Passport to Shandris

On Hiatus

2009-06-10T09:34:00.002-04:00

Hello all. My apologies for the lack of posts here. A combination of real life tasks and lack of in-game excitement has left me with little to say and no time to say it. Such is life!

I may return and post here in the future; we'll see. Until then, best wishes for your Azerothean adventures -- and your real-world adventures, too.

3.1 First Impressions

2009-04-16T07:01:00.001-04:00

We've had two days of 3.1 and I've only had a small chance to test it out. Part of that of course is the result of server instabilities. I know, it sucks. But it's got to be better than the alternative. Do we really want Blizzard to be less ambitious and slower to patch? It should be better within a week or so.

I of course got kicked out a few times due to "world server down" errors. I also had some weird talent bugs. When I first specced after the patch, I somehow ended up with a 11/0/61 spec — equivalent to a level 81 toon. Interesting! But I couldn't buy my dual spec option at that point, so I paid to respec as one attempt to clean up the mess. Then when I logged in yesterday, I saw I'd had my talent points returned again anyway, so all that was somewhat wasted. 45g lost! Crisis!

Addons of course are a big hassle too. I have maybe 40 addons installed so working through that is a pain. I use the Curse updater which has helped immensely. Most of my key addons had updates and so much has gone well. Grid has been the biggest challenge, but I eventually tracked down an interim fix that seems to be working OK. I did have to spend a good chunk of time tracking down errors in my less-crucial addons, in an attempt to figure out what I can keep running and what I can live without. It's not rocket science:

Observe an error
Log out
Turn off one or two likely offender addons
Log in and see if the error is still there
If it is, log out again
Turn on the addons you turned off before, and turn off a couple more candidates
Repeat until things are working again.

I worked on that for a few hours both Tuesday and Wednesday until I was functional again. It seems that TourGuide is a likely problem candidate, so I hope Tekkub has time to get that updated. The whole process is painful, but it's also a good opportunity to get rid of unused or redundant addons, and to reconfigure anything that needs some attention.

What about the patch? I stayed out of raids, partly because I didn't have time, and partly because stability of the instance servers was an obvious problem. Our guild spent a bit of time in Ulduar and at least got Flame Leviathan down, so that's good. I also haven't tried Wintergrasp yet, mostly due to being online at the wrong times.

I did spend some time with the Argent Tournament and had fun with it. I think it's going to be more fun than the Sunwell dailies, with some better rewards too. The fishing dailies have been enjoyable too, and I'm hopeful that I'll get some good money from that as well. (One annoyance however: I don't know why they felt compelled to add the glow worm as a new +100 lure. We had fish hooks in BC, so why add a new item to stack and save up?)

I did however love being able to switch to Boomkin for the daily quests. It's easier and a whole lot more fun. If you prefer kitty, I'm sure that will work too, but either way it's nice to have some alternatives to being a tree.

It's too early to judge the patch as a whole yet. In particular we need the world servers and instance servers to stabilize. And I'm eager to get into Ulduar! The unfortunate timing though is that I'll be on vacation next week. I might play (and post) a little bit but I won't be around much for a week or so. So have fun, ask Elune for some stable realms, and try not to get your HOTs in my DOTs, OK?

3.1 Today - What's First?

2009-04-14T07:20:00.003-04:00

It seems 3.1 will drop today, at least by what Zarhym says. Realms are down for extended maintenance, and the devs have communicated on clean-up details like why Equipment Manager won't make 3.1. At this point, it's safe to assume that 3.1 will arrive unless they run into unexpected problems.

Hats off to the guys pushing the build out; I've seen that kind of thing in action and I know it's a lot of work. Here's hoping all goes well.

Assuming it does arrive and all goes well, we'll go through the normal patch dance this afternoon. Log in and start downloading the patch; update as many addons as possible; maybe wait in a queue for the higher-pop realms. Once you're through all that, though, what should you do next?

Manage your specs.

The first thing to do is respec. All your talent points are wiped for this expansion, so you'll need to respec even if you're not taking the dual-spec feature. My recommendation is to build your first spec before buying the dual spec feature. The reason is to make sure you get the right glyphs on the right spec. I logged out as Resto, with full Resto glyphs. So if I messed up and specced Balance first, I'd have to replace those glyphs with Balance glyphs, then buy new Resto glyphs for my other spec.

So, make sure your spec and your glyphs match. Once you've handled that, then you can buy your dual spec if you're so inclined. You'll also of course want to buy glyphs for that spec. I did some shopping last night before I logged out, so I have at least my major glyphs ready to go.

Oh, and if you're curious, I wrote a post about the specs I'm starting with for 3.1.

Fishing Dailies

Once I'm all set with my specs, I plan to begin working my fishing dailies. Unlike the cooking dailies — but like the fishing dailies from Burning Crusade — these will take some travel, so plan for a bit of time because of that. You pick up the quests from Marcia Chase, by the fountain. If you want more details, check out El's Extreme Anglin', which is always your go-to source for fishing information.

Wintergrasp

When a Wintergrasp battle is close, I plan to get involved with that. The changes to Wintergrasp aren't that extreme, but they should make it just a bit better. My hope is that a few more players will spend time attacking (and defending) the south towers. Remember, you can now capture the south workshops. So if the offense ignores the south as they usually do, you can probably easily capture a workshop, build a vehicle, and start tearing stuff up.

Before or after the fight, I plan to do some Wintergrasp fishing. That will get me more Fish Feast materials, which I always need. It should be easy to find a quiet place to fish; we'll see whether PvPers seek out fisherman.

Argent Tournament

When I'm done with my fishing daily (and Wintergrasp), I'll head to the Argent Tournament. I suspect this will be the go-to place for running dailies and making money. Plus, it has cool rewards.

Take a gryphon to the Argent Vanguard, then fly north and just a bit west. The Argent Tournament is north of Sindragosa's Fall. You can read a great preview of the Argent Tournament at Banana Shoulders.

So there you go: some good stuff to get started on. Wait, wasn't there some kind of new raid instance too? Hm. That might be worth checking out as well...

Intro to Druid Healing 4: User Interface

2009-04-13T07:53:00.007-04:00

This is Part 4 of my Intro to Druid Healing series. The five parts are:

1. Base Concepts
2. Tank Healing
3. Raid Healing
4. User interface
5. Special Considerations

One of the toughest things to learn about healing is how to set up your user interface. Blizzard more or less acknowledges that the default UI is not very good for raid healing, so you're probably going to bring in one or more addons to help you heal. But with that comes the burden of selecting and configuring the tools. It can be a challenging task, and I wanted to share some of my thoughts on how to go about that.

Sections on raid healing:

Good UI Design
Observing
Casting Spells
Choosing Tools
Summary

Good UI Design

Healing an intensive fight can put some real stress on the player. Healers have to react to events more than any other role, and (unless you're dedicated to healing a single tank) you'll be watching multiple toons to see what happens — sometimes a full 25. That's in addition to watching the mob's health, in-game events, adds, void zones and all the other things that everyone has to manage.

Watching so many things at once means you're relying heavily on your user interface. It provides you information and enables you to act. A good UI can make that as easy and natural as possible, but a bad UI can slow you down and make it difficult to heal well.

You will be adjusting your UI. The default Blizzard UI fails for healing raids. Out of the box, you'll only ever see the health of your own group. You can configure it to be a bit better, by dragging the raid health frames into the field, or maybe by turning on the health bars above characters' heads. So you're changing things from the start. Almost every healer ends up making further changes, either through macros or addons.

But before we talk about that, how would we want our UI to work? There's a concept that the US military uses, called the OODA Loop. OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. I believe they use it for strategic thinking, but it applies even to the extremely tactical work of healing.

First you have to observe: what are the mobs doing? Who's taking damage? What are the other healers doing? Orient in this case is about all the background information that informs your healing. What's your role — main tank heals or raid heals? Who's most important to save? What is the boss going to do next? Based on that, you decide what to do: who are you going to heal, and what are you going to cast? (Or maybe you need to move out of that void zone instead!) Finally you act by casting your spells, whether it's a click or a key press. And then? Observe what happens and do it again.

This all happens in tiny loops, of course — as fast as every 1 to 1.5 seconds when healing is intense. But it's good to realize all these components of the process, because your UI can fail you at any one of them. The default UI fails at Observe, because it's difficult to arrange and isn't good at showing you heals, buffs, and debuffs. It also fails at Act, because you have to click on a toon and then either click or keypress to cast a spell. These two actions have to happen sequentially; it doesn't seem like a long time. But you can easily cast 200 spells in a 5 minute boss fight; those fractions of a second can really add up.

Observing

Observing is all about setting up your unit frames so that you have all the information you need. You have to watch a lot of information during a fight:

Health and health deficits of all toons, and maybe pets too
Who's taking damage
Who's got aggro
Who's being healed
What HOTs do you have running, and how much time do they have
Who is cursed or poisoned (or diseased, for non-Druid healers)
Who's dead or out of range

Your UI will have to show you all this information, in a way that's clear to understand but also not too complicated. Remember those 1.5 second loops? You don't have time to read hover-text on debuff icons, or to click on a bunch of toons to see who's cursed. Oh, and you'll need to watch the fight, too; you need to know if a Flame Wall is coming or if you're standing in a void zone.

Let me show you what Alamein's UI looks like. I don't claim this is the best way to do it — or even that it's all that great! But it works well for me. (I'll talk later about the addons I use to set this up, but in short, it's Pitbull for the player/target/focus frames, and Grid for the raid frames.)

Here's my full screen UI:

I've moved all my raid frames to the center-bottom of the screen. I could never keep track of my health when it was in the upper-left; this way it's very visible. The down side is that it obscures some parts of the screen.

Here's a closer look at my raid frames:

The goal here is first to get a quick look at the raid: who's hurt? (After Gluth does a Decimate, the answer is: everyone!) You can also see here that Firegrin and Zaha are out of range; that tells me instantly if I need to move to heal them. One thing you don't see here is my aggro indicator; anyone who draws aggro will have a red border around their unit. That way I know who's getting beat on, for instance if the tanks need to trade off each other. Similarly, I'll see an icon and a colored border around any toon that's either poisoned or cursed.

And what about tracking heals? Here's the details of what all those numbers mean:

It's very dense, but it gives me a lot of information in a compact package. I track most HOTs in the corners. The top left shows me the total HOT count, including everyone's HOTs; this way I can see if another healer has left something behind. The other corners count down the time on Wild Growth, Rejuv, and Regrowth (bottom left). Lifebloom, meanwhile, is in the middle; that way I have a clear indicator of when to refresh the stack. (I'm just going to wait and see whether I want to keep this setup after 3.1 lands. Sigh.) I've also able to see incoming heals, so I know whether someone else is healing up a toon.

It's a lot of information in a small space, but it's less confusing than you'd expect. It's very easy, with three corner indicators, to see where your HOTs are. That's especially useful for Wild Growth. Lifebloom is front and center, for now, because I will usually maintain 2 or 3 LB stacks for my tanks. (Soon to end, alas, alas.) And it's all close to the center of my view area; that means my eyes don't have to move much to see the larger environment. Those are all goals to strive for, no matter what addons you use.

Casting Spells

So what about casting spells? There's two pieces to this: who are you casting on, and what are you casting? (If you want to slice it fine, you could split that into Decide and Act.) In the default UI, you select a toon by either clicking on it or on its unit frame. You can use the F1-F5 keys for your party, but that doesn't extend to the whole raid.

You then cast spells either by clicking buttons on your action bar, or by mapping those buttons to keys. There's a lot of ridicule for "clickers", which has some basis behind it; it take a good bit of time to pull your cursor across the screen and get it targeted to a fairly small button. Still, there's a reason that so many players do it; it's simple and direct. With keys, you always have to remember which key maps to which ability. Also, you usually don't have time to look at what key you're pressing, so you have to go by touch. These are skills that you should work to build, because you'll probably find them faster in the long run. Don't be afraid to accept a short-term setback, if it will make things better in the long run.

So what comes after select-and-cast? There are two main styles that you can use: click-cast and mouseover-cast. These are both ways to reduce two separate actions into one smooth motion. They'll both be quicker than select-and-cast. How do they work?

Mouseover-cast removes the click action from the process. Basically, you set up macros for your spells so that they will be cast on whatever target is underneath your cursor. So you just point at what you want to heal and then press the key with the right macro on it.

Click-cast removes the separate key press from the process. It's almost like select-and-cast, but not quite. It uses a combination of mouse clicks and modifier keys to cast spells, choosing the spell based on the modifier key and casting the spell when you click on a toon.

There are advantages and disadvantages to either style, but I think they're both equally viable. I prefer click-cast because it feels most natural to me, and I can combine it with select-and-cast for less common spells. Some people feel that mouseover is more natural, because it relies more on your normal action bars, and it can be done without using any addons. (I don't believe that's true for click-cast.)

Here is the click-cast setup I use:

Alt-left click: Lifebloom
Ctrl-left click: Rejuvenation
Shift-left click: Regrowth
Alt+Shift-left click: Wild Growth
Shift+Ctrl-left click: Nourish
Alt+Ctrl-left click: Swiftmend
Alt+Ctrl+Shift-left click: Healing Touch
Alt+right click: Remove Curse
Ctrl+right click: Abolish Poison

The beauty of this, for me, is that I can cast these 9 spells without moving my hands on the keyboard. I keep three fingers on the modifier keys, so I never have to worry about moving that hand. Then I can cast spells as fast as I can click. I worried it would take a bit of time to learn, but I was surprised how quickly I picked it up. (A single 5-man Heroic run requires hundreds of healing spell casts, which drives learning through massive repetition.)

So that works well for me. I know however that many healers prefer using the mouseover-cast technique; it wouldn't surprise me if it's more popular than click-cast. The biggest advantage is in setup; you can do it all through macros on the standard UI. I suggest you try whichever option sounds more natural to you; try it for a couple weeks, and see how it's working. If it feels awkward, try the other approach.

Choosing Tools

This has been a long debate in the community. What are the best healing tools? I honestly don't think there's a clear winner; the short answer is, the tool that you like is best. I'm not going to spend much time on the analysis, because there's a lot of good stuff already written about it. But here's the short(er) version.

If you want to try mouseover-cast healing, you can do that without addons. You'll start by creating mouseover macros for your healing and cleansing spells. Sydera at World of Matticus has written a great mouseover macro guide that can help you out. You can start out doing that with the vanilla raid frames (or whatever you're currently using) and see how you like it.

I think probably the most common solution is to use Healbot. It provides unit frames, along with a click-cast interface. You could of course turn off the click-cast and use mouseover macros if you prefer. Keeva at Tree Bark Jacket has an excellent review of Healbot that you should check out.

I'm not a Healbot user, so I can't make its case well. I know that a lot of people use it, and the common wisdom seems to be that it's the easiest addon to set up. Personally I didn't find it that simple when I tried it, but your mileage may vary.

The other major raid frame competitor is Grid. It gives you the unit frames, but doesn't have the casting options that Healbot has. (Here's another great Keeva review.) Grid also allows/requires additional addons for specific tasks, such as GridStatusHots, GridStatusLifebloom, and GridIndicatorCornerText. That's even more stuff to set up, but provides for some powerful capabilities.

You can of course use Grid with mouseover macros, but if you prefer click-casting, I recommend Clique as the addon to use. It adds a tab to your spellbook that enables the setup of click-cast mappings.

The most common knock against Grid+Clique is that there are two addons you have to manage instead of one. I see that as a strength; each addon is focused on a specific task. You can read a long and very informed debate about the two approaches on Elitist Jerks in the Resto UI Discussion. My best advice is to try something, see if you're happy, and if not, switch.

At some point I should write up the details of how I configured my UI. In short however I used the techniques described in this EJ post from the Resto UI thread. You should see most of the elements described there in my screencaps above. I also have separate Grid setups for 5/10 man, 25 man, and 40 man setups; you can swap between setups with macros.

Let me know if you want to hear more about my setup, and I can write up an article about that.

Summary

So, there you have it. I feel a bit disappointed that I can't provide the One True UI Answer, but the reality is that there's a lot of good approaches you can use. My best advice is to try something, decide what works and what doesn't, and change based on it.

Your UI can be your best ally or worst enemy for healing. Spend some time on it, and it will reward you.

Patch 3.1 - Non-Druid Changes

2009-04-08T15:28:00.004-04:00

I talked a few weeks ago about the caster Druid changes for 3.1; that information is pretty much still accurate. However there are a whole host of other changes in the works. What else is going on?

I'm not going to talk about the new content yet — stuff like Ulduar, Noblegarden, or the Argent Tournament. Instead I'll talk about the other random stuff that's changing. And there's a lot! I won't cover nearly everything; check out the Patch 3.1.0 notes and Patch 3.1.0 Undocumented Changes for details.

Quality of Life

There's a whole category of things that will affect the details of your gameplay. What's up there?

Obviously the big change is dual specs. Here's the nickel summary:

For 1000g, you can purchase the capability to have two predefined specs.
You'll have two talent specs. Switching between them will also switch glyphs and action bars. So when I switch from tree to boomkin, I will also get boomkin glyphs and boomkin spells on my action bar. That means you don't have to redo this stuff each time you switch.
You can switch specs any time you're out of combat. (You don't need a Lexicon of Power, as they'd originally planned.) The change has a 5 second cast time and will apparently drain all your mana. You have to be out of combat, and you can't switch in Arenas.
Once you define your two specs, you can change between them for free, or pay your normal respec fee to alter one of the two specs. So if you start as Balance and Resto, but want to switch to Balance and Feral, that's a respec fee.
You can buy this feature at level 40.
Blizzard had planned to offer an Equipment Manager to help change gear along with your specs, but that was removed from 3.1. No clue if they'll add it later or not.
For the love of... it's dual spec. Dual = two; duel = fighting. Sheesh.

See where you can change specs without the Lexicon of Power? It turns out the Lexicon of Power is going away. You can now add/change glyphs from anywhere. So yeah, you might start changing glyphs in the middle of instance runs, if they're cheap enough.

Ground mounts can now swim. It's slow — 60% speed, or the same as your level 30 mount. Still, it's much better than being dismounted whenever you ride through a river. There are several new mounts, including a swimming mount that's slow on land but swims quite quickly.

Your hearthstone cooldown is now 30 minutes instead of an hour. Congrats!

Professions

Most crafting professions have new epic recipes that drop from Ulduar bosses. Both the recipes and the resulting gear appear to be BoE, so you'll see items on the AH, and maybe a recipe once in a while. Expect to pay a lot for it, though. The gear is iLvl 226, or the same as what drops from the 10-man Ulduar hard modes. So it's good gear. The mats for these recipes include [Runed Orb]s, which will drop from (you guessed it) Ulduar bosses.

The blue crafted PVP sets now get actual set bonuses. For example, the leather Overcast Battlegear set gives you a 4-piece bonus of +75 stamina and a 6-piece bonus of +50 resilience. This will add some survivability for newer PVPers.

Also, most crafting professions have had their lower level items buffed, basically so it's worth using these items as you're leveling. You might now be able to sell some of those pieces you make while leveling a new profession.

Another big crafting change is to flasks. Basically, both duration and cost will be halved on flasks — they'll last only one hour (instead of two) but you'll need half the materials to make them. The goal is that flasks will be more flexible, so for example you're not wasting so much if you drink a flask for the last half-hour of raiding some night.

There are about 50 new glyphs. You'll want to check your class to see what's most interesting for you. Many spells which weren't glyphed before now have glyphs.

Your current WotLK flasks will change, too. Basically, if you have a WotLK flask today, it'll be converted to two of the new, shorter-duration flasks. (I believe there's an intermediary step in there, probably for technical reasons.) However, your old BC and vanilla flasks will see their duration halved but you won't be compensated for that! So if you have old flasks around, it's best to use them now.

Gathering professions have a couple changes too. Herbalism will now recover more herbs for each Northrend node, which should increase the herb supplies. It also will take less time to harvest a node. Mining nodes will now despawn 1 minute after they're looted, so you shouldn't find any partially looted nodes.

There are a host of lesser profession changes — some nice stuff but nothing game-changing. It's more than I want to cover here, so check out the patch notes for the full list.

Cooking sees a host of changes. You'll get more skill-ups from most WotLK recipes, so leveling to 450 should be easier. (Cue "Back in my day...") They've eliminated most 'flavor' materials, like apples and spices, from recipes. (Boo!) And there's one new recipe of significance: [Black Jelly] is only a health/mana replenishment food, but it provides more of each than any other current food. I'm not sure how much of a market there will be for that, especially when mage food is free, but there are probably some borderline situations where you'll want the quicker replenishment.

Fishing sees some nice changes and may be worth a post on its own. First, we now have Dalaran Fishing daily quests. Hooray! You can check out El's Extreme Anglin' for the full scoop. Much like in BC, the quest will give you a bag with random items in it. You'll have a chance at some new fishing poles (with nice models) and another new companion pet, which is pretty cool.

Wintergrasp fishing is now very worthwhile. In open water (no nodes) you will now catch the fish you need to make [Fish Feast], plus some clams that have extra clam meat and very good chance to drop pearls.

It now takes less time to fish (on each cast). And you can skill up anywhere. If the required skill in the zone is too high for you, you'll catch worthless junk, but at least you can still get skill points. And you don't need to do Nat Pagel's quest to gain Artisan fishing. Instead, that quest will give you a new fishing pole.

Wintergrasp

Wintergrasp sees some good change. The defense can now capture the south factories. This will make it much easier to kill towers, and as a result give the offense more incentive to guard both the towers and the south factories. There will be more NPCs guarding the fortress and towers. You'll get quest credit for killing them, but overall you need fewer kills for the daily quest.

~~Siege vehicles now get a Steam Rush ability, which I believe is basically a rush forward.~~ (Edit: Steam Rush was removed in the latest PTR build; evidently it caused pathing issues.) You'll also get kill credit for attacking a vehicle, even if it's first tapped by a player in a different raid.

User Interface

The glyph interface is moved from the Spellbook to the Talent window. You can also preview talent choices before committing them, to make sure you don't mis-click and screw up your spec. (This option is off by default, so I think you have to turn it on.)

There are changes to quest tracking, Looking for Group/Looking for More, and the mini-map. There are also video and sound settings changes, to give you more precise control over the settings. And there are a host of Macintosh changes and bug fixes, including support for the Logitech G15/G19 keyboards. I might have to buy one!

So that's a lot of change, and I haven't even touched class changes or the new content! Yowtch! But what's the most important change? The one that will make your life much better and greatly increase your happiness?

The [Wind-Up Train Wrecker]. The best 200g you'll ever spend.

Guilds, EoE, and 3.1

2009-04-08T07:29:00.006-04:00

Guild changes

After much thought and debate, I changed guilds last week. My original guild was created by my RL friends and myself, so this was not an easy choice. The core group is still in regular contact, and in fact more may join me in my new guild; it's a guild who we've been collaborating with already so it's a natural move.

It's still a culture shock. My old guild was down to 4 or 5 regulars who I'd see most nights, and sometimes less than that. The new guild has 150ish toons and 20-25 online most nights, with more on the weekends when we run Heroic raids. They're good people and I'm enjoying it so far.

Eye of Eternity

I got into my first EoE run last weekend, on normal. It was interesting even though we didn't get Malygos down. It's pretty hard to learn and I made my share of mistakes. We had a couple of early wipes, but mostly ran into the enrage timer, probably because we were slow to get through the first two phases.

You can find complete descriptions of the Malygos fight but I'll give a quick outline. The first phase is mostly a normal dragon fight, with two complications. One are the sparks that show up; if they reach Malygos they buff him, but if you kill them they leave a static patch on the floor that gives you a (stacking) buff. Also, Malygos will toss you in the air at times, which gives you a significant DOT and eventually falling damage. This phase lasts until you get Maly to 50%.

The second phase sees Malygos take off and adds show up on floating discs. Your DPS has to kill the adds, who drop their discs. Melee DPS will grab the discs, and fly up to engage more adds. Meanwhile, Malygos spits out shield bubbles that you have to use for protection. The bubbles shrink over time so you have to run from bubble to bubble. This phase lasts until you kill the adds.

The third phase puts you onto dragons, vaguely similar to the beloved end of Oculus. It's a cool concept but stressful because you have to learn different movement and fighting controls and techniques. The good news is that you can practice this. There's a daily quest near the Nexus that uses the same dragon controls. You can pick up the feeder quest Corastrasza right by the flight point at Transitus Shield. From there you mount and fly waaaaay up above the Nexus. There's a platform there where you meet Corastrasza and pick up Aces High. I would definitely recommend running that at least a few times before trying EoE.

So, it's a complex fight. Not everyone likes it! It's a frustrating fight to learn; don't be surprised if you wipe a lot at first. I'm still interested enough in it to keep trying.

Patch 3.1

We've seen fewer and fewer PTR changes in the last week, and we haven't had a new build in a few days. So 3.1 would appear to be close to completion. There's a tentative date for Noblegarden, starting on 26 April. So my best guess is still that 3.1 will arrive 14 April, with 21 April the backup date if issues pop up.

Obviously Ulduar is the major new content in 3.1, but there's also the whole Argent Tournament concept, an almost-new holiday with Nobelgarden, dual spec capability, multiple new interface features, and a host of class changes. I'm looking forward to it; here's hoping it comes off without major glitches!

Patch 3.1: Speccing Resto and Balance

2009-04-01T08:17:00.005-04:00

So, when is 3.1 going to arrive? The current tea leaves are a bit mixed. It feels fairly close, as the PTR builds haven't seen major changes lately. We heard yesterday that Arena Season 5 will end on 14 April, and Noblegarden is currently scheduled to start 12 April (though they will delay it if needed).

