Monday, October 26, 2009

More Than One Kind of Tree p2

While I was thinking further on my previous post about healing types, I realized that the breakdown in healing style really comes down to this:


There are druids out there to fit all over this graph. I'd place myself, as a 10-man raider in a "hardcore" 10-strict guild, pretty close to the middle, going up a little ways on the y axis towards PvE.

Pure 25-man raid healers who barely touch a tank, or at least no more than they do any other member of the raid, would be far on the Raid-Healer end of the spectrum. Speccing and playing in arenas or battlegrounds compared to pve content would budge a person up or down the scale on pve/pvp: degree would vary depending on proportionate amounts of time spent in each venue and how much they spec for it. A pure tank healer would be one who focuses on tank healing, be it by nourish or HT. In terms of pvp, the tanks may be yourself and an arena partner.

I'm going to tentatively say that the interest in crit rating would increase going from left to right on the raid/tank spectrum, with crit becoming more important the more a druid needs to heal tanks. At the same time, there is increased interest in nourish and regrowth: but that may be more limited to the PvE half of the spectrum, rather than PvP. Towards the far left, there is increased reliance on rejuv and wild growth (in 3.2) over any other spells.

As for haste, I think the interest is pretty unanimous across the board, with all kinds of healers finding usefulness in lowering their GCD and cast times.

Some of the most densely-populated areas of the graph would be, I think, the middle area (generically 10's, 5's, and leveling druids), and the upper left (pve raid healers). I've been out of the arena loop, so I'm unsure where most pvp druids would congregate on the graph in terms of tank/raid heals, but even they may vary depending on whether they heavily battleground vs arena, and possibly even in whether they are in 2's vs 5's.

4 comments:

lissanna said...

You could represent raid vs. tank instead simply as # of people focused on (where "tank" would be 1 person focused on, 2v2 arena focuses on 2 people, and 25-man raid healers would be focusing on up to 25 people). It's a better representation for both PvP and PvE healing, I think.

Imabirdjk said...

This is Imabirdjk of P A R A M O U N T from Korialstrasz and a few times I've experimented fairly successfully with a 'Dreamstate' build and i find it fairly effective for tank healing since our guild has an abundance of trees that think casting a spare nourish on the tank as taboo.

Kae said...

@Imabirdjk:
That's pretty impressive, as dreamstate would disallow you reaching WG in the talents. I couldn't pull that off in my 10's! Would certainly make for a pure tank-healer... though there'd be no living seed, either. I suppose it is a trade off: small extra heals off of crits, or staying-power with the regen of dreamstate.

@Lissanna:
I would have done so, but I wanted to eventually add differences in spell selection and stat choices to the plot, too. I think there are some differences in spell-use between pvp and pve... and those sorts of differences could be displayed on a more map-like graph that splits pve and pvp. I would like to add the "favorite" spells to different sections of the graph, but to do so, I want to research pvp healing... something I've not seriously looked at since my marshal-group days in vanilla!!

I'd go research it now, but ten zillion other projects are clamoring for my attention (and that "work" thing too, which pays for my wowaddiction) :) any pvp/arena healers out there that can explain some on their spell selection choices, and how they may change going from healing lots of people down to healing just you and another in a 2v2?

Imabirdjk said...

Yeah with my dreamstate build, I went for living seed and a rough 57% nourish crit, over traditional trees making the living seed very effective.