I jumped in to a ZG mostly-pug (10 ppl from a guild invited 10 others to go) last night. First, let me say that I 've never done a raid before and I jumped in mainly to get my feet wet and learn a bit more about my character.

We wiped on the first boss we tried (the bat one) and the MT kept dying. There were 3 druids in the group and two priests. Both of the priests kept getting d/c'ed tho and maybe that contributed to the problem (in each of our three attempts, I think there was only one priest present.)

I keep thinking back about how I ran my druid. I kept the MT targeted and kept up a steady stream of my lower mana HoTs on him unless he was really dire and then I hit the higher mana ones. I am Balance currently and do not have NS or Swiftmend. The only thing I can think of that I forgot was using bandages.

Anyway, despite having 3-4 healers on him, I watched the MT go from 75% to dead fast. Several times. Then of course, in between runs, the raid leader lectured us druids that we need to heal. Which took me back to my resto PvP days in AV when I would get a “wtf drood heal” whisper and be staring at an empty mana bar and the cooldown for NS and Innervate. Granted, I'm a smarter healer now then I was then, but still that attitude is what made me respec away from resto.

Anyway, I jumped in last night to learn about raiding...and I'm not sure what it is I should take from that experience...aside from a lesson about joining PuGs /wink Any advice?

Thanks in advance,

Foresthawk
Dalaran

Overheal and never join PUG Raids. I almost stopped raiding because of that.

Some pug raids can be alright, especially for the lower ones like ZG and AQ20... I don't think I'd wanna pug anything MC or above though.

And from the sounds of it, the guild you went with was just learning ZG, which is why you wiped, not because you did a bad job. See, every raid has a learning curve, when a guild enters a raid isntance for the first time, they're bound to wipe some, just because they're not experienced with the encounters yet. Every boss in ZG has a couple key strategy points that are best to keep in mind, too. The raid leaders need to do some research and figure those strats out, and make sure people listen to em. From the sounds of it, your MT might have not been the best geared, either, cause I don't recall the bat boss hitting all that hard the first couple times I did ZG. Make sure people are taking care of the bats she summons too, and help keep the AoErs up.

In other words... don't sweat the wipe, it happens in all new encounters, perfectly normal. :) Try again, maybe with another guild, and your next try should be much easier.

As far as healing goes, if you're having mana troubles, hold back on regrowthing unless the tank gets below 50%. I personally only use rejuv/HT 4 unless the tank dips below 75%. At 70% or so I'll rejuv then start casting a HT9 or 10, since the cast time is so long, it usually hits at the right time (I'm full feral, no points into anything healing in resto). And if the tank dips below 50% or takes a big spike in 1 hit, then I'll rejuv/regrowth, start casting a big heal. Same goes for squishies too, I use far more regrowths on squishies than tanks, which in the end saves mana if the tanks are good. Everyone has their own healing strats though, best way to figure out yours is to just practice. :) Also, +healing gear is a godsend for non-restos I've found. Having rejuv tick for a decent amount plus being able to land a nice heal using lower rank HT is the best thing ever.

From the sounds of it, your MT might have not been the best geared, either, cause I don't recall the bat boss hitting all that hard the first couple times I did ZG.

I didn't inspect him, but when he died, I dropped into bear and feral charged her (note to self - rez MT first...I keep forgetting I can rez *during* the battle). I was on her for a good 30 seconds and I didn't take that much damage. Though that coulda been because of the general confusion...I have about 7300 armor in bear. Not as good as others, but nothing to sneeze at either.

I personally only use rejuv/HT 4 unless the tank dips below 75%.

Just to clarify - you use rank 4 of rejuv and rank 4 of HT?

Thank you for the advice...I'll definately try it out in my next raid. :)

Forest

As Khar said, don't worry about wiping and not feeling as if you did a good job right now. If it was your first run; it's not your fault. Everyone has to learn somehow. From the sound of it, you didn't do too bad. Really, it just takes practice, as Khar said. Try his advice, it should prove pretty helpful.

