[WoW] Healing in the Baron fight

[Gordon Cameron]

I know, the baron is the easiest fight in WoW, far easier than Hogger, and if you have any trouble with him when there are more than two guys in your party you're some kind of a loser.

Still, I have trouble with this fight as a healer. On my lvl 60 holy/disc priest (5/8 devout and various other blues) I find it pretty nerve wracking, and I just tried it for the first time on my druid, lvl 57 resto specced. I joined the group (all 60s, mage/warrior/shammy/lock) because they were desperate for a healer and I warned them that I might not be able to pull it off. Still, I surprised myself with how badly it went. Sure my druid is only 57, but with arcane Int he had 5400 mana, plus innervate, plus a superior healing potion, and 30 points in Resto. For all that I went OOM well before the baron died and I didn't even have enough mana to combat res the tank.

The combination of hard hitting, mortal strike, and slow heals on the druid makes it especially nerve wracking for me. I don't like the idea of healing through mortal strike since it's a big waste of mana, but when the tank is at 25% health I don't dare wait until the debuff goes away. Also, everyone else in the party was taking a lot of damage. I think the shammy was probably getting shadow damage aura, and I suppose the mage was getting beaten on by the skeletons. I burned some mana tossing big heals to those guys, which in retrospect may have been a mistake. Maybe I just should have given them HoTs but the mage got dangerously low at one point. Is there some conventional wisdom on how much mana the healer can expend on the non-tank party members? I assume I at least have to try to keep the mage alive too. At least on my priest I can shield him while he nukes the skeletons, but on my druid that wasn't an option. Lack of Shadow Protection spell wasn't exactly helping either.

It feels very retro talking about the Baron fight as though it's still a challenge, but for me, retard that I am, it is. (Except when I'm tanking it. It's an extremely simple fight from a tank's POV.)

My druid has almost no mana-per-5 and relatively low spirit too. His in-combat mana regen is pretty sad compared to my priest, who at least has lots of spirit and all the disc talents for regenerating mana during a fight. I had thought the presence of innervate would compensate for that at least in part, but it didn't seem to.

Anyway, any thoughts from experienced healers would be appreciated. Despite being very close to having my second lvl 60 healer, I feel pretty clueless in that area of the game.

Note: all of this assumes non-leet gear. I'm sure the math works out a lot better if you have Tier 1/Tier 2 etc.

[McBain]

Your tank probably hasn't figured out yet that Armor > HP > +Defense.

That tends to make him a lot harder to heal.

"I'm getting crit 0.3% less! Who cares if I'm taking 4% more damage across the board and I have 4900 HP buffed?!"


Oh, and mana potions. Lots of them. You do like farming, right?

Welcome to level 60.

[Kareem]

With both a shaman and a druid healing the MT you shouldn't be running OOM way before the end of the fight. Most likely the warrior's gear sucks.

The shaman shouldn't be taking damage if he is standing correctly. In fact, no one other than the AoE'er and the tank should be taking damage if done correctly. Tell the shaman to stand out of the Baron's unholy aura. If you have 2 healers, tell the shaman/paladin to heal the person doing the AoE and priest/druid to focus on the MT. Collecting Stratholme holy water along the way should make the skellies go down fast enough that not much mana is wasted on non-tanks.

All of that said, once again it just seems your tank's gear was rather sucky.

And yeah, go mana pots.

[Erik Andersson]

I did it four man without a healer (in T2), so it certainly becomes easier with epics. Almost did it three man without healer too, but we wiped at 11% after the rogue was killed at 50% due to the mage missing the AoE on the skeletons. If you run OOM it's not always your fault, that's all I'm saying. Low dps and poor tanks amplify the problem.

[Athryn]

In that fight, the only person on the baron should have been the warrior. Everyone else should have been back against whe wall, healing or taking care of adds. That's the way I've done it since it went 5-man. Shaman hate being told to shut up and heal, but there are times when they need to.

