sartharion this week.

But, since the guild's scheduled continuation of Naxx-25 on Sunday night was no longer needed since they already cleared it, they decided to do a Maly-25 instead. It went very well and we two-shot it. Since I still haven't gotten around to doing the Aces High quest, I'm still fairly shaky on Phase 3, but I've had a lot of chances to field-practice the technique now. My druid has already successfully done Malygos-10, it seems the 25-man version is actually easier.

I do think Arcane is a better spec for Malygos than Frostfire, once you get into the rhythm of the fight. Arcane is all about timing. Once you try the fight enough times, you get a feel for when there are natural breaks in the timing that allow for you to Evocate or reposition or do whatever else you need.

The Malygos Fight
I started out by popping Icy Veins to speed up initial casting. Keep in mind that at this point there's no sparks down yet. After the first vortex phase and a spark comes down, I sit squarely in it and pop Arcane Power. At that point someone's already popped Bloodlust usually, so there's a little window of time in which to just go balls-to-the-wall. POM-AB can be saved with Arcane Barrage and Fire Blast for vortex phases. After the second vortex I'll usually need to Evocate. I do it once more, during Phase 2, and mana gem in between as needed. I've been having no mana problems since I fixed my spec to include Student of the Mind.

Phase Two is still my least favorite phase, because it's possible to get into a rotation. Half the time is spent running between balls and trying to target stuff in the air anyway. And Phase Three just involves spamming the rotation over and over (1-1-2 or 3-3-3-4). On our successful attempt, only a few people died on Phase 3, everyone else stayed up and we finished with almost a minute to spare.

3-Fail Sarth
After finally getting the Champion of the Frozen Waste on my mage (long overdue, in my opinion, since she was ready for that title a long time ago), I decided to try main-tanking Sarth for a shot at my tier gloves, and joined a pug. What a mistake that was...

I'm used to seeing undergeared people in Sarth-10, since well-geared people don't bother with it anymore, but it seems that each Sarth-10 pug just gets worse and worse. I started thinking something was very wrong when five people, including a healer, didn't go into the portal on the first drake, and died. That drake took about five minutes to kill. The two hunters were doing 900 and 1000 dps, respectively. The healer that died, a very undergeared priest, was using Binding Heal as her most frequently used cast, and Healium who is extremely well geared (just got the Malygos-25 robe) soon found out that this priest had never healed before. Not just had never healed a raid before -- had never healed before, at all. She didn't even know how to "target the main tank." We were basically doing Sarth with one healer.

Five people, all from the same guild, including this priest and the two hunters, earned their very first Emblem of Heroism on that first drake. Not even a single heroic completed, or even attempted, as our number-one-dps (a rogue) pointed out. The hunters were now claiming lag as a factor in their performance.

We keep clearing trash, during which I find out that my offtank (another prot pally) is very good. Offtanking is a fairly involved and often thankless role, but he does it admirably -- he picks mobs off of me to tank, doesn't try to taunt off me, goes into the portals, and doesn't die. His gear is actually better than mine in some slots, but he's not enchanted, so I ended up with more effective health and avoidance. The other priest used this time to discover that Flash Heal and Greater Heal are better spells than Binding Heal. The hunters continue to lag, or just suck, or both.

I expected to wipe on the first actual Sarth attempt, and we did. What was surprising was that after five people died on the first Flame Wall (guess who they were...) the five that remained (me, the offtank, Healium, a dps warrior, and a rogue) brought Sarth to 6% until we finally wiped from being overwhelmed.

We rez everyone and try again. The two hunters died again on the first Flame Wall (if they were actually lagging, this is pretty understandable since I've definitely experienced this problem before myself, and it's infuriating). But everyone else, to their credit, learned quickly and didn't die until the very end, and we ended up killing it. The less fail of the two hunters won his tier gloves. Face now planted squarely in palm.

Just goes to show how easy the current content actually is, I suppose. Nothing in this game is an actual gear-check except for Sarth with drakes up.

