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Leveraging Insect Swarm as a Healer
Published on November 19, 2007 by Phaelia 
Macros, Spells and Talents 
18 Comments
So I kind of wimped out with my talent spec when Patch 2.3 was released. I gave up on my radical idea of going healing Boomkin and instead went with a much more traditional spec of 11/0/50. Since Mr. Phae is taking a break from PvE at the moment, I decided that I'd take a break from PvP and pull my points out of the Feral tree to pick up Living Spirit and a few other more PvE-oriented talents. And before you comment with "OMG DURIDS R 4 HOTS", I sunk points into Healing Touch talents due to the increased emphasis on Heroic instances from daily quests and badge rewards. So far, I'm really enjoying the changes.
One of my favorite changes to my spec is the addition of Insect Swarm, the 11-point Balance talent:
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While Insect Swarm is one of the highest DPM (damage per mana) spells in the game, it has the added benefit of preventing 2% of incoming damage on your tank. That's 2% less damage you have to heal and it scales in a way that nothing else (available to Druids) does. The more damage your tank takes, the more damage that's mitigated, completely independent of your +Healing or +Damage totals.
While the benefits of Insect Swarm are fairly obvious, the hardest thing about using it was figuring out how to integrate it into my healing strategy. After all, healing is different than dpsing, and mixing the two can be cumbersome. Which is why I developed the following macro:
#showtooltip Insect Swarm /cast [target=mouseover,exists,harm][target=target,exists,harm][target=targettarget,exists,harm] Insect Swarm
This macro first attempts to cast Insect Swarm on your mouseover target, assuming it exists and that it's aggressive toward you (harm). If it cannot find a mouseover target, it will attempt to cast upon your normal target with the same stipulations. By combining this macro with the techniques described in my earlier article on Healing via Focus Target, you can set your main tank to your focus target, then mouseover Insect Swarm his current target. You still have the liberty to Insect Swarm other mobs, but be careful that you don't DoT something that will later need to be crowd controlled. For this reason, it's often a good idea to make sure that your tank's target is missing a bit of life before you cast Insect Swarm on it, both so you're sure it's not a target he's only targetting to generate a little bit of aggro and so that he has time to build some threat before you DoT it.
Here is a revised version of the above-mentioned macro to also include Faerie Fire and Moonfire. It will cast these spells in the order Insect Swarm, Faerie Fire, Moonfire and will reset its sequence after 7 seconds:
#showtooltip Insect Swarm /castsequence [target=mouseover,exists,harm][target=target,exists,harm][target=targettarget,exists,harm] reset=7 Insect Swarm, Faerie Fire, Moonfire
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I am excited that BRK is back, though!
/cry I love you, ty for everything.
My post-2.3 build is currently 13/0/48. I’ve picked natural perfection and focused starlight to spam wrath in arena (well, spam as much as they let me, being the healer), giving up on improved tranquility (
) but keeping a strong PvE tree, since I don’t find as much fun in arena as I do in battlegrounds (where I can be a more conventional healer) and PvE (arena just helps me get some pieces of gear).
Insect Swarm is incredible! So cheap and effective there’s no reason not to keep it on all targets during arena. It also helps a lot when going solo. Those fire elementals in Nagrand used to hit me so hard when I tried to farm motes in cat form that I had to heal me all the time, and now not only I kill them almost without being touched but I hardly have to drink (innervate when needed, that’s it).
During raids I don’t think I’ll use balance spells though (maybe in 10-man if DPS turns out to be too low at a given point of the fight), because I like it being a tree
But in heroics? Hell yeah.
Improved (Untested!) version of your macro:
#showtooltip
/cast [target=mouseover,exists,harm][target=target,exists,harm][target=targettarget,exists,harm]Insect Swarm
Should now also cast on your target’s target as well. Now I leave it to you how to make it work on your mouseover’s target!
I love insect swarm too, though we have a doomkin in the raid normally, so the extra 2% is usually there even if I don’t have the talent (I vary specs a lot >.>).. I’m probably going to pick IS up again now that Natural Perfection doesn’t help me as much. Being a druid who focuses heavily on PvE and rarely arenas, the old version was nicer for me as a kind of free resilience against melee – but now it’s just not enough to justify 3 points of my tree. But maybe I’m just missing something wonderful about it. /shrug
And I think points in HT talents are never a waste. There are lots of instances where I use HT to supplement HoTs. We have both kinds of spells for a reason imo.
I use a 11/0/50 spec as well (although slightly diff). Insect Swarm is highly underrated in my opinion. That along with Naturalist and Omen of Clarity allows a resto druid to pretty much farm non-stop while never needing to drink. Grab yourself a hard hitting 2h mace (oathkeeper is a good example), double DoT/FF and start swinging, Lifebloom as needed. When OOC procs, fire off a free regrowth. Since you will be out of FSR meleeing while your DoT’s tick you will quite often have more mana at the end of a fight than when you started.