The Arena season info is dispositive for me. I can't imagine they'll drop 3.1 on 7 April, with so many talent and balance changes, just for the last week of the arena season. That to me says that 14 April is the most likely date for the patch. That would probably delay Noblegarden by a week, starting it on 19 April. We'll see if that's how it plays out. It's also possible that it will be even later, but Children's Week is supposed to start 1 May, and they're unlikely to overlap the two holidays.

So, we've probably got a couple weeks to get ready for the patch. I've spent a little time on the PTR. I haven't done any raiding there yet, so I don't have a firm opinion yet on how much the regen and Lifebloom changes will hurt. Still, I picked provisional specs for both Resto and Balance, based on talent changes.

Resto in 3.1

Here is the 11/0/60 spec I'm considering:

This is a raid-focused, mana-conservative spec. I'm worried about running out of mana, so I put 4 points into Tranquil Spirit. If mana turns out to be OK, I might steal those points back and put them elsewhere.

One place I didn't put points is into Nature's Grace. I've written about this before, but after reflecting a bit I think its value is a bit less for Resto druids than the previous flat .5 sec savings. To take advantage of the buff, you'll have to react to the NG proc quickly to cast a couple non-instant spells. But we do a lot of healing with instant-cast spells, which don't benefit, and they will use up the 3-sec buff. Also, I believe Nourish won't play nicely with this either, as the faster cast time will just bump up against the GCD. (I need to confirm this on the PTR.)

I put a total of 6 points into Living Seed and Revitalize, even though I'm not completely sure of their utility yet. For now though, I'll take the talents and see how much difference they make. Living Seed I feel better about, as the change to reflect overhealing will really help, and I think Nourish in particular will be a bigger part of our healing. Revitalize is a difficult talent to evaluate, but the addition of Wild Growth should make a big difference. If it goes well, this should actually bring a slight DPS increase to your raid.

If I pulled points out of Tranquil Spirit, Living Seed, or Revitalize, I'd be inclined to put them back into Natural Perfection, Empowered Touch, or possibly Nature's Grace. I would grab Improved Tranquility if I was doing 5-man heroics or PvP, and I'd definitely grab Natural Perfection and Improved Barkskin in a PvP build.

Balance in 3.1

Here is the 68/0/3 spec I'll probably use:

First, note that this is not a pure raiding spec. I expect to use this for a combination of raiding, battleground/Wintergrasp PvP, and solo questing. So I've taken a wide range of talents that won't help much with raiding. This spec will certainly do decent DPS, but if you really want to maximize your raid DPS, you'll need to look at your gear and the other players in your raid. Based on that you can decide whether talents like Improved Faerie Fire are useful.

So based on my desire for versatility, I've taken just about everything in the Balance tree. I took both IFF and Balance of Power, but these might be droppable if either I assume I won't be raiding as DPS, or if I collect enough Hit on my gear. (I should have plenty of hit for Heroics, even without these talents.) On the other hand, Eclipse is only really useable on longer fights, so if I were to stick to PvP and/or soloing, I'd probably shed those 3 points. Owlkin Frenzy is another talent I might sacrifice, particularly if I wasn't concerned with PvP.

If I pulled those points back, I'd put them into the Resto tree. The goal would be to build into Master Shapeshifter via more points in Furor, Improved Mark of the Wild, and Natural Shapeshifter. I'd also look at Intensity if mana is an issue.

So there are a couple provisional specs for 3.1. The big wild card in both specs is mana viability. Some of that can be theorycrafted, but a lot will depend on how the raids play out in both fight design and raid membership (particularly for 10-man). I can't promise that these will be the best specs, but I'm fairly confident that they'll provide a good starting point.

Offspec Gear

2009-03-31T07:29:00.004-04:00

(The UI post is coming along. I'll try to keep it from getting too out of control...)

Over the weekend we ran a heroic Utgarde Keep and the [Sharp-Barbed Leather Belt] dropped. Mattoo (our Bear tank) already had it (or better, I forget) and nobody else could wear it, so they offered it to me for my tanking offset.

Back at the bank, that led to Mattoo and me discussing my tanking gear set. He was interested to see if I could tank sometime, more for the novelty than anything. That's when I mentioned that had a pretty good tanking weapon: the [Staff of the Plague Beast]. That's one of the best Druid tanking weapons in the game. And, as it turns out, it's far better than what Mattoo has. Hm, jealous much? :)

I don't remember the details, but it was a PuG (10-man) and there was nobody around who wanted it. It's the kind of thing that I would never have considered, but the loot master sort of shoved it in my direction. Better than sharding it, at any rate.

The major irony is that it's far better than my current healing weapon. I'm currently rocking the [Gavel of the Brewing Storm]. Now, for a blue rep reward, it's an excellent mace, and I've paired it with the [Handbook of Obscure Remedies] which is darn good too. Still, there are a decent number of drops that are better; I've just not been lucky enough to get them. I haven't seen that many drops to be honest, and I've just lost rolls on those I have seen. At some point, I'll buy the [Titansteel Guardian] if nothing else drops, but for now I'll continue to hope.

But the irony continues. The next night, Mattoo was running a Naxx PuG and whispered that he'd receieved [Noth's Curse] as an offset drop. Well, of course that beats what I'm using; my [Battlemap Hide Helm] isn't bad but it's long overdue for an upgrade. So the irony returns; my tanking staff is better than the tank's, but his healing helm is better than mine.

That's life when you're PuGging raids. Progression is very much at the whim of whatever group you're in at the time. If Mattoo and I were running the same raids together, those pieces would go to the 'right' players. The good news is that I'm not feeling too limited by the gaps in my gear. Overall my stuff is solid, and for the most part I'm able to heal anything I go into. Better gear would help in challenging situations — clueless raids, poorly geared tanks, and so forth — but most of the time it's not an issue.

Still, I'll keep dreaming for a good drop. You know, dreaming [The Impossible Dream]...

Tree changes in 3.1, as of 23 March

2009-03-23T14:56:00.001-04:00

There's lots of changes coming up for Resto Druids in 3.1. It feels like we've been discussing this forever — the base ideas go back 6 weeks or more — while there are new changes coming out all the time. I fully expect more changes (and changes to the changes) before 3.1 goes live. But I wanted to provide a highlight of the changes you'll see.

Affects mana (cost or regen)
Affects healing (throughput, spellpower, debuffs, etc.)

All info is taken from Test Realm Patch Notes unless otherwise noted. The spell links are to the new (PTR/3.1) versions of the spells.

Base changes

Mana regen change: (This applies to all classes.) Spirit: The amount of mana regeneration granted by this stat has been reduced by 40%.

This affects both Innervate and baseline mana regen outside the Five Second Rule (O5SR). The main effect is that both Innervate and pauses in casting will return a lot less mana than they used to. It also raises the relative value of Replenishment — and of Intellect (vs. Spirit) — as a result.

Lifebloom: Mana cost of all ranks doubled. When Lifebloom blooms or is dispelled, it now refunds half the base mana cost of the spell per application of Lifebloom, and the heal effect is multiplied by the number of applications.

This is the biggest direct Druid change. In short, the mana cost of LB is doubled. On the other side, letting it bloom will now refund mana, and both the healing and mana refund of the bloom will stack. So maintaining a LB stack costs lot more but the bloom looks better for both healing and mana efficiency. This will be both a nerf and a significant change to habitual Druid healing techniques, but I don't yet expect to give up on Lifebloom stacks. We'll be discussing this a lot more.

Abolish Poison: Now ticks every 3 seconds, up from every 2. Now lasts 12 seconds, up from 8.

So you have the same number of ticks, spread over a longer time. It'll vary whether this is a buff or a nerf. You'll have longer poison protection, but it will take longer for poisons (especially stacks of poison) to be removed.

Innervate: This spell no longer costs mana.

On live today it costs around 100 mana. This is a trivial buff in any situation except where you're completely OOM.

Talents

Because of all the talent changes — and the dual spec implementation — all players will get a full talent refund. Don't forget to respec!
Tree of Life:Now receives 240% increased armor. You can now use Nature's Grasp and Thorns while within this form. Mana cost reduced to match the cost of Travel Form. Also, may change ToL talent to say reduces the mana cost of all your hots and also lets you go into tree form, which grants bonus healing.(source)

A whole slew of changes to ToL form. The latter clause was discussed on the forums but has not yet been implemented on the PTR. Assuming that change makes it too, then TOL changes as follows:

The mana saving on HoTs applies whether or not you're in tree form
Can now cast Nature's Grasp and Thorns as a tree
Lower mana cost to switch into tree form
Improved ToL goes from 100% to 240% bonus armor

These are mostly buffs to tree form in PvP. However, there are times in PvE when it's useful to heal outside of tree form, and this will help with that. Ultimately some decent stuff, but nothing groundshaking.

Improved Regrowth: This talent is renamed Nature’s Bounty. Increases the critical effect chance of your Regrowth and Nourish spells by 5/10/15/20/25%.

This is a big change. It halves the crit chance for Regrowth but buffs the crit chance for Nourish instead. The left hand giveth etc. It was always difficult to make a case for Nourish, mostly because Regrowth was so awesome. So at least this change buffs Nourish while also nerfing Regrowth. It's difficult to plan around healing crits, and there's a good chance that this will contribute to your overhealing. That I believe is the root of the next change.

Living Seed: This talent now accounts for total healing including overhealing.

This should buff Living Seed. I don't yet know how much of a practical buff it will be. Regrowth will crit less often; Nourish will crit more. I suspect that we will be using Nourish in particular a lot more, so this may make Living Seed more worthwhile. Today it does somewhere around 2% of my healing, so that's not quite breakeven for 3 talent points.

Intensity: Now grants 17/33/50% of mana regeneration while casting.

That's a buff in the percentage from the 10/20/30% on live today, but keep in mind that the 30->50% is on base mana regen that's been nerfed by 40%. So in the end it's about where you are today.

Nature's Grace: Redesigned: All spell critical strikes have a 33/66/100% chance to grace you with a Blessing of Nature, increasing your spell casting speed by 20% for 3 seconds. (Note: this is a Balance talent, but it's taken in many Resto builds.)

On Live today, NG will reduce the casting time of your next spell by .5 sec. That is a 33% cast time improvement for Nourish, 25% for Regrowth, or 20%/17% for Healing Touch (depending on talents). This gets somewhat better as you get more Haste. Nourish however suffers because the resulting 1sec cast time will likely be faster than your GCD, so you'll have to wait to cast your next spell anyway. The difference is that you get the buff for 3 seconds, so you can cast multiple spells with it (two Nourishes, for example). The downside is that you're unlikely to react instantly to a NG proc, so you may well miss the first second or two. Ultimately I think this probably works out as a slight buff, but the complexity of the mechanism will make this talent very difficult to employ effectively.

Improved Mark of the Wild: Now also increases all of your total attributes by 1/2%.

A straight buff, though the 2% increase goes only to you and not everyone who receives your MotW. It definitely helps MotW scale as you get more stats from gear. The effect isn't huge, but most Resto druids will take this talent anyway, so it's easy to accept.

Replenish: This talent is now re-named Revitalize and also works with Wild Growth.

This is a buff to Replenish, but is it now worthwhile? The good news is that you'll cast a lot of Wild Growth, so more toons might get the Revitalize buff. The ticks, however, are still both random and rather small. I'd much rather see the random element removed, even if that means making the ticks even smaller.

Improved Barkskin:(New Talent) Increases the damage reduction granted by your Barkskin spell by 5/10%, and increases your resistance to Dispel mechanics by an additional 30/60% while under the effect of Barkskin.

This change is purely for PvP; I can think of very few situations when it will apply in PvE, other than loose adds beating on the healer (which rarely ends well in any case). As a 2-point talent in the 10th tier, it is designed to give Druids some additional incentives to go deep Resto for PvP.

Glyphs

Glyph of Nourish: Your Nourish heals an additional 6% for each of your heal-over-time effects present on the target.

A nice little boost to Nourish, further suggesting that it will be a much stronger heal in 3.1, particularly for tank healing. With 3 HoTs up on the target, that's an additional 18% bonus to Nourish. Add in the increased crit chance, and you'll see some whopping big heals from our "Flash Heal" equivalent.

Glyph of Wild Growth Wild Growth now affects up to 6 targets.

A simple change, but one that could add an additional 20% to the healing capacity of Wild Growth. The only problem now is how many worthwhile glyphs we have available. I'm unlikely to take this — I'll probably go with Swiftmend, Lifebloom, and maybe Nourish. But if you do a lot of raid healing, this could be a major buff.

OK; I think that's the lot for now. I really should do a post on the Balance changes, if I can get to it. Those are a bit less extreme but still significant.

Intro to Druid Healing 3: Raid Healing

2009-03-20T14:48:00.004-04:00

This is Part 3 of my Intro to Druid Healing series. The five parts are:

1. Base Concepts
2. Tank Healing
3. Raid Healing
4. User interface
5. Special Considerations

Raid healing at its base level is pretty simple: keep the healers and DPS from dying. Because a lot of raid damage is avoidable, you'll often see the newest or least-geared healers given the raid healing role. But even more than tank healing, your raid healing can really benefit from skill, organization, and insight. This article is designed to get you started with building all three.

My apologies; this article is really long! (Took a long time to write, too.) I hope you'll find the information useful. I welcome feedback in comments.

Sections on raid healing:

Assignments
Understanding your raid
Types of raid damage
What to cast
Prioritization
Summary

Assignments

So, you'll be healing in a raid today. There are a few basic factors that you'll want to know before you get started. First, what is your assignment? In 10-man raids the assignments can be fairly blurry, and there's a good chance you'll be both tank healing and raid healing. In a 25-man you're more likely to have a specific role, even possibly to healing a specific group or role (e.g. melee DPS) in the raid. Even tank healers may need to do some raid healing from time to time, but if you have dedicated raid healers, you'll generally let them deal first with damage.

Related to healing assignments is heal sniping: the practice of people stepping outside their healing assignments. This can be a problem for a couple reasons. First, you don't want people to lose focus on their main job. If the tank dies while her healer is messing about with raid heals, that's pretty bad. Second, you lose time and mana when two healers heal the same raid member. Healing assignments are designed to help prevent this.

That said, heal sniping isn't all that big a deal in most situations, and in some it's crucial. (I talked about this last week.) If the encounter is easy and healers are bored, they're going to find other things to do. And if things are getting really tough, healers need to help each other out. That goes both ways: tank healers can help out on bad raid damage, while raid healers can lend a hand when the tank is getting creamed.

I think heal sniping gets blown out of proportion because people worry too much about the healing meters. Frankly, they're an OK tool, but they don't tell you a lot. The real measure of success is whether you beat the fight. If your raid leaders are judging healers by ranks on the healing meter... well, they need to understand a lot more about how healing works. I think I'll write more about healing meters in the Special Considerations post.

Beyond your healing assignment, don't forget to remove debuffs — curses and poisons, for a Druid.

Understanding your raid

It's crucial to know about your raid. One dimension of that is understanding the fights you'll be taking on. How much raid damage will you see? Is it avoidable or not? Will there be burst damage or does it come at a steady pace? This obviously will vary from boss to boss and between different kinds of trash mobs.

An important piece of that is understanding the debuffs you'll face. Sometimes they're just annoying, but other times they're critical, like the Necrotic Poison cast by Maexxna or the Curse of the Plaguebringer cast by Noth.

The other dimension is understanding the members of your raid. That starts with knowing your other healers. That starts with understanding the classes (and specs; Holy and Discipline priests are very different). Knowing the key spells of your partners helps you understand what they're doing. Beyond classes, know the players. Are they aggressive or slow to react? Do they suffer from lag or get disconnected? Do they stick solely to their assignments or help out? Are they good at removing poisons and curses? (And diseases — Druids can't remove them, but you might have to heal through the damage if your partners miss it.)

Finally, know your players in general. Are they quick to move out of the fire, or away from the bosses' Whirlwind? Do they use health stones and healing potions? Are the offtanks good at quickly picking up adds? Is the hunter quick to Feign Death when she pulls aggro? Does the warlock Life Tap a little too aggressively? Who's higher on DPS (and needed to beat the enrage timer)?

Knowing the other players you run with can be a huge factor. It's the biggest reason why PUGs are so hard. So if you're running with a guild or regular group, pay a lot of attention to your players, and you'll get a big advantage from it. And if you're in a PUG, learn as much as you can as you go along. (Hint: your damage meter is a better tool for healing a PUG than your healing meter.)

Types of raid damage

So you just saw one or more health bars drop, and you need to do some healing. It's good to be aware of both what just happened and what's happening next. In the end it's all just damage, but knowing the story helps you choose the right spells to use. The variation is huge but there are a few differentiators you can consider.

Who got hit are hit? Sometimes it's just one, say, due to a random mob attack or someone who stood in the fire. If it's just one toon then you can focus on fixing the single problem. But if a lot of toons are hit, you'll need to either spread out your heals, or (in desperate situations) prioritize who gets the heals.

How much damage is there? If someone is hit hard, you're going to need to tee up some bigger heals to deal with it. You'll also have to heal quicker in order to keep the toon alive. On the other hand, if it's less damage, you can afford to use slower-working, more efficient HoTs.

Is the damage one-time or ongoing? If the toon isn't going to get another hit soon, you can afford to let a HoT tick to heal them. But if they're going to get hit again soon, you might have to do something more direct. A special case of this is when a DPS or healer has pulled aggro. Hopefully this is not from a boss (!) but it's fairly common with trash (especially AoE trash) or adds that arrive during a fight. Here it's crucial to watch when the toon loses aggro.

What to cast

This is what you really want to hear, isn't it? What should I be casting? Well, let's make a few assumptions first. Let's assume that you're healing within your assignment, so you can't expect someone else to jump in. (This is the target of my stomping heals post from last week.)

As of today — before the 3.1 patch — you should really read my raid heals post. It describes some initial details about how much each spell can heal and when they're best used. It provides a good bit of analysis that I'm not going to address here. (I will eventually write a new post when the effects of 3.1 are set in stone, or at least curing concrete.)

OK, are you back? Here's the upshot of all that analysis.

Spam Wild Growth. You'll be using Wild Growth for a huge chunk of your raid healing. The only reasons not to use it are when only one toon has taken damage, or when someone is so gravely wounded that you need a big heal Right Now.

You can do some things to get the most out of Wild Growth. Keep in mind that it's a smart heal. So when you cast it on a toon, WG will hit the 5 toons within its range that need it most. (Note, this might not include the person you cast it on!) This is where knowing the nature of the damage helps. If it's geographically localized — say, the melee are hit by a Whirlwind — make sure you cast it on someone from that group. In extreme cases when the raid is highly spread out, you might not even be able to hit 5 toons with the same WG.

It's also worth noting that WG doesn't know about healing assignments. So maybe you're assigned to Group 4 or whatever, but WG will hit anyone. That's true of a lot of other spells too, so don't fret over it too much. Try to make sure however that you're at least hitting part of your assigned coverage.

So use WG when you can. But sometimes it's not enough, and even when it's good you'll have it on cooldown a lot. What do you do then?

Light raid damage: If the toons aren't hurt too badly (and if you're not using WG) your best bet is to use HoTs, most probably Rejuvenation. The other alternative is Lifebloom. Rejuv does more healing and also sets up a Swiftmend if necessary. On the other hand, LB delivers its initial healing faster (Rejuv doesn't tick for 3 seconds) and (before the 3.1 patch) has a slightly lower mana cost. Either one is pretty good if the toon doesn't have a ton of damage and can wait for his heals to add up. You can also spread around a combination of Rejuvs and LBs (plus WG of course) to top off a slightly bigger chunk of damage.

Heavier damage: This is the situation when someone's taken a bit hit and needs an urgent heal. Your goal is to get their health bar up quickly — maybe not to 100%, but at least enough so they won't be killed on the next hit.

The first choice here in many situations is the combination of Rejuv followed by Swiftmend. This sends a big heal within one GCD, and (if glyphed) leaves a Rejuv behind to top off the toon. Many Druid healers don't use Swiftmend enough — I know I don't! It's great for this kind of thing.

So Swiftmend is great, but often it's on cooldown. It's amazing how long 15 sec can be, especially if the whole raid is getting hit fairly hard. If the toon is badly wounded, probably your next option is to cast Regrowth. It gives you both a big direct heal as well as a useful HoT.

Nourish is your other option. Today (as of 3.0.9), I think Regrowth should usually be your first direct heal. Use Nourish as your first step in two cases. For one, if you already have another HoT on the toon, then Nourish will get the 20% boost that makes it more useful. The other situation is when the toon is gravely wounded (say, down to 5% or less health) and/or is taking damage rapidly. Then you might spam Nourish to get some very quick health back onto the toon.

The other big use for Nourish is as an additional spammable heal to get a toon back to full health. With the Regrowth HoT active, Nourish gets a 20% boost, and it's faster to cast than Regrowth. So if you still need to heal after your first Regrowth, consider switching to Nourish.

Nourish is really going to change in 3.1, so I expect this evaluation to shift. I don't have a full analysis now, but I'll provide more (and update this article) when we've learned more (and when 3.1 is in a more stable state). In short, however, Nourish will probably be better and Regrowth a little worse, so you'll want to use Nourish some more.

Finally, I want to mention the Nature's Swiftness + Healing Touch combo, especially if you have a macro to put them together. It will arrive faster and heal more than any other heal. The problem is the 3 minute cooldown; often you will either have it unavailable, or you'll be saving it for a 'real' emergency. Don't be afraid to use it; 3 minutes isn't that bad, and you might well get a couple uses from it within a single boss fight. Just be ready when it's not available.

Prioritization

Sometimes, you'll have more raid damage than you can deal with. This is where my earlier discussion of triage comes in. You have to know who to heal first, and who to ignore.

The toughest question is when to give up (on a toon, not the whole raid!). Sometimes the damage is too high for you to heal through. This is most common when a toon pulls boss aggro. If the toon is likely to die even with your heals, you don't want to waste the time and mana spent healing him. This is rarely an option for the tanks, but it's a common consideration for DPS and sometimes healers.

If you're forced to choose between two injured toons, it helps to know who does more for the raid. Many boss fights with enrage timers will test your DPS; if two toons are close to death, you'll want to save the one with higher DPS. You'll often have to prioritize healers above DPS, but in some cases the DPS is more important; this will depend on the fight. Class can matter here too; save the Moonkin, and maybe she can use her Rebirth. On the other hand, maybe that Shaman can use Reincarnation to rez himself if he dies. (Or maybe it's on cooldown — don't assume that Shaman will be happy if you let him die!)

However, you should almost always make sure to heal yourself. This comes from the principle that you can't do any healing when you're dead! The only exception is a desperate attempt to keep the tank alive. Also, if someone else is designated to heal you, you may have to trust them to take care of you. In general though, you need to be aware of your own health and the damage you're taking.

Summary

OK, wow. That's a lot of stuff! Really this is all designed to help you make good choices. Knowing that stuff will help you do much better raid healing. But if you're in doubt, a good outline of raid healing looks like this:

Know your assignment and make sure you cover it. But help out others if you can.
Use Wild Growth a lot.
Use Rejuvenation and Lifebloom to heal mildly wounded toons.
Use Rejuv + Swiftmend if someone's hurt badly.
After that, use Regrowth and/or Nourish to save the gravely wounded.
Remember Nature's Swiftness + Healing Touch for real emergencies.

And a final note: this is my own personal guide to raid healing. I think you can use this and it will serve you well. But there are many other techniques that players use, most of them quite effective. Options like a glyphed/talented Healing Touch can radically change your playstyle, and I don't mean to rule that out. But if you're looking for a good place to start, hopefully this will help you out.

Two more pieces on Intro to Druid Healing are still to come. Now that this is out of the way, I think the others should be relatively easy. Knock wood!

3.1 Professions: The value of spoilers

2009-03-16T10:16:00.005-04:00

I've been playing my rogue a lot lately. I like rogues and she's fun to play. But I've also kept her around as an enchanter, specifically to disenchant all the greens that I get in the course of play. She had been stuck at level 40 during BC — which allowed her to DE the greens and blues I would get. I've had a similar goal to get her leveled in WotLK so that she could DE the current greens.

Yesterday she dinged 58 and traveled through the Dark Portal to upgrade her professions. Safely back in Ironforge, I promptly leveled her enchanting to 300, at the cost of about 120 x [Illusion Dust], including about 40 that she had already and another 80 from the AH.

Today, I read the following on MMO-Champion:

Enchanting: Several recipes in the 250-300 skill range have been rebalanced, and the reagent requirements have been reduced.

D'oh! I spent about 200G at the AH on mats for leveling, and used another 100G worth of mats that I had in stock. As mistakes go, I guess that's not too bad, and I doubt that I'd wait until 3.1 drops to level up anyway. Even so, I wish I had known about the change in advance so I could make a decision rather than rationalize it away.

So to that end, what are some of the other relevant profession changes coming up? What might influence your buying or selling decisions? I'm going to look specifically at the pieces that might help you decide, say, to sell or buy mats, as opposed new recipes or questions like "is leatherworking worth it?", which is a different kind of question. Here is a list of the current profession changes. What stands out as AH-worthy changes?

First, there are some nice changes to Blacksmithing, Tailoring, and Leatherworking. Lower-level items for all three professions "have received major changes to make them more appealing." I read that to say that these items will now be very useful as leveling gear for newer toons. That in turn may make it worthwhile to make and sell this gear; at the least, I hope that any gear you make while leveling your profession will be viable to sell at auction.

