Wild Mushroom Usage in Throne of Thunder

I wanted to write a post based off of my experience with all twelve bosses last week during normal modes pertaining to the use of our new Wild Mushroom Bloom. There are a multitude of ways to use them in each fight and I found their healing to be fairly useful. You will often find them doing anywhere between a few percent of your overall healing to upwards of 12 or 14% depending on how things work for you.

Before we get into the fight specifics let us look at what it does for us and what tools we want to use to help the cause

Addon and Weak Aura

There are two very simplistic methods that I have seen to track the mushrooms that use very little screen real estate. The first is a weak aura created by Civilian on the Elitist Jerks druid forum, the link to the import string is here http://pastebin.com/yVzjUjXc . This happens to be what I am using currently. There is also a mod available that does roughly the same thing with a nice little UI setup. The link to that is here: http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/shroomhelper Thanks to WTSHeals for pointing me to that option.

Effect

Wild Mushrooms as you know cap out at roughly 1/3 of your overall health give or take a little bit. With three planted you get roughly your total maximum health. For me right now my mushrooms store up to 490K bonus healing. Applying Naturalist and Mastery bumps this up to roughly 674K healing done. Assuming a 18% chance to crit in raid environment you will generally average 795K healing done based solely on the overheal bonus. In reality that number will fluctuate above or below that amount by potentially sizeable margins if RNG is in your favor or not. For now we can use that number as a numerical average.

The base heal is slightly less reliable as it is subject to diminishing returns. I would say on average it will heal a single person somewhere between 7 and 15K which is not insignificant but not necessarily relevant to the current discussion.

Uses

For me there are a handful of uses for wild mushrooms during fights. I generally rank them as follows:

Raid Wide: You won’t necessarily hit everyone in the raid but there are certainly encounters where you can arrange for a large majority of the raid to be grouped up for a specific mechanic. This also benefits other ground based heals as well such as your swiftmend. I’d say on average when attempting to do this you’ll probably hit 15 to 20 people with it given some might end up outside of the area of effect. This will result in roughly 63K down to 50K healing per person. This is basically like hitting everyone in the raid with half of a crit regrowth simultaneously. Not insignificant.

Cluster: For some fights where you are required to be in smaller groups or spread out in a wider area you can position it such that the people near you or near a specific marker are affected by the mushrooms. This might be anywhere from 5 to 7 people. This would end up as on average 175K down to 125K give or take. I have found that ‘melee’ as a general group can often qualify as a valid cluster to mushroom on some encounters.

Small cluster or single person: When you can’t guarantee any sizeable number of people will be in any one place at any one time but you do know where one, two, or three people of import will be at any one time then this is a viable option. If you hit between 1 and 3 people with this then you’re looking at between 800K down to 275K for this situation. If no more useful options are viable this is useful on tanks. Just be careful with your placement if you are designing this to be used on tanks. I’ve had a few encounters where if placed wrong the melee creep up and steel some healing away from the tank as pure overhealing.

Personal: If all else fails drop the mushrooms roughly where you’ll be hanging out at any point in the fight. IF you do this do not push the growth of the mushrooms. Simply use them as needed to give yourself a self-heal to deal with the encounter’s mechanics.

 

THONE OF THUNDER

All of this aside my usage of Wild Mushrooms varied wildly over the course of our clear of the place last week

Jin’Rohk the Breaker

Movement: Moderate

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: Low

Tanks being stationary: Low

Mushroom Viability: Low

I personally found wild mushrooms to be extremely lackluster during this fight, and honestly any of the first three fights. This is not to say that they were useless. This is one of a few encounters where I viewed wild mushrooms to simply be a manner of delivering free healing. I did not push them to grow nor was I ever attached to any particular planting of them. When I saw where the raid was grouping up in a puddle I dropped some mushrooms and proceeded to heal as normal. Sometimes I dropped them around the boss. Anything you get from mushrooms in this encounter is purely gravy and shouldn’t consist of anything more than a couple % of your overall healing done.

 

Horridon

Movement: High

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: Very Low

Tanks being stationary: Low

Mushroom Viability: Low

This is another encounter that I would classify as not mushroom friendly. It’s not really even that friendly for swiftmend althought you’ll still get enough mileage out of its effloressence. This fight is clearly better suited for rejuvenation, wild growth, and incarnation lifebloom spreading. I think this is a fight that if you tried too hard to shoehorn mushrooms into it that you’ll actually come out with a HPS loss because of the hoops you’ll jump through. I learned this the hard way because in my desire to provide this type of information to you the reader I was doing just that.

