Healing Dreamwalker: Channeling your inner warlock
Brace yourself kids, this is a hefty one.
So, in the interests of putting out as much healing as you can, what steps can you take to maximise your performance?* Below are some tips that may help you maximise your healing for this fight.
- Revitalize and Wild Growth are useless, skip them.
- 2 points in Natural Perfection for 2% crit (there’s that incidental crit we can pile on!)
- Living Seed is nice to have, but it is unreliable since she isn’t being hit very often and most of the seeds will be overwritten as you spam. It’s a nice bonus, but if it won’t fit, don’t worry about it.**
**Note: I believe you’ll get more out of 2 points in NP rather than 2 in LS. If you believe this isn’t the case, please let me know.
- 3/3 Nature’s Grace. Nourish should already be a <1sec cast, so NG won't help you there, but it will make a marginal difference to your Regrowth refreshes, and fill in the gaps if you are just shy of the haste cap. It's one of those "might as well fill it out" talents, for this particular fight.
- 3/3 Natural Perfection for 3% crit.
- 3/3 Living Seed – every little bit helps. LS will be unreliable and mostly wasted, but it came in at ~4.5% of my healing (and I wasn’t even critting for the big numbers that come with getting your buff stacks up).. so it’s another “nice to have” talent.
- Keep Rejuv and Regrowth up at all times
- Slow-stack Lifebloom
- Nourish “spam” in between
- Swiftmend your Rejuv on cooldown. Note: you’ll need to make sure it’s Rejuv and not Regrowth; the easiest way to do this is to cast Swiftmend straight after you cast Regrowth, so that Regrowth is definitely the longer HoT, and it chooses to Swiftmend your Rejuv.
- When NS comes up again, it should be roughly in time for everyone to pop all their cooldowns (Bloodlust/Heroism, GS, potions, etc) because they have a large stack of portal buffs. When it’s called, pop another Potion of Wild Magic and hit your NS/HT combo, hopefully for some obscenely large amount
Note: Bloodlust/Heroism won’t help you here as you’re casting instant HT plus <1sec Nourishes, but timing your NSHT with all of the buffs and a potion means you should get an enormous HT crit.
- Try to Rejuv just before you enter a portal, and as soon as you come back out, for maximum uptime.
I quickly grabbed Class Timers and configured it to show me a large HoT icon (bars don’t work for me) and a simple timer next to it. As the HoTs tick down, they reshuffle to display the next-to-expire spell at the top. So basically all I have to do is keep an eye on whatever is on the top of the list, and refresh that next.
/focus Valithria
/cast [@focus] Rejuvenation
/target Valithria
/cast Rejuvenation
As far as DPS (err… HPS?) strategy on this fight, basically think of yourselves as affliction warlocks in a general sense.
Your goal is to maximize healing done in a given time. Since you only have a certain number of seconds available before the boss dies (err… is healed?), if you want to maximize HPS, it stands to reason that on any given one of those seconds, you want to be using whichever ability you have at your disposal that will cause the highest amount of damage (err… healing?) to the boss. It’s not about the HPS of a spell per se, it’s about the HPET (Healing Per Execute Time) – so even though a Rejuv lasts 15 seconds (unmodified), it only costs 1.5s (unmodified) to cast. Its HPS may not be as large as nourish, but its HPET is enormous.
Since I’m not a druid, and also not active in wow anymore (so no parses from my guild to draw from), I’m going to pull the first set of HPET numbers I see off EJ, and sort largest to smallest. They may not exactly match your numbers, but they’re probably roughly proportional (poster did not state which glyphs were in use.)
Rejuv – 19603
Regrowth – 15756
Lifebloom – slow 3 stack w/bloom – 15067
Lifebloom – rolling – Once it is rolling, 1 cast is worth 7 ticks of 1893 or 13251.
Nourish(w/glyph 3 hot) – 12169
Nourish(w/glyph 2 hot) – 11640
Lifebloom – fast 3 stack w/bloom – 10649
Nourish(at least 1 hot) – 10582
And then you simply base your next spell on this priority list. Rejuv is at the top for HPET, so that’s going to always be your obvious first choice – spending a second casting rejuv is always going to give you more raw healing than spending a second casting nourish (no matter how many hots are buffing it). Rejuv, Regrowth, slowstack lifebloom, and use Nourish as a filler when there are no higher-value spells to cast.