[Gordon Cameron]

Oh, and mana potions. Lots of them. You do like farming, right?

Welcome to level 60.

As I said, I drank a superior mana potion during the fight. And I've had a 60 for like a year and a half, just this is my first druid I've taken up there.

And yeah, I know you're still bitter about the game.

[Gordon Cameron]

In that fight, the only person on the baron should have been the warrior. Everyone else should have been back against whe wall, healing or taking care of adds. That's the way I've done it since it went 5-man. Shaman hate being told to shut up and heal, but there are times when they need to.

Honestly, I was too busy watching health bars to register everyone's position, but I think the shaman was in melee and the other guys were staying back nuking. If the shaman was enhance spec (which he may have been, I'm not sure), wouldn't he want to be up close meleeing? Otherwise dps takes a dive and the fight gets that much harder...

[Gordon Cameron]

With both a shaman and a druid healing the MT you shouldn't be running OOM way before the end of the fight. Most likely the warrior's gear sucks.

The shaman shouldn't be taking damage if he is standing correctly. In fact, no one other than the AoE'er and the tank should be taking damage if done correctly. Tell the shaman to stand out of the Baron's unholy aura. If you have 2 healers, tell the shaman/paladin to heal the person doing the AoE and priest/druid to focus on the MT. Collecting Stratholme holy water along the way should make the skellies go down fast enough that not much mana is wasted on non-tanks.

All of that said, once again it just seems your tank's gear was rather sucky.

And yeah, go mana pots.

Melee dps is still going to be in the baron's aura, aren't they? I don't see how that is avoidable. I assume depending on spec some shamans are going to be melee dps if they want to maximize their potential. Or are they supposed to just shock/lightning bolt/heal regardless of their spec?

I guess we should have had the shaman healing the mage then and me concentrating on keeping the tank up only. But then basically the only guy in the party concentrating dps on the baron the whole time, would have been the warlock.

I tend to think that the warrior was undergeared. He didn't have any valor that I noticed, though I didn't inspect him. I think he was a pretty fresh 60.

As I said in the initial post, I drank a superior mana potion and innervated myself. Still went OOM way before the baron would have died. By the time the tank died my potion cooldown wasn't finished yet so I couldn't drink another pot.

[mouselock]

As I said, I drank a superior mana potion during the fight. And I've had a 60 for like a year and a half, just this is my first druid I've taken up there.

And yeah, I know you're still bitter about the game.

Not to nitpick, but if you're having that much difficulty with mana, a major mana potion would have done you much better.

On a side note, had any of you bothered to pick up (and subsequently use) the holy water? A well-aimed holy water grenade will take out an entire round of skeletons all by itself.

Also, was the warrior in defensive stance? Did he have a shield? The shaman maybe should have been healing, maybe not. In general though in fights where heavy damage makes it into an endurance fight (which the baron definitely is), the more folks you can have healing the better. You need enough DPS to do it sure, but if you have 2 DPS, 2 healers, and a tank you should be good. If the shaman had been keeping the mage up (regardless of his spec) and throwing in the occasional DPS it's a lot more useful than bleeding the singular healer completely dry so the tank dies.

I don't think the problem was really that you can't heal enough. It sounds more like you all might be a bit underlevelled/undergeared, and then you didn't figure out a great strategy for the baron fight given your party. Warlock damage, mage AE/damage as possible, warrior tanks, you heal, shaman heals/damages from range as possible.

FWIW generally when I go in for a farming run despite being a feral druid and being grouped with a group full of T1 epic folks (hunter, rogue, warrior, druid, priest) I still heal. (Unless, of course, I'm tanking.) Having folks help out on healing even if you technically could do it all yourself just provides a nice safety net.

[Kareem]

Melee dps that would be up close where the Baron is would be a rogue, but you didn't have one in the party. For this specific fight you should only have a warrior in melee range to avoid a lot of the aura damage. If you have a lot of +healing you can afford having a rogue in there topped off with a heal over time and perhaps a low rank healing touch or flash heal every now and then if he gets too low, but nothing major.