Tanking Basics 101: Mitigation and Avoidance

Basic Tank Mechanics

Q: What exactly do tanks do, and how do they do it?
A: They take lots of hard hits without dying, and they allow no one else but themselves to be so hit.

So a tank's role breaks down into survival and threat. Threat is a lot less of an issue now than it used to be, so I think it is fair to say that a tank gears for survival first, then threat, then maybe dps. I realize that tank dps is getting to be a valid issue now that tanks can actually do above 200 dps, but no tank in a progression role has the luxury of gearing for damage (unless you tank with damage, as may be the case with druids). His dps is going to come from his stats, which naturally comes from better gear.

Q: How does a tank survive?
A: Two stats that tanks and ONLY TANKS care about --> mitigation and avoidance.

They are not the same thing. There seems to be quite a bit of confusion or general disagreement about the relative values of these two stats, so let's look at them more closely, since you will use them to evaluate the overall "goodness" of a tank.

Mitigation refers to damage mitigation; as in, the amount of damage you take when you get hit. It doesn't assume you'll miss, dodge, or parry the attack. It's not based on chance, or procs -- it's active all the time. Your damage mitigation comes from how much armor you have (it can also depend on your block value, but we'll get to that later). It also has nothing to do with how hard spells hit you; it has to do with physical damage only.

Avoidance is your chance to avoid damage completely. It is the base miss chance of the attacker, coupled with your block/dodge/parry. These days, most people count block only as a mitigation talent (more on this later). Generally speaking, a tank's avoidance is his miss/dodge/parry. Again, this has nothing to do with avoiding spell damage, that's just school-based resistance.

Then there is the matter of Effective Health. This is basically how much damage something has to do to you to kill you, and it directly relates to your armor and stamina. Let's assume you're offtanking Patchwerk and you eat a Hateful Strike -- you don't dodge, block, or parry it, it hits you squarely on the face. All that's saving you from death is your effective health -- part of that hit was mitigated by armor, and the rest was soaked up by your Hit Points.

There's also defense. Is defense a mitigation or an avoidance stat? It depends -- under the defense cap, more defense will be a mitigation stat because it will lessen the chance a mob will crit you for 200% of normal damage. That's very bad, in case anyone was wondering. Above the cap, defense adds additional block/dodge/parry, so it is then an avoidance stat.

Finally, there's block rating and block value. I said earlier that most consider block to be a mitigation stat only. The reason for this is that unless your block value is high enough, you won't block all of the damage of the attack, you just block a part of it -- in which case, you've blocked (or mitigated) part of the damage. You can think of block rating as being an avoidance stat and block value being a mitigation stat, but most people just consider block rating and value to be both mitigation because you won't block all of the damage of a boss attack in most cases. What this means, additionally, is that once a tank becomes block-capped (he has 102.4% avoidance, which we'll cover later also), that his block rating becomes effective health, because every attack that gets through will be at least partially blocked. That part that you blocked relates to your block rating, and it equates to more damage that you can absorb.

Q: What is a block cap?
A: When a mob tries to hit a player, the damage done is the result of one dice roll (0-100) based on the following attack table:

Miss
Dodge
Parry
Block
Crit
Crush (not possible at level 80)
Hit

While it is one roll, the values of all of these are summed up in descending order, so that if your tank's combined miss + dodge + parry + block is above 100%, there's no room on the table for a crit, a crush, or even a normal hit. Every hit was at least partially blocked.

In other words, when you roll a dice between 0 and 100, it lands somewhere between 0 and 100. When you sum up the values on that table in descending order, if you find that the combined percentages of your miss/dodge/parry/block is over 100, that means that the value of the dice roll always falls within the realm of miss+dodge+parry+block. Everything else has been pushed off the table. That's the block cap. That's what used to be called the uncrushable cap in TBC.

For example, let's say your miss+dodge+parry+block is 100, your miss is 10%, your dodge is 20%, your parry is 20%, and the 50% left is block. That means 0-10 is miss, 10-30 is dodge, 30-50 is parry, and the rest is block. The dice rolls 43, and that falls within the parry percentage, so you parried that attack. The next attack is 89, and that falls within block, so you block that attack. Probably not the entire hit, though...how much of it you blocked has to do with your block value.

