Druid in Fractals / Druid in raids. Help!
You should be fine with the build mentioned.
My advice would be getting a Magi / Cleric / Zealot Staff with Sigil of Transferance, get yourself some Delicious Rice Ball food and equip your armor with Runes of the Monk.
So you’ll be having +30% healing excluded to druid when needed. If your team needs healing – you just swap Heal for Healing Spring and Trait for Traps (perma AoE regen to fill CAF on CD everytime).
Using CAF #4 on Quickdraw is just enough healing you need. Even in berserker.
“Observe, learn and counter.”
As someone regular playing druid I can say that there are actually 3 main builds played for druids into raids.
-The Condi Druid (Viper).
-The power Druid ( berserker, maybe a few zealot pieces if you need some higher heals ) -Healing druid wich would be Magi/Cleric ( be sure to reduce you toughness on vg/gorseval if your tank has less toughness then you).
If your not experienced and are pugging raids I suggest using the healing druid, the other builds are good but they require you to have a bit more indepth knowledge of the encounter so that your heals are onpoint. Also my experience with pugs is that most pug groups need more healing then the zerker or condi druid.
And yes it is possible to use exotic gear, main problem is that most pug groups require you to be in full ascended.
The biggest problem are indeed pugs that require you to be full ascended while still expecting you to constantly change your gear to accommodate any individual tanks thoughness…
It’s in fact not needed at all because your biggest contribution to a group’s/raid’s dps are your buffs. (That’s the reason too, every damage rotation should include casting astral #4 on cooldown and many builds suggest a sigil of water on one of your weapons for higher astral force generation. Those 15% more damage for 8 seconds shared with 4 people are worth more than any personal damage skill ever could.)
And guess what… these buffs don’t scale with your equipment at all^^
Just a bit of napkin math to give you a rough idea of your effective dps through buffs:
Every glyph is one stack of grace of the land (3% damage for 8 seconds), casting rejuvenating tides is 5 stacks.
Just using your glyphs on cd (with the usual rejuvenation, allignment, empowerment, unity setup) means you do 2x 3% * 0.5 (8s duration/16s cd) + 3% * 0.33 + 3% * 0.4 through grace of the land.
Empowerment does another 10% * (6s duration/16s cd).
Your frost spirit adds 7% damage increase (70% chance for a hit to do 10% more damage) with an uptime of 75%.
And lets assume you get to cast astral #4 every 24 seconds (24 just because you get a round number^^) for another 5 * 3% * (8s/24s).
Add in your spotter buff (for sake of simplicity i assume a dps increase of ~2% here).
You now raised the direct damage of 4 guys by 20%.
So you already contributed 80% of an average guy’s dps without doing a single hit yourself.
Do you think you can do more than the missing 20% in personal damage to make yourself superior to every other class that could be in your spot? ;-)
And that neither includes the fact that you can line up the buffs with burn phases to be even more effective nor the healing output or the blinds through glyphs which really helps against all trash mobs.
Long story short… druids are quite overpowered at the moment. It’s just that nobody complains, because a) they can only achieve effective dps in group setups and b) one per group of 5 is enough, so they don’t threaten to replace other people :-D
You mentioned you already have one ascended armor set (i assume berserker stats), so just keep that. Think about replacing on sigil with sigil of water (or get a replacement weapon with that sigil).
For average pugs (who mostly want you for pure healing and are sometimes really bad at avoiding damage^^) add:
- a staff with some healing power and sigils of transference/water (you really don’t use a staff unless healing is your only priority). My personal preference are zealot stats here but ymmv…
- another armor set for healing (exotics really are fine here). I prefer zealots again with runes of the druid, but other +healing power combinations or runes of the monk work well too. (zealot just makes it easier for you in pugs because you don’t have to think about your thoughness and how much the tank has…)
- get some spare cleric trinkets
Combine zealot staff and armor with a few cleric trinkets (just so many that you stay below the tank’s thoughness) and you have more than enough healing power to keep even the slowest reacting monkey alive.
I promise you, with getting better at playing druid in raids and better raid groups you will use that +healing stuff less and less.
And if you think about making another ascended set some far day in the future i recommend taking a look at viper condition builds (you can get most ascended viper trinkets only from raids anyway^^). It combines nearly the same buffing/healing capabilites of the power build with more personal damage, all the while being able to stay mobile/mid ranged.
But to be honest: While many raids i know run a condition druid (or play a double druid setup) it may take ages until that thought reaches most pugs. Half the time i still get looked at funny (or kicked instantly^^) for playing a condition build and a second druid is considered some useless idiot… So solely planning to be the healer in a pug is the safer start.
But hey, that clueless guys really help to seperate good pugs from bad ones in a very short time. And playing the same condition build in high level fractals is fun too… :-D
Edit: Just an additional thought…
When starting raids as a healer don’t be afraid to spend time with bad pugs. You really learn much more about your ability to keep people alive, when those people are bad at avoiding unnecessary damage.
And i’ve seen more than one person used to a regular solid raid group struggle in critical situations while someone used to people screwing up just adapts quickly. :-)
(edited by Ooops.8694)