Playstyle & Rotation
Playstyle in raids with Incarnation: Tree of Life & Keeper of the Grove
In raids, you will most likely use Incarnation: Tree of Life paired with the Keeper of the Grove Hero Talents set, with all the synergies it has thanks to Grove Guardians, Cenarius’ Guidance, Power of Nature and Harmony of the Grove.
Since your Incarnation: Tree of Life will have a reduced cooldown thanks to the Grove Guardians fading, the aim for the build will be to reduce it to a ~2 minutes 20 seconds cooldown, and pair your Flourish with it, and with the Reforestation proc every other minute.
This ramp will be far less effective than before since Flourish has been nerfed quite heavily, but it will still be a requirement of your healing set-up to cover specific raid-wide damage during an encounter.
It’s important, due to these hero talents, that you keep and use all 3 charges of Grove Guardians at the same time during your Tree of Life or Reforestation proc, to maximize your throughput during these windows.
The basic cooldown plan will look like this, in an ideal scenario:
- Pop your Incarnation: Tree of Life > Pair a Flourish once you have a good HoT coverage, and with the 3 charges of Grove Guardians used as a burst healing. Thanks to your Rejuvenations on the raid, you’ll have all of your Abundance stacks afterwards, enabling you to cover the raid with Regrowths & proc’ing Dream Surge.
- Once you have 2 stacks of Reforestation, temporize it a bit, to wait for your next Flourish.
- Then, proc your 3rd stack of Reforestation (don’t forget to pair Swiftmend with Wild Growth mostly each time), that will activate your mini-Incarnation: Tree of Life > Pair a Flourish during it. Keep using your 3 Grove Guardians charges during the ramp.
- Your second Incarnation: Tree of Life will be available, and the cycle begins anew.
While doing this coverage, don’t forget the basics:
- Keep Lifebloom on a target with the highest uptime possible. Do keep in mind that you can refresh Lifebloom at 5 seconds and less to still benefit from its final bloom effect without letting it fade from the target.
- Keep Efflorescence down on a clump of players (ideally in melee, but this obviously can be swapped depending on encounters/healing set-up).
- Keep some Rejuvenations on targets before damage is incoming.
- You can use some Regrowth or Nature’s Swiftness, if necessary on low-health targets.
- Using support abilities such as Ironbark, utility abilities like Stampeding Roar and Wild Charge, or defensive abilities such as Barkskin and Bear Form is essential to use when needed.
- Don’t forget to cast some Wraths during downtimes outside of your ramp windows, to, in addition to the small DPS increase, gain some very valuable mana via Master Shapeshifter.
On top of this healing set-up, try to optimize your DPS a bit by maintaining your Moonfire DoT.
Don’t forget to use your Innervate during a ramp window, when available, and your Nature’s Vigil during a Flourish use!
Playstyle in M+
While playing with Wildstalker, you'll have to do some Cat-weaving (alternate some HoTs when your group needs healing + some caster DoTs, then morph and use your cat abilities with a full energy bar available, and repeat) for this build to fully work.
If you choose Keeper of the Grove, you can still use the same gameplay, although you won’t have as many drawback in term of talents value for not doing it. Your healing will be better during burst windows (at the cost of some DPS overall), but the healing set-up will still mostly be the same (you might want to use the whole 3 charges of Grove Guardians as much as possible though).
Whatever the Hero Talents set you choose, the overall desired set-up explained below will mostly be the same:
- Keep two Lifeblooms active as much as possible (This is possible thanks to Undergrowth).
- Keep placing Efflorescence on the ground.
- Add some HoTs on people before damage happens, and heal them reactively if needed. Most of the time, your HoTs will suffice, and you will be able to weave in your DPS abilities at this moment.
- Use Grove Guardians if healing is required (one charge for some rot damage, all 3 charges for burst healing).
Then, while HoTs are healing, and as long as you don't need additional reactive healing (or during a Heart of the Wild use/proc):
- Sunfire packs of mobs and Moonfire some of them.
- Auto-Cat Form via Rake/Shred (thanks to Fluid Form) and Thrash, then Swipe during AoE, if you have some spare GCD after your Sunfire and Moonfire.
- Otherwise, in Single Target, Rake (ideally in stealth thanks to Prowl before an encounter, but be careful on small mobs since it will stun them and can spread them from the rest of the pack)
- Keep going with Shred to grind your Combo Points.
- Apply Rip at 5 Combo, if not present, or if duration < 10 seconds.
- Otherwise, you can use Ferocious Bite at 50 energy!
- When your energy is depleted, and your Cat DoTs applied, time to refresh Moonfire & Sunfire, and maybe throw some healing abilities if needed before going back to Cat Form (via Rake/Shred).
If talented (as covered in the M+ - Wildstalker talent section), don’t forget to use Convoke the Spirits as much as possible, whether it’s mainly for DPS (use it after your first Ferocious Bite use to quickly gain another 5-combo points, then use Ferocious Bite another time), or when you need some healing.
As with the raid build, track your Reforestation stacks, in order to use your Tree of Life procs as a major cooldown when needed.