How Tank Stats Relate to Tanks

Well, not all of these stats relate to all tanks, for example. Druids can't block (they don't wear shields) and they can't parry (they don't tank with weapons, although a giant bear with a mace in their mouth might actually be really scary). Their mitigation comes solely from armor because of the inability to block. Their avoidance comes mostly from dodge and defense.

Death Knights also don't block. They make up for it by having armor that scales higher than for warriors and paladins.

Druids can effectively get 540 defense just from talents alone. It doesn't mean that defense doesn't help druids, it just means that they don't need it to be uncrittable.

What is better, avoidance or mitigation or effective health or defense?

It depends.

You need to be defense capped, first and foremost. It's not hard. Do everyone a favor and don't go anywhere without being defense capped. You're not a tank until you are, you're just a liability.

If you are defense capped but cannot get block capped, it makes sense to gear/enchant/gem for more effective health (more mitigation and block) perhaps over avoidance. Higher-end tanking gear has avoidance on it, luckily it also has more effective health as a general rule.

Tree Durid iz 4 Heel

i. Introduction – FHQ ("Frequently Heard QQs")
ii. Roles and Spells
iii. Talents and Builds
iv. Comparative Druid Stats
v. Gearing for Raids
vi. Glyphs, Gems, and Enchants
vii. Meters and You
viii. Consumables
ix. Recommended Addons

Introduction – FHQ ("Frequently Heard QQs")

QQ: Resto druids can’t heal tanks!
AA: You’d be surprised. One of the nice things about resto and its synergy with the balance tree is that you can spec/gear/glyph to fill whatever role you like, or design a spec that does everything pretty well. Resto druids have a very respectable arsenal for dealing with tank damage, which will be covered later on. It depends on playstyle and what the druid is comfortable with, but we’re definitely not gimped in this respect.

QQ: Resto is not good at end game content!
AA: That may have seemed the case in TBC, with the lack of a smart group heal, but it is certainly not the case now. As mentioned before, druids are extremely versatile and people are starting to recognize this. I’ve personally been involved in Naxx 25s sporting an entire forest of trees, and my very first Malygos-10 kill had a healing team comprised of three resto druids. It may just be that resto is a popular class to play right now. There’s even talk of them being overpowered.

QQ: Resto druids are overpowered!
AA: Maybe a bit – but you have to remember that a class that relies so much on delayed payback of benefit received will have to work a lot harder to make sure that the player did indeed receive the benefit of the heal, especially when the other healers in your raid will be quick to overwrite your HoTs. I’m always top on the activity meters, even ahead of pally tanks and other GCD-heavy classes. Maybe the general feeling that the current content is not terribly challenging for healers is helping to add to this (mis)conception.

QQ: Nourish is useless!
AA: That depends on how you’re using it. Are you using it to try to out-spam a pally? In that case, it probably is. Are you using it to augment the healing done by Wild Growth after you have applied WG on 5 targets? If so, you might appreciate it a lot more.

QQ: Wild Growth is useless!
AA: I’m surprised that I hear this, but I do. It may seem this way if you are part of a very proactive healing team, in which case, it may just be a matter of timing. Once you learn the encounters better, you may find the throughput of this spell increasing. Also, remember that the use of WG is not limited to its raid heal capacity but also to buff your next Nourish on the affected targets – think of it as a self-buff to Nourish.

ii. Roles and Spells

Druid healing is unique in a number of ways. The reliance of HoTs is the obvious example, but Blizzard has been actively designing spells to allow us to utilize “heal combos,” which is a very interactive and engaging healing method. Not everyone likes it, but I personally do.

I don’t want to go through every spell and explain what it does – I imagine you can read a tooltip. What I want to do in this section is go over some scenarios and evaluate what spells are good for certain occasions, and why.