One thing about healing though is... how to explain it. It sort of clicks after a while. When you start to heal, you'll become familiar with timings. For instance, when the tank starts to take damage, and you look at how fast he is taking damage, you'll know which heals to cast and in what order. Basically, it's just a matter of practice and developing your own methods, as well as quick thinking to know what to do when situations change. Healing is truly a hard job, in my opinion, because one has to watch several other people's life, make critical decisions, all the while trying to keep an eye on their own mana and health. Not to mention keeping everyone in the line of sight... gah, that can get annoying sometimes.

Good luck to you, though! I'm sure you'll get it.

Edit: And one suggestion of my own:
When I go into the instance, I have 4 spells that I tag my "Emergency" spells:
Barkskin, Tranquility, Innervate, Rebirth (Arranged in order of least cooldowns, meaning it's not as vital if you use barkskin a lot)

Barkskin's use is self-explanatory.

I always try and save Tranquility for those few occasions when everyone's health is low, and the group needs life--fast.

As for Innervate, I always hesitate to use this. I normally leave an instance using it once or twice, whereas I could use it many, many times... But I'd rather save it for bad situations when there is no chance of finishing off the last mobs without needing a few more heals that my mana regen can't keep up with.

Rebirth is obvious, too. But if there are others with ressurection in your party, here comes the tough choice. If you're in a battle, and the group is doing fine or you think they can handle it, then don't waste Rebirth. That way, someone else can res, and you're fine. But if you think the group definately needs it... well, go for it.

This might just be me, and I might have over-analyzed 2 or 3 simple spells, but that's my take on them. Figured I'd mention it.

Oh whoops, I meant I use HT rank 4 and max rank of rejuv. I guess you could use a lower tank of rejuv, but I never have.

Acquire +heal and your HT rank 4 will be more effective.

This is being changed in the expansion however so I'm not sure I'd bother getting used to using rank 4 right now.

I still believe a Raid guild is more suited towards this kind of thing and as such will be better equipped and organized to raid any instance regardless of the amount of times they have done it. Pug raids have the tendancy to follow no strategy and no leader, thus chaos reigns supreme.

spamming your HoTs won't help as much as they are less efficient, and generally at the moment c#ck blockers.

I mean, as a balance druid, if there is a resto there, your rejuvs will either not land or be overwritten by his better ones, your regrowth upfront portion will land, but if there is a stronger one ticking you won't get any ticks or if there is a weaker one you'll overwrite it. Either way lots of time and mana are being wasted between the two druids.

If you have moonglow maxed you should be a fairly capable healer efficieny wise, find a rank of HT you are comfortable with and stick with it primarily. If you can get to HT4, it has a faster cast time, but you really need a good amount of +heal gear to make it effective.

Try stutter casting too, casting a big heal and interrupting if it is not needed, once you get the hnag of it you can always have a big heal ready when needed, but you'll slip on the meters compared to constantly topping off.

Yes, I definately wasn't blaming myself for the MT going down (though the raid leader certainly did seem to think it was us druids that kept letting him die) it was just disconcerting how he kept dying with 4-5 of us healing him.

Those are really good points about the HoTs, gwmort. Indeed, several times I cast, I got the "A more powerful spell is already active" message. I'll experiment with using more HT in my next raid...which will hopefully be soon as I've applied to join a raiding guild. I have the Champion PvP set currently, which does have a fair amount of +dmg/healing. Not as much as say, Cenarion, but it's there.

I'm currently Balance because I've decided to try out all the trees. I'm not sure I like it tho. I'm considering a feral/resto hybrid build if I get into the guild (if they don't make me go full resto). This is one place I wish WoW was like Guild Wars - where you can respec any time you need to free. That would be nice :/ Oh well.

Thank you all for advice/input. I learned more here than in the instance! :)

Besides what the others have said already, I think part of the problem was the tank's gear..

Me and a warrior guildie of mine tank most of our guild's ZG runs and although neither of us are too well geared out (Each have a few epics, nothing too special) we can each last for a good 20-25 seconds without being healed at all on the bat boss.

And yet another warrior of ours who has mostly greens dies in half the time of us

Well the priests would most likely be on the mages since there were only 2 of them for the shields when the bats come out. That leaves the druids to keep the MT up....

When a RL assumes all healers need to be on the MT, then it's generally a good time to either stay and learn how not to do things if you haven't been already or leave, imo.