 

Council

Movement: Moderate

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: Moderate

Tanks being stationary: Moderate

Mushroom Viability: Low to Moderate

This is a fight where you can get some usage out of wild mushrooms with consistancy. As long as you aren’t trying to force the mushrooms up to full potential before popping them you can certainly place them at the feet of the bosses as they are empowered. Being able to offer some nearly free healing to the tank and/or melee is perfectly fine. Expect it to still be a small percentage of your overall healing done but the mana cost of detonation is so low that there is generally no harm in doing it. There are some parts of the encounter with enough significant AoE damage going on that the 3 GCD’s to plant the mushrooms will be a detriment. Use your better judgement when doing so.

 

Tortos

Movement: High

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: Very High

Tanks being stationary: Very High

Mushroom Viability: Very High

Tortos was the first fight that screamed to use mushrooms. I had a specific spot on the ground somewhat near the boss that the raid would group up on just prior to every quake. Ground based AoE heals were planted there and fully charged mushrooms were detonated immediately after control of our characters returned. I believe I was able to have mushrooms prepped for every single quake. I think organization and coordination worked to trivialize this encounter once we knew exactly how to manage it. I found it helpful to call out on vent for people to group up for mushrooms as sometimes people’s brains turn off mid fight.

 

Magaera

Movement: Low

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: Very High

Tanks being stationary: Moderate

Mushroom Viability: Very High

Magaera was another fight where wild mushrooms were perfect which was pleasant immediately following Tortos. We just grouped the entire raid up near the front of the ridge and had all of the frost beams and fire behind us as needed. Adjustment was required but in general I was able to use fully charged mushrooms for almost all of the rampages and even some of the acid ball barrages from the venomous heads. The value of mushrooms is highly dependent on your raids strategy but for us it worked out perfectly. Any fight with extremely predictable intense raid wide damage is a huge boon to wild mushrooms (and to pre-hot’ing as well). Become familiar with the rate at which your raid is killing heads and plan accordingly.

 

Ji-Kun

Movement: Moderate*

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: High

Tanks being stationary: High

Mushroom Viability: High

* Raid members tasked with killing the hatchlings may or may not have difficulting taking part in your wild mushroom detonation depending on the timing

This is a fight where if you are NOT required to fly to any of the nests, you can utilize wild mushrooms extremely well. I organized a spot for raid members to run to for Quill to pick up some quick ground based healing and wild mushroom detonation. IT was of course up to the raid members to immediately scamper away to a safe spread so they did not die to Caw. This of course lasted untill we made a third nest team and I was assigned to it. Once I was going to the nests I had literally no way to reliably stack or maintain the wild mushrooms. Once you go to the high nests it is impossible to keep track of their progress. It is a single phase fight though so if you are on the platform you can consistantly use bloom throughout the whole encounter.

 

Durumu The Forgotten

Movement: Very High

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: Very Low

Tanks being stationary: Moderate

Mushroom Viability: Low

For two out of three phases of this encounter, that repeat with regularity, people are pretty much always moving with the exception of the blue beam soakers and the tanks on occasion. I would recommend using wild mushrooms for the encounter but very judiciously. You aren’t really looking to power them up any more than would be done from run of the mill overheal. I used mushrooms almost exclusively on the tanks for this encounter as I wanted a huge heal available for the tank during the red/blue/yellow beam phase especially if I was constantly on the move (yellow). Don’t exepct this to be overwhelmingly useful here and do NOT force it. Simply place them and charge them when it is convenient and confer with your tank on the best placement to give them the most amount of wiggle room.

 

Primordius

Movement: wtf?

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: wtf?

Tanks being stationary: wtf?

Mushroom Viability: Myself only

I have little I can offer on this fight. Somehow we did it in only a matter of minutes where it is intended to be a 7+ minute encounter for others. Stuff was going on, people were taking a ton of damage, the world was flying on its head and somehow by the grace of our good healing core we held it together. That being said I only really used mushrooms at my feet and prairie dogged it while we held it together. Perhaps if this fight is done properly then they might be better? Unsure.