Now, as for the rapid rejuv glyph causing you to need to recast rejuv more often? That’s a good thing. Because rejuv is your #1 top HPET spell – the more often you cast it, the more often you’re taking a second or so of time that would otherwise be spent on low-value Nourish filler and using high-value rejuv instead.
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This is a wonderful guide – thank you so much! Since we’re not near this particular fight yet, I hadn’t looked it up, but now I am very excited to get there. Thanks for all the tips!
Taz´s last blog ..The Non-Tree Resto Druid 
You’re welcome
Probably the biggest tip is to have a good HoT timer. Even if you don’t change your gear or spec or anything.. going in with a decent timer will make a huge difference.
It was awful to start the fight and realise I had no good way to track them, yuck.
Thanks so much for the advice! I’m not into mix/maxing *that* much, but most of the advice will be useful. I’ll go tinket with Quartz and see how to track those HoTs… I definitely don’t want to squint at the boss to try to figure out which my HoTs are.
Jen´s last blog ..A holy paladin walks into Icecrown…
Fantastic Post Keeva!
And as a side note…I particuarly love your Keeva-lock
Beruthiel´s last blog ..Healing Valithria Dreamwalker as a Resto Druid 
Just wondering: (25 man) how many healers are assigned to heal Valithia and how many are assigned to heal the tanks and raid?
[...] For even more in-depth information on gear and spec suggestions check out what Keeva has to [...]
Lol.
I dont know if im doing it wrong, but my tree is FULL Spell Power and haste. I can easily change to full SP + crit by swapping moonkin gear (main). I’ll do fine i guess.
Well, I don’t think she’s saying that you should necessarily stack crit – spellpower and haste (to cap) are going to give you more bang for your buck.
All she means is that, with all the crittable nourishes you’re blasting out, it has a lot more value now than it did when you were sitting back and peppering the raid with mostly non-crittable hots and when you DID crit a direct heal, it mostly went to OH.
So it’s probably not worth dropping your entire SP/Haste heavy healing set for moonkin gear, but if you get an opportunity to drop low-value stats like MP5 for crit, that would be a good tradeoff.
This fight motivated me to add boss frames to Pitbull4 so I could track hots on the boss in the same way I track them everywhere else.
Great post as always Keeva. I definitely agree on the Rapid Rejuv glyph being useful and worth having
just on the LB I believe slow stacking will give the worst results than fast stacking, here is why,
Assuming we use the glyph, our LB will run for 8 Secs but must be recast after 7 if we want to roll it, therefore our first 2 stacks will be 7 secs long each and the third will be 8. also remember that we will cast in between so will lose on tick every 7 secs.
Based on these assumptions our numbers look like this
Slow stacking
hpsxsecs
Stack 1 631×7 = 4417
cast 0×1 = 0
Stack 2 1262×7 = 8834
cast 0×1 = 0
Stack 3 1893×8 = 15144
Bloom = 15067
total time = 24 secs
Total heal = 43462
total HPS = 1810
With fast stack (1 sec stacK)
hpsxsecs
Stack 1 631×1 = 631
cast 0×1 = 0
Stack 2 1262×1 = 1262
cast 0×1 = 0
Stack 3 1893×8 = 15144
Bloom = 15067
total time = 12 secs
Total heal = 32104
total HPS = 2675
Just rolling or LB will give 1893hps so will be better than slow stacking
also this doesn’t take into account crit on bloom which could be more often if you bloom more often
It is also important to note that if you dont use the LB Glyph, your HPS goes up to 2746 so it seems you are better off without the glyph for LB
It can be hard to grasp.. it makes my brain do backflips!
Basic logic tells us that punching out a bunch of fast-stacked blooms in half the time of a slow stack will be better – I mean, it seems logical that 32k healing over 12 seconds is a better strategy than 43k healing over 24 seconds, because the HPS is substantially higher.
Remember though, it’s not about HPS here, it’s about HPET (Healing Per Execute Time). When you’re thinking like a DPSer, it’s the HPET that you have to focus on. How much healing you’re going to get out of your casts. The bang you’re getting for your buck.
Using your numbers, the slow stack is doing 43462 healing, and takes 3 seconds of execution time (3 casts). That’s 14487 HPET.
The fast stack is doing 32104 healing, and also takes 3 seconds of execution time (3 casts, just further apart). That’s 10701 HPET.
