5 resto druids

I've come to the conclusion that I'm just not very good at PvP. I'm ok with that. What I want is for a team to have ultimate survivability while slowly killing the opposition. I'm guessing that will be 5 of some sort of healer.

Please help me think through how to use 5 resto druids in PvP.

1.) I don't think any of them will be shapeshifted, except travel form to do quick escapes. Through the improved barkskin talent they will have +160% armor, which isn't huge, but should help a little bit.

2.) There is a choice between wild growth and insect swarm. Having insect swarm would be nice since I could apply 10 DoTs, but right now I'm thinking I need Wild Growth for survival and the revitalize effect (15% per tick to restore 1% mana... could make for unlimited mana which means as long as I can survive then I will eventually win).

3.) Killing is secondary, and really my only tools are wrath and moonfire. Honestly, I'm not sure that's enough damage that an opposing healing would ever run out of mana, much less two healers. While it's not a goal to make an ultimate stalemate, it's still preferable to 30 second matches where I lose immediately.

4.) I always hear it's impossible to kill a tree 1v1. As a multiboxer, what ways can I make sure it's impossible to kill a tree with 5 focusing on 1 target at once?

5.) After using the pally/DK team, I'm wondering if interact target is actually a preferred way of moving. Certainly after a fear it's an easier way of grouping up due to the extended range, but what ways can I avoid massive AoE with this group?

Many more questions. I understand this will never be a highly rated team, but I'm hoping it is functional and could use some help.

Are you talking arena or bg and world pvp?

Arena and BG. I'd like to be able to get 1500 in arena (I'd consider that a success), and be unkillable in BGs (even if I rarely ever kill).

Arena basically unless someone can kill you in a global they will all end in stalemates. I dont see how you could burst someone down being resto before a healer gets them back up to full. If they have a mana burning class you might be in trouble.
World BG could be fun, and hilarious to watch as I know I have faced some trees that made me want to throw my keyboard.

I guess I was hoping arena would be a battle of who has enough mana, and hoping that the massive number of revitalize proccing would mean unlimited mana.

However, if I can get insta gibbed on even one of the trees then I'm pretty screwed. The only way for me to win would either be a stalemate (which I would win since 5 others would have to continue in the battle versus just me, and I'm probably laughing the whole time) or a slow war where their healers eventually run out of mana. The problem is I'm not even sure I could do enough damage to outpace another healers mana regen.

When I say "tree" I'm just referring to resto druid. I do not plan to be in tree form.

Well assuming someone couldnt kill you in a global, do you really want to play arena matches that last 30 minutes long? Problem comes in when a healer gets to sit down and drink. You literally have to keep an eye on everyone since you are trying too oom the healers and stay away from the dps (while trying to kill them too.) Sounds like a lot to do =)

Although Im sure someone will post saying thats what all MBers do =P

If he manages to do all that, he might as well just win the damn thing with 4 shamans or something.

I would think it might do a lot better in battlegrounds then in arena.
Whenever Cataclysm releases, we will have rated battlegrounds.

In any of the larger scale BG's, you'll have the healing power to keep your side up, probably through just about anything.
Especially if they change burst damage, as they have advertised they want to.

Not really sure you can win in arena with 5x Resto Druids.
But you can definitely prolong the matches by a large margin.

1. & 2.)
Treeform ups your heals by a large margin, and armor as well. But it precludes most of your offensive spells.

If you're not going for Tree Form, I'd look into a Dreamstate build or something similar. Basically deep enough in Balance for Moonkin and deep enough in Resto for Swiftmend.

Dreamstate was a healer build, but it costs you Wild Growth. Wild Growth is an amazing group heal, which when you have one healer and a party/raid, or that type of mechanic, you would not want to be without. However, with an entire team of healers, AoE healing is less necessary.

You could play around with only one toon as a Moonkin at a time, and have your heal macro built for [nostance:x], so whichever toon is Moonkin doesn't drop the stance. Optionally, only spec with one or two toons, and use the talent point elsewhere, but possibly have a toon who is more focused by the opposition.

3.)
Unless you build for some form of killing, you'll likely lose every arena match, even if they are drawn out. Dreamstate gets you pretty decent single target heals (a lack of AoE heals, aside from Tranquility), but does get you decent Wrath/Starfire/Moonfire/Insect Swarms. But you miss Eclipse, Force of Nature, Typhoon, Earth & Moon. Not sure that it will be enough, but deep resto probably won't for arena; although depending on your team, it can be for BG's.