Main Tank Healing

1. Lifebloom x3, rolling
2. Rejuvenate, refreshing
3. (Glyphed) Regrowth
4. Living Seed proccing on Regrowth crits, which if you have Improved Regrowth, will be often even with low crit. This is a passive effect that provides a bit of a health buffer against incoming damage, like the priest’s Prayer of Mending, except that it doesn’t jump. It does help. Just because you don’t notice it doesn’t mean it’s not doing anything.
5. Swiftmend
6. Nature’s Swiftness + (Unglyphed) Healing Touch
7. Nourish

If you have the Swiftmend glyph, it will not consume the Rejuvenation effect. Obviously, if you don’t have the glyph, it is best to use Swiftmend when Rejuv is about to expire to maximize the total healing done, but with the glyph you can do it whenever you want. Every fifteen seconds you have an instant cast heal that doesn’t eat a Rejuv charge. Rejuvenation by itself hits for ridiculous amounts, and can be seen as a way to augment the already periodic health buffer of Lifebloom.

Glyphed Regrowth spam with the proper gear (this requires a fair amount of haste and spellpower) and talents (Nature’s Grace, Improved Regrowth, Nature’s Majesty) is extremely powerful. Each regrowth you apply is essentially buffing itself, as well as probably critting, applying Living Seed, and decreasing the cast time of the next one. This makes it an extremely good tank-healing spam spell.

The best use of Nature’s Swiftness is clearly with the unglyphed Healing Touch, since the glyph will halve its healing output.

Do not let the Lifebloom stacks fall off. Druid healing output depends on HoT uptime.

Nourish is low on the list because although it will get the benefit from all the HoTs already up, most of the time Regrowth will still outperform it.

Main Tank Healing (post 3.1)
Several things are different now. Both Nourish and Regrowth have the 25% crit (down from 50% on just Regrowth). Nourish, Swiftmend, and Regrowth will now proc Living Seed. This is a good thing! With the new Nourish glyph set to outperform the current Regrowth glyph as a MT healing glyph, and the increased mana cost to Lifebloom, you may want to alter your tank healing style.

1. Lifebloom - the new Lifebloom strategy to maximize your mana is to apply it slowly (don't cast 3 stacks upfront, but cast the next stack only when the first is about to expire). Let it bloom out, and reapply slowly. In between you have time to cast other HoTs, such as:
2. Regrowth - no longer as good as a main-tank spam heal because of the changes to Nourish, but it is still useful for applying the HoT, and for the Living Seed bonus.
3. Rejuvenation -- apply for its HoT
4. Nourish. Glyphed and with the T7 bonus, this will be your main tank spam heal now. It heals for an additional 11% per HoT on the target, crits more, and procs Living Seed. It's also quite mana efficient. Spam until one of the above HoTs needs to be refreshed.
   
5. Swiftmend and Nature's Swiftness as usual.

You can also just use Lifebloom like you did before 3.1, but it will cost more mana upfront. You can also just cast one Lifebloom, and let it bloom (which basically means you're just using it to buff Nourish, not for its periodic healing) -- probably not recommended unless you have both the glyph and the T7 bonus.


Raid Healing (e.g. Malygos)

1. Wild Growth
2. Nourish
3. (Glyphed) Healing Touch
4. Rejuvenation/Lifebloom
5. Swiftmend
6. Tranquility
7. Regrowth

Assume that in this situation, main tank healing is assigned to someone else. You are in charge of keeping the raid alive in a situation where everyone takes lots of unpredictable damage (or when everyone just takes lots of damage, such as in his vortex phase).

Use Wild Growth whenever the cooldown is up, then quickly Nourish the people it hits. Target the tank to get the melee group. Target yourself and run into the caster group. Get creative with how you control who it hits.

Throw HoTs around, liberally – but make sure you follow up, because even if you don’t have to worry about someone else overwriting your HoT, chances are the damage might come too quickly for slow healing to keep up. Rejuv, LB, and WG are now designed to be used in conjunction with Nourish.

Some druids really like glyphed Healing Touch (keep in mind that if you do this, you will have to find some other spell to use with Nature’s Swiftness). With the glyph and 5/5 Naturalist, cast time is down to 1 second, which basically turns it into a Flash Heal. I personally think Nourish is better, but I can see a good case made for glyphed HT, especially if you know you’ll always be raid healing. It’s also nice for leveling, since it’s the only “fast” heal you’ll have until you get Nourish.