But the shaman should have been healing and not doing melee dps in there, especially given the fact that you are still level 57 and aren't that well-geared. So yeah, he definitely should have been outside melee range and helping heal. For instance when we have a paladin, he goes in melee range and consecrates the adds to pull them from near the baron to the mage, but is out of melee range for the rest of the fight. This is being too picky in a non-major fight, as others with good gear will attest, but the shaman should have been way more considerate of the fact that you were level 57 and as such didn't have much level 60 dungeon gear.

You still would have pulled it off if it wasn't for the warrior's gear though. If you had to go through a full mana pool, an innervate, and a mana potion and he wasn't even close to being down, that means either the warrior needed insane healing in a pretty short time (which sounds more likely), or dps was non-existent, which is difficult to accept given that you had both a warlock and a mage who could dps in between add breaks, plus a shaman.

As for dps during the fight, you don't constantly have adds. If the mage is fast enough in AoEing the skeletons, he/she should have time to dps the baron in between. Plus the shaman could help out with ranged dps when your mana isn't dangerously low.

EDIT: And yes, the holy water is just essential for the Baron if you don't have the gear.

[Gordon Cameron]

Not to nitpick, but if you're having that much difficulty with mana, a major mana potion would have done you much better.

On a side note, had any of you bothered to pick up (and subsequently use) the holy water? A well-aimed holy water grenade will take out an entire round of skeletons all by itself.

Yeah, I know about the holy water. They brought me in when they had cleared to the baron, so I wasn't there for the rest of the run. I don't know if they picked up holy water or not, but I have done plenty of baron fights where the mage's AoE was sufficient regardless.

A major mana pot would obviously be better than a superior, but I still have to think that 5400 mana plus innervate plus a sup mana potion should have been enough. So I'm trying to figure out where the problem was, either in my error, or in positioning, or tank gear, etc. Probably all of the above to some extent.

My druid's in-combat mana regen is extremely poor compared to my priest's, but again, I'd have thought innervate would compensate for that at least somewhat.

[Gordon Cameron]

Anyway, thanks for the comments everyone. It's not particularly fun to get your ass kicked by a fight you have done many times before, but it happens when you have different party members or are learning a new class etc.

[Gordon Cameron]

that means either the warrior needed insane healing in a pretty short time (which sounds more likely),

That's certainly what it felt like. I know the baron hits hard but I was a bit taken aback by how quickly the tank would drop down to ~25% health. And then of course he's got the MS debuff on so if I do a big heal it's half wasted.

[Saxman_72]

Sounds like the tank was really quite undergeared and/or dps wasn't that great. How long did the fight last?

[Gordon Cameron]

Sounds like the tank was really quite undergeared and/or dps wasn't that great. How long did the fight last?

I don't remember, sorry. Short enough that I could* quaff a second mana potion by the time the tank died, for what that is worth.

*couldn't, I mean to say!

[Erik Andersson]

That's the problem, you can't view healing as something separate from tanking and dps. With T2 you can kill him with regular tanking with warrior/mage/mage, probably without using any consumables. Replace the epics with rares and it should still work if you add a healer with good non-epic gear. With five people the margins are greater, but if the gear on the tank is bad enough it will be hard to conserve mana in a meningful way. Give both the tank and the main healer bad gear (and even lower than intended level), and it becomes hard. My warrior has over 10300AC/7300hp unbuffed with 440 def and lots of dodge and parry. A fresh lvl 60 might have less than 6000AC/4000hp and maybe 320def, the difference is considerable.

When it comes AC>def I guess it depends. In Naxxramas now you can't afford to be crit, I thought I'd lower to 425 def to increase my AC somewhat against Maexxna, and that resulted in me being killed by a crit for over 8000 when she became enraged. As soon as you have 440 you're safe though, and at that point you can increase stamina/AC. For non-epic instances it doesn't matter that much, I'd probably recommend lots of stamina just in case. AC is good, but stamina helps against magic damage too. Defense is a good general stat, but unless you aim for 425/440 it is not very important, and the same is true for dodge/parry.