The HPS of the fast stack is higher, and at first glance looks more attractive than the lower HPS of the slow stack. But, for your same 3 GCDs, a slow stack will give you 43k total healing, while the fast stack will only give you 32k healing.
Again, it’s easy to think “Yeah, but it’s 32k healing in half the time, so in 24 seconds I could be doing 63k healing from fast stacking, instead of 43k from slow stacking!” – but it doesn’t work that way with HPET. Fast stacking will lock you into far more LB GCDs, where you really should be using them for higher HPET spells (again, getting more bang for your GCD buck). The HPET of a 3-HoT Nourish is higher than the HPET of a fast-stacked Lifebloom, so it is the better spell for your GCD cost.
You will get more healing out of slow stacking LB and Nourishing in between, than fast stacking Lifeblooms and locking yourself into a lot of LB GCDs.
This may seem to contradict what I said about it being wrong to want Rejuv to last 18 seconds because you could squeeze more Nourishes in between Rejuv refreshes. RR has a higher HPET than Nourish, so it’s the better choice of the two – recasting Rejuv is a GOOD thing in this case, and it’s not “wasting time that you could be Nourishing”. On the other hand, fast stacked Lifebloom has a lower HPET than Nourish, so having to recast it constantly is hurting your Nourish (and overall) output, because it IS wasting time that you could be Nourishing.
I hope that makes sense.
Keeva´s last blog ..Healers and Killing Blows
This assumes just LB and Nourish while LB is ticking and doesnt take into consideration rejuv every 12 secs
Fast stack LB = 1476592 healed over 130 secs
Roling LB (3 stack no bloom) = 1582438 healed over 134 secs with a single bloom at the end of the cycle
Slow LB = 1588994 over 134 secs (6k More than rolling over 134 secs)
based on this there isnt realy much difirence over the long term between Rolling LB and Slow stack LB (with Glyph)
I guess the benifit here for slow stack LB is the slighty improved healing and the Mana refund
over a 6 minute fight, this will be about 18k more healing done, definately worth having
Why not WG?
If Wild Growth is another instant-cast HoT, wouldn’t it have a better HPET than Nourish, or is my top-of-my-head guesstimate off base? It seems like it would also make Nourish 6% better with the glyph, too.
Hi Lunarea
WG will only heal the dragon for a tiny amount, and it’s not worth using that GCD for it. Yes, as another hot on the target it will boost Nourish again – but not enough to make it worth spending a GCD that could be used for another of our spells.
Keeva´s last blog ..Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation and 25man raid healing
[...] off, of course Valithria doesn’t show up on Grid. However, thanks to Keeva’s awesome guide, I was prepared. Or at least semi-prepared – I didn’t know we were going to do [...]
The problem I have with the slow stack is this. HPET isn’t completely accurate because you’re inside the Dream State for more than 8 secs. Therefore EVERY time you come outside the Dream State you have to reload the stacks. While I haven’t re-done the math for HPET, as far as my glance at the original stuff I did says, having a fast stacked LB put up after Rejuv and Regrowth is significantly more healing in light of a 20stack of the healing buff, because the time spent outside a portal will mean that you don’t have enough time time do more than simply let a slow stack build then pop, or maybe refresh once if you start with it before Rejuv/Regrowth on exiting the portal.
I can see your point, but if I even try to wrap my head around the math, my brain might explode.
Keeva´s last blog ..Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation and 25man raid healing
But fast LB comes in lower on the HPET scale than Nourish (even with only 2 HoTs), so doesn’t that mean that it’s not worth fast stacking LB, you would be better off skipping it in favour of Nourish?
Keeva´s last blog ..Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation and 25man raid healing
Funnily enough, yes you’re probably right. Not sure if you had a look at my latest SOS log, but I changed my Nourishes to be a bit slower. The main point of them was to refresh so that my nourish would have an extra counter for GlNourish increases, rather than purely their own healing, so I went with a slow stack and focussed back on nourish more. Given everything has a 1s cast (all but Regrowth which is just there to give another HoT to nourish boost) then 3 casts of a HoT filler vs 5-6 to maintain the fast LB, gives me 2-3 more Nourishes, so yes, I’m coming around to the slow stack point of view. You don’t lose enough HPS in lifebloom itself that the additional nourishes don’t make up for it well and truly.
So ignore comment 17 :-p