4.)
Having 5x Rejuvenation ticking on all toons at once, will be substantial healing vs any switch. You also have Swiftmend for burst healing, Nature's Swiftness + Healing Touch, can add Lifebloom's to the mix. The challenge will be deciding which HoTs should be kept up constantly, and then having the ability to add others relatively quickly as a toon is focused... realizing they will probably switch between your toons.

If one toon is focused, you could always shift that toon to Bear, and just survive. You'd have the 360% armor increase, even if you did not have any feral specific gearing. PvP resto gear will likely have a lot of stamina on it, and a fair bit of armor.

5.)
IWT is a very good fear recovery tool and it is a decent way to group your team up, on any npc/player.
You are not dependent on facing for your heals... However, I've found I am required to face my target for Moonfire, probably because of the DD component of the spell.
As long as your toons are within heal range of each other (and you'll have to be wary of Death Grip to single one out), you won't need to be closely grouped up.
You can play with spread out macros, and IWT to bring them back together.

Another alternative is grouping with a rogue who will benefit from the revitalize proc and actually deal some damage. If a single rogue constantly has 4 wild growths and 4 rejuvs on him, then I believe the math would be as follows:

Wild Growth: 7 ticks over 7 seconds
Rejuvination: 5 ticks over 15 seconds

Each has a 15% chance to restore 8 energy.

Over a 105 second duration, on average the rogue will have 140 ticks between both spells per druid (15 casts of WG for 105 ticks and 7 casts of Rejuv for 35 ticks) which means for 4 druids it's 560 chances. At 15% per proc, that means it will proc on average 84 times, which will restore 672 energy. Normalizing down to 30 seconds, that means every 30 seconds the rogue will on average get an extra 192 energy... that's quite a bit.

Did I just rape the math? Haven't double checked it yet...

The great part about this team is I can try it tonight! The Owltoids are coming off the bench, baby! Their gear isn't that good, though it is almost full PvP from two seasons ago, and mostly moonkin, but it should be a decent starting point. At least I can be an immediate benefit to AVs... if we can't take out the boss + 1 guard with 5 restos then we're fizucked anyway.

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Originally Posted by Owltoid

I've come to the conclusion that I'm just not very good at PvP. I'm ok with that. What I want is for a team to have ultimate survivability while slowly killing the opposition. I'm guessing that will be 5 of some sort of healer.

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lol - i'm teh suck @ pvp as well - thanks for making me feel better.

I ran 5 resto druids up to 80 recently exclusively in AV. It was the most boxer love i've seen and tons of fun. Wild Growth is an amazing spell, and just crazy x5. It was awesome to be the difference maker as I sat at the back of the group as we marched forward

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Originally Posted by Owltoid

4.) I always hear it's impossible to kill a tree 1v1. As a multiboxer, what ways can I make sure it's impossible to kill a tree with 5 focusing on 1 target at once?

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it can be impossible to kill a tree 5v1. My 5 shamans in full furious/deadly gear, and I couldn't down this 1 tree in WSG 2days ago. I sat there spamming FS,LB,CL,LVB against him for a good 30 seconds while he spammed hots and heals on himself ... maybe my rotation was wrong, or my SP wasn't high enough (almost 2000), but I couldn't down him .... I'm looking forward to gearing my 5 trees for rated BG's
**EDIT** omigosh - how did i forget purge?? guh!!

I think you'd have a tough time in arena's (I didn't last long when I tried), but you'd rock in AV.

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Originally Posted by Ualaa

Treeform ups your heals by a large margin, and armor as well. But it precludes most of your offensive spells.

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I could be wrong, but I believe improved tree gives you 200% armor increase versus non-shapeshifted of 160%. While still a decent difference, I don't believe the extra 40% armor and 6% healing would be beneficial enough to not have offensive firepower. The really nice thing about tree form is the 20% reduction in HoT mana cost. I may initially start out with 5 trees just to practice staying alive and not worrying about any damage. From there, if I find out that I can easily survive anything, then I'll start figuring out how to get offensive powers in there.

Not having tree form will eventually save 4 talent points, too, which is nice because as I play with this build I'm finding that I need every one I can get.

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Originally Posted by gitcho

I think you'd have a tough time in arena's (I didn't last long when I tried), but you'd rock in AV.

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Other than not being able to kill anything, why are you having trouble in arenas? I'm only concerned because you said you didn't last long and I'm wondering if their focus fire is just too much. Was it gear, practice, or just not a survivable combo?

Yeah, I remember floating this idea around when I was first playing my moonkins, but I never gave it a true shot. Coming to the conclusion that I don't have anywhere near the skill that Kromtor, Ellay, and other accomplished PvPers on this forum have, it's time to be damn annoying and hopefully usefull in certain situations!

