I use the lowest form of blessing in events that have spikey AEs for group heals. Not much other than that.
I rarely check these boards anymore, but @ Twinheal, the only time I would use it was for Sepulcher 4 raid due to how much we DPSed and how often AE DMG was firing off. I'd use 1 charge for group heal and 1 for healing whoever happened to be killing themself in new and interesting ways that night (the wizard who discovered he could nuke himself was my personal favorite). Basically twin-healing our group heal every 15s (recharge of group heal). Beyond that, don't use twinheal. The issue in modern EQ healing is speed, not potency. The reason group heals are exempt is the potential of completely healing 6 players vs. 1 is much different. Group heals are generally used to counteract timed / expected packets of damage (AEs or AE Rampage for example) firing off every 20 seconds or something of that nature. Meaning you can take your time and line up a twin-heal and group heal to completely heal your group.
Nice guides. Alot of helpfull stuff in there.. But i do have one question tho to your DPS guide.. Why would you use twincast at that point? It doesnt work on our dots? So little point in doing so? Seems like a few wasted twincasts or have i missed something along the journey?
A twincast dot has a 2x multiplier applied to it. Easy to check, take off your fire focus, Sunblaze a test dummy to get the normal and crit dmg amount. Then cast TC and Sunblaze it again, both those numbers will double.
Aha.. So i did miss something.. Thats not embarassing at all -_- Thanks for the quick answer and great work on those guides
That is awesome to know for both my Druid and Enchanter. I would feel like I was wasting a TC counter if I threw a DoT. Major props for the guide btw- Druid isn't my main but I always use her alongside my Ench or sub in for groups and the info here has been invaluable.
I have had my spellbar set up for many levels as: 1-group heal 2,3,4-individual heals 5,6,7,8-dots 9-the dot that starts with a DD portion 10-the DD that heals target's target (fast heal when the tank is in trouble and I am dotting) 11,12-snare, root, specialty spell for the type of action at the moment, or a regularly used group buff like thorns or foe. The DD/DOT spell takes the same time to reset as the duration, so I cast this whenever avaiable and the other dots as they exire...if they expire. Your guide backs up a lot that I do and gives me plenty of new ideas. Thanks! I used to say that druids can do most everything but they can't do anything well. I have found that groups love the druid for it's flexability. And with a tank merc, I solo dark blues in SL ( I don't kite well and I don't like root rot) Again...Nice post!
If you have the spell version of Twincast, I'd highly recommend keeping that on your bar at all times as you can Twincast dots as well as nukes. If you're dpsing in a group I'd suggest tweaking your spell lineup a bit to not have as many dots, and focus a little more on direct damage spells. You'll see an increase in overall dps. The opening post has a list of what to use in most standard dps lineups.
For the longest time my spell lineup on raids was: 1. Winter's 2. Summer's 3. Main heal (vida) 4. Adrenaline 5. Group Heal 6. Twincast 7. Remote Nuke 8. Quick Heal (invigoration) 9. Survival 10. Reptile 11. Growth 12. Single Skin Debuff would replace slot 10 or 12 as needed. When no chance to DPS 1 and 2 were replaced with Promised / Twinheal When Winters started being bad, Roar replaced it. When no need to heal... 3-5 were replaced with rain nuke, NSW DoT, SunX DoT and 10-11 were replaced with Chill DoT and either fire/ice empathy. When I needed utility like Vinelash that would go in slot 10.
Wow, you straight up dropped heals when you load up dps? The most I do is drop Adrenaline or vida on burns where I shouldn't need to be chaining heals. On raids, my spell bar usually looks like 1: Group heal / Blizzard 2: Remote 3: Roar of Kolos 4: Summers / Growth 5: Vivification 6: Adrenaline 7: Vida 8: Survival 12: Twincast 9, 10, and 11 are my rotating slots for spell sets that I swap out during fights. The main one is Sunray, Ice -atk, Ice -CR. Then swapping in Skin for one of the ice debuffs. Or 3x fire dots and manually loading Chill in replacing Sunray. The nukes and single target heals are in order for heal and dps multibinds. If I want group heal and Blizzard in the same fight, GHeal goes in to slot 11 and I change a hotkey.