I usually use Rejuv in conjunction with Swiftmend when I need to instantly heal someone – when nothing else is fast enough.

Don’t “forget” to use Tranquility (I do this a lot).

Tank and Raid Healing

1. Everything you have :)
   

Obviously you won’t be able to do everything, but you can do a lot of things well. The spec section below will provide more detail.

iii. PVE Talents and builds

Here is an example of a “raid healing” build without glyphed Healing Touch:

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=0xG0zZZf0IufugiuVhst

This build picks up all the talents from resto that improves your HoTs and a few talents that help with Regrowth. It also picks up Genesis from the Balance tree and a few other talents to get to Nature’s Splendor, increasing Lifebloom’s duration to 9 seconds. Add the Lifebloom glyph to get 10 seconds. This build is for raid healing with HoTs, and assuming you’ll never use Healing Touch except with Nature’s Swiftness.

Here is an example of a “raid healing” build with glyphed Healing Touch:

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=0VG0zZZfVhuVuxiuVhst

The key here is 5/5 Naturalist, which in conjunction with the glyph will cause Healing Touch to have a 1-second cast time. Since you’ll be using Regrowth with Nature’s Swiftness instead, it picks up talents that buff Regrowth also.

Here is an example of a “Dreamstate” build.

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/druid/talents.html?tal=55320031003300300000000000000000000000000000000000000000023003331203150053105001200

Dreamstate is a talent in the Balance tree that regens 10% of your mana while casting. It used to be fairly popular back in the day before druids got Tree of Life form, as mana management was very much an issue for healers in Vanilla WoW. It has since fallen out of vogue, but I hear of it every now and then in Wrath, and with the coming nerfs to mana regen, some may find it interesting again. I’ve heard reports that it is quite effective in Wrath as long as you don’t mind not having Wild Growth. Since druids didn’t have a group heal until the end of TBC, this isn’t giving up that much for some druids.

The idea with this spec is to delve a little deeper into the Balance tree to pick up Lunar Guidance and Dreamstate. In return, you lose a little of the healing bonus to Tree of Life, your GCD on your HoTs is back to where it was pre-Wrath (1.5), and you lose Wild Growth. This spec will tend to favor Intellect a little more heavily than other builds. It will also benefit from haste, since as you get up into the realm of 500+ haste, your GCD on Lifebloom and Rejuv will start to approach what it would be with GotEM.

Here is an example of a Regrowth-glyph build:

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/druid/talents.html?tal=05320131003000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000023003331203150053105301351

This build uses Nature’s Grace to supplement Regrowth criticals (which, remember, is going to be very often) with a reduction in cast time of the next spell, and picks up Celestial Focus for some extra haste. Coupled with the Regrowth glyph, this makes for very powerful Regrowth-spamming. With this build, you would still use Healing Touch with Nature’s Swiftness, but you don’t have a 4-minute Tranquility. It’s still a very powerful raid healing build that doesn’t sacrifice any of the utility of Wild Growth or Lifebloom.

There are infinite more variations. You could design your own Dreamstate/glyphed Healing Touch spec and try to out-spam pallies. Anything is possible.

QQ: Why do none of these builds include Replenish (soon to be renamed Revitalize because for some reason it confuses people)?
AA: This is going to be complicated, because they are changing Revitalize to work with Wild Growth, which makes it ten times as useful as it previously was. The mana/rage/runic power gained is a minimal increase for most of the targets you cast this on when using rejuv, but Wild Growth ticks more often, affects more targets, and is used more often in general. It's certainly not a bad spell, but it may gain in popularity when it works with Wild Growth.