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I'm wondering if their focus fire is just too much. Was it gear, practice, or just not a survivable combo?

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yes

i'm not an arena guru, but you'll never be able to do enough damage that their healer can't easily heal through. Fears will eat you alive (can't heal the toon being focused), and even if you do, you'll run out of mana healing your group long before he will.

In BG's, you're not focused for long periods of time as much as arena - and your HPS on a focused team member at the front of the pack is just awesome - unless someone can kill them in 1 global, they're invincible - and they will love you for it. :)

Offopic: On the other hand, 4 resto shamans might be fun (although hardly viable). They don't suffer from having to shapeshift, they can resist fears with totems and earthshield, riptide etc might keep you up for a long time.

I recently lvled up 4 druids. I quested as Boomkin and BG'd as resto. Resto was a blast to play with 4....especially for mass encounters. But.....If i was caught alone guarding a bunker, two dps could eventually break me down with a stun, cc, interupt...something. It would take a while, but they would eventually get me down.
So, I learned to follow at least 1 dps around to back cap and defend stuff. With someone else dps'ing while you only need to heal(especially in tree form).....thats when it got epic.



....and i would also agree....resto shammys would be alot easier to dps when need be. You just wont get the nice hots.

SW: pains, holy nova spam, instant smites, SW:death is decent offense on a 5xhealer team. Sneak in a holy fire and you can drop people easily. The only problem with priests though is they have 1/10th the lasting power of other healers when it comes to mana.

I dual specced 5 of my Shamans into resto and ran around AV chain healing for God 4-5 months back.
It was fun for a while but even with Tremor Totes, soon devolved into the usual stun /fear and AoE carpet bombing.
From what I experienced once the op4 figures out you have no teeth they will just swarm you until dead,however if you have aware teamates who can pvp buffer/stay with you in AV its an unstoppable juggernaut.
Hope this helps.:)

Still not any evidence that any number of druids is even remotely viable in arena, or even pvp in general. On paper they look great, but in practice: no so much. I think that's why this topic keeps coming up.

I've done 4x resto shaman in full relentless, 5400GS, and it's a gimmick that gets old in about 2 days. You can't heal people to death. Ultimately you find the team susceptible to the same tactics that work against a dps comp, only it takes a little longer to die and you don't kill anyone in the meantime.

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Originally Posted by heyaz

Still not any evidence that any number of druids is even remotely viable in arena, or even pvp in general. On paper they look great, but in practice: no so much. I think that's why this topic keeps coming up.

I've done 4x resto shaman in full relentless, 5400GS, and it's a gimmick that gets old in about 2 days. You can't heal people to death. Ultimately you find the team susceptible to the same tactics that work against a dps comp, only it takes a little longer to die and you don't kill anyone in the meantime.

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wasn't any evidence that paladins or melee was viable at all a couple months ago but Kromtor didn't give a shit about that. keep trying to discourage people from trying new things though.

I'm running a team 5 boomkins (amongst others) at the moment - lots of fun in BG's but not much chop in arenas. Lack of burst is already a problem for the space chickens, and if you went 5 resto I think it would become a major problem - your damage would easily be healed through.

Have you thought about going 5 x feral cats instead? With IWT opening the door on melee boxing, they might be worth a try.

Cheers,
S.

I'm messing around with 5x Feral at the moment.

They're 69th to 72nd, pretty much PvE at the moment.
But will PvP with them.
Probably a very decent team for rated battlegrounds, not sure of arena.

Berserk is 20 seconds of fear immunity, and also breaks fear.
Add in the trinket every 2 minutes, and diminishing returns.
And Feral Charge - Cat, and they have decent fear protection.

I'm using a macro, similar to Art of War procs.
Based on stances, where if they are cat form it casts a heal.
But then there's a stopcasting line in there, to cancel a non-instant cast.
And then another line for resuming cat form, if they're in caster form.
I should translate this into a mapped key, so after cat form it won't advance back to casting the heal for "x" seconds.
Feral has a talent, which gets you a 20% chance per combo point that your next 'Nature' spell under 10sec is insta-cast.
It's working as intended, but still means unlike Pallies they will need to drop from DPS form to heal.
With IS Boxer, I'm using a toggle mapped key, to alternate from target=player to assisting the active toon for the heal.

I have IWT built into my DPS moves.
And a toggle mapped key, to enable/disable the IWT that is built in.
So I can have IWT spam, along with my click macro, or disable the mapped key, and have click without IWT spam.
Of course also have another IWT key, on its own keybind which is not spammed as part of my dps.