There are a ton of new recipes coming, including some (presumably excellent) recipe drops from Ulduar. The recipes will be BoE, but I don't know yet whether the items they create are BoE or BoP. During Burning Crusade there were a good number of BoE recpies that created BoP gear, but my guess is that the trend of skipping BoP gear will continue. If so — if the new gear is BoE — you'll see price drops for the current high-end crafted gear in the same slot. Keep watching to see what specific recipes are available, and sell the corresponding gear soon.

There's an important twink-relevant change for Enchanting: "Some enchants now have level restrictions. Note: the enchant is never removed from the item to which it's applied, however, the player no longer receives its benefit until they reach the required level. Any enchants modified in this way have had their tooltips updated." So this will nerf twinks, reduces enchanter's income from selling these twink enchants, and may invalidate some enchants on your lower-level toons.

I need to research this Leatherworking change: "Added a recipe for combining Borean Leather Scraps into Borean Leather. You can still use Borean Scraps from your inventory to combine them." If they do the exact same thing, it's trivial/silly, but it might be in to help people who forget how to combine scraps. (I've been guilty of this myself.) My hope is that leatherworkers will actually get more leather out of scraps than other players, which would be kind of nice. If the latter, you should maybe hold on to your scraps until 3.1. I'll research more and find out.

There are a couple Jewelcrafting notes. The first: "Added a new recipe to cut black diamonds." Don't know how good the recipe is yet, but it might be worthwhile to stock up on ultracheap diamonds now — or at least hold on to the ones you have. The second: "Added a recipe for Shifting Twilight Opal to the daily jewelcrafting vendor." This is a +agi/+stam gem, which should be fairly useful.

Herbalism sees a simple change that may have major effects: "Northrend herbs now yield more herbs on average." That could drive down Northrend herb prices. On the other hand, a new, challenging raid will probably increase demand for flasks and elixirs, and a ton of new glyphs will also add to the demand for herbs. So I bet in the end that prices will not drop drastically — at least, I won't place any bets one way or the other.

Cooking sees some interesting changes. If you're leveling Cooking, you should know: "You no longer need to learn cooking from books. The trainers have finally done their reading and are able to teach you the same thing." That's probably not a big deal if you track down the vendors yourself, but it will end the sometimes-lucrative trade in reselling these books on the AH.

Another big Cooking change: "A new recipe has been added to cooking trainers for making Black Jelly, using several Borean Man 'O War as ingredients. While it looks disgusting, it restores more health and mana than the highest level food." Currently these fish don't have any use, so they're often vendored or just ignored. I'll be watching the AH to see if any come available though, because they should be really cheap.

Fishing sees some major improvements, including new daily quests (yesyesyesYES!) some big changes to leveling, and even a chance to fish up a mount. As noted under cooking, you're going to want to hang on to those Borean Man 'O War now. There are also new fishing options in Wintergrasp, including: "A new clam, the Giant Darkwater Clam, can be obtained by fishing in Wintergrasp. This mighty clam has a greatly increased chance to drop pearls, and yields up to five times the regular amount of clam meat." So you will likely see price drops on both clam meat and pearls.

That's the quick summary of auction-house-relevant changes. I'll probably look at some of the other profession changes in more detail, especially for Leatherworking, Cooking, and Fishing.

T8 set bonuses

2009-03-13T08:25:00.004-04:00

I know Lifebloom, regen changes, and dual specs have occupied my attention with patch 3.1. But there's a ton of other stuff going on and some is very interesting. I saw the T8 set bonuses today on MMO-Champion and they're pretty sweet.

DISCLAIMER: All subject to change of course! So don't assume this stuff will really happen. But it's cool enough to think about anyway.

Tier 8 of course will be the new sets that come from Heroic Ulduar. They have an iLvl of 226, compared to 213 for heroic Naxx/OS and normal Ulduar, or 200 for normal Naxx/OS. But the set bonuses are exciting:

T8 Feral Druid

2 pieces: The periodic damage dealt by your Rake, Rip, and Lacerate abilites has a chance to cause you to enter a Clearcasting state.
4 pieces: Increases the duration of Savage Roar and Survival Instinct by 8 sec.

I don't know feral well enough to give a full analysis here. But the Clearcasting proc seems like it could be fairly powerful, depending on how often it procs. Free abilities are pretty cool. The 4pc duration increase isn't sexy but it has punch. For Savage Roar, it depends on how long a combo point cycle takes. If it allows you one more 5-pt finishing move before you have to reapply Savage Roar, that will be a sizeable buff for cats. For bears, adding 40% duration to Survival Instinct sounds like a big enhancement for a major panic button.

T8 Balance Druid

2 pieces: Increases the bonus granted by Eclipse for Starfire and Wrath by 6%.
4 pieces: Each time your Insect Swarm deals damage, you have a chance to make your next Starfire cast within until cancelled instant.

As of WotLK, a big question for Moonkin is how to manage your Eclipse procs. Do it well, and your DPS goes way up. The 2pc bonus really rewards skilled Moonkin with a 6% buff to the talent, which is great. The 4pc bonus could really multiply that even further, depending on the proc chance. If you get a few instant-cast Starfires in your rotation, that's huge. If you can work in 1-2 extra instant Starfires while under Eclipse, that's immense. It also sounds like a fun mechanic to work with. I hope it has a distinctive sound and/or a nice visual effect when it procs.

T8 Restoration Druid

2 pieces: Increases the healing done by your Swiftmend spell by 10%.
4 pieces: Your Rejuvenation spell also instantly heals your target for its periodic healing amount.

The 2pc bonus here is both boring and useful. I have to admit that I'm not great at using Swiftmend, and I need to do more to work it into my rotation. But it's a great spell, and buffing it by a straight 10% is fairly big. Now, the 4pc bonus is slightly vague to me, but it really sounds like it gives Rejuv an instant heal in addition to its HoT component. Really? Because that would be amazing! If Rejuv becomes an instant-cast mini-Regrowth, then you've got a damn powerful tool at your hands. It could be useful for tank healing, but it would make Rejuv the hands-down best option for raid healing, no question.

Edit: Tree Bark Jacket confirms this as an instant heal for a single tick of Rejuv. That makes a lot of sense but not a "mini-Regrowth". That's still a fairly powerful ability however; Rejuv ticks are sizeable and usually the first one is 3s away.

The only thing depressing about these set bonuses is how difficult they'll be to acquire. I haven't looked yet but it's clear that some tokens are going to drop from some difficult bosses. So, getting to your 4 piece bonus won't be trivial. Of course you want great gear to be hard to get, there's nothing wrong with that. But some of these bonuses — Resto, in particular — can really change the way you play. It seems odd to give game-changing abilities to such a small percentage of Druids.

First Lifebloom thoughts: thanks Keeva!

2009-03-11T08:22:00.002-04:00

Only time for a quick post today — my apologies!

I've been giving a lot of thought to Lifebloom and the potential changes. I haven't come to any conclusions yet, though I'm closing in on them. However I wanted to quickly call your attention to a great Lifebloom thoughts post at Tree Bark Jacket. She's thinking in the same direction as me.

In a nutshell, I'm fairly confident that I'll still be rolling LB on at least one tank. I'm not sure about two, and three is probably out except for special circumstances. But I think that has the potential to make healing assignments easier.

Today (in 3.0.9) a significant Druid role is to roll HoTs on multiple tanks.* In 3.1 I can imagine that we'll focus more on single-tank healing. We'll limit ourselves to a single Lifebloom stack, but our newly-buffed Nourish will be used regularly to fill the gaps that our HoTs leave behind. Plus, if we're focused on one tank, we can reliably decide to let LB bloom when it's useful. And we should have the same capacity for raid heals as we've had before; potentially more, if you're able to effectively use Lifebloom for raid heals.

The only mild disagreement I have with Keeva is her description of our role as support healers. I know what she's trying to say, and there's truth to it. But I disagree with the implication that other healers are primary and that we're there to help them out. You could just as easily say that our HoTs, for tank healing, are the foundation. They certainly do a big chunk of the effective healing! Another healer working on the same tank is more likely to support us than the other way around.

That's just a quibble however, and I very much support what Keeva says overall. Thanks for a great post!

*There's lots of ways for Druids to heal, and I know many don't use Lifebloom much even today. More so than most specs, Druid healers have multiple viable approaches to healing. But I think multiple LB stacks is still one of the most common techniques.

Stomping on each other's heals

2009-03-10T07:22:00.003-04:00

Raid healing. That post is coming Soon. No really!

Before I take that topic on, though, I want to explain one common raid healing issue that I'm not going to discuss. That's the issue of different healers sending heals to the same raid target — and specifically, which heals are better at stopping it.

Heal crowding like this is something you don't want. Most raid damage is low enough that one heal can take care of it. When two or three healers are healing the same (non-tank) toon, it wastes both mana and time. I know that mana in particular is rarely a concern now, but all evidence says that this will change with 3.1. Better to learn good habits now.

Heal crowding is a particular problem for Druids. Healers all react to a low health bar. If every healer sees the same bar, they'll instinctively want to deal with it. Most druid heals are instant cast HoTs, right? So a Druid can react quickly, but his heals won't be effective for several seconds. Meanwhile, a Priest or Paladin will start up a short cast time heal, which will arrive after the HoT but before it ticks much. Group heal spells like Wild Growth, Circle of Healing, and Chain Heal also contribute to the problem, especially because the caster can't predetermine who they will hit.

Now, truth is, many healers are having an easy enough time at this point that it's not worth the effort, and we just stomp on each others' heals without thinking too much about it. It's also part of the alternative game "who can top the healing meters?" But if (when) you find yourself tackling some challenging encounter, you'll have better chances of success if you're cooperating with other healers, rather than competing.

It's a legitimate issue and one that raids should work to avoid. But what I don't want to get into is analyzing Druid heals based on which ones are most likely to avoid the problem. Because, in a nutshell, the problem isn't the heals, it's the healers. If your raid heals are getting stomped on, the answer isn't to change what you're casting, it's to work with your healers to coordinate better.

I've read a lot of analysis of raid heals that comes down to, for instance, "Regrowth is better than Rejuvenation because other healers will heal over my Rejuv, which wastes it." For me, that analysis is both true and misleading. Sure, a direct heal may be more obvious to other healers (the toon's health bar goes up). But the HoT is probably both more efficient and faster to cast. Or, possibly, the other healer's spell is more appropriate to the situation.

There are a few things you can do to avoid the problem. First, work out healing assignments and know who's supposed to be doing what. Second, know your other healers — both the classes and the people playing them. Know what they're good at, what spells they cast, how they'll react (and how fast). And then hold back on that HoT if someone else will be healing the same toon.

Doing that won't help you win the healing meters. But it will help you beat the encounters.

Emblems and Badges

2009-03-09T07:57:00.009-04:00

I've struggled some with posting, mostly because I'm still not sure how to react to the Lifebloom nerf. It's pretty clear that it will be a major change to Druid healing in raids, if it goes through. On one hand, we've had a well-defined niche for a long time now, so I'm not sure how it will land to move to something different. On the other hand, rolling 3+ sets of Lifebloom gets to be both stressful and boring. Lag in particular starts to be a real pain in the butt, and forces earlier LB refreshing.

On the gripping hand, 3.1 is still on the PTR and subject to a lot of change. So no point in worrying about it a lot yet. I think I'll go ahead with the Raid Heals chapter anyway, since that's not going to be a Lifebloom-centric thing anyway.

As we contemplate this (on the Tree of Woe), we can consider some other changes that are incoming. One that I wanted to mention a bit is the upcoming addition of the [Emblem of Conquest]. Basically this adds a new tier to the boss emblem system, as follows:

Emblem of Heroism: heroic 5-man dungeons and normal (10-man) Naxx/OS/Arch/EoE; gives iLvl 200 items
Emblem of Valor: heroic (25-man) Naxx/OS/Arch/EoE and normal (10-man) Ulduar; gives iLvl 213 items
Emblem of Conquest: heroic (25-man) Ulduar; gives iLvl 226 items

The Emblem of Conquest approach is consistent with the method taken by Blizz with the first WotLK emblems. However, I have a good deal of concern, mostly centered around heroic 5-man dungeons.

In short, I think this change is going to render them obsolete. There will be little desire to run heroics any more. Even the daily Heroic is a lot of work for the gold reward involved; the only advantage it really provides extra badges.

In Burning Crusade, there was a lot of desire to run heroic 5-mans, because you could get some great gear with Badges of Justice. Gear started out at iLvl 110 and kept adding up to iLvl 146. There were almost 250 different items you could buy for your badges. The [Grovewalker's Leggings] I eventually bought cost 100 badges, and were close to the best healing Druid legs in the game.

The result was a lot of incentive to run heroic 5-man instances. Raiders would do this in their off time, while more casual players had incentive to keep going back too. Even the most maxxed-out raider would still get value from a few badges; if nothing else, more high-quality badge gear would show up with the next patch.

This led to mixing players in some good ways. It provided rewards for the raiders who helped out others. You could PUG a heroic and find high-level raiders mixed with newer or more casual players. It gave raiders some variety too. Meanwhile, casual players could gear up well enough to prepare for raiding, if they wanted to, through running 5-man content. If nothing else, they knew they always had more and better gear to get to at some point.

In WotLK, it's different. The tier system means that the gear available for any given badge is limited. I already don't have much that I can get with EoH that's useful, except for PvP gear, and I'm not all that dedicated. What's more, with this system, I'll never get better gear for those EoH. They're going to stagnate, just like the few leftover BoJ I still have.

That's me. What about casual players? They'll soon lose any motivation to play 5-man content too. Why bother? They can't get any better gear. The best chance to upgrade will be to run daily quests and build up gold, with the hope of buying high-level Bind on Equip gear that the raiders — eventually — put up for auction.

I firmly believe that the 5-man game is key for a majority of players. It's vastly easier to get 5 players together together than 10, let alone 25. Start with you and a friend, and you're 40% of the way to a 5-man group. Try that for 10-mans and you'll still need 8 more players, including at least a tank and/or a couple healers. Besides that, there are 12 5-man instances available in WotLK. That's a lot of good content, and it would be nice to have some reason for running it.

I worry that this direction is going to turn off a lot of more casual players, and open wider gaps between the 'casuals' and 'hardcore'. And I throw those quotes in for a reason. Many of those 'casual' players are quite skilled and very good at what they do; they just don't have the time or inclination to work at raiding, either because of the time commitment, the detailed organization involved, or the drama that can come with high-pressure content.

There's nothing wrong with giving better gear to the raiders; that's as it should be. But there's nothing wrong with helping the more casual players move along that same path, even if it's at a reduced pace. In the end, they also need to have something to look forward to.

Phaelia's Retirement, and some small 3.1 news

2009-03-02T08:47:00.004-05:00

Can't I leave you people alone for a week? I go on vacation, and look what happens...

The biggest news of course is both happy and sad. I'm referring of course to Phaelia's upcoming blogtirement. She has great news, with an upcoming ~~noob gnome~~ baby on the way. Understandably this will cut into her blogging time, so she's scaling back. While that's great news for her and Mr. Phae, it's of course a loss to the Druid community and for WoW blogs in general.

I wanted to take some time to give Phaelia her props. She's been the single best resource for me about all things Resto, and I owe my rare instances of doing things right to her tutelage above all else. Druids all throughout the world (of Warcraft) have learned from Phae. She's done that with a blog that's been both informative and entertaining; Resto4Life can serve as a role model for any WoW blogger. Beyond that, Resto4Life is probably the best-designed and most functional WoW blog. We'll carry on, and other bloggers will sprout up in her place. But her tree will still cast a mighty shadow long after it's stopped bearing fruit.

Phaelia should stand proud; she's done a tremendous service for Druids everywhere. She's earned her retirement many times over and I hope her blog 401K has treated her well. I just hope Phaelia finds herself blogging again soon — whether or not the topic is WoW or MMORPGs. She's got a talent for it and she'll be missed.

Thanks, Phaelia! Congrats on your imminent parenthood, and best wishes in all your future works!

3.1 on the PTR

Oh yeah, there was some WoW-news too, as the 3.1 patch has arrived on the test realm. Not to be coy; there are big changes afoot for Resto Druids. 3.1 will be a serious change for us; in some ways, even bigger than WotLK itself. I will have to update my Tank Healing guide for sure, and I'm going to have to decide how to target my Raid Healing guide.

The first change is to Regrowth, and yeah, it's a nerf. On live, Improved Regrowth grants you a 10/20/30/40/50% added crit chance to Regrowth. On the PTR, this talent is changed to Nature's Bounty. The bad is that it's cut in half, with a 5/10/15/20/25% added crit chance. The good – such as it is – is that it now affects Nourish as well as Regrowth. Clearly this is designed to dial back Regrowth while helping Nourish. The latter has always struggled to find its niche, and this should bring it forward — especially now that mana efficiency will be a bigger concern.

Lifebloom has seen big changes too. The changes are a big nerf to rolling stacks of LB, but we have a couple small carrots to go with the big stick. Here's how it shakes out:

Lifebloom's mana cost is doubled (!)
The bloom heal now stacks too (so a 3x LB stack gives 3x the bloom effect)
When it blooms, you also get a mana refund of 50% per application

The mana cost change is the big nerf, hitting the HPM of Lifebloom stacks right in the gut. Put simply, you probably won't roll more than one stack in most situations.

The buff component will require some adjustment. Today, if you're rolling a Lifebloom stack, you hate to see it bloom. I mean hate. The good news with this change is that the mana refund can be useful, and you have a potentially huge heal with a 3x bloom. Today, a bloom (in PvE) is usually accidental, and is a wasted heal more often than not. With this change, we're going to have to be more mindful of whether the bloom will be useful or not.

There are other changes too (Revitalize, Intensity, and of course mana regen), so there will be a lot to talk about. I've transferred Alamein to the PTR, so I should be able to try out some of the new stuff. And I expect further changes. That's why it's the "Test Realm," after all! The numbers I mention above (especially on Lifebloom) are very likely to see at least a bit of change.

I'll post deeper thoughts and updates as I experiment a bit, and as we learn more. One thing I promise: I won't go emo on you. I fully expect trees to be powerful healers through 3.1 and beyond. We'll have nerfs and (scary!) changes, but we'll get through them. Hang in there!

Tiering Up

2009-02-20T07:46:00.004-05:00

I wanted to launch part 3 of my healing series this week, but it's not going to happen. As Crash Davis said, "We're dealing with a lot of sh*t!" I was going to zip it out, but I'd rather it be worth the time. I'll be out on vacation next week, so you'll see the series pick up early in March. Thanks for your patience!

Last night was a milestone for Alamein because she got her first piece of T7 gear, the [Heroes' Dreamwalker Robes]. In itself it's a minor upgrade over the [Robes of Crackling Flame] I was wearing previously, but my hope is to add more T7 gear to it over time. The set bonuses will make a significant difference in its value.

The odd part about getting that piece, though, is that I bought it with Emblems of Heroism rather than getting a drop. In some ways that's a bit cheesy; you'd rather know that the gear represents a raid accomplishment. Some players will complain that you can run 20 heroics and get the same gear that requires a full raid otherwise.

There's a couple of sides to this. One is that I can say that I've killed Four Horsemen (who drop the token for this) a few times now. We always have at least another Death Knight and Rogue in the raid, plus we usually have either a Mage or another DK along. I don't remember how often the token has dropped, but the others have won rolls on it when it did, and frankly everyone who's won it has needed the gear more than me anyway. Token drops are a nice way to mitigate the randomness of drops, but they're still random, and especially with the plethora of DKs around, I think your odds on the Lost Vanquisher token are slightly lower (despite its increased drop rate).

The other side, though, is that I have no patience for the arguments about how you earn your gear. When I hear complaints about 'welfare epics,' I hear people who need to define their success externally. I don't care how exclusive your gear is, it's never going to be the single signifier about your skill or accomplishments.

You and your friends and your guildmates know what you accomplished. They know if you were dead in the first 30 seconds of the fight, if you are #1 in DPS in your guild, or if you have been around for every Naxx run plus helping newer players run heroics for gear. Or all of the above. The external signifiers should be treated as a bonus, not as the evidence.

I like having current tier gear on Alamein. We never raided seriously in BC, and I never had any T4 drops until people started PUGging raids late in the game. But it's more important for me to know that our guild has worked hard on Naxx. It took us a few tries to get Four Horsemen down, and when we did, that felt really good. I didn't need to win a roll to make the effort worthwhile.

"I don't get the regen nerfs"

2009-02-18T12:05:00.004-05:00

No time for a long post today. Thanks for the great response to the two intro healing posts; I have good plans for part 3.

There is a great thread ongoing on the official forums about the incoming nerfs to mana regen (through the five second rule) and how that relates to healing overall. For reference, here is the overall thread and here is the BlueTracker which highlights the Ghostcrawler (Blizzard developer) responses.

I don't have a complete response to this, and it's an ongoing discussion anyway. But I wanted to call out a few interesting points.

We actually want for healing to be less spammy and more about decisions and coordination. But if we did that sans other changes, everyone would be out of fsr even more and the content would be too easy. Make sense? Making regen more consistent is also the key to making healing more tactical and less monotonous and frenetic.

This really helps understand what they're striving for in 3.1, but I think it elides a significant point. 5SR regen doesn't directly make the content too easy, it makes regen too easy. That in turn means there's no penalty to spamming heals, so that becomes the right strategy to beating the content, and your best strategy is to cast your biggest heals as fast as possible.

Sunwell and similar content were tuned to where you couldn't realistically stop casting for regen anyway. If you are stopping now, it's because Naxxramas is easy. On challenging content, all 4 classes already spammed heals pretty consistently. That meant the out of FSR breaks came mostly from clearcasting procs or encounter mechanics that forced you to pause. When that happened, mana felt limitless. As I've said, we would rather shift back a little (A LITTLE) from GCD-constrained healing to mana-constrained healing.

This helps clarify the intent even further. In my IDH Base Concepts post, I intentionally put GCD before mana. GCD-limited healing is by far the biggest concern — today. The goal for 3.1 is that you're weighing it more against mana management.

The tough part is that in that kind of design, if your raid is undergeared or handling the encounter badly, you'll find yourself spamming heals to survive and then wiping when the healers go OOM. That will feel weird, and we'll need to adapt.

This change won't change the relative values of Int and Spirit. Int was already a good regen stat (in part because it provides other bonuses). However, you are rarely ever choosing between a +100 Int chest and a +100 Spirit chest (though you might be with gems). More to the point though, the regen formula is SQRT of Int * Spirit * a constant. We are just lowering the constant. If Spirit was good for you before, it will still be good for you.

This is really only partially right. Spirit gets hit harder because it no regen value outside this equation, while Int also builds up your mana pool (and adds Crit besides, which procs some mana-saving talents). So if you're going OOM, you'll first stack Int and MP5. Spirit will still be a Spellpower stat for Druids (Improved ToL) and (I think) Priests, so that should help mitigate a bit.

If you mean these changes will nerf Innervate, yes, it will. On live Innervate can be 120% of your bar, say 25,000 mana. Historically it was more like 75% of your bar, and it should be closer to that with these changes.

Pretty clear answer. This will feel like a nerf, for sure. It will definitely affect your choice to pop Innervate. Right now, I wait until I'm just about OOM... and even then it's a license to spam (even more) for a few seconds.

The problem is simply, the 5sr adds too much variance into your regen that non-spirit classes don't deal with. Blizzard wants to make fights that challenge your mana pool, but they have to be able to model what your mana pool should look like over the course of the encounter. When luck based factors can greatly affect that, there's no way to model it.

(Not a blue post, but endorsed by Ghostcrawler.) This is very good at explaining the motivation behind the change, and it clarifies how the developers got from point A (want more interesting fights/less spammy healing) to point B (nerf the 5SR regen). That linkage was unclear before.

The right conclusion is that yes, this will have a big impact on how we approach healing. At first it will be less obvious when you undergear the content — you can keep everyone alive, after all... until you go OOM. You'll feel like you just need more potions/Replenishment/Innervate/faster DPS. Adjusting to that mindset will be a challenge. It probably means some low-intensity long-duration fights. It also means a lot more attention to healing assignments (overheal is now a lot more painful) and the mana efficiency of heals (do more with less).

I'm still not completely settled into an opinion on how well this will work. We'll have to see what happens first on the PTR. In the meantime, my advice is twofold. First, don't make major adjustments to your gear choices, but you might start backing off just a hair on Spirit. Second, chill out. More changes will come, so there's no point to getting mad at this yet. At the least, save your nerdrage until you see problems on the PTR.

Intro to Druid Healing 2: Tank Healing

2009-02-16T10:15:00.005-05:00

This is Part 2 of my Intro to Druid Healing series. The five parts are:

1. Base Concepts
2. Tank Healing
3. Raid Healing
4. User interface
5. Special Considerations

Tank healing is the closest thing we get to a rotation. Your tanks should take, depending on the encounter, somewhere between 70% to 100% of the overall incoming damage. That's... the definition of a tank, I guess: he takes the damage, so you don't have to.

Sections on tank healing:

Know Your Tanks
The Foundation
Spike Damage
Panic Buttons
Other Considerations
Summary

Know Your Tanks

This all starts with knowing who are the tanks. In a 5-man instance, that's usually pretty easy. (Though it can be confusing sometimes. I ran heroic Gundrak over the weekend with four Death Knights. Honestly, I'm not even certain which talents separate a tank-spec DK from DPS.) In a 10-man raid, it's a bit more confusing. You'll usually have a main tank (MT) and an off-tank (OT). 25-man raids will likely have 2 or more off-tanks.