I find talent points in naturalist to be a marginal choice. It’s not a complete waste, and maybe I’m too geared to need to use HT in heroics. But I would much rather go heavier into balance (I’m 19/0/42) to get Celestial Focus so I can grind like a baby oomkin in my healer gear.
I do like the oathkeeper + DoTs grinding idea, that’s clever.
I used to have Naturalist when grinding in cat form with my blue feral gear, but I don’t know if it’s a such a good idea if you intend to melee while casting. Spamming wrath with celestial focus sounds like a better choice to me (I don’t have it so I have to keep them rooted all the time, quite annoying). Of course you’ll eventually run out of mana after a combat (don’t think it will ever happen if you kill them with your weapon), but it may be considerably faster.
Another thing, I think (not sure yet) spell casts reset the weapon timer, so if you’re about to hit when you cast something you may have to wait again.
Anyway, I haven’t done it nor checked the numbers so it may be something worth trying
@Someone: Oh, good idea to add target of target. I’ve edited the post to include your revision.
@Adarel: Pairing Insect Swarm with Moonfire has made a huge difference, especially after I changed all my HoT macros to cast on myself if I’m not mousing over someone else. I can solo indefinitely with as cheap as Lifebloom and Insect Swarm are!
I can’t believe that I missed that they REMOVED the melee/ranged damage reduction. When they announced the change, they made it sound like the new effect was in addition to what it did already. That really, really sucks. =/
@Bullar: I think you’re right. Insect Swarm is underrated. But I think that we’ll see a lot more Druids picking it up with the increased spell damage. And it’s a spell that really lends itself to healing, especially with as easy as it is to pickup. Great idea on the mace. I, for one, dislike having to switch to kitty to farm, so anything that helps with that is a plus in my book. =)
@Bigtoy and Ermengol: Yeah, like I said, I have Naturalist for help in healing Heroics, especially given that I no longer need buff Regrowth since I’m not PvPing (I consider it too expensive a spell outside of Tree Form – an ability that’s rarely available to me on our current content). My +Healing is definitely sufficient for Heroics, but there are still some pulls – pretty much in every instance – where I need access to the high HPS of HT.
About natural perfection:
I haven’t checked if the stacking effect applies to the critical hit that makes it proc too (for example, I don’t know if when you take the first critical hit it already receives the -5% damage that will apply for the next 8 seconds). That would certainly suck, because that very first instant pyroblast would burn your fur at 100%. It’s gonna be difficult to test it unless trying with and without talents under the same circumstances, because I don’t think the combat log will show the reduction. (Any ideas?)
During sustained damage periods, I’ve run several simulations and the new natural perfection may still significantly increase survivability. Of course, as we all thought, it depends a lot on weapon/spell speed, critical strike chance, etc, but against melee classes it is roughly an overall 5-10% damage reduction (maximum against fast dual wielders), whereas previously it would result in a mere 3% under the same conditions. Of course I’ve made a lot of simplifications in order to get these figures, such as considering all attacks in each case share the same hit/crit chance, damage and speed, but it would’ve been impossible otherwise
The problem with this theory is that a few seconds in melee with a warrior can be enough to be cut into pieces, but I think that used to happen with the old natural perfection already. What I’m relatively sure of now is that whenever you get a 5-point kidney shot, your chance of surviving will be higher with the new natural perfection (although still quite low
).
@Ermengol: I do know that the math sounds close, but just running battlegrounds yesterday (in my scant pvp gear which totals about 40 resilience >>), it just *felt* like I was dying to melee MUCH more quickly than I had before. I used to be able to just stack lifebloom and rejuv and last against a warrior and rogue for a good while, but they tore through me yesterday. I would sometimes not even get Natural Perfection to proc until I was already down to like 30% – speed v crit builds maybe? I don’t know, I don’t melee.. ever. :O
So yes I think it could be a comparable benefit against someone who crits a lot, and I can see it being helpful still for resto druids who *primarily* arena (does this new talent stack with a maxed resilience rating? I assumed it does which the former version did not..I think), but for someone like me who rarely does, the more generable benefit previously was more helpful I found.
Well, if NP didn’t proc til that point, the old one wouldn’t have saved you either, I’m afraid
But it’s true, in PvE old NP provided some crit damage reduction that was always there (if you get those 2-3 crits needed to let it stack, you’re kinda dead anyway). -10% against that unlucky hit that happens to crit could’ve been worth it. However, those were 3 talent points I wasn’t willing to pay. I was (and still am) a sporadic gladiator and more often raiding tree, and I didn’t see the full benefit of it until I got some balance talents (give 3% spell crit, thanks). To tell you the truth, even if we had the same Natural Perfection as pre-2.3, now I’d still take it, but in my opinion it only makes sense for PvP healers and resto-balance druids (either PvE or PvP). If I took it, it was just because of PvP (extra crit is nice for grinding, but I could’ve taken other balance talents instead).