Events where I would drop Vida, Adrenaline and Group heal (I always kept Invig / Survival)... were events where if someone in my group was dying, either they were and standing/aggroing when they shouldn't or the tank epic failboated. "Loading DPS" is all out burn parse situation. A general sustained DPS or trash DPS fight I would usually just drop utility slots 10-11 for rain (or single ice if mez etc.) and NSW Between Remote, Invig, Survival and AAs like CoS... you can hold someone for a few seconds until a tank can Ageless or Undivided the mob. Tanking/aggro holding was so very easy-modded the last few expansions. Those two abilities never should have existed, but that's a tangent. Also... multibind, hehe. I always cast each spell individually, not really sure why but I just preferred it that way. Because even with value priority of DPS spells, there are time (like the last 1-2% on a boss) where I'd prefer to get a quick Summer's in vs. waiting on Rain to do its full 3 waves and risk him being killed and losing out on DPS etc. While marginal, that is one example of the reason I preferred single casting everything. Heals I DEFINITELY would never multibind. All that does is promote spamming your high value/high reactivity heals with recast timers. It doesn't really lend itself to the proactive healing I talked about in the first part of the guide. Getting used to mob timing on heals and readjusting forward/backwards so that your heals are landing at more opportune times is pretty important as far as druiding goes. And if you are simply casting Adrenaline every time its up, you will shift yourself off that timing. That's my 2 cents! Now hopefully I'll find sleep.
There's really nothing wrong with using a multibind, but don't rely on it. To be proactive you have to be aware of what's going on, and how you most likely will not always cast the exact same at each given moment. It's mainly a personal preference thing to use, or to not use them, but I wouldn't completely rely on it alone.
My spell lineup is... 1. vida 2. invig 3. group heal 4. remote 5. hail 6. roar 7. summers 8. magic dot 9. ice dot (natureward) 10. NBW 11.twincast 12. survival invig gets dropped on burns for whatever debuff I need to quickly apply. non burns I swap slot 9 (ice dot) between ice dot and debuffs as they need applying
Your spell set always hurt my brain. Magic DoT is god awful. If anything it should be SunXXXX DoT. Hail being a permanent fixture and not just a burn spell I found peculiar but meh it works. Dropping Invig for anything is badmode, in a burn dropping vida is more useful. If you are burning you will only need to cover over-aggroers and AE DMG as far as heals go. Group heal / Invig should cover both those situations, if it doesn't either someone is screwing up (people overaggroing / standing in AE damage or you burning on wrong fight). PS Call me maybe.
erm correction ice swaps out with debuff/invig fire goes there. 1. vida 2. invig ( debuff/ice dot) 3. group heal 4. remote 5. hail 6. roar 7. summers 8. magic dot 9. fire dot 10. NBW 11.twincast 12. survival
likewise I am incapable of comprehending the decision to make a dps/heal hybrid with the intention of playing a cleric in leather with a more limited toolkit.
Cleric wearing leather argument aside. I still don't understand dropping a Druids best spell (invigoration line) for a debuff. From the DPS side cutting out one DoT is an extremely reasonable thought, especially since you can reload said DoT after the debuff has been applied on bigbadboss. From the heal side cutting out vida line makes sense also. In DPS Druid situations you have no real use for vida. If you've made the choice to be all out DPSing as a Druid on a raid then your group shouldn't be subject to much AE damage (beyond what our group heal covers). If group members are taking damage from adds, or locational AEs/Rampage that is their fault and If they've got a brain, they should be able to fix taking said damage quickly and said damage should be quickly covered (invig or adrenaline). I still don't understand the logic