On trash fights, you'll typically see the MT and OTs splitting up the mobs, unless the trash is pretty easy. Usually this plays out as one tank grabbing initial aggro, then the other will peel off some of the mobs onto himself. Be ready for this.

On boss fights, the MT is defined as the player who's tanking the boss. That often but not always means he'll be taking the most damage. The OTs usually have the job of grabbing aggro from "adds", the additional mobs that show up as part of many fights. Another common OT task is to grab and hold the boss when the MT can't; the Archavon fight in Wintergrasp is an example.

Be aware too that the MT and OT may change roles at different times due to class differences, skills, or gear. For example, in our guild our feral Druid is usually the MT, but in the Military Wing in Naxxramas our Paladin usually switches to MT, as Paladins have special tools against the undead that populate that wing. (I might eventually post an advanced topic about each tank class's special abilities and how they affect healing.)

The Foundation

Your HoTs (Heal Over Time spells) will form the base that do most of your tank-healing work. I'm talking about two spells: Lifebloom and Rejuvenation. On some fights, they'll be all you need.

Lifebloom (LB)

Lifebloom is the defining spell for Druid healers. It's also the centerpiece of your tank healing.

LB is a great tank healing spell because it's fairly powerful, ticks every second, and is mana efficient. On your tanks, you'll want to keep up a stack of 3 Lifeblooms, without letting them bloom. You should be able to keep a Lifebloom stack rolling on up to 3 tanks without too much trouble, depending on spec and glyphs. (Practice this if you need to.)

Don't let the stack expire. Your mana efficiency and healing throughput take a big hit if you have to rebuild the stack. The key here is timing your refresh cast: earlier hurts your mana efficiency, but too late and you'll lose the stack. (Lag can hurt you here too.) I usually shoot for about 1s left, or 2s if I'm being careful.

Rejuvenation (Rejuv)

Rejuv is a nice complement to Lifebloom. It ticks every 3 seconds but its ticks are fairly big. Another reason to keep Rejuv up: you can Swiftmend off it when needed.

Rejuv is unlike Lifebloom: you want to let it expire before you re-cast it. That's because it only ticks 7 times. If you re-cast it before it hits 0, you'll lose that last tick - almost 15% of its healing power (and mana efficiency). Remember, if you're looking at a timer, "0" usually means "less than 1 sec" and not "expired".

(Regrowth can bridge the gap between your foundation and spike damage. More on that in the next section.)

So for basic tank healing, keep Rejuv and a full stack of Lifebloom up at all times. Do this, and you've done 75% of your tank healing. But the other 25% comes at really important moments — when your tank is in a bit of trouble.

Spike Damage

When your foundation starts falling behind, you need to get caught up. We have a few heals in our arsenal that do this. The three most important are Swiftmend, Nourish, and Regrowth. Unlike the foundation, these are more of a choice: what's appropriate for the situation? They each have strengths and weaknesses.

Regrowth

This is an amazing spell, and you'll use it a lot. It is your biggest quick-cast catch-up heal, especially with its high chance to crit. So it's a good spell for when the tank has a sizeable health deficit. But it also leaves its HoT behind, so it's useful as an additional piece of your healing foundation. Its biggest weakness is that it has a fairly high mana cost. Use it when your basic HoTs are losing ground, or when the tank is less than 50% health.

Swiftmend (SM)

Swiftmend is a great spell: instant cast, decent healing throughput, decent mana efficiency. It requires an existing Rejuv or Regrowth on the target; that's why you'll always have Rejuv up — right? Its biggest weakness is the 15s cooldown. That does limit its use, but don't be shy: use this as often as possible.

The Glyph of Swiftmend is almost mandatory — it stops the Swiftmend from consuming your HoT. Basically, it saves you a GCD every time you cast Swiftmend. Highly recommended.

Nourish

Nourish is a pretty good spell, though most Druids are having a tough time deciding when to use it. It's quicker than Regrowth and uses less mana. But since many Druids have more mana than they can use, there's little motivation to be efficient.

My current recommendation is to use Nourish if the tank is between 75% and 50% health, and if Swiftmend is on cooldown. I expect however that Nourish will get buffed, probably through an added glyph, and that Regrowth might see a bit of a nerf. Watch for developments in this area.

Panic Buttons

When the tank gets below 25% or so health, you need to start reaching for heroic measures to keep him alive. Druids are a bit lower on panic buttons than many other healers, but use what you've got.

Start by hitting your Swiftmend if it's not on cooldown.

Your big panic button is the combination of Nature's Swiftness (NS) with Healing Touch (HT). This gets you an instant cast HT, which hits big and can crit for even more. This can restore 25% or more health on even a well-geared tank. It's on a 3 minute cooldown, so you get maybe one or at most two of these per fight. Put these into a macro for best use.

If Swiftmend and NS+HT are on cooldown, your best bet is a combination of Regrowth and Nourish. Nourish will hit faster, so use it if the tank is really low. Beyond that, the key variable is whether you have the Glyph of Regrowth. Without it, Nourish is more efficient and about the same at healing throughput. With the glyph, Regrowth is about as efficient and a lot more powerful. See Phaelia's Direct Heal analysis for the details — but expect this to change with later patches.

Finally, there's Tranquility. This is a wonderful spell in 5-man instances; it can keep the whole party from death — not just the tank. It can be pretty good in raids, too — if you're grouped with the tank(s). Just remember that it has a 30-yard range, so you need to get at least a little bit close. If you're taking damage, you'll need to pop Barkskin to prevent Tranq clipping.

Other Considerations

One of the biggest things you can do to improve as a healer is to anticipate the fight. Make sure your HoTs are refreshed before stuns, if you know when they're coming. If an aggro switch is on its way, start stacking HoTs on the next tank. This kind of anticipation is what distinguishes the really good healers.

Be ready to use Abolish Poison and Remove Curse when necessary. It helps a lot if you know what kind of curses or poisons you're dealing with. Many are actually not that painful, and you can either delay cleansing them or just heal through them. But some are deadly. One example is Maexxna's Necrotic Poison. It reduces healing received by 90%, so you're basically locked out of healing your tank until you get rid of this.

Finally: practice. This is the most repeatable part of your healing job, and the piece that will benefit the most from refinement and repetition. Practice will help you time your HoT refreshes better and will help your reaction time to damage spikes. Polishing your tank-healing skills will really help you shine as a healer.

Summary

Know who your tanks are.
Start tanks with a base stack of 3 x Lifebloom and a Rejuvenation.
Spike damage: Use Swiftmend when it's available, Regrowth, or Nourish.
Also use Regrowth for its extra HoT.
Panic buttons: Swiftmend and/or your NS+HT macro.
Remove curses and poisons, especially the worst ones.
Know the fights and what the mobs will do.

Next up: raid healing. That should be interesting!

Breaking News: Details on Dual Specs

2009-02-12T13:51:00.003-05:00

Blizzard just released a Q&A Session on Dual Specs. If you're not familiar, this is the long hoped-for capability to have and switch between two talent specs. This is currently in development for the 3.1 patch, and the Q&A between Nethara and Ghostcrawler reveals the details as they exist today.

First, keep in mind that this is all under development, and could change along the way. My biggest fear is that some problem shows up that keeps it out of 3.1. Hopefully unlikely, but definitely possible. The details can change too with testing. I'd say that it's unlikely there will be wholesale changes from this setup, but that there will probably be some changes.

Key details from the Q&A:

You'll be able to have two specs: your current active one and a "saved" spec. You can toggle between the two. (Old news.)
Switching between specs will also change your glyphs and action bars. (Old news.) I get tired of pulling Typhoon, Starfall, and Insect Swarm back onto my bars when I respec for Balance, and this will eliminate that.
We'll also get some kind of gear manager that makes it easy to switch gear sets. This won't be tied to spec switches but instead complements it. (New news.) Probably eliminates one of my addons - cool!
Switching specs will happen in cities (old news) at the Lexicon of Power (new news). There will also be an Inscription ability that allows Inscribers to summon a Lexicon of Power, much like a Warlock can now create a summoning stone. (New news.) So, you'll be able to switch specs if you're in a city, or if you're in a group/raid with an inscriber.
We'll also get a better respec system, so that we can play with specs (much like you can on web sites today) and then 'commit' them when we like what we've got. (New news.) This makes mistakes a lot less likely, and probably eliminates another of my addons.
The feature will only be available to level 80 characters. (New news.)
Some hunter details that I won't analyze. (Mostly old news.)

This will inspire me to make my first ventures into the PTR, and I'll report back what I find. But in the meantime, my first impressions are: DROOL!

PS. Anyone who calls it "Duel Specs" is immediately banished to Goldshire.

Intro to Druid Healing 1: Base Concepts

2009-02-12T08:53:00.010-05:00

I see a lot of referrals that come from people searching for "druid healing rotation" or something similar. Think of this post series as "Intro to Druid Healing" — it's first-semester calculus, but designed for math and physics majors and not liberal arts. You'll go on to bigger and better things, but this should give you a good foundation.

The intro-level course will span five posts:

1. Base Concepts
2. Tank Healing
3. Raid Healing
4. User interface
5. Special Considerations

So, on to DH1: Base Concepts

Like I mentioned, everyone wants to know a healing rotation. The secret? There is no healing rotation, Neo. Healing is, more than any other WoW role, fundamentally about reacting to what's happening. A plan is good, but you have to be willing to toss it out when the situation changes.

I could just tell you what spells to cast. But you probably know that already. (And if you don't I'll get to that in later posts.) The key to good healing is to make smart decisions. These base concepts will provide the foundation for those good decisions.

There are four basic concepts I want to talk about in this post:

GCD Management
Mana management
Gear levels
Triage
Summary

GCD Management

Global Cooldown (GCD): A global or universal cooldown, frequently shortened to "GCD", is the cooldown which starts every time you start to cast a spell, and it affects all of your class spells. (from WoWWiki)

The number one thing that will make you a better healer is GCD management. One obvious part of that is knowing how to cast spells as fast as possible; that's just a matter of timing your casts to the GCD. But GCD also represents a choice. You only have so many chances to cast a spell. GCD limits that for every class to some extent. But as Druids, four of our main healing spells are instant cast, and a couple more have cast times either sometimes (Regrowth) or always (Nourish) about equal to the GCD.

So GCD management means making the most of your limited chances to cast heals. It's a matter of opportunity cost: spell X will do the most good at this particular time. There are many ways this shows up:

If you cast a heal on a target that dies, that's a wasted GCD.
If you let your Lifebloom stack expire, you'll have to spend 3 GCDs building it again. That's two lost GCDs.
If you forget, and (accidently) cast a Rejuv on a target that has several seconds left on its existing Rejuv, that's a lost GCD too.

Each of those lost GCDs is a lost healing spell. That doesn't matter on easy, boring, casual fights. But it makes all the difference on challenging fights.

Mana Management

If GCD provides the time-bound healing constraint, mana is the resource-bound constraint. Cast too many spells, or too many inefficient spells, and you'll run out of mana.

You'll see a lot of recent references that state "I never run out of mana" or "mana regeneration is currently too powerful, especially for healers." This is both true and false. There's a real problem here for moderate- to well-geared healers, particularly in larger raids. But a newer healer in green-to-blue gear will very likely have mana issues, particularly in a group or raid that doesn't bring the Replenishment buff.

Moreover, mana regeneration is going to change. You will have to manage your mana at some point. I'm not going to analyze the specifics, mostly because I expect them to change at least a little bit. Point is, it's a good habit to be aware of mana efficiency, and to practice managing your mana. Otherwise you'll find the boss at 30% health and you OOM with no remaining options.

There are three basic things to look for:

What is the mana cost of your spells? In particular, what is their Heal per Mana (HPM) amount? This is basically a measurement of your spells' efficiency.
What is the size of your mana pool? How much mana do you start with?
What is your mana regen? Broadly speaking, this is the rate your mana bar refills. This is a whole topic itself, and there are a host of factors that affect it.

We'll talk about mana management throughout the guide. But it's also important to remember that mana management is secondary to healing. Or to put it differently, a mostly-full mana bar does you no good if you're dead. So you do your best to manage mana well, until an emergency hits and you have to toss heals like confetti. That's why good GCD management results in good mana management: you have fewer emergencies.

Gear Levels

I've talked about judging healer gear in this post and this post. I won't repeat that material; it gives some background on what stats you need and why.

The only thing I'll add is the concept of throughput versus sustainability. Throughput basically means how powerful your heals are, while sustainability talks about how long you can keep healing. Stats that modify throughput are Spellpower, Crit, and Haste, while sustainability is affected by MP5 and Intellect. Spirit is primarily a sustainability stat but it has significant throughput effects too, through Improved Tree of Life. (I'm not forgetting about the crit from Intellect, but it's a smaller effect on a less-important stat.)

Triage

This isn't some WoW term — it's a medical concept with a history dating back to the Napoleonic Wars.

Triage (pronounced /ˈtriːɑːʒ/) is a process of prioritizing patients based on the severity of their condition. This facilitates the ability to treat as many patients as possible when resources are insufficient for all to be treated immediately. (from Wikipedia)

There's a lot of complexity to true triage, but the most basic form relies on three categories for your patients: (Quoting again from Wikipedia)

1. Those who are likely to live, regardless of what care they receive;
2. Those who are likely to die, regardless of what care they receive;
3. Those for whom immediate care might make a positive difference in outcome.

The word "triage" comes from a French word that means "to sort", but I've always been struck by the "tri = three" resemblance.

For healers in WoW, this means understanding your priorities. Sometimes, if a DPS toon pulls aggro, you may not have enough healing power to save them. Sending heals onto that toon burns GCDs and mana that ends up wasted. Triage also means knowing who can wait because they're not in immediate danger.

Triage also involves knowing who you can afford to let die. Hint: the tank usually can't afford to die. It also can involve choosing among your DPS. Who's the damage leader and who's not quite up to par? Keeping the right one alive can make the difference between winning the fight and dying to an Enrage timer.

A related concept is healing assignment. As you get into 10- and 25-man raids, you'll be working with other healers. Assignments are basically there to help the healers avoid stepping on each other's toes. Again, this is all about resource management. If two healers are fighting to heal the same toon, there's probably another toon that's dying in the meantime.

Summary

The base concepts I talked about here are really what

You have a limited number of spells you can cast. Managing your GCD is all about choosing the right spell and target with those casts.
You can only heal while you have mana. Mana management is a bit avoidable at the moment, but it's going to get more important with patch 3.1. Sometimes, however, mana concerns have to take a back seat to just keeping people alive.
Your gear represents a hard limit on how much healing you can do.
Sometimes, deciding who lives and who dies is part of being a healer. That's triage.

OK, that's my throat-clearing first post. Next time out I'll look at tank healing.

Welcome!

2009-02-11T10:29:00.005-05:00

Hi folks! Just a quick post to say hello to all the new visitors coming over from Resto4Life. Thanks for the link, Phae!

I hope you find something useful here. But I wanted to say something about where I'm coming from. Our guild is 10/15 in normal Naxx, and we typically PUG in two players for our raids. We wipe often (currently on Hegian and Four Horsemen sometimes and on Grobbulus a lot). I'm not as strong at theory as Phaelia or World of Matticus or the crowd at Elitist Jerks. I spend as much time on Festival achievements as I do on raids.

That said, I believe a few key things:

A casual player might not have the gear that a hardcore raider does, but there's no reason the casual can't have the same skills.
The casual player often has to work a lot harder and needs more skill than the raider in a guild that's farming heroic Naxx and EoE every week.*
There is an amazing amount of heavy-duty theorycraft and good analysis that's out there.** But it's a very steep learning curve, and casual players often have to spend a lot of time to process and assimilate that knowledge.

That's what I'm trying to do with this blog: connect some of the dots for more casual players — specifically Balance and Restoration Druids — to help you upgrade your skills.

So most of my posts will be pretty elementary for the hardcore players. But hopefully they're useful to a lot of people also. I sometimes simplify stuff, and I'm sure I get a lot wrong too. Call me on it! And if there's anything you want to hear about, let me know.

*The hardcore raider may well be more skilled; that's what got him or her in the hardcore raids to begin with. But those raids are going to see shorter fights, less damage, and fewer mistakes. Casuals by definition are going to have to deal with a lot of crap, so they use their skills more.

**I can't emphasize this enough. The available resources are astonishing. There are whole disciplines of IT that should be so lucky.

3.0.9: The Stealth Patch

2009-02-10T07:23:00.004-05:00

Patching has been weird of late. Last week we had 3.0.8a, which didn't do much other than fix a few bugs and tooltips. Now, today we are getting a 3.0.9 patch. This hasn't been on the PTR at all but as usual MMO-Champion has the goods.

There are a handful of class changes. Some are significant, but for Druids this will be a quiet patch. There's only one Druid note and it's Feral:

Ferocious Bite: This ability now only uses up to 30 energy in addition to its base cost.

I won't try to analyze the change, but you can check out the EJ discussion if you're concerned.

Other classes have more changes, but they're roughly similar in impact. There's really only one that might be relevant for caster Druids. All cast time increase debuffs — Mind Numbing Poison (Rogue), Curse of Tongues (Warlock), and a couple Hunter pet abilities — are nerfed from up to 60% cast time increase to only 30%. So, you'll see that in PvP.

There are also some minor UI and raid changes. All in all, it's a clean-up patch, probably designed to fix some pressing Arena issues while limiting the impact on PvE.

So the patch itself doesn't represent a major change. What I'm taking from it though is some positive impressions that Blizzard is getting more nimble at deploying changes. This is not a trivial thing, and getting even a +0.0.1 patch out the door in two weeks is rather impressive. That speaks to their confidence in both design and implementation, as well as agility in QA.

This is a good thing because it makes it more likely to get quick fixes to problems, as well as allowing new stuff to come more quickly. The complaint of course is that "they're making too many mistakes," but that doesn't hold up to inspection. If you look back at Burning Crusade history, there were 9 patches within the first 4 months of the initial 2.0.1 patch. For WotLK, it's more like 6 patches over a comparable time, and most of the fixes have been for balance issues rather than crashing bugs. Blizzard deserves credit for the development and QA work that they've done on this expansion.

The more interesting question is when we will see patch 3.1 — and what it will contain. I'm not going to start speculating too early, but once it's up on the PTR I'll start adding my thoughts.

Switching to Balance: Stacking Hit

2009-02-05T11:30:00.005-05:00

Last time out I posted about key Balance stats, and in particular hit rating. If you've read that, you know why Hit is important.

Suppose you're a resto druid who's decided to switch to Balance. Maybe you've got Naxx on farm now, so you need fewer healers. Or maybe patch 3.1 has arrived and you want Balance as a second spec. Either way, your Resto gear in general will do pretty well for Balance. The exception is Hit Rating. You'll want to stack up some hit to do good DPS as a Moonkin.

To stack up some hit, take a look at your weakest current gear pieces. Try to replace those with some easy-to-find gear with hit rating on it. There's quite a bit out there that you can get rather quickly.

Balance gear: pieces with Hit Rating and Spellpower
Purchasable, quest reward, or 5-man drops; 187 <= iLvl <= 200

Slot	Name	Source	Cost	Hit Rating
Head	Hat of Wintry Doom	Crafted	~300g	44
Head	Titan-forged Leather Helm of Dominance	Wintergrasp MoH	40	44
Neck	Necklace of Taldaram	Drop - OK (H)		43
Neck	Chain of Latent Energies	AH - BoE drop (Naxx)	~3000g	34
Neck	Hateful Gladiator's Pendant of Ascendancy	PvP - honor	38000	34
Neck	Encircling Burnished Gold Chains	EoH	25	25
Back	Hateful Gladiator's Cloak of Ascendancy	PvP - honor	38000	34
Back	Dark Solider Cape	Rep: Revered - Ebon Blade		29
Back	Cape of Seething Steam	Drop - HoL (N)		29
Back	Shroud of Akali	Quest - Gundrak (N)		24
Chest	Ebonweave Robe	Crafted	~1500g	68
Chest	Water-Drenched Robe	Drop - VH (H)		62
Chest	Robes of Lightning	Quest - HoL		55
Hands	Ebonweave Gloves	Crafted	~750g	51
Hands	Lava Burn Gloves	Quest - VH (N)		36
Waist	Girdle of Bane	Drop - UP (H)		48
Waist	Belt of Unified Souls	Drop - CoS (H)		42
Waist	Sash of the Wizened Wyrm	Rep: Honored - Wyrmrest		40
Waist	Plush Sash of Guzbah	EoH	40	33
Waist	Flowing Sash of Order	Drop - HoL (H)		31
Feet	Titan-forged Boots of Dominance	Wintergrasp MoH	15	36
Finger	Ring of Northern Tears	Crafted	~300g	31
Finger	Voodoo Signet	Quest - Gundrak		24
1H Wep	Flameheart Spell Scalpel	Rep: Revered - Kirin Tor		34
2H Wep	Grand Staff of Jordan	Stone Keepers Shard	325	68
2H Wep	Chilly Slobberknocker	Quest - ZD		50
Offhand	Telestra's Journal	Drop - Nexus (H)		39
Offhand	Ward of the Violet Citadel	EoH	25	38

Note: The [Deadly Gladiator's Focus Staff] also has hit, but it's a fairly difficult arena item (1930 rating required). Wowhead also lists Hateful and Savage versions of the Focus Staff, but I can't find any other reference that they exist in-game.

Don't be afraid to lose some Spellpower or other stats in favor of hit. A spell that misses does 0 damage regardless of how much SP you're stacking. And how much Hit will you need? Check out the WoWWiki article for a full breakdown. Assuming you have 2/2 points in Balance of Power and no other buffs:

Heroics: 53 Hit (0 with IFF up)
Raids: 342 Hit (263 with IFF up)

For raids in particular, it's unlikely that you'll have no other buffs, so 342 is probably more hit rating than you'll need in most situations.

Balance gear weights, revisited

2009-02-05T09:19:00.004-05:00

This is another followup to my post on stat weights for trees and Moonkin. Last time out I dug deeper into Resto stats, and I wanted to do the same for Balance.

Here are my current Balance weights:

Balance weights:
Spellpower:   12.1
Hit:          11.3
MP5:          10.0
Crit:          6.3
Haste:         5.7
Intellect:     3.8
Spirit:        1.5
Socket-Red:  230.0
Socket-Yel:  140.0
Socket-Blue: 140.0
Socket-Meta: 360.0

Most of the stats are similar to what Resto needs, so I'm not going to revisit everything I talked about last time.

Hit Rating
The one big addition is Hit Rating. This used to be "spell hit" but this was merged with melee hit along with all the other stat normailzation that came with 3.0.2. It's a confusing stat. The WoWWiki article has a comprehensive definition. But the stat stems from the fact that there is a static % chance for your spells to miss, based on the level difference between you and the boss you're fighting, as follows:

Boss type  Level  Base % chance to miss
Heroic      82           6%
Raid        83          17%

To look at it another way, without hit rating, your DPS will go down 6% against Heroic bosses and 17% against raid bosses. That's huge!

This miss chance is reduced by talents and debuffs. Moonkin should always take 2 points in Balance of Power, which cuts that miss chance by 4%. Furthermore, Improved Faerie Fire will increase your hit chance by 3%. (There are buffs from other classes that help with this too.)

Even with those in effect, your miss chance on raid bosses is still 10%. That's why you need Hit Rating. The goal is to reduce your miss chance to 0%. >WoWWiki has a complete analysis, but generally the magic number for a Druid with Balance of Power and IFF will be 263 hit rating.

Hit rating has a hard cap: once you have enough to reduce your miss chance to 0%, more hit has zero benefit. That's why it's a funny stat to weight: it's hugely important until you hit your cap, but more is worthless. But adding Hit can increase your DPS by 10%, with no other improvements; that's a huge benefit.

Other Stats
Otherwise, your Balance stats are very similar to Resto. In general, MP5 and Spirit are worth less, because mana regen is somewhat less important. DPS can stop casting for a few seconds if necessary, in order for mana to regen. Healers generally don't have that option. Intellect also adds Spellpower through Lunar Guidance, raising the overall importance of Intellect.

Crit Rating and Haste are much more important for Moonkin. Every damage spell you cast, except Insect Swarm, has a chance to crit. That's a huge increase to your damage, so you want a good bit of Crit on your gear. Crits also have knock-on effects: they will speed your cast times through Nature's Grace, and to regen mana through Moonkin form. (Increased crit chance also adds to the value of Intellect for Moonkin.)

Unlike Resto, most of your spells (notably Wrath and Starfire) have significant cast times. Haste helps with that. Haste also reduces the time for a full channel of Hurricane, landing its full damage over a shorter time. So Haste Rating will increase your DPS quite a bit.

So to summarize: Moonkin need Hit Rating, probably up to 263 total. They want more Intellect, Haste, and Crit than the trees do, but less Spirit. MP5 is also not as important.

But having said that, your Resto gear is not bad balance gear at all. If you respec from Resto to Balance, you can start with your Resto gear and you'll do OK. The most important thing when you switch is to look for Hit Rating. I'll add a post soon with easy sources of Hit Rating gear.

Resto gear weights, revisited

2009-02-03T08:48:00.005-05:00

I wrote a post last week with stat weights for both trees and Moonkin. Today I wanted to go into the qualitative reasoning behind the numbers.

Here were the weights I had for Resto:

Resto weights:
MP5:          10.0
Spellpower:    9.4
Intellect:     5.8
Spirit:        5.1
Haste:         2.9
Crit:          2.0
Socket-Red:  180.0
Socket-Yel:  130.0
Socket-Blue: 110.0
Socket-Meta: 320.0

I'll look at primary, secondary, and tertiary stats. I'll skip the gems today, but in essence they're based on looking at stat values for the best blue-quality gems of a given color.