@Phaelia: that “someone cast rebirth” while server was down.. LOL!
@Ermengol: I wanted to smack my host this morning. 5 hours of unscheduled downtime, two long distance phone calls, and one unanswered tech support e-mail. And they never even let me know what was wrong or how they fixed it (it wasn’t anything to do with me – but I’m still curious). Really put a pall on my morning. ^_^
Maybe it’s just me, but the healing benefits of insect swarm seem somewhat insignificant. Obviously, as you’ve noted this scales perfectly with increased tank damage. So it’s best in fights where your tank takes a lot of damage. Consider that even on the worse fights I don’t think we need more than 3 healers on the tank (tidewalker for example we go with myself a druid, a priest, and a pally). So suppose each healer does their one third – i.e. they handle 33%. Now, consider that druids use a 7 second spell cycle – and look at 2 cycles (so you get a full insect swarm in there). Assuming you do ‘your share’ of the healing, you’re managing 33/8 = 4.125% of the tanks damage per 1.5 seconds (4 1.5second casts per 7 second cycle).
Insect swarm doesn’t even carry half its weight from a strict healing perspective. Add in that it only mitigates physical damage and it’s usefulness is even further reduced. This is of course assuming you don’t have a boomkin tossing it up already (and with the idol of the unseen moon now out and idol switching becoming important, I think you’ll see more moonkins mixing IS into their rotation to maximize idol effeciency).
To me, if anything it seems like this is a pvp talent. I just don’t see it’s benefits being significant enough in pve (and lord knows there are a lot more ‘we almost had him’ moments in pvp than pve I find).
@Kalaghan: I was speaking primarily from a 5-man point of view where you are the only healer. Insect Swarm provides 2% damage mitigation over 12 seconds for less than the cost of a Lifebloom. It also does damage that scales with your +Healing. Just because it doesn’t “heal” as much as a Lifebloom doesn’t mean it isn’t worth using, especially if you have a spare GCD. =)
I was wondering yesterday about putting some points to improve wrath to be able to do something by myself as resto (since kitty is NOT an option, even tho I have feral gear), and never thought about IS. It’s a nice idea.
But if you’re healing on tree form, how do you use IS? Or you just stay out the form for the whole fight? And about losing the 50% crit on regrowth, don’t you miss it? I usually take it as my panic button on tree form, but maybe I’m relying too much on it…
(the anti-spam word was “resto”, lol… ah, yeah, I’m easily amused)
@Hokuto: I rarely use Tree of Life for instances myself as the mana conservation isn’t generally an issue since you can drink pretty much any time you need to. It’s also been wonderful for soloing daily quests like the Aether Ray Wrangling quest in Blade’s Edge Mountains!
As far as Improved Regrowth, I don’t miss it at all. If I have an “emergency” I can just press NS + HT or just set up a Healing Touch (if I think there will be enough time). With the changes in 2.3, it’s an instantaneous deshift and start casting. Regrowth is just so inefficient that I personally haven’t missed its lack (though for PvP, it’s a must-have).
Spending 11 points in Balance to get insect swarm to mitigate 2% damage does not sound like a good tradeoff to me from a pure healing perspective.
Insect Swarm is 792 damage over 12s, and -2% hit at the cost of 176 mana. Insect swarm is not free; it is equal to a lifebloom outside ToL. I guess I would find more use out of 50% crit to regrowth and 3% crit to all spells over Insect Swarm.
Which actually brings me to another point:
I would never argue Regrowth is the epitome of mana efficiency, but in ToL with 62% crit rate it is not as bad as it looks on the spell book.
I know this is an old post, but as I was just thinking about this and brought it up in the Druid forums and with my guild, I came upon the realization that though Insect Swarm is good, tanks generate rage and mana from being hit (and hitting), so sometimes that -2% isn’t fabulous but usually isn’t a problem unless your tank isn’t fabulous.
Brambles however… oh Brambles- Increasing damage by Thorns by 75% is certainly worth considering (of course, you have to remember to rebuff every 10 minutes, which is really annoying). So every time your tank is hit, whatever hit ‘em is looking at taking 43.75 nature damage. This is especially good for warrior tanks, since they don’t have really good group damage like feral druids and paladins do.
When I switch over to full resto at 70 (I’m currently Restokin), I’m looking at 14/0/47.
@Dru: Good point about the rage generation. Have you taken a look at my article on Thorns? WTB 30-Minute Thorns!