5 druid questions

[Schwarz]

Hello all. I have taken a little break from WoW and 5 boxing. I had a very successfull PVE 5 shaman team at 70. When I started leveling the plan was to try and do instances with another 5 boxer in Wotlk. I dropped one shaman for 1 mage. I leveled mainly through quests to get to 80. When I got to 80 I couldn't really do any instances with out a tank.

Sooooo now I am thinking about coming back and doing it all over again. I have a team of 5 druids at level 61. Watching some of nolifes videos got my brain thinking. 1 bear 1 tree 3 boomkin seems like a pretty successful combination.

Just some theory crafting in the past couple days I habe come up with the following

tank: tanking macro bound to 1 through 5
boomkins: dps macro bound to 1 through 5
Tree: Button 1 has a healing macro to heal 1 . 2 has a macro to heal 2 ... etc

super simple setup. I will most likely be controlling the tank. I know that alot of the instances in Wotlk are pretty complicated as far as movements and what not. I think this will be fun and I am looking for input from people that have already done this.

Is there still such a thing as stealth runs in Wotlk?

Does Innervate Cause a debuff on a player? (are you kidding me 4 or 5 innverates)

For a healer basically I am looking for something that can just nonstop spam heals to keep it simple. I know pre 3.1 druids were like this. How have the druid healing changes affected people that are using trees as healers?

From my limited searching I see NoLife is pretty successful with his group. Any hints or tips would be appreciated. (macros and whatnot would be awesome!!!)

[Multibocks]

I dont believe innervate causes a debuff, but any fight should be over before you go through 2 mana bars. I don't know about stealth runs in lich king, try it and let me know! I was too lazy to level up my other 4 druids from 70.

[Starbuck_Jones]

With the 40% reduction to mana regen from spirit, non stop spamming is prolly going to be a bit harder to do w/o changing some gear or going hardcore spirit and mp5. There are some nice rolling lifebloom, regen, sequences that can pretty much keep a tank up 99.9% of the time with no need for any emergency healing and with the glyph swiftmend its all you will need if you do.

Boomkin aura does not stack so there is not much reason to have three unless you have a special situation where you need the improved armor. This will leave 3 druids able to cast heals instead of one tree and they will still DPS just fine. Stacking heal over times is crazy. I have a paladin and 4 druids. I run them all in just caster form so they all can DPS and Heal. Im tempted now with dual spec to put them all in deep restoration and pop 4x wild growths for heals. 4x AOE Healing over time will be impressive. Regardless 4x rejuv on the tank gets my paladin through 95% of anything ive come across so far and on bosses I just stack on regrowth and you may as well be invinceable at that point with 8 heal over times.

Because of the insane healing power, its popular for 5x druid teams to have the main be boomkin and do not talent out threat reduction options and leave the other 4 in caster form. Gives you 4 healers and 5 dps.

[Multibocks]

As I understood it, the 40% reduction was also counterbalanced by making the +regen talents even stronger. Net effect is that regen in combat was down slightly and out of combat it was better. I should look for the blue quote on that one.

[Starbuck_Jones]

Mana Regeneration: The amount of mana regeneration derived from intellect and spirit has been reduced by 40%; however, talents that allow for mana regeneration while in combat have been increased. As a result, in-combat regeneration for classes with those talents will stay the same, while out-of-combat regeneration will be lower.

That didnt help us who dont have mana regen talents.

[Mamut]

Hey there.

My 5 druids hit 80 recently, and I've done a bunch heroics and PVP. Out of combat regen blows arse, but in combat is roughly the same if you have the talents that augment it. The resto of my group is always the last to run dry on mana but if I want I can use innervate on her twice or more if I ever found a fight that i needed too but I rarely use it even once. I mostly use innervate between trash pulls to keep me going longer before I have to stop and take a drink.