I've come to the general conclusion that when all healers are "on the MT," people get bored and start looking for someone else to heal. Maybe too many. In some cases, I've landed rejuv-regrowth-HT before another heal goes off on the MT in such cases. That's a lot of time for someone else to also be landing a heal when the MT is taking damage, yet.....

You do not need 5-6 healers on one person in a 20-man. I've never seen a need for this. What I have seen is this "strategy" lead to wipes many a time.

I use proactive HoTs on mages during the bat boss. You can see the bats coming...HoT the mages. You can go bear if you draw too much aggro and you won't have it long. I'd put one priest on MT, one druid, and perhaps a pally if needed. Other healers should be watching the mages and cross-raid healing.

If the priests were d/cing, then they are more to blame than the druids. Druids get singled out for this kind of crap way too much, and I wouldn't take it. I would have left.

As for healing gear, you could farm mats for your Hide of the Wild if you do not have it. It will take you about a week, on and off. (By the way, I got two epic drops while doing this..a Lifestone and Hammer of the Northern Wind).

Do the Dire Maul quest to get your trinket if you need to. Grind Stormpike rep for your Lei of the Lifegiver, it's fun and it took me about 3 weeks on and off in between raids and life (I'm Alliance, so this may be different for Horde). Farm some bones and core of elements, etc. for the Argent Dawn rep dagger if you don't have a better mainhand to couple with the Lei of the Lifegiver.

You could farm some demonic runes in Felwood for back-up mana on a separate timer. I couple them with a low-cost mana pot and rarely go oom. Fish and cook some mp5 food. Buy some cheap oils (the lesser ones, not the expensive uber ones).

Use your mana! If you're oom at the end of a fight and someone says something, remind them that you innervated the priest and not yourself. That always backs them off for me.

Hope some of this helps.

One other thing made a huge difference in raid healing for me way back when, and that was that I learned how to set up my UI for raids.

You can configure CT raid if you want, or you can just drag and drop groups from the WoW raid tab... and right click the group name at the top and select "show buffs." You will be able to see who already has a HoT on them so you don't waste time or mana overwriting one, you can see who has an innervate, you can see who has thorns, and you can see who needs a gutter MotW buff. It is limited to just druidy things. This will help. I also selected "don't show party when in raid" or whatever from the main WoW interface options.

I understand the CT raid mod also shows who is out of range.

Some people say not to use low rank HT because we won't be able to use it in the future. I don't like that advice, because there are other changes that will make other strategies work better. Our HoT's will become much more mana effecient in WoW 2.0 and that will be a good strategy then. For now use the best strategy we currently have, which is low rank HT.

Rank 4 HT is a godsend if you have a ton of +healing gear. If you don't, then you'll need to use a higher rank. With around +400 healing in DM blues, I would usually cast rank 5 or 6. A lot of balance druids have a sick amount of int and not much +healing, so they might even cast ranks 6 and 7.

Now with that fight, what was the problem with healing? Was the tank and others dropping quickly, but you had plenty of mana left? If so, then you need to put out greater HPS and not worry about effeciency. Was the tank and others dropping because you were OOM? Then you need to lay off the regrowth and use lower rank HT.

Having the priests DC is no good, also, what were the shaman/pallis doing?

Being more feral than resto I was asked to join a ZG guild raid (their guild did not have enough members at the time) and since I had a friend who was in that guild at the time, I thought, why not. Well ... let me tell you ... Raids win or lose on two and only two things alone. If your RL doesn't know what his doing and if the raid does not listen to the RL then all is lost. Your whole raid can have tier whatever gear and be more than uber, you are still bound to fail.This was ultimately what I found out that day.Having ZG on farming status and doing runs with my druids there every second sunday, I became sheltered and forgot just how hard raids can be without great leaders and trustworthy followers.Uhm .... anyways .... I think my point is made.

To begin with Zul'Gurub is much harder that people make out. 80% of molten core is easier. The tactics involved in zul'gurub make it incompatible with pug groups unless we are talking about a complilation of players from raid guilds.

I wouldnt recommend raiding zul gurub until you have the best gear from all the 5 man instances dire maul->Ubrs. This is a real foundation for learning how to play in a team rather than jumping in at the deep end.

ZG is nearly always only ran by pugs on my server. (tichondrius) Heck even Molten Core is Pug alot now.