What you can look for in your tank is that he is generally using defensive stance (can taunt), a good shield (important!), and that his gear seems to contain more stamina/def/dodge/AC rather than strength/crit/AP and so on. If that is not the case and his gear isn't good enough to compensate, then you should probably try to find another tank.

[Duality]

If the shaman was enhance spec (which he may have been, I'm not sure), wouldn't he want to be up close meleeing? Otherwise dps takes a dive and the fight gets that much harder...

Then the shaman should be worrying about his own heals, if he's going to fight. The shadow aura, not unlike Alexei Barov, is a bitch. It does very little damage in one tick, but let it go and it adds up considerably.

I tend to think that the warrior was undergeared. He didn't have any valor that I noticed, though I didn't inspect him. I think he was a pretty fresh 60.

Watch their gear next time. Its amazing to see what people will take to tank in an instance. Especially these instances where people are still in the "ez mode" mindset of the old 10 mans.

Are you only interested in healing? And are you eventually going into raiding? My girlfriend specced 30/20 feral/resto. Just enough for Nature's Swiftness to be able to heal. She is a phenomenal healer or tank in the PUG instances. No, she's not going to be doing much raiding with a build like that, but for what we do together, its amazing. That's not to say that you'll be able to switch from healer -> tank midfight (you still need the gear to maximize), but it makes for planning groups a lot easier when you can fill either role. She tanks up through UBRS better than many warriors I've seen.

[Supertanker]

I agree the tank sounds undergeared, he shouldn't take that much damage so quickly.

Another trick, but an expensive one, is to give the tank and the healer a Greater Shadow Protection potion. That basically nullifies the aura damage, and makes the fight much easier.

[Gordon Cameron]

Are you only interested in healing? And are you eventually going into raiding? My girlfriend specced 30/20 feral/resto. Just enough for Nature's Swiftness to be able to heal. She is a phenomenal healer or tank in the PUG instances. No, she's not going to be doing much raiding with a build like that, but for what we do together, its amazing. That's not to say that you'll be able to switch from healer -> tank midfight (you still need the gear to maximize), but it makes for planning groups a lot easier when you can fill either role. She tanks up through UBRS better than many warriors I've seen.

I doubt I will raid. My main is a warrior so I'm quite happy to bear tank when it's called for. At the moment I have 18 in feral, the rest in resto. I've tanked some of the pre-60 5mans ok with my druid (Sunken Temple and Maradon) and it went fine. I'll need to play around with specs and get a decent tanking suit if I want to fill both roles, but maybe I'll do that if I play the druid enough. What interests me at the moment is learning to heal on a druid, which seems tougher than the priest since I don't have the luxuries of flashheal and shield. And to be honest I'm still a pretty iffy healer even on my priest.

Yeah, the dual role is part of what attracts me to the druid, since my first two 60s were a warrior and a priest.

[mouselock]

Are you only interested in healing? And are you eventually going into raiding? My girlfriend specced 30/20 feral/resto.

Yeah, I gotta say I think 30/21 is probably a better heal build for non-raiding. 20% mana increase is pretty huge, and you still have room to get the mana regen talent and such in the resto tree (and NS for that emergency heal). I think if you're raiding where mana isn't as much an issue and an extra 10-20% hit per heal is really useful, it's a different story. But for single group stuff I'd suggest this spec:

Hybrid spec

As a bonus you can play around with the feral tree to either tank or do decent DPS for when you're soloing.

20% improved mana from the int boost is >>> 10% reduced mana cost on spells IMO. It's a bigger boost, and it gives you more resources for the course of a fight (where your mana regen is low).

No, she's not going to be doing much raiding with a build like that, but for what we do together, its amazing.

