It’s been almost two months now since I was part of a guild regularly doing 25-man content, so I’ve been able to get away with using a bastardized catch-all Resto spec, leaving my other spec slot free for whatever tomfoolery I wished. (Lately, this has been bear tanking.) So, I’m returning to my old ways, of optimizing top-to-bottom for a given role, with regards to my talents. I’ll be using two somewhat distinct, and highly focused builds to fill either the role of raid healing or tank healing as need arises.

Tank Healing

The first, my tank-healing build, is 14/0/57. Using the Glyph of Nourish, Glyph of Innervate, and Glyph of Swiftmend, it is tailored to HoT up my chosen tank(s) and then bombard him with big-number, high-crit Nourishes. The only real allowance I’ve made for the changes in 3.2 is adding Empowered Touch to the mix, for the extra 20% of spellpower added to my Nourishes (along with the original 40% of spellpower to Healing Touch.)

I’ve sometimes comtemplated rocking out my 4-piece Tier 7.5 set in this build to nearly duplicate the effect of the Nourish Glyph: “Your Nourish heals an additional 5% for each of your heal over time effects present on the target.” (Lifebloom counts as one HoT whether it’s a single stack, double or triple.)

Raid Healing

For the purposes of raid healing, I’m using 11/0/60 with glyphed Healing Touch, Swiftmend, and Wild Growth. I can hit up to 6 targets with my AoE heal, cast sub-1.0 second Healing Touches for anywhere up to ~11K crits, and Swiftmend all those Rejuvs I’m tossing out to the raid. This build will really shine if I ever get that elusive fourth piece of tier 8, which will add an extra instant Rejuv tick to the target as soon as it’s cast, healing for upwards of 2K and then another ~12K over 15 seconds. Since 3.1 I’ve dropped Revitalize in favor of Living Seed, as my glyphed HT gets tossed around a lot and has a great crit rate.

I’m still adjusting to the new Innervate mechanics, but I so seldom need to Innervate myself anyway that it hasn’t tripped me up yet.

All that having been said, looking forward to getting back into 25-man content again!

Cross-posted via email from Shane’s Posterous

Raid Screenshot

Click the image above for the full-resolution 1680×1050 screenshot.

As you can see above, I have a lot going on in my interface, but I’ve tried really hard at keeping it clean, concise, and lightweight, in terms of addon efficiency. Chat messages and names on Recount have been blurred to protect the innocent.

Here is a (quick-and-dirty) diagram showing the majority of what’s on my screen during a raid:

Interface Mockup/Key

I play on a 22″ widescreen at 1680×1050, using a Logitech G5 mouse and a Logitech G15 keyboard.

I covered a handful of the addons I use here and some more here. I’m gearing up to do a total overhaul sometime soon, but in the meantime this is what I’ve been using to raid for last month or so.

LibDataBroker AddOns

In the top left, I have:

• BugSack
• Broker_Memory – a memory usage display, click to start garbage collection and free up some RAM, hover for a list of highest memory usage in your addons
• fps display from Broker_SysMon
• ping display from Broker_SysMon
• Calendar display
• Attrition
• Bagsy
• Outfitter
• gold displayed from Broker_Money

In the center, I have:

• picoFriends
• picoGuild
• AutoText – for posting macros like Vent info, boss tactics, healing assignments, etc.
• Broker_Currency – can be toggled to show any counter from the Currency tab of your character frame, and shows them all in a tooltip on mouseover

In the top right, from left to right, top to bottom, I have:

• Broker_Transit – a portals/teleport/hearth menu
• launchers for Cooking and First aid, from Broker_Professions
• Broker_Switcher – a fullscreen/windowed mode toggle
• gfxToggle2 – for switching between presets for video quality
• configuration button for my LDB display addon of choice, DockingStation
• spell reagents counter
• launchers for my other professions, Alchemy in this case
• BankStack – a super fast way to keep your bags and bank nice and neat
• Broker_Trainer
• TradeBook – lets me view the professions of all my other toons while only using a tiny bit of memory

Unitframes

My party frames are provided by oUF_Perfect, powered by Haste’s oUF and written by P3lim. They show names, health and mana, targets, are colored by class and turn red when a player has aggro.

(I just realized proofreading this post that I do not have a usable screenshot of my actual player/target unitframes, so I’ll have to add those later.)

Next up we have my Grid frames. Mine have mana bars on the bottom, two text lines in the center, and several corner indicators for HoTs and missing buffs. The second line displays a color-coded timer for Lifebloom. The white square in this shot is for Thorns. As you can see, we’ve only got it on our tanks, as it should be. The first row are only the tanks. I took some of what I’m doing with Grid from Resto4Life and two posts from Tree Bark Jacket. Once I put some more time into creating my own Grid setup, I’ll do another blog post, but I’m starting to eye another addon, VuhDo, with some interest.

Other

My buff bars are provided by SimpleBuffBars which I prefer slightly over the more common ElkBuffBars.