Primary Stats: MP5 and Spellpower

It is just about impossible to overstate the importance of Spellpower (SP). It is the fastest way to increase the size of your heals. This benefits you in all kinds of ways. Beyond having more powerful heals, you'll also have to cast fewer heals, which will save your mana. Spellpower always has been and always will be a key stat for any caster class. There will never come a time when you say "No thanks, I've got enough."

Mana per 5 sec (MP5) provides the opposite side of the equation — more mana. Specifically, it boosts your mana recovery rate. This works on both sides of the 5 second rule (5SR), but its most important when you're casting.

The value of MP5 is much less clear-cut than Spellpower. If you're not running out of mana, you have either enough or too much MP5. As mana regen isn't really a problem for many players, you'll see statements that "MP5 is overvalued". If two items are otherwise similar, but one has MP5 while the other has more SP, most players will prefer the SP item.

When you're evaluating gear with MP5, consider whether you ever go OOM. Don't think about the easy stuff you do; think about when you're really working. (You want to gear for the most challenging situations, right?) If your mana bar is mostly full, give MP5 a lower weight. But don't drop it entirely; you never know when new content will start drinking your mana again.

And also, be prepared for this to change; the developers have clearly stated that they want to look at mana regen. No info yet on whether this will be a tweaking of the numbers, or a complete change to the way the stats work.

Secondary stats: Intellect and Spirit

I only call these 'secondary stats' because they're weighted about half of SP and MP5. But Spirit and Intellect are important.

Intellect (Int) does a few related things for you:

Increases your mana pool
Improves your mana regeneration
Increases your spell crit chance

Our main concerns are the mana implications. A bigger mana pool is helpful in a lot of ways. The 'mandatory' raid buff Replenishment returns a percentage of your maximum mana, so a bigger pool works well with this.

Intellect is also key for Moonkin who have the Lunar Guidance and Dreamstate talents. But we're talking Resto here!

Spirit (Spi) is primarily about mana regen. By default it affects your MP5 only when you're out of the 5SR, but Intensity allows 30% of that to carry over while you're casting too. Spirit directly affects this regen ability, but it's also modified by the square root of Intellect. So Spirit has a much stronger effect on mana regen, but since Intellect also increase your mana pool, it has overall the bigger impact.

Your regen outside the 5SR is also important because of Innervate. Pure MP5 has no effect on Innervate; it's based completely on your Spirit-based regen. A common rule of thumb is that "you need enough spirit to regen a full mana bar within one Innervate." That's a good target but it's neither a firm requirement nor a hard cap on Spirit.

Spirit also affects your Spellpower via the Improved Tree of Life talent. It's a 5/10/15% effect, so 100 Spi adds 15 SP if you have the talent maxed out.

So you'll want both Int and Spi. As it happens, Intellect is found on more pieces of gear, so you'll probably wind up with a good amount without trying. Spirit is less common, so keep an eye for items that have a good bit of spirit on them. If you're close to a 50/50 weight between the two, you're probably in good shape.

Tertiary Stats: Haste and Crit

In the abstract, these are good stats. Crit rating increases your chance for a spell crit, while Haste rating reduces cast times and reduces your GCD. Both these stats used to have spell-specific versions, but in current WoW they are shared with their melee counterparts.

But both are a bit problematic for Resto druids, for various reasons.

Haste has two significant challenges. For one, our most important spells are instant cast, and see no direct benefit from haste. Regrowth, Nourish, and Healing Touch are all affected, but these are not really staples of the healing rotation.

On the other hand, the GCD reduction is nice. The problem here for Resto is Gift of the Earthmother. It already reduces your GCD by 30%, so you have quite a head start. ~~That puts your GCD at 1.05s, but the GCD can't go below 1s.~~ (Edit: With patch 3.0.8, GotEM now reduces your GCD to a flat 1.2s max.) Phaelia did a complete analysis of the relationship. But the upshot is that your GCD is already pretty fast, and so haste is OK but not crucial.

Crit suffers from the same problem: our best spells don't use it, and our talents make it a bit redundant. Our HoTs don't crit, which removes most of the value of crit right away. You won't cast Nourish or Healing Touch all that often, and you will mostly not let Lifebloom bloom, so you just won't get many crit chances from these spells.

The exception is Regrowth; that's used fairly frequently and crits are quite useful. But here we have Improved Regrowth, giving Regrowth a 50% increased chance to crit. So here Crit is just going to have less impact. A change from 15% to 16% crit is a big improvement; you'll crit about 7% more frequently. But going from 55% to 56% is hardly noticeable — only a 2% increase in crit frequency.

Crit is still useful, mostly for your NS+HT combo and for when you want Lifebloom to expire. But, like haste, you'll never feel like it's a stat that you're actively trying to stack. My experience is that you'll have plenty of both without searching it out. Treat it as a tiebreaker between otherwise similar pieces of gear, with Haste just a bit more important than Crit.

Other stats

The other stats you will consider are defensive stats: armor, Stamina, and resilience. These are crucial for PvP, but for PvE instances they're generally not worth sweating over.

Stamina is probably the most important, as you're sure to take random damage at some point. But most gear carries Stamina anyway so you're not likely to go searching for it.

Armor only matters if you're getting whacked by something. So if all's going smoothly, it should be irrelevant. This is why you should feel OK about wearing some cloth gear, when it's available. (Don't take too many rolls from your priest, mage or warlock friends — they need gear too!) Resilience is even less important for PvE, but it will help a bit.

You will see some caster gear with Hit rating on it. This does absolutely nothing for a healer, but you'll see some good caster gear with hit on it. This is designed for Moonkin (or Mages or Warlocks if it's cloth). Leave it for the DPS casters if they need it, but if not, the gear may still be useful to you despite the irrelevant hit rating.

Otherwise there really aren't any stats that a Resto druid will care about. Spellpower and MP5; Intellect and Spirit; Haste and Crit.

Druids: What's the best raid heal?

2009-02-02T10:57:00.003-05:00

What raid heal should you cast?

First, let's talk about what a raid heal is. In short, it's the quick heal you throw on someone who's not the tank. It's mostly used when a healer or DPS takes incidental damage. Caught in AOE. Stands in the fire. Draws aggro from an add. Someone other than the tank has taken damage, and you need to fix it. This could apply to 25- or 10-man raids, or even 5-man groups.

The short TL;DR summary:

Nothing beats Natures Swiftness + Healing Touch... except the 3min cooldown. High mana cost. Save for true emergencies.
Rejuvenation + Swiftmend is your best go-to option, especially with the SM glyph. Just watch for the mana cost.
Wild Growth is surprisingly good (but inefficient) for a single toon. It's a no-brainer if it will heal 2 or more toons.
Rejuvenation beats Lifebloom as an instant-cast low-cost raid heal. But they're close. Use Lifebloom if you need those 2 fast ticks, if you might follow with a mini-stack, or if you're just about OOM.
Regrowth is good for a toon that's low on health but unlikely to take more damage soon — say, a hunter who grabbed aggro but then Feigned.
Nourish on the other hand has a niche for players on the brink of death. Use option #1 or 2 if they're available, but if not, turn to Nourish. Spammable — faster cast and more efficient than Regrowth.

Let's look at the numbers. For now I'm not going to worry about mana efficiency or whether your heal will be overwritten. (I'll have a bit to say about that later.) I just want to look what will heal the most.

Assumptions
Calculated based on Alamein's current spec, glyphs, and gear, and including the normal raid buffs I run with (in 10-man Normal raids, as these are what I spend most of my time on). I pushed these into Rawr to get the amount healed for each spell. Alamein is specced 14/0/57 for this analysis. Glyphs include both the Glyph of Swiftmend and the Glyph of Lifebloom.

I did not account for Haste. For these purposes, it means that the cast-time heals — Regrowth, Nourish, and Healing Touch — will land somewhat sooner, depending on how much haste you carry. I also did not account for Gift of the Earthmother. For this analysis it only affects the Rejuv+Swiftmend combo, enabling it to arrive .3 sec earlier.

If a heal can crit, I figured the average heal, based on % chance to crit and average values for a normal hit and a crit. I would have just used the normal values, but Improved Regrowth would make that a bit dishonest.

I did not assume any pre-existing HoTs on the target, which affects Nourish, Regrowth (due to the glyph) and Swiftmend.

Overall, I do not think these assumptions will affect the analysis significantly. The biggest affect comes from the glyph and talent that extend the duration of the HoTs, as well as the Swiftmend glyph.

Caveat lector.

Druid Raid Heals

(You can also see the full duration effects here, but really the first few seconds are the most important, right?) One set of heals are big but either have a cooldown or require standing still. In order of preference:

Natures Swiftness + Healing Touch. 3m cooldown - save for real emergencies (usually on the tank). Chunky mana cost.
Rejuvenation + Swiftmend. 15s cooldown. Really shines with the glyph. Use it whenever it's up.
Regrowth or Nourish. Nourish is faster and more efficient in the short term — it's better to spam. Regrowth is the bigger heal and leaves the HoT behind.
Healing Touch. Too slow for most situations.

But what about the more efficient spells? Surprisingly, Wild Growth wins for even a single target. It surprised me that it beat Rejuv and Lifebloom; you can see the effect here. Of course this isn't the most efficient use, but if more than one toon is damaged, it's a no-brainer.

The real tough comparison is Lifebloom versus Rejuvenation. They're both instant-cast, relatively efficient, and spammable. Which is best?

Raid Heals: Lifebloom vs. Rejuvenation

Lifebloom gets in faster, due to its 1-second tick. It leads in the 1-3s frame as a result. It also leads from 10-12s, after it blooms. (This happens earlier depending on glyphs and talents.)

Rejuvenation takes a couple seconds longer, but leads in the 3-5s and 6-10s frames, with 5-6s a virtual tie. It also regains the lead for good at 12s.

So overall, I argue that Rejuvenation is the better raid heal tool — but not by much. The faster LB ticks can be an advantage, and its mana cost is slightly lower. On the other hand, Rejuv can be Swiftmended later if necessary.

Oh, what about Tranquility? In 5-man groups, it rocks. Used at the right time, and when the healer won't get pushback or interrupts, it's a "do-over" for the group. In raids however it's tough to use, as it only hits your group.

Finally, a note about efficiency and overheal. My belief is that theorycrafters worry about these factors a bit too much. They are important solely because they affect whether the healer goes OOM. (If you had infinite mana, efficiency and overheal would be irrelevant.) It is important to know what's more efficient, and to use lower-cost spells when they'll get the job done. But when things are getting rough, it's more important to know what will give the most benefit.

Worrying about having your heals 'overwritten' is similar. Yes, your efficiency goes out the window if another healer drops a Flash Heal or something on top of your Rejuv, wasting the remaining ticks. But this only matters for the opportunity cost — you don't want two healers wasting GCDs on the same toon. That's not an effect of any particular spell; it's about communication and working well with your partner. Beyond that, it's about efficiency — see above — and healing meters. And if you're watching the healing meters that closely, your raid will suffer from it.

Evaluating Druid Gear - weights for Moonkin and Trees

2009-01-27T09:21:00.008-05:00

I wrote up an earlier post on ranking resto and balance gear. I want to talk about the tools I use to rank gear, and also the specific numbers I use for those rankings.

Ranking tools

Easy: Wowhead and Lootrank
The easiest ranking tool is Wowhead. In fact, it's built in. I wrote a whole post on ranking items in Wowhead. Here for example is the list of leather helms ranked by Resto value. I do not agree with the default Wowhead rankings -- they vastly overvalue MP5 and Spirit relative to the other stats. (More on the values in a moment.) But you can edit in your own values — click on Show Details and then enter the values you'd rather use.

The alternative is to use Lootrank. It's similar to Wowhead, but gives you somewhat better filtering options, and the capability to save your weights. I use a combination of both tools.

Detailed: Spreadsheet
The most detailed way to rank gear is with a spreadsheet. You can put items into it and do the math based on your weights to rank the various items. Here's a sample from my spreadsheet, showing the ranks I put on helms:

The spreadsheet is great because you can cut out extraneous items, only listing what you want to see. But it's a lot of work; you'll end up copying data from Wowhead. I do it anyway because I can print out a copy and keep it next to my computer. It's especially great for tracking what BoH items I want to buy, or what Heroic to run for any needed upgrades.

In-game: Pawn
The best way to evaluate gear in-game is the Pawn addon. It will show your relative values directly in item tooltips. This is hugely valuable when gear drops. You can look at what you have and what dropped, compare the two numbers, and get a quick gauge of whether something is an upgrade or not. I definitely recommend using a bit of sense with this too; for example, if the upgrade is minimal, it's probably not worth the expense of adding new enchants and gems. Still, Pawn definitely makes your gear choices easier.

Ranking weights

OK, so those are the tools you use. What are the weights you should use?

I wrote a whole post about this early in WotLK, which took a very rough look at gear evaluation. I've been using that basic approach, but with more refined values.

Resto (Tree) stat weights
For resto I'm still using the weights I ninja'd from this EJ post. I rounded those a bit, and did some adjusting for the gem values, giving me the following:

Resto weights:
MP5:          10.0
Spellpower:    9.4
Intellect:     5.8
Spirit:        5.1
Haste:         2.9
Crit:          2.0
Socket-Red:  180.0
Socket-Yel:  130.0
Socket-Blue: 110.0
Socket-Meta: 320.0

Pawn string:
( Pawn: v1: "Resto PvE": Intellect=5.8, RedSocket=180.0, CritRating=2.0, ColorlessSocket=180.0, MetaSocket=320.0, HasteRating=2.9, BlueSocket=110.0, YellowSocket=130.0, SpellPower=9.4, Spirit=5.1, Mp5=10 )

Balance (Moonkin) stat weights:
I did a bit more research here — mostly because I didn't like the Moonkin values I saw in the EJ thread.

With all specs your weights should really change as your gear changes. That's even more important with a stat like Hit: it's very important until you reach the cap, but after that it's not very valuable. So for Balance I took my values from Rawr. (I would have done the same thing for Resto, but Rawr doesn't give you stat values in its Tree model. Shame, that.)

These values should be good at low to moderate gear levels, but as you get maxxed out your values will change. In particular, you'll weight Hit much less once you reach the cap.

Balance weights:
Spellpower:   12.1
Hit:          11.3
MP5:          10.0
Crit:          6.3
Haste:         5.7
Intellect:     3.8
Spirit:        1.5
Socket-Red:  230.0
Socket-Yel:  140.0
Socket-Blue: 140.0
Socket-Meta: 360.0

Pawn string:
( Pawn: v1: "Balance PvE": Intellect=3.8, RedSocket=230.0, CritRating=6.3, ColorlessSocket=230.0, MetaSocket=360.0, HasteRating=5.7, BlueSocket=140.0, YellowSocket=140.0, SpellPower=12.1, Spirit=1.5, Mp5=10, HitRating=11.3 )

Those numbers should get you started. Use them in Wowhead or Lootrank, in your spreadsheets, or in Pawn. And don't be afraid to change them — if you're going OOM a lot, rank Spirit and MP5 higher, for example.

Still to do: create values for PvP. I have no numbers, but I can provide hints for what I'd look at. PvP weights will add value for Resilience, Armor, and Stamina, but you'll need to decide the weights for survivability vs. damage. And it also adds value for stats like Spell Penetration, and will probably lean towards more bursty stats like Crit.

How to PUG a raid

2009-01-26T09:08:00.004-05:00

If it's not obvious by now, I'll be clear: this blog is not written by or for elite WoW players. If you're in a guild that has two Naxx teams or Malygos on farm, I'm sure this stuff is old hat to you.

But I write this blog for the rest of us.

For example, take my guild's raiding experience. We have been able to set up multiple Naxx runs for the past 3 weeks or so, and that's been fun. But we also need to pick up other players, as we usually have 8 that can go into the raid. Usually we need another healer and a DPS, though for some fights we can do fine with just two healers.

We've had a range of PUG players in our raids. Sometimes we'll get a geared, experienced player — maybe someone who's running 25-man raids every week but has an off night to help out in 10-mans. That's wonderful and really helps with learning. The other extreme is to bring in someone new to raids entirely, or at least new to the fights you're taking on. And even someone who's been in Naxx before may not have fought (or fought successfully) the bosses you're tackling on a given night.

It's very common to see this. Reading the official forums, it's easy to believe that Naxx is 'too easy' and 'no challenge'. And yet I see numerous players and guilds who aren't able to get deep into it. For us, we have downed 9/15 bosses max, and felt pretty good about that. I don't doubt that many experienced guilds have an easy time. But there's no need to feel noobish just because you're struggling with Maxxena or whatever. If you have the right attitude, and enjoy challenges, you're having more fun than the uber leet crowd.

So, if you're a average joe or jane like us, maybe you want to try some raiding, but don't know how to get started. Obviously you can (and should!) read up on the fights and know what to expect. But how do you set things up so that you have a good chance for success? Here are a few ideas I've found that will help out.

Tips for starting a PUG raid

1. Start with a core group. If you can, begin with a nucleus of players who you know and get along with. This might be the 5 or so players that you run instances with, or the handful in your guild that want to try things out. Things are easier when you know what to expect from even half of your raid.

2. Tackle something that's realistic. This is affected by how good your gear is, how skilled your players are, and how organized your group is. A good place to start is the Archavon raid in Wintergrasp. If you have zero raid experience, try tagging along for this a few times; it's usually PUGged right after a Wintergrasp battle (if your side wins, of course). If you have no trouble organizing Archavon, your next step would be either Naxxramas or Sartharion in Obsidian Sanctum. They're both targeted for about the same levels of gear. The advantage of OS is that it's three mini-bosses and one boss; the disadvantage is that the boss fight is a little bit complicated, and if you don't figure him out, you get no loot. There are Naxx fights that are more complicated, but the first few bosses are relatively simple.

3. Make learning the goal. Loot is good, and it's worth striving for. But depending on who you're running with, it's very possible that you'll struggle with parts of the raid. If you start with an attitude that loot means everything, that can quickly lead to disappointment, whining, and arguments. Instead, you should focus on understanding the fights you're tackling. If (like us) you're adding new players to an existing core, make sure you understand what they know — and try to teach your newer players. On the other hand, if a more experienced player joins your raid, be willing to learn from what they have seen.

4. Keep the tone light but focused. Don't sweat things if you're struggling, or if someone gets something wrong. That's part of the learning. Be polite. And, if someone is making things unpleasant for everyone else, don't be afraid to have them leave the raid (but be polite about that too).

Remember, the whole point of playing this game is to have fun. Yeah, it can be intense, but that doesn't make it OK to be a jerk.

5. Try to learn every time. If you wipe, try to understand why. It may well be a mistake by someone. Don't punish it but learn from it. If your strategy is really complex, it can take a long time for everyone to learn it. And don't be afraid to own up if you make a mistake; that helps everyone. (And raid leaders can make mistakes too, by failing to explain things.)

6. Understand your raid lockouts. This is a real pain sometimes, but you have to know about it. Basically, you are (usually) saved to a raid instance after your group has downed a boss, but you can be saved before that too. Once you're saved to an instance, you can't group up with a different group and try things again. Some notes about this:

All current Northrend raids reset every Tuesday morning (for US players). So if you ran a raid on Thursday, you're saved to that raid until the following Tuesday.
Normal and Heroic raids are saved separately. So if you ran normal 10-man Naxx, you're saved to it, but you're not saved for 25-man Heroic Naxx.
Check your saved raids. This is done in two ways. The nicer way to do it is to use your in-game calendar. You'll have to turn on the "show raid resets" option, but then it will show upcoming raid resets. You can also accomplish this through the Raid interface. Open the Social window (O) and click on the Raids tab. Then click on the Raid Information button at the top of the window. It will tell you what raids you're currently saved to.

Be ready to explain this to any PUG candidates you're bringing on too. It's surprising how many players won't remember what raids they've run this week.

7. Use a standard method to communicate. Voice chat works best when you're explaining things; you can use in-game voice chat or Ventrilo. You don't need everyone to have a microphone, but if they can listen in that will help.

If voice isn't an option, be prepared to type a good bit!

8. Build up a regular group. Not everyone can run your raid every week. But as your regular group gets bigger, things will get much easier. If someone runs with you and you got along well with them, try to invite them back the next time.

OK, those are my tips. Hopefully those will get you started. The raids are fun, and more accessible than they've ever been. Give them a try!

Our long patchless nightmare is over

2009-01-20T08:07:00.003-05:00

All 3.0.8 posts

It's official: 3.0.8 is going to drop today. OK, semi-official. For whatever reason, Europe always announces maintenance and patches before the US. (UPDATE: it's now official, announced via the log-in screen.)

As I said yesterday, this patch is a bit unusual, in that there aren't any headline additions, but there are a huge list of minor tweaks that will add up to significant changes. I encourage you to check out the MMO-Champion 3.0.8 roundup for details, as they include a lot more than the official patch notes.

There is one significant caster druid change that I forgot to mention yesterday:

Shield Wall, Barkskin, Guardian Spirit, and Divine Protection are now off the Global Cooldown.

This is designed to aid tanks — our bear brethren will be able to pop Barkskin without stopping their threat cycle. However, it's a nice little buff for caster druids, especially when soloing.

The best time to use Barkskin when soloing is to aggro a herd of mobs, pop Barkskin, and start a Hurricane.Prior to today, that Barkskin would start the GCD, so you'd have to wait up to 1.5 seconds to start your Hurricane. That's significant because of their relative durations: Barkskin is 12s while Hurricane is 10s. So until now, you would essentially get off one Hurricane under Barkskin, but after the change you'll have a couple extra seconds to work with, allowing you to at least start a second Hurricane. I believe that will help; today it takes me a bit more than 2 Hurricanes to kill most level 80 mobs. So those two extra ticks will most likely save me a good bit of casting.

The other changes I'll point out is to cooking. We're getting a recipe for Fish Feast which will be a great group buff. From what I've read, the PTR recipe only requires 1 Northern Spice (not the 4 listed here), which makes the mats for this very reasonable.

The other recipe to watch for is Kungaloosh. It's available to you from an NPC in the Dalaran sewers, if you've completed The Taste Test quest in Sholazar Basin. The great thing about Kungaloosh is that the cost in mats is around half the cost for Honeymint Tea.

I'll update later today if any other significant changes show up. Until then, here's wishing for a short maintenance window and quick updates to all your addons!

The caster druid 3.0.8 wrap-up

2009-01-19T10:18:00.002-05:00

All 3.0.8 Posts

Is patch 3.0.8 going to hit tomorrow? I asked my Magic 8 Ball, and it said "Most Likely". Last Thursday, Blizzard poster Zarhym said he'd wager it's imminent. The patch has been up on the PTR for something like a month now, so it does feel like it's getting close. I'd give it about a 70% chance.

Anyone in Naxxramas has dealt with painful lag at times, and there are 3.0.8 fixes to deal with that. Hopefully it will help. There are also fixes in the works for Wintergrasp. When it's under attack, it causes lag throughout Northrend, which is both incredibly annoying and horribly funny. I can speak from experience that the lag in a pitched courtyard battle is insanely bad, as in a personal FPS of something like 0.5 to 0.2. Hopefully that gets fixed as well.

There have been a few more tidbits in the latest builds. One is a nerf for Moonkin, most significant for PvP:

- Celestial Focus (Balance) no longer includes Starfall.

Translation: you'll no longer get a random stun-chance on Starfall hits. Blizzard poster Ghostcrawler has stated that their goal is to remove random-proc stuns. Basically, it's OK to decide to stun someone and use an ability to do it, but it's not OK to randomly stun someone as a natural result of something else you're doing. That's why mace spec stuns for Rogues are gone, for example. Thus, we'll probably see an eventual wholesale replacement for Celesital Focus as it stands.

But that won't happen in 3.0.8. For full details, start with the patch notes. I have also written a few posts on 3.0.8. But the biggest caster druid changes are:

6 second cooldown on Wild Growth.
Wild Growth now affects Nourish (as other HoTs do).
Moonglow now affects Nourish (3/6/9% reduction in mana cost)
The Genesis talent now affects Tranquility and Hurricane.
Starfall now cancels if you shapeshift into an animal form.
Abolish Poison can be cast in Moonkin form.
Set bonuses for the Deadly Gladiator's Refuge, Dreamwalker Regalia, and Valorous Dreamwalker Regalia sets are changed.
[Idol of the Emerald Queen] is getting a bug fix (which is a nerf).

All in all, caster druids won't be majorly buffed or nerfed. The Wild Growth and Starfall changes are definite nerfs, and may change your playstyle significantly. However the subtle talent changes to Moonglow, Wild Growth, and Genesis will balance that out.

The big changes are really for feral druids, including serious changes to both armor calculations and feral attack power on items. I haven't found a great overview source, but this ThinkTank article is a good start. Suffice to say that you'll change how you rate gear for both DPS and tanking.

All in all, it will be an interesting patch, with a huge number of small changes, affecting just about every aspect of the game. Will it drop tomorrow? We'll see!

Druid healing on Loatheb

2009-01-16T10:07:00.003-05:00

Sorry for the lack of posts this week. I'm working on a "Druid Healing Rotation" omnibus, but it's going to take a few days.

Our guild had another successful night last night. This is our first week with multiple runs into Naxxramas. Our first night saw us close out the Spider wing and kill Noth, all of which we'd done before. Last night was new territory for us, as we got three guild firsts: Heigan, Loatheb, and Razuvious.