QQ: What’s the deal with Gift of the Earthmother (GotEM)? Why do most restos swear by it?
AA: GotEM increases the base global cooldown of your instant cast heals by 20%. That means that your Rejuv, WG, and most importantly, Lifebloom can be applied at a 1.2 GCD, instead of 1.5. You will need 655 haste rating at level 80, and 5 points in this talent, to get your HoTs on a 1-second global cooldown. This was actually nerfed in 3.0.8; previously, it scaled better with hsate because the bonus wasn't applied in any particular order, so you only needed 505 haste to reach a 1.0-second GCD. Nevertheless, most restos consider points spent in this talent to be well worth it – anything that allows you to apply HoTs faster just frees up that much time for other things, even if it’s just to compensate for lag effects.

iv. Comparative Resto Druid stats

Generally: Spellpower>Spirit/MP5/Intellect>Haste>Crit

A word about regen: The upcoming nerf to spirit-based mana regen means that although your in-combat regen will remain about the same, your OOC5SR (out of combat five-second rule regen) will take a hit. When I'm healing, I'm not out of the 5SR that often, except in certain fights (Heigan), and because of Clearcasting. Clearcasting is being changed also, so in general, Spirit will be devalued. What this may mean in practice is that you may aim to get your Intellect to Spirit ratio a little closer to 1:1 than it was previously. In other words, you may have to gem for Intellect. MP5 remains a secondary mana regen stat, but it might become a little more useful than it previously was.

Spellpower is fairly self-explanatory. Haste is still very good for restos, and a fair amount of leather healing gear comes with haste, even the tier pieces. You shouldn’t ever really need to gear for crit, in the same way that you never need to gear for Stamina. The amount that comes default on your usual gear is more than enough. Do try to replace all your old epics as you level to 80, even if you think the other stats are good enough to keep, the lack of scaling on stamina and intellect alone makes replacing those level 70 epics necessary.

As a healer, you should also be mindful of the overall pace of your guild when determining how best to outfit yourself. If you’re still in the progression phase, it might be a good idea to value mana regen slightly more, since fights will most likely last longer when you are just learning fights and the dps has not had a chance to gear up yet. Later on, when things are on farm, fights will be shorter, and tanks will have more health, so it might be more useful to drop some regen for spellpower.

v. Gearing for Raids

Don’t be afraid to equip cloth to start out with, the stats will be more in line with what you need until you’re doing Naxx. Heroic instances drop a lot of moonkin gear (crit gear) – don’t use it. There’s a couple of really good standout pieces that are easy to get for resto:

Helm: Helm of Anomalus (Heroic Nexus). Far better than anything else you can equip in this slot until Naxx.
Neck: Dragon Prow Amulet (trash drop from Heroic UK), Necromancer’s Amulet (Heroic CoS).
Chest: T7 piece (80 Emblems of Heroism)
Bracer: Handler’s Arm Strap (Heroic Drak’tharon)
Gloves: Grotto Mist Gloves (Heroic Azjol-Nerub), T7 piece (60 EoH)
Belt: Elegant Temple Garden's Girdle (40 EoH). Massively better than the leather version for resto, despite the armor downgrade.
Legs: Earthgiving Legs (leatherworking BOE)
Feet: Earthgiving Boots (leatherworking BOE)
Trinket: Talisman of Troll Divinity (Heroic Drak’tharon)
Weapon: War Mace of Unrequited Love (Heroic Nexus)
Offhand: Handbook of Obscure Remedies (EoH)
Idol: Idol of Lush Moss (EoH)

vi. Glyphs, Gems, and Enchants

Gems:
Runed Scarlet Ruby and Sparkling Sky Sapphire for spellpower and spirit, respectively.
Purified Twilight Opal and Royal Twilight Opal are good choices for a purple gem, Luminous Monarch Topaz may be the gem of choice for regen (spellpower and intellect), and Reckless Monarch Topaz is an okay choice for orange. Gem to enhance the strengths of a piece, not to hide its weaknesses.

Enchants:
Head: Arcanum of Blissful Mending
Shoulders: Greater Inscription of the Crag
Robe: Powerful Stats
Cloak: Greater Speed or Wisdom.
Bracers: Major Spirit
Gloves: Exceptional Spellpower
Legs: Brilliant Spellthread
Boots: Greater Spirit
Weapon: Exceptional Spirit, Mighty Spellpower

Glyphs:

Major glyphs:
Glyph of Swiftmend for sure. Probably one of the most OP glyphs in the game.