 

Dark Animus

Movement: High

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: Low to start, High at the end

Tanks being stationary: Low to start, High at the end

Mushroom Viability: Myself to start, then Tank, then raid

I started off with a charged stack of mushrooms on my spot where I tanked one of the animus adds. I used that as a buffer so I could begin healing other people with lifebloom on myself. If my animus ever made headway OR another animus passed by following someone dodging explosions I could pop the mushrooms to absorb the much larger hits. Once my animus was killed or taken off of my I dropped my mushrooms on the nearby tank picking up other animus. Is there a plural of animus? I don’t know. Anyway, when the final Dark Animus was spawned and the raid worked on burning it down before the soft enrage killed us all I found that mushrooms worked fairly well on the raid. Here’s the rub though. With Dark Animus as well as the final phaes of Iron Qon it is extremely difficult to use Wild Mushrooms because your rejuvenation is doing much less overhealing. Any scenario where the whole raid is being pummeled by AoE damage that is consistent and keeps people from being topped off the less you’ll be able to utilize Bloom. This is something you’ll need to be aware of and you may want to place and charge a set of shrooms before the raid damage intensifies to the point where you’ll no longer fill them up.

 

Iron Qon

Movement: Moderate

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: High

Tanks being stationary: High

Mushroom Viability: High

Iron Qon is a four phase fight where the effect of your mushrooms will vary wildly. The first phase consists of your raid clustering and spreading around specific locations in sequence in order to force him to do his fire attack and keep his energy down. This attack does a significant amount of damage divided among your group. We did two pulses per group in succession with three groups taking turns. My group consisted of 7 people so mushrooms would be hitting everyone for roughly 25%+ of their life which coupled with the other healer and my HoT’s was enough to easily recover from the first of the two attacks. I simply used Tranquility and Incarnation to absorb the brunt of the second in each of the first two times my group soaked. I rate this is very high bordering on amazing usage of mushrooms.

The second and third phases have lots of spreading out and movement and are not necessarily great for mushrooms so I wouldn’t push too hard. If you can casually charge them under the tank and melee then by all means do so but don’t force it.

The fourth phase was grouping up again and mushrooms worked great here. I couldn’t necessarily pop them more than a couple of times as the raid damage was significant enough at the end that I had little to no overhealing done. This is an odd drawback to the wild mushrooms. There are times we would love the AoE burst the most and cannot actually charge them up to do so. This is OK because those situations are the ones that make Rejuvenation shine. When it doesn’t overheal it is one of the most effective heals in the game hands down.

 

Twin Consorts

Movement: High

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: Low

Tanks being stationary: Moderate

Mushroom Viability: Low

There isn’t much to say about this encounter really. As a healer all your raid leader needs to tell you is “spread out, don’t get hit by stuff and heal everyone”. The fight is technical and the constellation running is some of the coolest stuff that I’ve seen but the fight doesn’t have you doing anything particularly unusual. I ended up using mushrooms where the tanks were positioned when possible to get some extra healing on the melee but it was not a high priority. Bloom when convenient but do not push their growth here.

 

Lei Shen

Movement: High

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: Moderate

Tanks being stationary: Low to Moderate

Mushroom Viability: Moderate

I will add a disclaimer that I was not in for the kill so I cannot go into extensive details about the last phase of the encounter. What I can tell you is that I was utilizing mushrooms for the first and second phases and intermissions. As you move from pillar to pillar it is easy to plant the mushrooms where the tanks and melee are going to be. Depending on which pillar you are at you’ll have more or less healing to do so you can use your own judgment on how much you want to try to force their growth. Even if you squeeze a little healing out of each Bloom that is still more than worth the minimal mana it takes to detonate it. During intermission however I recommend getting a fully charged mushroom stack online as you get into your quadrant so that you can utilize it during Static Charge if you get one. Mechanics, RNG, and movement play a huge role in whether or not you’ll get effective blooms during this encounter but you can certainly utilize it for some effect. I can write more about this later.

 

Final Words

Now that we’re starting heroic modes I’ll have more to offer on those later. Sometimes heroic modes require more grouping up for healing as needed or more spreading out to avoid new mechanics. All of this and more will affect how much we can or cannot use Wild Mushrooms.

I’d love to hear about your experience with them and what you have thought about them so far! I hope everyone is having a good time in Throne of Thunder!