On the left you can see my RaidBuffStatus window. This lets me see at a glance who/how many people are missing crucial buffs like Well Fed, flasks, and so on. A control-click will (very matter-of-fact-ly) whisper those players who can give the buff about who is missing it. An alt-click on a buff I can provide myself will cast it on one person who needs it, or if at least 4-5 are missing it, it may cast the group version. In my case, Gift of the Wild instead. The bottom buttons can report to yourself or to a channel/whisper the overall status of who’s missing what.

My lower left chatframes are separated by one last row of LDB addons:

• BuffEnough – self-check for all available buffs
• RBS window toggle
• DropTheCheapestThing
• DBM
• Broker_RaidSave – let’s me see on mouseover exactly what instances I’m saved to and for how long, across all toons
• Omen
• Broker_Recount
• oRA2

The top chatframe has most of the more personal chat channels, party, whisper, raid, and guild, while the bottom one is all the regional channels, says, yells, emotes and so on. You can see the style applied by PhanxChat as well. It’s a very clean, concise look that I really like.

My minimap is customized by pMinimap, also by P3lim, configured to show new mail and server time. Again, very clean and sleek. Below that you can see the rest of my minimap buttons arranged by TidyMinimap, including a redundant BugSack icon that I have since rid myself of, and another DBM button. Rawr!

My actionbars are controlled by Bartender4, here with ButtonFacade and the Caith skin. I do dabble in PvP, but I largely click-cast my heals, so my action bars are fairly empty. You can also see a fine example of my macro naming policy!

On the right I have my micro-menu bar, bags bar, and two (technically three) more chatframes. Rightmost is the vanilla combat log, while the left are colored backdrops for EavesDrop.

All in all, it’s served me well, but this UI layout and collection of addons are getting a little long in the tooth, and to be honest, a little chunky too. Here’s to hoping I can come up with something svelte over the next week or so.

• Unitframes: Haste’s oUF and oUF_P3lim, and oUF_Perfect for party frames but tweaked to not display raidframes
  What can I say, I’m a sucker for attractive, lightweight, and expandable unitframes. P3lim does some great work!
• Actionbars: Bartender4
  Hands-down the best actionbar addon IMO, though prior to 3.0.x I used Dominos.
• Chat: I prefer PhanxChat over Prat, etc.
• Map/Minimap: Mapster and pMinimap
• Auction House: Auctioneer Advanced
  Let’s face it, folks. You’ve heard this spiel before. If you like making money on the AH with whatever you can gather or make, I highly recommend AucAdv.
• Equipment Management: Outfitter
  For a hybrid class who keeps multiple gear sets and needs to switch on the fly, Outfitter is a major boon. It even makes it easy to pop items in and out of your bank.
• Leveling Help: A combination of LightHeaded, Tekkub’s TourGuide, and Carbonite.
  Now I know many of you swear by QuestHelper, but as a programmer, I am horrified every time I look in the general direction of QH. It causes crashes, huge framerate drops, DCs, etc. I just prefer the look, usability, features and general stability of Carbonite. The only one of these I keep enabled on my 80 is LH, though.
• Visual Customization: ButtonFacade with the Caith skin, Tekticles for my fonts, TipTop for tooltips
• Raidframes: Grid for the frames and Clique for click-casting goodness
• Meters: Omen3 for threat, Recount for damage, healing, etc. although I may replace with Skada as it matures
• Other: QBar for an Autobar-style set of buttons for my Usable quest items.

Well, this definitely turned out to be longer than I planned or expected, but I hope you enjoyed reading and maybe saw a few new addons to try!

Glyph of Swiftmend. Hands down, 100%, the best Restoration Druid glyph out there, in my humble opinion. Its usefulness absolutely cannot be overstated. It removes the need to spend the mana and a cast time or global cooldown re-applying Regrowth or (more likely) Rejuvenation, and essentially turns both of these HoT’s into an emergency heal without having to sacrifice the HoT afterwards. It’s absolutely invaluable for 5-man healing. It may turn out to be less so for raids given the new abilities given to other healers, but instant compensation for burst damage on a tank while your HoT continues to roll is just amazing. I love this glyph and have never replaced it in the beta.

Glyph of Lifebloom. Insanely useful, especially if you take this in conjunction with Gift of the Earthmother, which will reduce the global cooldown on your Lifebloom casts by 20%. With that talent, this glyph, Nature’s Splendor from the balance tree, enough +haste, and minimal latency it’s theoretically possible to roll full Lifebloom stacks on 9+ people (not that you would want to be doing only that, just sayin’). If your healing attention in raids tends to be divided between tanks with a few spot heals on the raid as mine typically is, this allows you some extra breathing room.

Glyph of Regrowth. If you get the Living Seed talent, then you will want this Glyph to make Regrowth as efficient as possible. I have some doubts about the wisdom of turning Regrowth into a main-line healing spell, but the 21-second duration on Regrowth is probably enough in and of itself to make sure that this glyph doesn’t get wasted. 20% more healing from Regrowth plus a Living Seed on a tank is very powerful. I like this glyph a lot for 5-man healing and I think it could be very useful for tank healing in raids.