Thursday 21 January 2010

Healing touch

Ever since I started playing wow as a resto druid, I have found healing touch to be amoung our oddest spells. Now that 3.3 has hit and we have an extra 10% haste bouncing around before you look at our gear I finally looked at a healing touch build. The build I propose would be:

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This build assumes that your gear is able to get to over 856 haste to be even remotely viable. I took this into onyxia 25 and I found that I had aproximately 950 haste:
1.6s healing touch without natures grace
1.3s healing touch with natures grace

This build was one of the oddest heailng build i've ever used, bar glyphed healing touch builds. It provides well as you see above 13k heals, 20k crits on a relatively small cast speed. This build surprisingly has some majour short fallings and nice points:

Pros
- Healing touch provides a massive throughput, above what nourish can hope to touch, especially on a tank that you haven't had time to hot.
- You can combine phenomenal throughput with hots to provide stable tank healing that few can match.

Cons
- Healing touch has a high haste requirement
- Healing touch requries crit or even higher haste
- Healing touch costs a phenomenal amount

The cons I feel need a tiny bit more explaining. On our gear we have 3 stats we can chose 2 from; crit, haste and spirit. A healing touch build requires high crit to maintain naturesgrace to keep your throughput high, or high haste requirements to allow you to talent out of natures grace. I presume something in the region of 1200+ haste and you could ignore natures grace. High mana cost means that you would need an insane amount of regen to maintain a spam equivalent to what a paladin can pump out.

Unsurprisingly this build did not work out as effective for me, but I had alot of fun and noone died in the poor onyxia run I solo healed with this on my first time out of the garage.

2 comments:

  1. One thing this build is very viable for is the Valithria Dreamwalker fight. Healers who are entering the portals basically have infinite mana regen, so mana is no issue at all. This also allows points to be taken out of Tranquil Spirit and put into something like Celestial Focus in the Balance tree to reduce the haste needed.

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  2. It was written before I had done my reserach on Valithria, but yes I could see this build working very well (i'd even get to dig my haste gear out of the bank and break 1k haste). I have to say we had an interesting tactic with 4 valrithria healers and 4 raid healers, but I'm sure its a tactic we'll perfect with time.

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