Updates

I have a few posts I'd like to follow up on.

Inscription: What will it take?

WotLKWiki now has a good starter Guide to Inscription available. It's more advanced than what I cobbled together, but only goes up through 300 skill right now. Here's the list they came up with:

• 3-5 stacks of Alabaster-giving herbs
  
• 2-4 stacks of Dusky-giving herbs
  
• 6-8 stacks of Golden-giving herbs
  
• 5-7 stacks of Emerald-giving herbs
  
• 5-7 stacks of Violet-giving herbs
  
• 6-8 stacks of Silvery-giving herbs

Based on this, my estimate of 5 stacks looks a bit low but in the right ballpark. Watch the WotLKWiki guide; I'm sure they'll update it fairly quickly as more information is released.

Current WotLK Questions

Most of these are still unanswered. We did get a bit of an update to the Resto Druid questions. So says the ever-communicative Ghostcrawler:

Here are the changes we're making next patch. See how they feel.

Wild Growth: Coefficient and healing increased. Mana cost decreased. Cost should be about the same as Circle of Healing. It doesn't heal instantly, but will heal for about double what CoH does over its duration.

Nourish: Reduced mana cost by somewhere between 15 and 20%. This is supposed to be your Flash Heal, but we recognize that it doesn't have the same versatility -- you can't just drop one on a wounded rogue or something since you need the hot up first. Hence the lower price.

Druids have quite an arsenal of healing spells now, and it can be tricky to find niches for all of them. :)

That's starting to get some usefulness into these spells. I'm provisionally confident that I'll have to find space for them now, which is a good thing.

Wild Growth looks like it will be our best bet for fighting AoE damage. It's both less powerful and less costly (less mana, no cooldown, no time channeled) than Tranquility, so it will be a less-panicky panic button. I see using it for example when a boss Whirlwinds and starts cutting up the melee.

Nourish will be interesting; it's less costly and faster casting than Regrowth. Nourish will do more instant healing but less overall healing compared to the full run of Regrowth. It will probably be best used when a non-tank's been gibbed, quickly pulling him back from death's door with a Rejuv+Nourish or even a naked Nourish. It'll also be potentially useful when the tank is getting low, to get to a more comfortable zone where you can let your HoTs tick.

So I think both spells will prove to be useful; it just remains to see if they're extremely situational or if they become staples of our healing arsenal. The biggest open question is how hard Lifebloom has been nerfed and whether they'll un-nerf it a little bit.

Trinkaholic

After looking at my list of trinkets, I was able to delete 7 of them, as well as a [Cache of Mau'ari] I'd been holding. But I also ended up grabbing two trinkets I had missed: [Airman's Ribbon of Gallantry] and [Skyguard Silver Cross] They're both available at Exalted with the Sha'tari Skyguard. They're both great for solo dailies or leveling, either for casters (ribbon) or for physical DPS (cross). The key is the proc: with every kill (giving honor or exp) there's a 50% chance to get buffed with either +80 spell damage or +140 AP for 30 sec. Not quite as good as most on-use trinket bonuses, but this will be up a lot more often. So I'll use other things for instances but this for solo work. It's a good excuse for me to start running Skyguard dailies with Sali.