Have two DPS macro's for the cats.
Mangle based from the front.
And Shred based from the rear.
Spamming Shred, with IWT, is more dps then Mangle without the circling etc.
Need to have another target nearby, or be quick on the follow (put it on a mouse thumb button) or they frequently run away, from the IWT spam.
Bear has similar function keys on the same binds... so could run PvE heroics for gearing too, with a tank.

Have hotkeys for everyone to Cat, everyone to Bear.
Also have action target groups, where toons are either in the Cat or Bear group.
And the option to toggle each toon independently between these two states.
Not sure yet, if going to bear form when focused by melee is even worthwhile, but want a bear option for PvE.
The Bear group never does heals, but the Cat group does.

Will possibly ditch repeater regions for Cats entirely, and have them only load for toons in the Tree group.
And then have a mapped key for talent switching which adds toons to the Tree group, for click repeater based heals.

Will have Battle Rez on round-robin, for battlegrounds.
With the glyphs, it is no reagent and the toon comes back at full health.
And 5 druids, that's going to be decent.
Of course, cannot use B.Rez in arena... the team will arena until Cataclysm, because that is where the gear is, but BG's > Arena once both are rated.

So far the team absolutely destroys mobs.
Much more so then any other team I've played or when they were Boomkin.

Each has dual-spec, with a Resto form.
And I'd already bought a set of iLV 187-226 gear for level 80 as boomkin.
So that's a decent starter set for their Tree Forms.
Might run the odd BG (AV in particular) as 5x Resto.

They're still a work in progress.
When I'm happy with what I have, I'll do a write up on my set up.

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Originally Posted by Ualaa

I'm messing around with 5x Feral at the moment.

They're 69th to 72nd, pretty much PvE at the moment.
But will PvP with them.
Probably a very decent team for rated battlegrounds, not sure of arena.

Berserk is 20 seconds of fear immunity, and also breaks fear.
Add in the trinket every 2 minutes, and diminishing returns.
And Feral Charge - Cat, and they have decent fear protection.

I'm using a macro, similar to Art of War procs.
Based on stances, where if they are cat form it casts a heal.
But then there's a stopcasting line in there, to cancel a non-instant cast.
And then another line for resuming cat form, if they're in caster form.
I should translate this into a mapped key, so after cat form it won't advance back to casting the heal for "x" seconds.
Feral has a talent, which gets you a 20% chance per combo point that your next 'Nature' spell under 10sec is insta-cast.
It's working as intended, but still means unlike Pallies they will need to drop from DPS form to heal.
With IS Boxer, I'm using a toggle mapped key, to alternate from target=player to assisting the active toon for the heal.

I have IWT built into my DPS moves.
And a toggle mapped key, to enable/disable the IWT that is built in.
So I can have IWT spam, along with my click macro, or disable the mapped key, and have click without IWT spam.
Of course also have another IWT key, on its own keybind which is not spammed as part of my dps.

Have two DPS macro's for the cats.
Mangle based from the front.
And Shred based from the rear.
Spamming Shred, with IWT, is more dps then Mangle without the circling etc.
Need to have another target nearby, or be quick on the follow (put it on a mouse thumb button) or they frequently run away, from the IWT spam.
Bear has similar function keys on the same binds... so could run PvE heroics for gearing too, with a tank.

Have hotkeys for everyone to Cat, everyone to Bear.
Also have action target groups, where toons are either in the Cat or Bear group.
And the option to toggle each toon independently between these two states.
Not sure yet, if going to bear form when focused by melee is even worthwhile, but want a bear option for PvE.
The Bear group never does heals, but the Cat group does.

Will possibly ditch repeater regions for Cats entirely, and have them only load for toons in the Tree group.
And then have a mapped key for talent switching which adds toons to the Tree group, for click repeater based heals.

Will have Battle Rez on round-robin, for battlegrounds.
With the glyphs, it is no reagent and the toon comes back at full health.
And 5 druids, that's going to be decent.
Of course, cannot use B.Rez in arena... the team will arena until Cataclysm, because that is where the gear is, but BG's > Arena once both are rated.

So far the team absolutely destroys mobs.
Much more so then any other team I've played or when they were Boomkin.

Each has dual-spec, with a Resto form.
And I'd already bought a set of iLV 187-226 gear for level 80 as boomkin.
So that's a decent starter set for their Tree Forms.
Might run the odd BG (AV in particular) as 5x Resto.

They're still a work in progress.
When I'm happy with what I have, I'll do a write up on my set up.

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Sounds like a nice setup - looking forward to hearing more :-)