As for heal spamming thats a no go now. But if you bind a dps key that is separate, then heal keys like you mentioned you should be fine. All of my heal binds on my resto also have DPS bound for my boomkins and a one stop tanking macro for my bear. My Boomkins have 2 extra DPS keys bound that have no corresponding resto keys bound so my resto can just chill if I dont need the heals. The one macro I use a lot for trash that is almost spamable is something like this (trying from memory as i cant get into wow atm) :

#showtooltip Lifebloom
/use 14
/castsequence reset=combat Lifebloom,,,,,,,,,, Lifebloom,,,,,,,,,, Lifebloom,,,,,,,,,,

With the lifebloom changes you really need to let it bloom or it runs you dry on mana pretty quick. My bear tank when i hit 80 equipped a lot of craftable stuff, polar, titanium earth etc. My dodge was crap like 31% but i had unbuffed HP of 41k which gives me lots of time to HoT up and get some LB rolling. As for stealth run a lot of the mobs are tightly packed like in Utgarde Pinnacle hallways or see through stealth like the dogs in the patrols, but you can skip trash in a lot of spots if you wanted. I have been doing full clears because I need the rep while wearing my faction tabards.

All in all I have been enjoying my new druid group quite a bit. I bought dual spec for them and switch over to 5 boomkin for PVPing which has been a lot of fun. Insect Swarm and one moonfire kills just about anyone and its easy to spread the love around. Stand off at the AV bridge just outside stormpike? No problem I stealth up and pop starfall, force of nature, barkskin and tranquility and hope I don't get feared around lol.

I gotta head out but I hope my little rant might be of some use to you.

Cheers

[Schwarz]

Thanks for all the replies.

Mamut how do you deal with healing the group? One thing that I am trying to avoid is having to select the person I want to heal? What I really want to avoid is on the main selecting a clone that needs healing pressing a button to get the healers focus then pressing another button to heal that clone. I thought I saw a nice video someone put together about tanking on a main and then making a clone heal.

Any other ideas/suggestions I love reading them. Thanks a bunch guys/gals

[Tezze]

I don't know if you have one but all me heals are bound to my number pad. 1-4 are for the tank and 5-8 are clone heals. The rest you can use for random resto stuff like swiftmend or and oh shit button like nature's swiftness plus healing touch or some such.

[Maxion]

Just have a separate macro for healing each person (i do this on my multiclass team)
Like, I have button 1 as tanking spam, 2 as dps, and 3,4,5,6 and 7 for healing each different person, with the healing targeting built into the macros by name or spot in the party depending on what you prefer / how generic you want it.

[Mamut]

My buttons are kinda all over but this is the gist of it.

For some of my dps keys my resto heals the tank with the usual stuff, rejuv, regrowth, etc.

For spot healing my resto has seperate keybinds that no other character uses each with a macro like

#showtooltip
/castsequence [target=Druidonename] reset=6 Regrowth, Rejuvenation, Lifebloom, Lifebloom,Lifebloom

more importantly I make liberal use of wild growth

#showtooltip Wild Growth
/cast [target=player] Wild Growth

The mana cost is nothing serious and my dps run out of mana waaaay before my resto so I dont mind using it even to heal one character while im on the move (love all the instant casts on resto druids!)

Gotta run again, hope this helped.

Cheers

PS: if you have a tough boss fight using 2 tranquilities back to back is dirty, just make sure you can keep DPSing on the others not casting it.

[Ualaa]

Can you use:
/cast [nochanneling:tranquility] Wrath

I know warlocks can macro..
/cast [nochanneling: Drain Soul] or /cast [nochanneling: Drain Life]

You could easily preface your dps macro's with that, so when any toon is doing Tranquility, the normal dps spam macro's don't end the tranquility, that is assuming nochanneling: tranquility arguement works. When I was playing boomkins, I had a dps macro for Wrath (trash) spam, another cast sequence for Moonfire/Insect Swarm, and dps macro for Starfire (tougher mobs) spam. My boomkins were dreamstate, really strong heals for a boomkin or really strong dps for a resto, whichever way you look at it.

[Aethon]

You can also just do:

/cast [nochanneling] Wrath (or shadowbolt, or mind blast, etc.)

That way if you're channeling anything, it won't cast and interupt your spell.

I use it on my priest so I don't clip my mind flays