I raided exclusively with a 30/21 build for a long, long time. (I'm fully feral now, but when the expansion comes out with the talent collapse they're putting in I'll be more hybrid-y again.) In similar gear I tended to be in the top 5 healers. Don't underestimate a 8k mana pool spamming HT Rank 4 with +550 healing or so, improved rejuve, and the ability to NS if you really get in a bind and need a big heal. (Mind you, you have to pay attention more and adjust your healing.. that's top 5 in net healing, not gross healing. I was *much* better about overhealing than others, primarily because using HT Rank 4 is faster than the big HT's so I don't end up popping over the top of bigger heals.)

Maybe you need full resto for Swiftmend by the time you get to Naxx.. but you can do just fine through MC, ZG, AQ20, and as much of BWL as I've seen. (Which admittedly isn't much.. damn Vael! :( )

I could also tank, either maintank or offtank, in MC with the feral talents (I was specced for tanking over DPS). Of course, for both of these you need the right gear. The healing gear is easy enough to come by as a byproduct of raiding. The tanking gear is a lot tougher.

[Athryn]

Honestly, I was too busy watching health bars to register everyone's position, but I think the shaman was in melee and the other guys were staying back nuking. If the shaman was enhance spec (which he may have been, I'm not sure), wouldn't he want to be up close meleeing? Otherwise dps takes a dive and the fight gets that much harder...

I have an enhance/ele spec shaman. Any responsible shaman would be back doing backup healing, and not getting themselves torn up by the baron. There are times when you should be DPSing, and times when you should be healing, just like with a druid. It would be the same as if you had decided to go and be cat dps.

[Duality]

I'm pleased to hear that druid tanking is just fine in a lot of raiding circumstances. Sadly, I still see a lot of the recruiting guilds looking for druid who are or are willing to spec in Swiftmend. Nevermind short of laughing in druids' faces at the thought of giving them DPS leather that rogues can use.

[JM]

I've resubbed to play around with my lowbie Druid - been doing a lot of reading and it seems that Druid tanking really IS very effective (we're talking BWL and AQ40!) although main tanking is beyond it for some encounters.

[_Fury_]

Another thing which you may already do, but it's worth noting for druid healing:

Max rank druid heals are special-purpose, and you shouldn't use them unless you have a *very* good reason. Use lower ranks of Healing Touch. Find one that heals around 1000-1200 in your gear and use that as your primary heal. If you try to use max rank Regrowth like you'd use Flash Heal on a priest, you'll find yourself out of mana in 20 seconds. Also, if you want to heal anything harder than Hogger, you'll need the .5 second improvement on the cast time. I didn't catch if you had that or not.

[mouselock]

I'm pleased to hear that druid tanking is just fine in a lot of raiding circumstances. Sadly, I still see a lot of the recruiting guilds looking for druid who are or are willing to spec in Swiftmend. Nevermind short of laughing in druids' faces at the thought of giving them DPS leather that rogues can use.

Druid DPS is in much worse shape than druid tanking. Part of this is by nature (You just have to survive as a tank; as long as you do it doesn't matter if you survive to the same 20% margin as the warrior or not, for example). Part of this is because druids as a DPS class are fundamentally flawed.

Hopefully they'll either fix our itemization, or inherent abilities, or both with the expansion. Right now at the top end in the best possible gear druids do roughly 50% of a rogue's damage. While I'm all for the idea that 100% rogue damage is a bit much for a druid due to having the ability to heal and tank, the reality is that druids are 50% of a rogue's damage and rogue's are like 80-90% of a fury warrior's damage. That fury warrior can tank better than a druid. Unless we're only supposed to be healers period (which would come as a huge shock to anyone who's played a druid from 1-59) we're just messed up right now.

[Garoun]

From what I can gather from reading...

1) The tank was under-geared and/or not doing what he could to properly mitigate damage

2) Shaman should have backed off and assisted with heals, especially considering you aren't 60 yet.

You need to keep as many people as possible out of that shadow aura or it'll chew through the healers mana like candy. Most everyone else gave the proper "normal" method for the encounter and nothing really to elaborate on that :).