As a healer, Loatheb is the most interesting boss — by design. (Doubt me? "Loatheb" is an anagram for "Healbot"!) Loatheb casts a wicked debuff called Necrotic Aura. He casts it every 20 seconds, and it prevents all healing for 17 seconds. All healing! That means no spells, no potions, no bandages, no Improved Leader of the Pack... nothing. For 17 seconds, your health bar goes only to the left.

What makes this really interesting for healers is that you can cast heals — they just don't do anything outside the 3-second window. That leads to some very tactical healing to get the most healing into the shortest time. You have to be very aware of the mechanics of your spells. Cast times, GCD, HoT durations, and HoT ticks are all very important. All this will vary, mostly based on your talents, glyphs, and the Haste you have on your gear.

Healing this encounter is all about timing the window. I recommend (again) that you install Deadly Boss Mods. It will track the Necrotic Aura and give you a timer for when the healing window will open. Watch that, and you can time your spells closely.

But what spells should you cast? The key is what I call the Bloom Window.

Let's start at the beginning of a Necrotic Aura cycle. This is your down time. For the first 7-10 seconds of the aura, you don't have much to do. Cast a Regrowth, or two if you're really sweating. It's the only HoT that will last long enough to tick during the healing window. You will probably also use this HoT for Swiftmend fodder in a bit.

Now we come up on the Bloom Window. The goal here is to get Lifebloom to expire and "bloom" during the healing window. So you will cast three Lifeblooms on different targets during the Bloom Window. Those 3 casts will realistically take between 2.5 and 3 seconds*, so you'll get 3 Lifeblooms to Bloom during the healing window.

So when is this 3-second Bloom Window? This depends on the duration of your Lifebloom, which starts at 7 seconds, but extends 2 seconds if you take a point in Nature's Splendor, and 1 second if you use the Glyph of Lifebloom.So here's your window:

Baseline         -7s to -4s
Glyph            -8s to -5s
Talent           -9s to -6s
Glyph + Talent  -10s to -7s

So cast your three Lifeblooms on three different targets during the Lifebloom window. This will do a good chunk of your healing overall.

Now you'll have a few seconds before the healing window. Your best use of the time is to cast more Lifeblooms on different targets. (Remember, you want those earlier LBs to expire at just the right time, so don't stack on them.) With these Lifeblooms, you'll use the 3 ticks during the healing window to provide some extra health. With these Lifeblooms, since you don't care when they expire, you can either cast them on different targets or stack them on the tank or another toon in danger.

Now we're coming to the healing window. The main thing you're shooting for is a Healing Touch to land just as the window opens. HT cast time starts at 3 sec, goes to 2.5 seconds with 5/5 in Naturalist, and will be further cut by Haste on your gear. Having it land a hair late is OK, while a hair early is no help. So err on the side of starting a bit late.

Follow your HT with an instant Wild Growth. That will get you two ticks of WG during the window, on 5 players. Since there's a range factor, keep in mind whether you're hitting the melee/tank zone or the caster zone. But either way, get that WG in there!

Now you have, realistically, one cast left. Your best bet is probably a Swiftmend on one of the Regrowths you left ticking from the start of the cycle. You could also use a Nourish here, but Swiftmend will probably be your better bet.

Alternatively, you could use your Nature's Swiftness plus Healing Touch, but you'll only get one of those every 3 minutes.

If you have GotEM and a lot of haste, you might have just enough time to get a Regrowth off. It's your biggest heal option here, but you'll need a lot of haste and a lot of luck to fit it in. Today you might cast another Wild Growth, but with patch 3.0.8 it will see a cooldown that will prevent this. Better get used to living with that now.

So here's the summary:

-17s   Rest and recover mana
-15s   Regrowth (for ticks)
-10s*  3 Lifeblooms, different targets, as fast as possible
-7s*   A couple more Lifeblooms (on more new targets) depending on how much time you have left.
-2.5s  Begin casting Healing Touch
0s     HT lands. Cast Wild Growth.
1.3s   Begin casting Swiftmend, Nourish, NS+HT, or alternatives
*Depending on where your Bloom Window lands, based on the Natural Perfection talent and the Glyph of Regrowth.

This fight will really test your healing smarts, rather than your sheer HPS. It's a true challenge — enjoy it!

*If you have so much Haste gear that your GCD is 1 second, I'm sure you are so well geared that you don't need my advice!

Introduction to Obsidian Sanctum

2009-01-12T08:12:00.008-05:00

We did three raids this weekend. Friday we ventured into Obsidian Sanctum again. Saturday we built a PuG for 25-man Archavon, and then kept a few for 10-man, though that one didn't complete before the Wintergrasp battle started. Sunday we put together a 10-man Naxx group and cleared the Spider wing again.

We've had a lot of luck clearing Obsidian Sanctum. It's not a terribly long raid, with three mini-bosses, some trash, and the black dragon Sartharion. The encounters are more complex than Archavon but less complex than Naxxramas. So this is a good entry-level raid. The neat thing about Obsidian Sanctum is that you can choose to add to the difficulty by not clearing all the mini-bosses first. More on the details in a moment.

The Info

WoWWiki - Obsidian Sanctum (also links to the mini-bosses)
WoWWiki - Sartharion
TankSpot video - Sartharion

Getting There

Appropriately for a dragon boss, this raid is found near Wyrmrest Temple. That will be your flight point and staging area. The temple has repairs, food, water, and reagents, so you can stock up mid-raid fairly easily.

The entrance to the instance is found in an area called the Chamber of Aspects. It's the basement of the temple. To get there, use your flying mount and move south out of the ground floor. There's a major rift that leads underneath the temple; descend into that and turn north to enter the Chamber of Aspects.

When you die, you'll start at the graveyard on the main floor of the temple. Just turn south and jump off the edge of the temple (in ghost form, of course). You'll fall into the rift and run right in.

There are a few instance portals here, but only the Obsidian Sanctum is active. It's the southernmost portal.

10-Man Raid Composition

Two tanks are needed. Your offtank will probably have the harder job, as he has to collect adds that spawn at random locations. For healers, this may be the first raid you'll do with only two, but take a third if you're just starting.

Melee DPS will be disadvantaged on Sartharion due to the lava waves, so if you're choosing, take ranged DPS first. However, melee can be just fine; they'll just have to be more aware than usual about their surroundings. It's good to have at least one AoE class to help deal with the adds.

Fire resist gear can be a bit helpful, particularly for the tanks. Just don't stack too much at the expense of your other stats.

Consult Be Imba! to see whether your stats are up to par. The raid is about on the same level as Naxx.

Instance Layout

When you portal in, don't move too far, as there are trash mobs fairly close. However, it's safe enough to buff up right by the portal. You start on the south side of the instance. In the center of the instance, you'll see Sartharion, on a rectangular island surrounded by lava. The three drake minibosses are on hills to the west, north, and east of Sartharion.

The handful of trash groups are scattered between the minibosses. There are also patrols with two huge dragonkin; time your pulls so that you only get the patrols when you're ready. The trash mobs don't have to be CC'd, but you'll want your two tanks to split them up if possible.

Watch for the lava rivers as you move around, they can damage you (though it's not really significant. You can mount up, though there's usually no point until all the trash is cleared.

Fight Mechanics

The mini-bosses aren't too tough to beat. They're dragons, with the typical breath weapon and tail lash, so the tank should turn them away from the raid. The trick to the fights come when the mini-bosses spawn a portal. All raid members, except the main tank and one healer should head through the portal to defeat the add before it emerges. When you enter the portal, you will phase out and see the add. They're fairly easy to burn down; when its dead you will be back with the mini-boss. You can also use the portal to escape — most useful if the main healer having a hard time healing the tank.

On the second mini-boss, Tenebron, we've never found it necessary to go into the portal. Just wait for the eggs inside to hatch and burn down the adds.

Sartharion himself is an interesting fight. You can read the WoWWiki guide and watch the video for details. The basic facts however are these:

The tank needs to grab Sartharion and turn him right-angle to the raid, so that he faces east-west.
Sartharion does a flame breath, so you need to keep everyone but the tank away from his head. He also does a tail whip; it doesn't hit for much but it does a 2-sec stun. That will be important because of the....
Lava waves. These form on either the west or east side of the island and move across. Raid members need to dodge the waves by finding gaps in them. These walls will do a big chunk of damage to anyone caught, so you need to avoid them.
Fire elemental adds will enter the fight; the offtank needs to pick them up. It's good to have DPS work to burn the adds down. If the adds are hit by the lava walls, they will enrage and do 400% damage, so you need to drag them to the gap too.

The key is the lava waves, and the gaps in them. The waves can form on either the east or west sides. The gaps are determined by which side the wave forms on, so the east-side gaps are always the same (and likewise for the west side). So if you know where the wave is forming, you know where to run.

X Drakes Up

As I mentioned earlier, you can try to kill Sartharion without killing all the mini bosses first. This will grant you an achievement, but it will also get you more loot. The problem is that each drake will grant extra abilities to Sartharion, so the fight gets a lot harder. I wouldn't recommend this for your first try, but as you get more comfortable with the fight, you can leave more drakes alive before attempting the boss.

Loot

The mini-bosses don't drop gear, but they do drop Emblems of Heroism. Make sure to loot them!

Sartharion drops loot like usual, of course, including the T7 glove tokens. He also drops the [Satchel of Spoils]. Every raid member should roll on this item. It will contain 5 [Emblem of Heroism] and a good amount of gold (~40g). The emblems are of course soulbound. You could in theory just share the gold, but we have left it with the winner of the bag.

Don't confuse the Satchel with the [Dragon Hide Bag]. That's a 22-slot bag that he also drops. Of course all raid members should roll on that as well (though you can only have one).

In the 10-man raid, "one drake up" will get you an extra iLvl 200 epic. "Two drakes up" also gets you an extra iLvl 213 epic, while "Three drakes up" adds the [Reins of the Black Drake].

It's a good raid to try out with your guild — simpler than Naxxramas but not as easy as Archavon. Give it a shot and have fun!

3.0.8 updates from 7 January

2009-01-08T09:59:00.005-05:00

Previous 3.0.8 posts:

No sooner do I post some news, then we see more arrive later that day! 3.0.8 is shaping up to be a fairly significant patch — no new content or huge changes, but a whole host of minor changes that add up to a lot.

Let's see, where to start? How about level 16? You'll now be able to train Aquatic Form from the trainers, rather than running the quest line. I get why they're doing this; the quest line takes a good bit of time due to a lot of travel. Still, it's a bit sad; the druid form quests really add to the flavor of the class. It's unclear whether the quest line will still be available or not.

For more substantive issues, the first thing to note is that it's now confirmed that Nourish will now benefit if a Wild Growth HoT is present on the target. This will increase Nourish's viability as a raid healing tool.

A bigger buff for Nourish is that it will now be affected by the second-tier Balance talent Moonglow, reducing its mana cost by 3/6/9%. Moonglow is a common talent to take in Resto builds, if you build up to Nature's Grace and Nature's Splendor. So this will be an instant buff to Nourish for many Resto druids. I'm starting to find a lot of use for Nourish, and these buffs will pump it up even more. Now, if we could just get a Nourish glyph...!

In items, the set bonus for the Deadly Gladiator's Refuge has changed. The old benefit was a .2 second cast time reduction on Regrowth; the new benefit is to reduce the cooldown on Swiftmend by 2 seconds. The Deadly Gladiator gear all requires high arena ratings (though they'll be reduced by 100 with the patch); you'll need an 1750 rating to get even one piece, and a minimum of 1950 to get the four-piece bonus. I'm more likely to become a GM than to get a 2000+ arena rating, but I wish you luck!

The two-piece bonus on the Tier 7 Heroes' Dreamwalker Regalia (10-man) and Valorous Dreamwalker Regalia (25-man) are changing. The old bonus reduced your Rejuvenation cost by 5%, but that's changed to reducing the mana cost of Lifebloom instead. Rejuv fans will see this as a nerf, but Lifebloom is such a staple that this should be a buff for most of us.

Here's a bug fix that's a bit of a stealth nerf:

[Idol of the Emerald Queen]: This idol was providing greater healing than implied by its tooltip. It has been reduced to correct value.

Ouch! If you read the comments on the [Idol of Lush Moss], people have tested it and found that it provides only a small benefit over the Idol of the Emerald Queen. The assumption was that the Lush Moss idol was bugged, but it turns out we've had an overpowered idol ever since regular Slabs.

There are a lot of profession changes piling up. I've focused mostly on Leatherworking, but if you chose something else, take a look and see what's new. For example, miners will find that it only takes one whack to extract all the ore from a node. Also, the passive benefit Toughness will now affect your stamina rather than directly adding health. That will be a big help if you have buffs that leverage stamina, like Blessing of Kings.

But the big change for leatherworkers is another nerf:

The epic leg armor patches now require a [Frozen Orb] in addition to their other materials.

This means [Frosthide Leg Armor] and [Icescale Leg Armor] just got a lot more expensive to make.

My advice is to make as many of these as you can before 3.0.8 hits, but hold on to them; the AH price will probably rise. If you use them yourself, you might want to make a handful and hang on to them. They are also the easiest and cheapest way to level leatherworking from 430 to 440, so if you plan to do that, do it sooner rather than later!

Those are the biggest changes for caster druids in the latest batch. I'll post more as they arrive!

More on 3.0.8 for caster Druids

2009-01-06T11:44:00.002-05:00

I find myself talking more and more about "caster druids". I'm using that term as a blanket for both Balance and Resto druids. I play both specs, and they share lots of concerns, particularly since Spellpower was consolidated. The two trees are suited to switching back and forth, both due to gear and to play style. So when I (for instance) look at notes for a patch, I'm looking at things that will affect both Moonkin and Trees.

Contrary to my earlier thoughts, we haven't yet seen patch 3.0.8. It might happen today, but current thinking is that it won't. Still, changes are on the way, and we'll probably see them before the end of January at the latest.

I've heard a few more changes beyond what I've discussed before. The one that will hit me hardest is a nerf to the [Battlemap Hide Helm]. It's a drop from Heroic Utgarde Keep, and I've been wearing it since it dropped. I got it for Moonkin but it's darn good for Resto too. Too good! It's somehow well over budget and it's getting nerfed, losing 16 Intellect and 32 Crit rating. Ouch.

Not specific to casters, but Enchanting recipes are changing by quite a bit. The short story is that WotLK recipes will require less dust/essences than before and more shards. On the whole, this should make enchants easier, but it will definitely pump up the value of shards. (Hmm...)

We will now be able to spend those Wintergrasp marks on a wide range of gear. It's PvP gear, so you'll give up some other stats to gain resilience, but still the items will be rather nice. And Wintergrasp is a lot of fun anyway!

Two new Kirin Tor rings have been introduced; healers will be most interested in the [Loop of the Kirin Tor]. Moonkin will probably still prefer the [Signet of the Kirin Tor]. All you need is 8500g for an epic iLvl 200 ring. It doesn't get easier than that!

There are also two new Leatherworking patterns, most interesting to Moonkin. The [Windripper Boots] and [Windripper Leggings] are itemized nicely and will probably be the pre-raid gear of choice for our feathered death-dealers.

Skinning is getting a Moonkin buff too. The passive benefit, Master of Anatomy, will increase its benefit from 25 to 32 crit rating.

Finally, there are two new interesting Balance glyphs. The [Glyph of Focus] will reduce the diameter of your Starfall but increase its damage output, while the Glyph of Typhoon will remove the knockback of Typhoon and reduce its mana cost. Both spells will be more usable in instances as a result.

So that's what I've seen so far. Overall some decent stuff; Moonkin will be especially happy about the glyphs and leather patterns. We'll see if new notes come out tomorrow!

Introduction to Naxxramas

2009-01-05T13:31:00.001-05:00

Talon Guard had a busy and productive holiday season. The capstone however all happened after New Year's Day, as we've been able to do quite a bit of raiding. We took 5 TG members into a PUG for Archavon, which went so well that we stepped into Wyrmrest Temple and killed Sartharion in the Obsidian Sanctum. Both runs were successful, and we were able to down all bosses.

We also got our first taste of Naxxramas. Friday night we put together a run that included 6 TG members, our good friends Hazek and Humansheild, and two other pick-up players. After some group adjustment (including swapping a mage for a resto Shaman), we were able to clear the Spider wing in Naxx. We had so much fun that Hazek came back to Talon Guard. Welcome back!

Last night we took on our second venture to Naxx, this time trying out the Plague wing. We downed the first boss but had a hard time learning the Heigan Dance. We got better at it each time, but it got late before we completed it. We'll try again.

There are great guides for Naxxramas, starting with the WoWWiki Naxx page and the Tankspot videos. For boss fights, those are the two places to look first. Check the WoWWiki page and read up on the fights, and if the fight is more complex (cough Heigan cough) check out the Tankspot video. But here are a few basics to get you started.

Getting There

Naxxramas is located in eastern Dragonblight, close to the border with Grizzly Hills. Alliance will fly into Wintergarde Keep, while Horde will stage at Venomspite. Both towns offer a full range of vendors, including reagents and ammo.

You'll need a flying mount to get to Naxxramas. As you fly towards it (it's on your zone map), you'll see the giant floating necropolis. Fly underneath it. The entrance is on the bottom center of the ziggurat — the base of the pyramid. As you get close you will see fairly small balconies; just land there. There's a small staging room with a summoning stone; there's not much room in there, so on a busy raiding night things will be hectic.

A plea to my fellow players: Please. Just dismount. I know you think it's clever to mount your Mammoth in the middle of the room, but you're about the 10,000th person to think of it. Surely there are more creative ways to be annoying.

Instance Layout

There are four instance portals around the anteroom. It really doesn't matter which one you enter; they all go to the same place. Once inside, you'll find a relatively safe ring that leads to four hallways. These are the four wings (quarters) of Naxx:

NE: Spider Quarter
SE: Plague Quarter
SW: Military Quarter (aka Death Knight wing)
NW: Abomination Quarter (aka Construct wing)

Each wing has three bosses except the Abomination quarter, which has four. From what we've seen, there aren't too many trash pulls in any quarter, in keeping with WotLK-esque design. You should be able to do the wing in about the same time as a 5-man instance — if your group is up to the task.

When you kill the final boss of a wing, a portal-looking sign will light up in the central ring; when all four bosses are dead, a portal will open to allow you access to the final bosses, Sapphiron and Kel'Thuzad.

10-Man Raid Composition

Two tanks are needed. Entry-level raids should probably take three healers. Poison cleansing is important in many places, so you'll probably want either a druid or a shaman tasked with doing that, ideally a healer. For your remaining 5 players, bring a mix of melee and ranged DPS. We have not yet found crowd control to be important.

There are no attunement requirements for Naxx. I don't know if level 80 is required, but it's certainly recommended. If you can't quite handle Heroics yet, you're probably not ready for Naxxramas.

This Naxxramas Raid Minimums page provides a good guide for minimum gear requirements. You can also consult Be Imba! and see what it recommends for you. These aren't absolute guidelines. I was probably at the bottom or slightly below those requirements when we started, and never felt that my gear was holding me back.

Fight Mechanics

From what we've seen, the boss fights will generally be a bit more complicated than Heroic boss fights; you'll also have to coordinate twice as many players. So if you're not experienced, plan to spend some time learning the fights. There usually seems to be a twist or an important detail that you have to manage. For example, here are the three boss fights in the Spider wing:

Anub'Rekhan: The boss will send out a ray of spikes from himself to a player; any players in this line or nearby will be hit by the spikes too. So your players have to spread out. He also casts a Locust Swarm that will do a lot of damage; you have to decide whether to kite him to avoid it or just heal through it. You'll also get a lot of adds that the offtank must pick up.

Grand Widow Faerlina: She starts the fight with four "worshipper" adds. Your offtank will have to pick them up and tank them, but not kill them. Faerlina will periodically go into a Frenzy effect, increasing her damage and haste. That's bad... but killing a worshipper will dispell the Frenzy. So the raid has to kill a worshipper as soon as the Frenzy arrives. (Obviously all the DPS needs to kill the same worshipper.) You'll have to save the other worshippers for subsequent Frenzies. So, use raid icons and mark a kill order for the worshippers. The offtank will have to treat them with care; ideally they'll be at 15% health or so when it's time to kill them, but you definitely don't want them to die early!

Maexxna: This giant spider has the annoying habit of periodically cocooning one of your players. You need to DPS the cocoon down to free the player. She will periodically stun the entire raid and continue to do damage, so you can't let anyone get low on health. She also puts a poison on the tank that reduces healing received by 90%, so that must be cleansed ASAP.

So there's a lot to learn for each fight. Some (like Patchwerk) are a lot simpler, but most have lots of details to track. Be prepared to learn (and possibly wipe in the process). Even if you've read a lot about the fights, it can be tricky for everyone to know what to do at what point, either because they miss cues or because they forget what happens in Phase VI or whatever.

Deadly Boss Mods can help with that. It's an addon that tracks a lot of these special abilities and announces them. By default it will announce them to you, but you can set it to announce to the whole raid. Open up the GUI (type /dbm config), open the specific Naxxramas sections, and click the "Announce to Raid" checkbox for each boss. It's a huge help to know (for instance) that the next Frenzy will come in 15 seconds.

Of course your players still have to know what to do, and that's the learning aspect. But that's the fun part! If you go into a raid like this expecting it to be a loot piñata, and expect everything to go perfectly, you'll probably be disappointed. Stick to heroics! Raids like Naxxramas are most interesting when you're doing something different and challenging. And challenging means that you'll wipe. Accept the frustration, try to always learn from your mistakes, and keep a positive attitude, and you'll find that you're having a lot of fun.

Respeccing

2008-12-23T10:44:00.000-05:00

If it's not obvious from this blog, I feel equally committed between healing and DPS. And that means I have to think about respeccing. A lot. I have a paladin friend from another guild, who runs instances. A lot. All. The. Time. I'm on his friends list, and he often pings me to see if I want to heal an instance. Lately, I've had to tell him that I'm DPS right now, so I can't help. Really though, I could just respec. It's not as bad as it used to be. Having more gold helps, and having Spellpower gear (instead of +heal vs. +damage) help.

One of the annoyances is the sheer clicking to respec. I'm now using the addon Talented to solve that. It can save talent specs and automatically apply them, which is great. I use a slightly different option: I'll bookmark specs from Wowhead. Talented can parse the Wowhead URL and apply that spec to your toon. You can confirm that it's right before having it do all the clicking to spec you out.

A side note: if you're going to do this, make sure to click the "Link to this build" link in Wowhead. That will "lock in" your spec and URLify it. It's also the way to post URLs to specs. Otherwise you will get a blank spec — or worse, a look at the spec you started with instead of the one you wanted.

That takes care of most of the hassle. You still have to alter your action bars, replacing buttons with the new spells you've learned — or maybe just more appropriate spells for your spec. The bigger hassle in WotLK is to deal with your glyphs. The DPS glyphs are no use for healing, so you'll have to switch. This is the biggest cost; if you switch your 3 major glyphs, that might cost you ~100g for each switch. It's also annoying, because you'll have to get to the AH to buy glyphs, and then find a Lexicon of Power to make the change.

So: today, it's possible, mildly expensive and annoying just to respec, and more seriously expensive and annoying to switch glyphs. The good news is that this is going to change at some point. Blizzard is working on a dual-spec capability. The idea is exactly like what I would want: you can swap between two predefined specs, with much less cost and hassle. The spec swaps should also swap glyphs and action bars, and won't require you to reapply your "lost" spells when you switch. And you should be able to do it pretty easily and cheaply. To quote from an official Ghostcrawler post about spec swapping:

Our thought at the moment is that swapping specs (going from A to B) will truly be free in towns and possibly during the prep phase of PvP. In an instance it may cost a nominal fee (think reagent level). We want you to be able to do it when you want to do it, but we also don't want to slow things down if everyone is constantly flipping spec from fight to fight. But if it's free in town, then obviously it can't be more of a burden out of town than just hearthing and being summoned back is or nobody will use the remote option.

Of course this is subject to change, but if it stays in this form, life will be good. My A and B specs will be Resto and Balance of course, and I'll be able to move back and forth without too much trouble. Of course, for the most part the gear is the same which helps. There are a couple of gear pieces that swap +hit for MP5 or whatever, but as a druid, carrying around lots of spare gear is standard already.

It doesn't solve anything. You'll still have to pay (and re-glyph) if (for instance) you want to switch your B spec from Balance to Feral, or if you want to adjust to get more PvP talents. (You could choose to have your A-B specs be PvE and PvP of course.) Some people feel this is an unreasonable burden, but they won't be happy without on-the-fly free respecs. That too me sounds like overkill... because soon you'd be expected to respec at any time. "Oh, this boss does a stun, so everyone drop DPS spec points and put them into your stun resist talent."

That way lies madness. The A-B spec swap is the right way to go. And I can't wait!

3.0.8: Bits of News

2008-12-22T07:51:00.001-05:00

Well the 3.0.8 patch didn't drop on Tuesday. If it's not tomorrow, I would bet it'll come on 30 Dec. A couple notes to my earlier 3.0.8 post:

Regarding the Starfall change: evidently, the tactic of concern was to pop Starfall and change into Travel form. You could bop around at speed and drop stars on quite a few enemies. I don't really think this was a big deal — the cheetah is pretty squishy — but I can see where it'd be painful in arena. Either way, I'm OK with the nerf here.

Regarding Polearms: Evidently the current best-in-show polearm is [Black Ice], which drops from Malygos in both Normal and Heroic. Still nothing for caster druids.

An update on Wild Growth: Official talk now is about a possible change that would allow Wild Growth to benefit Nourish as other HoTs do. That would be pretty cool. I keep wanting to like Nourish. It's a handy spell to have, and I think we'll find a good bit of use for it. But as Phaelia has shown, it isn't really advantageous either in efficiency (HPM) or sheer healing throughput (HPS). The WG/Nourish change would really benefit Nourish as a raid heal, especially from painful burst AoE damage. Here's hoping that it goes through.

