Aside from some raid encounters, direct healing is highly optimal in vanilla. HoTs in vanilla are low in heal per mana (HPM) ratio and can have issues with talents, scaling, and prioritization; they aren’t very effective. This puts the Druid’s healing kit in check, right?
We all know about Resto Druid’s support skills (Decurse, Brez, Innervate, MoTW, Thorns, Hibernate, Roots, Clutch-bear, etc.) BUT how do Resto Druids overcome HPM and direct heal issues?
Well, Imp. Healing Touch, at Ranks 3 and 4 has arguably the best HPM in the game. Later on, geared Resto Druids (700~1000 heal+), can achieve the 24/0/27 meta. Strategically, these Resto Druids know the when/why/how of avoiding HoTs.
So how do you think Resto Druid measures up?
Would you take more than two per raid?
They have BREZ, inervate, abolish poison which ticks, they are the only healer that can decurse. They are also the best aoe healers by a mile.
You can easily bring 3.
Most of these optimization questions need context imo; A progression guild (outside the hardcore progression guilds) can use many raid setups and be quite comfortable in most circumstances.
In my biased opinion (played a resto druid through and into Naxx), they are extremely useful for many of the reasons you mentioned, and I believe we brought 6 in our raids. Rank 3 spam is primarily what I spent my time doing, but druids were also used as raid-wide healers. I was alliance, so perhaps you’d want to bring less depending on the efficiency of a shaman raid healer (I have no idea how good shamans are)
Depends on the level of knowledge and skill compared to the other healers in your guild. I was one of the best in my guild in vanilla but most people didn’t know a ton. Now on pservers I’ll out heal other druds and some priests. It depends on the gear/skill of the priests if i can beat them or not. I never have a chance against paladins.
Druids bring rebirth and innervate as well as your GotW and decurse. Druids are so much fun to play. They are usually under represented so if you know what you are doing you shouldn’t have a hard time finding a raid spot.
With 40 mans sometimes you just need bodies… but I probably wouldn’t take more than 2.
Improved renew later on in progression is a nice way to keep people healthily-afloat during bigger intervals of raid damage spikes. But as stated they’re really there for the raid buff, a decurse, and the situational battle rez and innervate. Earlier on they are good healers, and you’ll always see some very good Druids in Naxx. But if private servers are any indication, most guilds don’t take more than 2 or 3 at max. Shaman chain healing and totem groups, Paladin blanket healing and efficiency, and Priest strong healing usually take up the bulk of the healing spots in raids. I think it’s a good idea to take what you can in MC and BWL, but as less fights hinge on a lot of decursing and just more raw healing, Druids fall off a bit. Their big heals are largely inefficient, and their toolkit is gimmicky like a Ret Paladin.
I’d generally say 3-4 Druids in MC and BWL, 2-3 in AQ40 and Naxx.
Most of the very good private server guilds that were doing Naxx just ran with 1 Resto Druid.
I’ve seen a similar situation from the alliance side. By the time you are in naxx druid’s start to fall off compared to efficiency of paladins and the priest’s ability to panic heal.
One thing to note in naxx is that druid’s share their T3 set tokens with paladins, shamans, and hunters. Since a hunter’s utility to the raid doesn’t scale well with gear they are usually low on the prio list. So druids are really only competing with paladins for T3. They should be able to gear up relatively quickly compared to priests, who are competing with warlocks and mages.
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you typically only have 1 dedicated Hot-druid since they don’t play well with each other. The rest are primarily HT spammers and talented for maximum HT efficiency, while your deep resto handles all the hot work on fights that benefit from it (he can still do decent HT spam as well, just missing out on the extra mana reduction from Moonglow). (my net was crap during vanilla so I ended up as our Hot druid since stop-cast was completely impossible on my connection and it played a lot better once Swiftmend was added).