Other good choices:
Glyph of Regrowth for more tank healing oomph. Glyph of Nourish will be better once 3.1 hits. Glyph of Lifebloom is also useful. Glyph of Innervate is also nice, but you probably won’t need the benefit to yourself since you should have enough spirit to regen your entire bar anyway. It’s good if you never really need an Innervate and use yours on other people a lot.

Come 3.1 I'm going to be rolling with Nourish, Swiftmend, and Lifebloom.

Minor glyphs:
Not a lot of good choices until they finally make the druid form glyphs, which will probably be never. Glyph of Rebirth is pretty nice, saving you from having to restock a reagent.

vii. Meters and You

When crap hits fan, all healers basically heal the same way – find the button labeled “Heal” and push it.

Druids have the most unique healing style of any healer in the game, due to the necessity of using HoTs, most of which buff or enhance other heals the druid has. Because of this, keeping HoT uptime at the maximum will greatly contribute to your effective healing output more than anything else you can do.

You will never outspam a pally, or be as good at mitigation as a disc priest, but you are very well equipped to handle most situations just as well as, or better, than other healers. If you know your heals and which situations in which to best apply them, topping meters is very easy for a resto.

What do Healing Meters Actually Mean?

Generally, not a whole hell of a lot. How much healing you’re actually doing is something only you and the other healers can feel out. Meters can supplement this information, but it’s only a metric, nothing more. In healing, as in dps, there are usually one or two individuals that set the pace; everyone else works around them. In dps, you time your rotation to the rotation of the highest dps. In healing, you heal to pick up the slack of the highest healer. But that really depends on who you’re healing and what classes of healers are present. If you are a discipline priest, for example, your job is to help mitigate damage, so if you’re doing your job or until they allow shield mitigated damage to count as a heal on meters, your healing output will be low. If you happen to be a group healer, or a pally with the glyph, just throwing out random group heals at opportune times will push the meter up.

There are a lot of other reasons why healing meters are deceiving. Your raw healing output is going to depend on who your healing assignment is, for example. An overgeared group will require less overall healing because fights will be shorter, which will lower everyone’s healing output. For a druid, your overhealing is going to be low, and that is good. Whereas for a priest, for example, a certain amount of overhealing might not be a bad thing because they get mana back from it.

Meters are not all bad. They can reveal your miss/hit/crit rate, your rotation, your incoming damage, your deaths and the causes thereof. And they can be used to help diagnose problems if you find yourself running into trouble. But they should always be read with a grain of salt. Don’t assume that just because someone is low on the meters, that they are not doing their job. Conversely, don’t assume that just because you’re topping meters (which is easier for certain classes than for others) that you’re more useful or more important. It’s nice to be competitive, but healers, more than anyone else except maybe tanks, must work together -- or everyone dies.

viii. Consumables:

Tender Shoveltusk Steak for spellpower, Mighty Rhino Dogs for Mp5. A bunch of haste/crit food, which usually doesn’t work as well.

Spellpower elixirs for more spellpower, and Elixir of Mighty Mageblood or Elixir of Spirit for regen.

Flask of the Frost Wyrm is a great choice for more spellpower, for heavier progression some may prefer Flask of Pure Mojo for regen.

ix. Addons

It is highly recommended that you get some kind of Hot-tracking addon, so you can see who has your HoTs and their duration. DoTimer works pretty well. As a healer, the two package deals are Grid/Clique and Healbot. I use Clique/Pitbull myself because you can set up Pitbull to display your HoTs with their duration on the side of the target’s unitframe. Since downranking is out of the game, I have about 8 key-and-click binds set up with Clique to the different combos of my most used heals.

Make sure that whatever unitframe addon you are using can support showing party/raid pets (and that you know how to turn that functionality on and off, so you don’t have to stare at 25 player frames and 2 kitties, 4 ghouls, and a felhunter if you don’t want to). Not that you’re ever going to be healing hunter pets, mind you, but certain fights require healing dragon mounts (the Oculus, Malygos), which count as pets to the UI.