As for Druid, Spi shouldn't be at the top of your list on your healing suit. From my experience your healing suit should focus on +heal, int, per5 because the +heal will let you use lower rank spells (as mentioned) to achieve the same as the higher with less mana. You will also find that Innervate doesn't do a whole lot for you since it uses spirit / natural regen rate to determine how much mana you get back and a druid will rarely have a high enough regen to get much benefit from it; outside of emergency situations of course. When healing I try to use the lowest HT rank I can (between 800-1000) and keep Rejuv up because it's a nice buffer spell, especially in long fights. I rarely use Regrowth because it is simply too expensive to cast unless you down grade it considerably.

We are especially good at tanking instances when punts are involved thanks to Feral Charge. That ability will save your butt so many times in a punt fight. Get kicked, hit charge in midair and you're back in the fight with no falling damage to boot.

Disclaimer:
A lot of the gear/healing methods are going to change in BC due to:
- Penalty Blizzard is adding to the +healing coefficient:
[((spell level) + 6 / (Player Level)] * normal +healing calc

Simply put, you will have a 6 level reprieve after which you will start recieving the penalty
Source: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...38173821&sid=1

- Healing spells will no longer be overwritten by the same spell cast by another person. So if you have 3 druids in the group, the tank can have 3 Rejuv's going at the same time :). (I can't find my source link for this but it was mentioned a while back on the forums)

[Gordon Cameron]

I have an enhance/ele spec shaman. Any responsible shaman would be back doing backup healing, and not getting themselves torn up by the baron. There are times when you should be DPSing, and times when you should be healing, just like with a druid. It would be the same as if you had decided to go and be cat dps.

Well, I was designated main healer in this particular fight so obviously I wouldn't go and be the cat dps. I don't think the shaman's role is quite so clear cut, since it's possible to have a single healer on the baron fight. But given my apparent inadequacies, or the tank's, or both, I suppose the shaman would have been better used staying back and backup healing/nuking as you say. Assuming he wasn't already. As I say, I wasn't watching much beyond the green bars. All I remember is that he whispered me before the fight saying "just heal the tank." Which maybe meant he was prepared to backup heal and maybe he was doing that. He and the mage were still extremely low for a lot of the fight though which is why I tossed them some heals too. Maybe I shouldn't have done that. It's hard to think clearly and calmly when the tank keeps being at 25% health with a MS debuff on and you know your heals are going to take 45 minutes to land.

[Gordon Cameron]

When healing I try to use the lowest HT rank I can (between 800-1000) and keep Rejuv up because it's a nice buffer spell, especially in long fights. I rarely use Regrowth because it is simply too expensive to cast unless you down grade it considerably.

Can you give me a primer on downrank heals? Do you need a certain amount of +healing to make them worthwhile? Do you use them for the faster casting time (in which case anything above HT4 I think would not accomplish that goal)? Or are downrank heals inherently more mana efficient, or is this only the case when you have X amount of +healing on? Or is it for the ability to spam heals without worrying about too much overhealing? Or is it some combination of the above, or something else?

This is where my eyes start to glaze over with WoW, to be honest. I bought the game to do fantasy quests and kill monsters, not to do math. =/

Thanks for the comments, by the way.

[Kryten]

He and the mage were still extremely low for a lot of the fight though which is why I tossed them some heals too. Maybe I shouldn't have done that.

FWIW (I'm no Excel spreadsheet player either) - I've only ever done Baron with my mage and it was made perfectly clear to me that I was a) there to AOE the skeletons off the healer(s) and b) look after myself when it came to heals. In a couple of cases I've ended up pretty close to dying, but never had a wipe unless the tank (who was the only one on the Baron) completely screwed up.

[Vincent_GC]

Just as an FYI about downranking healing spells, keep in mind that blizzard just announced recently that they are going to nerf it. (for lack of better words)

You can find more info about that here http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...38173821&sid=1

I don't know how much that will effect healers since the highest one I have is 23.