Other than that, not a whole lot to report. Had a fun weekend, with runs into regular Halls of Lightning and Culling of Stratholme, and heroic Nexus (good) and Violet Hold (not so good). In Heroic VH we got stuck on the first boss, who was Xevozz for us. With three spheres we'll really have to work out our strategy for DPSing on the move. After three or four wipes — including once when we didn't realize a player was AFK — we gave up on it and ran Nexus instead. The good news is that Nexus appears to be very doable on Heroic. We did struggle with Keristrasza, probably because our DPS was moving/jumping too much, gimping DPS more than required.

Next up for me: complete the Merrymaker achievements, including runs into Ahn'kahet for the hat for Tis the Season, and run battlegrounds With a Little Helper from My Friends. Curious to see how annoying that will be — it kinda sucks to be a druid that can't shapeshift. Probably the best option will be to heal like crazy on defense in AV or something similar.

Patch 3.0.8 for Resto and Balance Druids

2008-12-16T07:52:00.002-05:00

Today's long maintenance window may indicate the arrival of patch 3.0.8 (which happens to follow 3.0.4). That's very quick, as the PTR only went up a week ago. But I would bet that Blizzard is eager to start Arena season 5 before Christmas, for players who have time off from school or work. So we'll likely see the new stuff today.

So what's happening? The 3.0.8 patch notes from yesterday show a lot of changes. There's some general fun stuff — Tauren on raptors! — but for the most part the general changes are bug fixes. One in particular that we've encountered:

The Wintergrasp Aura should now properly update in all instances, transferring the buff when the zone control changes.

We saw this in Utgarde Pinnacle the other night. My computer locked up and I had to reboot halfway through the instance. When I returned, I could no longer loot the [Stone Keeper's Shard], though the rest of the group could. Best guess is that Wintergrasp fell to the Horde while we were in the instance, but the other players didn't get the message. So that will suck a little bit when you lose Wintergrasp, but will help when you seize it.

There are a few other minor changes like that in 3.0.8, and of course the rewards for Arena Season 5 are part of it too. But I mostly wanted to look at Druid changes, and specifically changes that affect Balance and Resto druids. The Feral changes are big, though, so if you're a bear or kitty, check them out. In short: armor calculations are a lot different, and the weapon-damage relationship is completely different. No more Feral Attack Power! There's a good first look from Big Bear Butt Blog as a start. It appears that this will be a minor nerf, but the challenge right now is more about understanding the effects of the change more than overcoming it. Ferals have some thinkin' to do!

So what about the rest of us? Here's the changes that will affect Resto and Balance druids:

Wild Growth now has a 6 second cooldown. This is the big one. You can get an in-depth look from Phaelia (with only a couple of tears shed). Wild Growth has been an amazing spell; it will be 90% as amazing after the change. For starters, this doesn't even really matter if you're running 5-man instances. Wild Growth hits 5 toons and HoTs for 7 seconds, so there's no benefit to casting it twice. It's a bit bigger nerf for 10-man instances and pretty substantial for 25-mans. But even there, the "smart heal" effect plus the HoT aspect means that spamming WG was subject to diminishing returns. So I suspect that Druids will move along just fine.

Genesis: Now works with Tranquility and Hurricane. This makes Genesis more attractive for Boomkin, basically buffing Hurricane damage by 5%. The Resto effect on Tranquility is probably less exciting — Tranquility already heals for a lot — but Genesis is already attractive for Resto anyway.

Remove Curse and Abolish Poison can now be used in Moonkin form. I'm a bit confused, because Remove Curse was already available in Moonkin form. ~~My hope is that they really mean that Remove Curse can be used in Tree form. That current limitation is a bit annoying to Resto, and it would be nice to see it gone.~~ But it's great that Abolish Poison is now available for Moonkin; it's a good solid utility we can provide to the group. Boomkin, help out your healers: remove curses and poisons! EDIT: I forgot that had changed for Trees. Obviously I was leveling as Balance when I posted!

Starfall: Instead of canceling shapeshifting, now cancels on shapeshifting into an animal form. (The "instead" clause here refers to a previous PTR build, and not current live behavior.) OK, now you can't cast Starfall, shift into Bear form, and blast your enemies with arcane bolts while you're armored. So don't do that. This must be targeted at Arena tactics that I'm not familiar with. If you're deep enough into Balance to get Starfall, you'll almost always have Moonkin form, which has a pretty good armor bonus too. Maybe the risk was Starfall + Cat form + Stealth? Or Sprint? Either way, it's gone now.

Nature's Grace - Now also effects Revive. You know what I hate? When people use "effect" where they mean "affect". If Nature's Grace really effected Revive, it would mean Nature's Grace procced Revive. Now THAT would be a buff! Instead, you'll occasionally get a half-second shorter Revive. I predict now that you will see this happen exactly three times in the next year.

Polearms: Now trainable by Druids. I like this, just because Polearms are IMHO the best looking weapons. But there are only 111 polearms in the game, and none of them have any Spellpower. (Two have MP5, but the best of them is the [Ethereum Phase-Spear], a vendor green from Netherstorm. Our Feral cousins will be eager to roll on stuff like the [Wraith Spear] that drops in Naxx, but polearms will be strictly eye candy for casters.

And... that's it for the mana-eater Druids. One noticeable nerf, and a couple of utility buffs. We're not buffed like Arcane Mages... but we're not nerfed up like Hunters either. Should be fine! I'll update if anything new or surprising shows up.

Utgarde Pinnacle

2008-12-15T07:34:00.000-05:00

Alamein is now 80. /cheer! (Oh, and WTB a new /cheer emote for female Night Elves. Thx!) I had my first runs this weekend into Gundrak, the Oculus, and Utgarde Pinnacle. Oculus in particular is a shockingly innovative instance. But I think my current favorite instance is Utgarde Pinnacle, so I'll talk about that one today.

(Also: screenshots, yay!)

Utgarde Pinnacle (UP) is the second half to Utgarde. It's designed on Normal for level 80 players. It's not terribly hard, but it is noticeably more work than the mid-70 instances. As a level 80 instance, it will grant reputation; make sure to wear your favorite tabard to get rep for whatever faction you want. There are two quests for UP, and you'll pick them up from Brigg Smallshanks immediately after zoning into the instance; it's terribly convenient.

The trash is pretty simple. UP is populated by Vrykul and Scourge, with a few beasts also in the mix. We didn't see a major need for crowd control, though we did a good bit to stay in practice. The only thing I noted here is that the Ymirjar Berserkers were immune to roots, and probably to other CC forms too. The Dragonflayer Seers are healers, so burn them down quickly.

The bosses all have some complexity, and the fights require some level of attention from everyone. Here's the Need To Know:

Svala Sorrowgrave - Vrykul/Val'kyr

After clearing a bit of trash, you'll come into a room with Svala. As you enter, she's in dialog with our good friend Arthas, who converts her into a Val'kyr. The key to the fight is the Ritual of the Sword. Every 20 seconds she will rise out of combat and teleport one party member onto her altar. Three adds will spawn and channel to hold the victim in place, while a sword slowly descends over the victim. If the sword hits the victim, he dies, so the key is to kill the adds as quickly as possible. We just DPSed the adds down, but on Heroic it appears that you need to AoE them. (A tip: she keeps channeling the ritual after the adds are down, so ranged DPS can get some free shots in before she begins attacking again.) For us, she was easy, and a good warmup for the rest.

Gortok Palehoof - Magnataur

After some more trash, you'll come to a room with a clickable stasis controller. Five frozen mobs will line the hallway, with Gortok at the end. When party members click the controller, mobs are sequentially unfrozen. On Normal, you'll have to fight two before Gortok, while on Heroic you'll fight all four.

The good news is that they're all pretty much a tank 'n spank. The first four mobs include a (giant) worgen, rhino, furbolg, and jormungar. Each has its own special ability: the worgen hits hard and does a Mortal Strike; the rhino does a stomp and a charge; the furbolg does a chain lightning, and the jormungar does an AoE poison. After defeating 2 (Normal) or 4 (Heroic) of them, you'll face Gortok. He too is tank 'n spank. He does a frontal cone attack so the tank should face him away from the group; he also does an AoE shout that's apparently nasty on Heroic, reducing your max health by 1000. On Normal though we didn't do anything fancy, and just spanked him down without much trouble.

Skadi the Ruthless - Frost Vrykul

This is another cool event, and the most complicated fight of UP. He's also a tough boss, so you'll work for this one. You'll come to a long hallway with the giant Skadi and his proto-drake Grauf.

When you aggro Skadi, he'll take off on his drake and start a gantlet event. Waves of Vrykul will attack you in groups of 5 or so. You end the gantlet by killing Skadi's dragon, but to do that you'll need to use the harpoon guns at the end of the hall. And to do that, you'll need to pick up harpoons dropped by the Vrykul. You'll see these stuck in the ground after fights; they'll show the gear cursor when you hover over them.

So you'll fight your way down the corridor, picking up harpoons as you go along. It's probably best to have 1 or 2 DPS designated for harpoon duty. As you fight, Skadi will take periodic passes down the corridor; his drake will lay a band of frostfire on one side. Call it out and have everyone move to the other side. When someone has four harpoons, they can take down Grauf. The harpoon guns are at the end of the hallway. They show a gear cursor too, and will fire when you click on them (no need to mount them or anything). Skadi and Grauf will only occasionally be in range of the harpoons, so look for the raid warning ("Skadi is in range of the Harpoons") and fire off a few shots when he flies past. After four shots, Grauf will die, Skadi will land, and you're finally fighting the boss.

(Note: you'll keep any leftover harpoons if you die, which can either make the gantlet easier after a wipe, or can be a strategy for achievement fights on Heroic.)

The boss fight is a simple tank 'n spank but Skadi is tough. The end of the hall is a fairly confined space, and Skadi does a wicked whirlwind that you'll need to avoid. Our healer got caught up in it and died, though Spirit of Redemption and Rebirth saw us through. I'm afraid of what he'll be like on Heroic. Everyone, melee in particular, has to make sure to dodge the whirlwind at all costs.

So to sum up:

Aggro the boss and fight groups of Vrykul
Pick up harpoons dropped by the Vrykul
Dodge left or right to avoid the frostfire
When you have at least four harpoons, and when he's in range, use the harpoon guns to kill the drake
When he lands, tank down Skadi, but avoid his whirlwind

Keep those points in mind, and you'll get through the chaos.

King Ymiron - Vrykul

You'll come into the final room, where you'll see the king receiving tribute from the final trash pack. You can pull the trash (including the last two Berserkers) without aggroing the boss.

Ymiron has two notable abilities you'll have to deal with. The first is a spell he'll cast called Bane. It gives him an aura that will cause Shadow damage to the party if Ymiron takes direct damage. So when Bane is up, the party has to hold up on DPS. It has a cast time, so if you watch (and have cast bars turned on!) you can see it coming. The good news is that it can be dispelled or spellstolen.

Ymiron will periodically (we saw it twice) cast a group-wide stun. (I have read that you can trinket out of the stun. We didn't try it so I can't confirm, but you might want to equip your PvP trinket before the fight.) He'll then run to one of the nearby boats and channel the spirit of a Vrykul ancestor, which will grant him another special ability. They are as follows:

Front left boat: Summons an orb that does AoE shadow damage. Avoid the orb, and kite Ymiron away from it.
Front right boat: He will cast a Shadow damage AoE. Keep healer and ranged DPS back.
Back left boat: Summons four adds; AoE them down.
Back right boat: Casts a Spirit Strike stacking debuff.

For the most part, you'll just DPS through no matter what ability he gets. Just avoid the orb if it's up, and AoE the adds if they arrive. Ymiron hits pretty hard, and on Heroic this is gonna be tough. But on Normal we had no problem.

So, a good instance! I love the Utgarde aesthetics and music, maybe more than any instance since Deadmines. There's just enough trash to make things interesting. The boss fights all have their twists, but they're not insanely complex. UP was a lot of fun. But it's also pretty tough, and I think it's gonna be a bear on Heroic.

Drak'Tharon Keep

2008-12-10T09:16:00.000-05:00

Another instance we ran last weekend was Drak'Tharon Keep. (I need to start grabbing screencaps to illustrate these articles!) DK is a fort that's located between Grizzly Hills and Zul'Drak. It's pretty typical of the WotLK instances I've done so far: well-designed, fairly short, and thoroughly enjoyable.

Drak'Tharon is populated by Scourge, Drakkari trolls, raptors, and spiders. The trash fights aren't too complicated. One tip: you'll see Drakkari bat riders. If you just attack them, you'll fight the riders and their bats separately. But if you CC them first, you'll just fight the riders; the bats disappear. On Normal it wasn't worth the effort.

Boss fights are amusing enough, and pretty simple for the most part. Here's the Need To Know for each of them.

Trollgore - Dire Troll

On Normal he is pretty much tank 'n spank. He's attacked by adds throughout the fight. He can do two things with them: eat them for a damage buff, and explode their corpses for an AoE. On Normal we ignored that and just burned him down. It's possible that on Heroic you'll need to clean up the adds before they reach him, but I'd start by just DPSing him and see how that goes.

Novos the Summoner - Lich

He starts out shielded and unattackable. He will summon adds which you have to deal with. One type of add that he will summon is a Crystal Handler. After you kill four Crystal Handlers, the shield goes down and you can attack the boss. DPS him down. He'll cast a Blizzard effect — run out of it. Pretty easy.

King Dred - Devilsaur

Pretty much tank 'n spank. Clear the other raptors before pulling him. He will periodically fear the party. He also pulls in adds. Healers: watch for his Grievous Bite. It's a significant bleed effect, and it won't go away until the tank is healed to full health. (This includes after the fight — make sure to top off the tank when you're done, or he'll die while rolling for loot!)

Prophet Tharon'ja - skeletal Wind Serpent

Half of this fight is a normal tank 'n spank. But Tharon'ja will periodically cast Decay Flesh. This will turn him into a full-flesh wind serpent... and turn the party into skeletons. You'll have a new action bar with four abilities:

1: Skeletal Strike. This is your attack; use it as much as possible.
2: Taunt. If one player is taking too much damage, taunt Tharon'ja away. On Heroic the best strategy might be rotating taunts, though you'll want to end up with Tharon'ja on the tank if possible.
3: Bone Armor. Use it if you're the one with aggro.
4: Touch of Life. This is a self-heal that also drains health from the boss.

So when you're a skeleton, everyone DPS on the boss with your Skeletal Strike. After doing a certain amount of damage, Tharon'ja reverts to skeletal form, the party returns to normal, and the fight goes on as usual.

One note: Hunter pets won't become skeletons. So a hunter helps with his fight a lot, as the pet will continue to DPS when the party becomes skeletal.

We didn't have too much trouble on Normal, with any of the bosses. Even Tharon'ja wasn't bad once you're ready for the skeleton form. I have a suspicion though that this is the kind of instance that will be a lot worse on Heroic &mdash much harder than it's mid-level Normal difficulty would suggest. We'll see!

Ahn'kahet: The Old Kingdom

2008-12-09T08:26:00.001-05:00

We did a couple instances over the weekend. The first was Ahn'kahet — impossible to spell and destined to be known as AK, I guess. It's definitely worth the visit, though it will take a bit more time than the early WotLK instances I've seen so far.

Ahn'kahet is found in western Dragonblight. It shares an entrance and meeting stone with Azjol-Nerub. It's another Nerubian Empire leftover, partially occupied by the Scourge and partly held by Twilight Cultists, who have also summoned some elementals. In other words, just about every type of CC is usable at one point or another in here.

The map is the longest I've seen yet in WotLK, and it's a bit more confusing; a couple times we found ourselves looking for the next hallway. At least one sequence requires you to deactivate two crystal orbs to free up a boss (Prince Taldaram). The complex map reminds me of Underbog a bit, with a winding multilevel path. As with Azjol-Nerub, you'll have some 'paths' that are really ramps made of web; they're easy to miss.

Ahn'kahet has four bosses on Normal. None of them are a serious challenge per se but they all have tricks or complications that you should know about. With a good plan, things will go smoothly. Here are the key facts to know about each guy:

Elder Nadox - Nerubian Vizer

The first boss, a giant spider-looking guy, has one key fact you need to know. He'll summon adds during the fight. Most of these are pretty unimportant, but you absolutely must keep track when he summons a Ahn'kahar Guardian. While these guys are up, Nadox and his summons are immune to damage.

You'll get a raid warning when a guardian is summoned; pay attention and burn it down. If you do, the fight will go quickly.

Prince Taldaram - Darkfallen

As I mentioned, you first need to release this guy before you can fight him. Look for two pillars, accessible via web ramps. Each pillar will have a small party of mobs and a crystal orb. Kill the mobs, click the orbs, release the boss.

Taldaram himself isn't too tough of a fight. He'll spawn Flame Spheres, which do damage to nearby party members, but on Normal the damage isn't too bad. He also does a Vampiric Embrace on a party member, which is a bit annoying... but the right answer is to DPS his butt (which ends the Embrace), so no need to adjust. Avoid the Spheres and burn him down.

Jedoga Shadowseeker - Twilight Cultist

You'll eventually come to a room with Twilight Cultists and two stairways. Take either one (doesn't matter) and you'll see Jedoga floating amidst her initiates. When you kill off the last initiate, she descends and starts the fight. When she starts the fight, she'll summon more initiates, but they'll be inactive and untargetable at the start of the fight.

Mostly, the fight isn't too complicated. She does an AoE that you can avoid if you're watching. But there's an important event to watch for. A few times during the fight, Jedoga will ascend and become untargetable, calling for a volunteer. One of the surrounding initiates will step forward, walking towards her circle. Kill it quickly. If the volunteer reaches Jedoga, it will sacrifice itself. This adds its health to Jedoga, but more importantly gives her a +200% damage buff. That hurts, and even on normal a couple of these will likely lead to a wipe. So find and kill the volunteer!

Herald Volazj - Faceless One

This is a fun fight! He's not too bad on Normal; he hits a little hard but nothing that should trouble you. The key is the Insanity phase. You'll see this twice, when he hits 66% and 33% health. Everyone will phase out and see shadow-copies of the rest of your party. Kill 'em. They're not too bad — they're not full copies of your party, and don't have all abilities. Once you've killed them, you'll see your other (real) party members and their shadow-copies, so you can help kill them too. Do that quickly, and you should have no trouble with Volazj.

Any of these bosses can wipe you if you ignore the tricks, but if you know what's going on, they will be pretty easy. The scary part? There are Heroic achievements for killing the bosses... while basically ignoring the tricks. (See Respect Your Elders and Volunteer Work.) These will be pretty tough, but I guess that's what the achievements are for!

Evaluating Druid Gear (Resto and Balance)

2008-12-04T08:46:00.001-05:00

TLDR version: Being really casual about it, here's a quick-and-dirty way to judge the Resto gear you'll see as you're leveling or running normal instances:

1 Spell Power/MP5 ~ 2 Intellect/Spirit ~ 4 Haste/Crit
1 reg socket ~ 10-13 SP/MP5
1 meta socket ~ 25 SP/MP5

And this probably works well enough if you want to switch to Balance sometimes too — or for a Restokin doing both like yours truly.

OK. Now for the full post.

I've struggled with how to evaluate Druid gear in WotLK. I had a pretty good process worked out for BC, based on a lot of data I'd ~~stolen~~ learned from Resto4Life, the Wowhead rating scales, WoWWiki, and other places. But there hasn't been a solid consensus on stat weighting that I'd found yet for WotLK, so I've been guessing more than I'd like.

So here's my numbers. First, let me say, this is for evaluating leveling gear: stuff you find as quest rewards, normal instance drops, and maybe earlier crafted gear. So there's no need to be super precise about things. You will replace this stuff pretty quickly with Heroic drops, raid drops, badge gear, and/or PvP rewards. So don't sweat it too much: get some good rough comparisons for now, and we'll do some real analysis for the purples later on.

The first question for me is whether I'm grabbing something for Resto or Balance. I switch back and forth a lot, so I want good gear for both specs (and Restokin too). The change to Spellpower from +heal and+spell damage makes "both" a more attractive option. I'm most worried about Resto, so my plan is to take good Resto armor and swap out trinkets and maybe a weapon for my Balance set.

For Resto I did find a good Resto itemization thread on Elitist Jerks. In particular I think I'm going to work from Whïspur's post for now. Rounding off, he comes out with the following relative weights:

MP5: 100
Spell Power: 94
Intellect: 58
Spirit: 51
Haste: 29
Crit: 20

Like I said, I'm really interested in quick-and-dirty comparisons. So we can simplify the above even further. So a casual comparison could use something like this:

1 Spell Power/MP5 ~ 2 Intellect/Spirit ~ 4 Haste/Crit

I think that is probably a close enough SWAG until you really start looking at purples down the road.

Now this ignores armor, stamina, resilience, and other stats. That makes great sense for high-end raiding but for a more casual player the other stats grow in importance. For example, if you're PUGging a heroic, extra armor and stamina will help you get through fights where aggro is a bit dicey. But if we're talking quick-and-dirty, for me (as a more casual player) this basically means I'll stick to leather armor, and mostly only worry about stamina if everything else is nearly equal.

The other thing to look at is gem sockets Sockets are even more important now because WotLK gems are more powerful — about double the strength of BC gems. The BC Rare-quality +SP gem, [Teardrop Living Ruby] gives +9 SP. The WotLK equivalent, [Runed Scarlet Ruby], gives +19 SP. So what does that mean for evaluating gear?

First, decide if you're looking at early gear (say, available at level 70-75) or later gear that you'll start Heroics with. For early leveling gear, assume that you'll use green-quality gems at best. For the later gear, assume blue-quality gems.

The formula above is way stronger at valuing Spellpower than the formulas Blizzard uses for gems. For example the [Runed Scarlet Ruby] gives +19 SP, but the same-level [Luminous Monarch Topaz] is +9 SP and +8 Int, which in our formula is equivalent to about +13 SP. Because of this, for quick-and-dirty comparisons, I won't use the pure spellpower gems for judging a socket. Choosing the Luminous Monarch Topaz as a baseline gives me a weight like:

1 socket ~ 10 SP/MP5 (green gem/early leveling gear)
1 socket ~ 13 SP/MP5 (blue gem/late leveling gear)
1 meta socket ~ 25 SP/MP5

Now again, if you're looking at purple raiding gear, you'll want to judge by specific sockets, epic gems, whether the socket bonus is worthwhile, etc. But for now I think these numbers to judge whether I'll keep the gear or not.

These are all based on Resto numbers. But how will this work for Balance? I haven't found anyone yet who's theorycrafted out the same kind of comparison for Balance that Whïspur did for Resto. I think — for me! — the above comparison is close enough. A serious Moonkin will value crit, Int, and maybe haste a lot higher, and Spirit and MP5 a good bit lower. But for leveling gear, I think the above numbers are close enough.

I'll spend more time on the detailed numbers after I hit 80 and start raiding and running heroics.

Violet Hold basics

2008-12-03T07:39:00.001-05:00

Status update: I've been gone for the better part of two weeks, due to travel and holidays. Still, I've been able to get into the game a bit. Alamein dinged 76 last night. Mattoo is 80; Firegrin and Wyrmm are 79, and Eric's been playing up his Death Knight who's up to 76 too. So I have some catching up to do!

Last night we ran Violet Hold which was a blast. It's an instance found in Dalaran, like Stockades in Stormwind. The instance itself is a lot like Black Morass: you stay in place and face 18 waves of adds coming through portals. After waves 6, 12, and 18 you face a boss. The setup here is that the Blue Dragonflight is attempting to invade Dalaran through its prison. After facing 6 (and 12) waves of invaders, one of them will open a prison cell, forcing you to deal with a prisoner. The final boss is the blue dragonflight leader of the invasion, Cyanigosa.

We ran the instance twice. The first time included Eric's DK tank Abscess, Sedem healing (Disc priest), Firegrin (BM hunter), Wyrmm (Sub rogue), and my Alamein as Boomkin DPS (in a 35/0/31 Restokin spec). With this group, we wiped once while learning a boss fight (more in a sec) but finished the event on the second try. After that, we ran it again, subbing out Firegrin to bring in Mattoo as Feral DPS, and finished it on the first try.

The trash waves are mostly Dragonkin. We really didn't need CC, but we did it anyway, more for conserving the healer's mana than anything. Druid CC really shines here, since Hibernate works on Dragonkin and Entangling Roots works indoors. Between that and Wyrmm's Sap we were really able to pace the fights.

The key here is to have some space between the portal and the tank, so you can CC out of damage range. The portals spawn at several random locations, and most of them give you enough room; the toughest one spawns in the middle on the lower level. On Normal difficulty, we really had no problem even with zero CC, but I'm sure heroics are different. There are also 5 switches on the wall that you can activate (once) to put a big chunk of damage on any active mobs. We really didn't need these, only pulling them a couple times to see what would happen.

Some of the waves will spawn additional mobs, who tend to head straight for the healer; make sure to have someone watching for this. If uncontrolled, the mobs will eventually try to head for the door shield. If they damage it down to 0% you're defeated (again, similar to BM), but that was never an issue for us.

So the trash ain't bad. The tougher part for us were the first two prisoner bosses. The challenge is that they're a bit random. There are six mobs to choose from, and each has a different strategy, so you don't know who you're going to get. I had read up a bit in advance, but it was tough to know all the strats for all possible bosses.

You can get good info on them from both WoWWiki's VH pages and from Wowhead's VH data and comments. But two weeks into WotLK, the info is still a bit spare and I had to gather info from a few sources. Here's a quick and dirty guide to the six bosses you could face, from simplest to most complicated.

Moragg - Beholder

A straight tank-n-spank. Will put a stacking debuff on the tank that reduces armor (5% per application), also damages another group member with an eye beam attack. Does magic damage, but otherwise nothing complicated. On Normal he was a cakewalk. On Heroic he's probably a healer-intensive fight (high damage on 2 targets).

Lavanthor - Core Hound

Another tank-n-spank. He has a flame breath ability so the tank should face him away from the group. We didn't face him, but he shouldn't be tough.

Erekem - Arakkoa

Didn't face him either. He spawns with two adds, and the key here is to take Erekem down and just control the adds. If an add dies first, bad stuff happens (125% damage buff to the boss).

Xevozz - Ethereal

He spawns orbs that are Bad News. I'm not sure exactly how it works, but you need to a) keep him away from his orbs, and b) keep party members away from the orbs. But the orbs will teleport you to them. In Normal we were able to just burn him down while eating some of the orb damage; this hit us pretty hard but I popped Tranquility to get us through a rough patch. On Heroic this is gonna be a tough fight. Evidently the Orbs can be rooted, which will probably help a lot, but we didn't know that/do that.

Zuramat the Obliterator - Void Walker

This guy wiped us, but it's easy once you know the trick. He spawns adds that will AOE the party hard. The key is to watch for the Void Shift attack. Zuramat will cast Void Shift on one party member, and only that player can target and kill the adds. The key is to realize when you're Void Shifted and kill the adds quickly.

If you're not shifted, you'll see spheres casting the AOE; when you shift, you'll also see small voidy guys who are casting them. Kill them fast. (One Moonfire was enough to do it for me.) Everyone who's not Void Shifted should just DPS on the boss. The biggest challenge would be if the healer gets Void Shifted. You'll either need the tank to eat damage for a few seconds, or have a backup healer ready to switch from DPS. On Normal, with a good group you could probably just DPS the boss and eat the damage, but you'll need to be quick. On Heroic that's probably a wipe strategy.

Ichoron - Water Elemental ("Revenant" model)

This fight goes in phases:

DPS on Ichoron (actually his shield).
Ichoron blows up, knocks you back, and drops to the ground. Little water elementals spawn around the room and head for the boss. Kill them, they have about 4000 HP on Normal.
When an elemental eventually reaches Ichoron, he pops back up with a new shield and starts fighting again. So you want to kill as many as possible before they reach him, or you're dealing with boss+adds at the same time. Subsequent elementals will heal him if they reach him.

This repeats a few times until he hits 25% health, when it becomes a DPS race.

TLDR Version: Kill him, then kill the adds before they reach him. Repeat.

He wasn't bad on Normal, as long as you know the trick to the fight. I worry on Heroic that the adds will be tough to kill. Activating the wall switches can kill the adds, which many people recommend. This shouldn't be necessary on Normal, but may be key for Heroic.

So: those are your six possibilities. You'll face two of them each time. On our first attempt, we wiped on Zuramat after 12 trash waves, and we had to restart the whole event including the first boss. The two bosses were the same as our first try. The good news is that we got loot for each kill of boss #1.

The final boss, Cyanigosa, was easy by comparison. She's a typical dragon fight: tank faces her away from the party, melee needs to attack from the sides instead of the back to avoid her tail sweep. She does a blizzard AOE that you'll need to run out of. A few times during the fight, she'll teleport everyone on top of her. This is an aggro wipe. On Normal, she was darn easy. If everyone stays awake I don't think that Heroic should be tough (if you can get past the first two bosses, anyway). She was slightly anticlimactic after the more interesting fights that came before, but then again we've killed tons of dragons in Blades Edge so dragon fights are second nature now.

So: Two runs, one wipe, two successful completions. Abscess got a lot of plate loot, so he was pretty happy. We also got a mail belt and a druid staff (that I took for offspec). All in all, it was a lot of fun. It's a great instance and another example of Blizzard's design getting better and better.

WotLK gear replacement, revisited

2008-11-19T07:36:00.000-05:00

This is a post-launch followup to my earlier look at gear replacement. My best guess at that time (late September):

T4 gear doesn't start to get replaced until fairly late in the first zones, and will be relatively decent even into your mid-70s. T5 will last to your late 70s, and T6 won't be replaced until you get into heroics or the new Naxxrimas.

WoW Insider had a post on upgrading to greens, where the poster points out that it's not happening, flirts with complaining about it, but then counsels patience.

So what's the scoop? Blizzard did this on purpose. Flash back to the release of Burning Crusade. There, the design was that pretty much everyone would replace their gear with early quest rewards. Only Naxx raiders held on to their gear beyond even Hellfire, and even that T3 gear was replaced from midlevel quest rewards. For everyone else, their hard-won raid gear was gone by the time they dinged 62 or so.

New gear is cool. But this quick replacement had a few consequences:

It devalued the hard-won raid gear, leading to a "what was the point?" reaction.
The nicely matched tier gear was replaced with mismatched greens, resulting in the dreaded "clown suit" look.
By amping up the equipment values so quickly, it created an inflation effect where each subsequent level — later quest rewards, dungeon drops, and BC tier gear — had to be more and more overpowered.

The experience wasn't good for players and created headaches for the developers. So they changed it.

Here's my graphic from the last post, showing the relative item values from various types of gear:

There's two big changes. First, the early BC purples are more comparable in value to the midlevel WotLK greens, so you'll hold on to those much longer. And second, the easy access to Badge gear means that even non-raiders will have some good gear that should last for a long time.

You will replace your gear eventually; how quickly depends on what kind of gear you had. Here's a quick summary:

Gear source	Replaced with:
BC quest rewards	early WotLK quest rewards
BC instance drops	early-mid WotLK quest rewards
BC Tier 4 gear	mid-level WotLK quest rewards
BC Tier 5 gear	late WotLK quest rewards, WotLK dungeon drops
BC Tier 6 gear	WotLK Heroic drops or Naxx gear

So what's been my experience? My starting point was a combination of T4-level and BoJ gear. I replaced a ring fairly quickly with a quest reward, but otherwise I wasn't very tempted by any Howling Fjord gear. Last night, I replaced my first decent purple. The [Life Binder Talisman] replaced my [Voodoo Shaker]. That was a bit sad; the Voodoo Shaker was a recent pickup, my last BoJ spent. But it is nice to have some new gear for a change. The two items aren't far apart, and that's probably true for a lot of the rewards I'm starting to see. But something like my [Grovewalker's Leggings], a 100-BoJ pair of pants, will probably last until I start running Heroics.

Have no fear; you'll get upgrades. Just be thankful that the transition is a lot smoother this time around.

Leatherworking: time to give it up?

2008-11-18T07:31:00.000-05:00

First, the good news. Leveling Skinning is about the easiest thing you can do, at the launch of a new expansion. There's tons of dead animals all over the place, just ready to be skinned. I'm already at 450 skill for that, with probably about 150 Borean Leather in the bank so far. It's nice.

But I haven't made a single new leather item yet, and I'm starting to think that it's time to quit Leatherworking. That's really a shame, because I like it. The irony is that Blizzard has said that the profession changes were designed to route you to something you enjoy rather than something you felt you 'had' to take. I enjoy Leatherworking, but the available items are so bland and boring that I'm not seeing any use from the profession.

Leatherworking has always suffered (along with Tailoring and Blacksmithing) in that many of its products aren't consumable. Yes, you can make armor patches and leg armor. But the bread and butter of the profession — the leather or mail armor — is unlikely to sell for much. People just get better rewards from dungeons, rep, and badges. There are a few high-end items that you can sell, but those are pretty rare. Most things aren't worth the material cost. And the patches, while not bad, compete with enchants and aren't a huge money-maker.

The Bind-on-Pickup leather items used to be great, at least for me. I worked hard to craft my Windhawk set. It was a bit better than T4 and lasted me through all of Burning Crusade. (I didn't get out much.) Raiders got some good BoP patterns too. But it appears that Blizzard won't do anything this good any more, which really kills the attraction and value of Leatherworking for me. Even if there was comparable gear, I took pride in wearing something that I'd made myself; it marked me out as a leatherworker (though the models were crappy) and made me feel that the profession gave me something unique. Without that, my motivation is much less.

Drums were a Burning Crusade addition designed to make Leatherworking more attractive. And they did! The effects they added to battle were great and were a big advantage. Too big. Advanced raiding guilds had many of their players convert to Leatherworking so that they could chain-drum their way through challenging encounters. That is specifically what Blizzard wanted to combat (and rightfully so). So, they changed drums so that all drummers in a party or raid are subject to the same cooldown. Not a bad change, but as my normal party has three leatherworkers, we're really overstocked with drummers now.

So, Wrath has another answer: fur linings. These are crafter-bound wrist enchants, like the ring enchants that enchanters get. They're not bad. Compare Fur Lining - Spellpower to Enchant Bracers - Superior Spellpower. The fur lining gets you almost 125% more spellpower than the enchant. The attack power advantage is about the same, while the Stamina bonus is huge. There are also fur linings for resistances. It's all pretty nice.

But that's what Leatherworking reduces to: +37 spellpower for me. That's it. Beyond that, I've lost my unique (and pretty good) armor; any value from my Tribal Leatherworking specialization, and much of the utility of my drums. It's depressing.

I haven't looked at it, but I suspect that Blacksmithing is in much the same boat. Enchanting is probably about where they were before, as are the consumeable professions of Alchemy and Jewelcrafting. Tailoring at least gets their flying carpets, and Engineering gets their choppers and a host of other unique and cool items.

So will I switch? I'm reluctant, since Alamein has been crafting leather her entire career. I'm still hopeful that I'll see some useful changes with future patches. Besides, I don't have time to level another profession while I'm leveling up. So I'll probably hang on to Leatherworking for now, at least until I reach level 80 and/or the 3.1 patch comes out (and we see more recipes). But if things stay as they are, Alamein may have to become an Alchemist or Inscriptionist.

Druid leveling in Wrath: Resto and Restokin

2008-11-17T09:45:00.000-05:00

I did want to add a note about my leveling experience so far, with two specs.

I started out with a 5/0/56 full Resto build. The story in short: Yes, you can level as full Resto. It's not horrible, but it is fairly slow. After a while, I became annoyed with how long it took to kill things. I watched Recount for a while, and I was doing about 350 DPS, which is pretty much crap.

So yesterday, I respecced to the 31/0/30 Restokin build I talked about last Friday. No surprise, it's a lot faster to kill things as a Moonkin than a basic Night Elf. I collected a variety of stats, and as a Moonkin, I'm doing something closer to 610 DPS. It's not double, but it's not far from it, either. Moonkin can take a beating too, which helps. It's just a lot faster and easier, and I don't regret it.

The only remaining question is whether a Restokin can heal an instance run. My biggest problem is that I'll miss Wild Growth. Mana efficiency may be an issue too. I'm hoping to get a run into the Nexus soon, and I'll report back on that.

Howling Fjord is Tapped

2008-11-17T07:54:00.000-05:00

Last night, I more or less finished the quests in Howling Fjord. Sometimes, I am a completist to the point of OCD, and leveling in a new zone (one that I think is beautiful and fun) is the kind of thing that gives me the itch to get everything.

So even after I completed the Explore Howling Fjord and I've Toured the Fjord achievements, I kept working to complete the last few quest chains in the area. I finally completed just about everything last night, with the help of Firegrin and Wyrmm, when I finished March of the Giants and then Demolishing Megalith. On to Dragonblight!

I was stymied by a couple of bugged quests. The worst is I've Got a Flying Machine. It's a vehicle-based quest, where you take over a plane to haul bags of artifacts out of the Steel Gate excavation. Problem is, the bags appear to bug out over time. After a server reset, things are great, but over time fewer and fewer bags can be hooked. By the time I tried it, everything was borked.

There appears to be a similar problem with Seeds of the Blacksouled Keepers, though I was able to complete it anyway. The quest asks you to kill spores, then freeze the remains. The spores appear to progressively bug out, evading so that nobody can kill them. When I did it, yesterday around 2PM, about 70% of the spores I saw were evading. Firegrin and Wyrmm went after them around 10PM and only two spores were accessible; they had to camp those two and kill them repeatedly.

The only other quest I had trouble with was In Service to the Light. The issue here isn't bugs, it's spawn rate on the Deathless Watchers. The only spawn points I found were on the edges of two upper platforms; there's about 6 spawn points. But you need to kill 10 watchers, so everyone was running back and forth, tapping watchers instantly when they spawned. It took me about 20 minutes to get enough of the watchers to complete the quest.

Such is life in a new expansion. It's painful to run into quests like these, but on the balance it's a necessary part of trying new things. I would rather have Blizzard try new mechanics and add more quests. That added complexity comes at a cost; it's less likely that all bugs and issues will be fixed before launch. But I'd rather deal with that instead of killing a couple dozen more shoveltusks or whatever.

So, Howling Fjord is checked off. What are my conclusions? Here are my top awards for the zone:

Best quest: This one's tough, but I'll go with The Slumbering King. I also liked Sleeping Giants in the same area, which made it a lot of fun.

Best questline: The Iron Rune Constructs. It starts with The Human League, and runs several quests through Wyrmskull Village and Utgarde Catacombs. Then it heads to the Explorers' League Outpost with the Tools to Get the Job Done quest. It ultimately finishes by having you drive your own rune construct into Baelgun's excavation site. There's a lot going on here, both in lore, new quest designs, and new equipment.

Best new quest mechanic: The harpoon guns in It Goes to 11.... Though I'll give a special runner-up award to Send Them Packing. Threatening mobs with emotes, I love it!

Funniest quest: Absholutely... Thish Will Work! Note to self: don't trust a drunk alchemist.

Worst quest: Aside from bugged quests and poor spawn rates, I would vote for March of the Giants. It's fine if you're grouped up (as indicated), because the giants aren't bad to kill then. But I tried to solo it, and the frustrating thing is that I could solo it, if everything went right. I killed the first giant, no problem. But whenever I tried again, a giant would eventually break my roots, or a rune construct would get involved... I was about 1 for 5 before I gave up and sought help.

WTF? quest: The Way to His Heart.... You have to help... sea lions mate? I suppose it could be worse!

Most beautiful subzone: Ember Clutch. There's a lot of beautiful stuff in Howling Fjord, but the burning trees (using the new flame effects) are simply stunning.

Best-looking mob: The Vrykul are really amazing. As Wyrmm pointed out, it would be wonderful if player character models looked this good. It's tough to pick a favorite, but I'll go with Halfdan the Ice-Hearted, the Thane of Skorn.

Favorite NPC: Zeh'gehn, the incomprehensible troll at Scalawag Post. "Ye'll ku fer yerself with yer own deadlights, yahso." Of course!

Most amusing vignette: The "Thish will Work" quest above was pretty funny. But I was constantly giggling at the extra transport option you receive from Grezzix Spindlesnap with the Street "Cred" quest. Talk to Lou the Cabin Boy, and he'll give you a canoe ride to Scalawag Post. A tauren... in a canoe... as a taxi service? Too funny!

Now: on to Dragonblight!

Quests to catch in Howling Fjord

2008-11-14T11:49:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, I got up and collected Eric at about 6:30 to head to Fry's. I wanted to get the Collector's Edition of Wrath, so I wanted to line up early. It turned out that there were about 25 or 30 people there, but almost 100 copies of the Collector's Edition, so we were safe. Still, it was fun to participate.

I had to work, but after I got home I quickly logged in and got cranking. Alamein had logged out in Menethil, so I headed to Howling Fjord and got busy.

I'll give a more detailed look at my thoughts eventually. But for now, it sums up as wow. My jaw hit the floor again and again as I came across new elements. I want to talk about the art and design in some detail eventually, because it absolutely kicked me in the teeth. It far surpasses my hopes.

The quest design too is amazingly cool, though there are a few rough spots and ho-hum "collect 4 pieces of meat" quests. (The latter are actually important in order to make the special quests stand out, but still: boring quests are boring.) But I'll highlight a few of the don't-miss quest lines that I came across so far.

Harpoon operation

This chain begins in Valgarde with The Path to Payback. The first parts look pretty standard, but at the end you get to take control of a couple harpoon guns and rain destruction on both buildings and attacking drake-riders. At one level this is simple training in operating siege machinery... and that's important. (Hint: look for the folded arrow icon on the right when you want to 'exit' the harpoon.) But it's also fun and cool. And there's an amusing coda at the end; as Eric described it, it's a real Dr. Strangelove moment.

The spirit world

This one begins in Valgarde with Into the World of Spirits. The first quest has you go diving for a bag found on a sunken ship, and I know that those quests can be annoying and skippable. Don't. The next two steps have some very cool stuff involved.

In the second step, The Echo of Ymiron, you enter the spirit world and observe a conversation. This is cool for a couple reasons. It gives you background on what's happening with the Vrykul, but it also just looks incredibly cool. But, there's more! I don't want to give spoilers, but while in the spirit world, you should wander around until you find an... important figure. It starts a cool scripted event that's well worth the price of admission.

The third and final step is similarly cool and informative. Well worth the time.

Falcon quests

This starts in the Explorers' League Outpost with the Trust is Earned quest. The first couple steps are pretty easy and harmless. The third step, Falcon Versus Hawk, is pretty annoying, because there aren't enough hawks around, so it takes forever. I almost skipped it, but the last phase is a lot of fun, and teaches you more about the new vehicle/minion control mechanism.

Iron Rune Constructs

This is a long chain, starting all the way back in Valgarde with The Human League. After a lot of work in Wyrmskull Village, you end up heading to the Explorers' League Outpost, where you'll eventually get Tools to Get the Job Done from Walt.

Walt will send you all over the place to get materials. (This includes the amusingly named We Can Rebuild It and We Have the Technology.) After that though, Walt will build you a small siege vehicle to finish the quests with. It takes a little work to learn how to control it, and it's pretty slow. But the quest is otherwise easy, and gives you a very cool experience at learning more of the new vehicle interface. Have some fun with this one.

So those are just a few questlines to look for. But I haven't found anything yet that I'd say you should skip anyway, so just do it all!

Restokin for leveling in Wrath

2008-11-12T10:45:00.001-05:00

I'm struggling a bit with how I want to level in Wrath. I'm very hopeful to heal a good number of instance runs, so I want to keep my Resto build if possible. But I'm concerned that Resto will still be a bit too squishy for easy leveling. And respecs are still expensive, so I don't want to go back and forth too much, particularly when I need to save for Cold Weather Flying.

My current plan is to keep my Resto spec and see how that works for leveling. Maybe I'll try the slowest AoE grind possible:

Buff with Thorns.
Aggro a good group of mobs, maybe with Hurricane.
Pop Barkskin and drop another Hurricane.
Shift into Tree of Life form, and keep healing yourself while the remaining mobs kill themselves on your Thorns.

OK, that's a bit of a joke. Right? Ha ha? I've actually tried it a bit, and it does work... though it's incredibly slow.

If that plan fails me and I decide to move to Boomkin, I'll probably go with a Restokin build. That should give me the survivability and DPS I need to level, but leave enough healing power to heal instance runs. That's the theory anyway, and I'm hopeful that it will work.

I had previously guessed at a Restokin build. I think that's mostly right, but I came up with a new build that I think makes some key changes.

Here's the new build: Level 70 Restokin build: 31/0/30

Key changes from before are as follows.

I decided to take Genesis in Tier 1 of Balance. That helps a lot with healing, even more than DPS. But it comes with a cost, because you can't really afford to skip Starlight Wrath either. To do this, I sacrificed points in Brambles, Nature's Reach, and (most painfully) Dreamstate. I also put an extra point into Moonfury, since that now gets me to a full 3/3 in the talent.

On the Restoration side, the changes were less severe. I decided to move the build from Healing Touch to more of a Regrowth build. That meant that I stole points from Naturalist and Empowered Touch and gave the points to Gift of Nature, Improved Regrowth, and Tranquil Spirit (to make the rare HT more palatable). Regrowth is a more versatile spell than Healing Touch, and it has better synergy with Nature's Grace. It's less mana efficient, which makes Dreamstate that much more necessary. On the other hand, level 71 would likely see me pick up Swiftmend to add to my healing arsenal.

So that's my best-estimate Restokin build for leveling, starting at 70. I think my level 80 Restokin target would be 40/0/31 build, but that would depend heavily on what problems come up in both soloing and healing as I level.

Wrath: Where to start?

2008-11-12T07:23:00.000-05:00

Here we are — one day away from Wrath of the Lich King. I'm eager to start exploring new zones, attempting new quests, and running new instances. But that all starts with traveling to the starting zones and invading Northrend.

With Burning Crusade, it was pretty simple. You jumped through the Dark Portal and hit Hellfire Peninsula. A quick quest would fly you to the starting city (either Honor Hold or Thrallmar) and you'd start picking up quests.

But Wrath will offer you a choice, because there are two starting zones this time around. Both Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra will start you off with level 70 quests, so you'll have to pick which one to head to first. Of course, it's not a major commitment (like Aldor vs. Scryer); you can switch back and forth between zones. Yet one way or another you'll have to pick a starting place.

I did a bit of research into it, to decide where to go. As far as I can tell, they're balanced quite well; it won't matter which zone you start with. I looked up quest rewards in both zones, and they shouldn't matter a huge amount. Most are green items at iLvl 138, which will probably not replace anything better than BC dungeon blues. Borean Tundra has quests that will give you one druid idol and a selection of blue weapons that might be more useful, but overall things look pretty comparable for druids.

So, it comes down to aesthetics I think. Here's a quick look at both zones, to help you choose.

Borean Tundra

Borean Tundra is on the west end of the Northrend croissant. Alliance can get there from the Stormwind harbor, while Horde will take the zeppelin from Ogrimmar. The Horde has a stronger presence here, but both factions have towns and quest hubs.

Borean Tundra is a grassy, barren environment. (It's... tundra, actually.) You'll see caribou, wolves, and mammoths wandering the plains. It's populated by Tuskarr, Taunka, Naga, and dragonkin. Oh, and you'll be working with the Murlocs too. D.H.E.T.A., the anti-Nesingwary group, has a strong presence here as well.

Howling Fjord

The Howling Fjord is on the other side of Northrend from Borean Tundra, on the easternmost peninsula of the continent. Alliance travel there from Menethil Harbor, while Horde will catch a zeppelin from the Undercity.

Howling Fjord is rocky and mountainous. Wildlife is dominated by herds of shoveltusk, and odd, stocky combination of bull and caribou. The NPC population is focused around the Vrykul, a viking-esque half-giant race. There's also a strong Scourge presence, leading the Forsaken to attack here in strength.

I really don't think there is a strong advantage to either starting zone. It all comes down to aesthetics and experience. I expect that I'll end up spending a good bit of time in both places, but Howling Fjord looks like the most appealing area to me. (I'm also a bit concerned about the effect of D.H.E.T.A. on the skinning profession in Borean Tundra!) My best advice is to pick whichever zone looks like the most fun, and don't worry about it too much.

I'll be logging out in Menethil tonight. See you there!

Useful addons from Tekkub

2008-11-06T08:29:00.000-05:00

I use a lot of addons. I made a list before the 3.0.2 patch dropped, and I had more than 60 installed. Now some are multiple addons from a single package, like the 10 or so components of Deadly Boss Mods, but still that's a lot.

I've talked about healing and UI addons before. Addons like Pitbull and Grid and Clique can totally change your playing experience, and I would hate to live without them. But today I wanted to focus on a few addons that are less essential, but just make life a lot nicer.

Specifically, I want to focus on a few of the cool addons I'm using from Tekkub. He has a minimalist philosophy for his addons; they're generally small and focused on a single task. This also means they're typically easy to install and operate, with minimal to no configuration needed. His stuff is mostly very clean; I've had a couple small problems when his pieces have conflicted with other addons, but for the most part they just work.

His page has a list of 45, and I've probably tried about a third of those. But I'll just talk about four of my favorites today.

Buffet

If you just try one of these, try Buffet. Basically, it gives you two buttons for your action bars — one for health and one for mana. But these are smart buttons.

Consider the health button. Normally it will show you food. But what food? It will pick the best food you have available in your bag. As you use up one kind of food, it will swap in whatever else you might have available. Oh, did the mage just give you [Conjured Mana Biscuit]? Buffet is smart enough to show that first (or any equivalent conjured food) instead of the stuff you bought. However, it doesn't show you buff food; it's only going to use the plain health-regenerating stuff. Buffet does the same thing for the mana button, showing you the best drink you have available, and showing conjured water in preference to purchased.

That's cool enough. But when you go into combat, it switches to show you potions instead. Just like with the food, it's smart about that, showing you the most powerful potions first, then scaling back if you run out of your best stuff. And it's smart about conjured items here too, showing you healthstones or mana gems first, switching to potions when the stones are gone (or on cooldown).

For a final trick, the health button will switch to show you bandages instead if you hold down the Shift key. All in all, it's a slick way to consolidate a lot of stuff. On my mage, I used to have separate buttons set up for food, water, bandages, and mana gems; I had to swap between conjured food/water when I was soloing and conjured biscuits when I was grouped. Now, it's all automatic.

There are a few limits. The biggest one is not Tekkub's fault: you have to be careful about those times when you think you're out of combat but aren't, or you'll drink a potion when you meant to eat food. But that's easy enough to do. I've found some food that Buffet doesn't know about, like Stewed Trout. (It does know about the new Northrend foods however.) It's also unaware of Charged Crystal Focus, the poor man's healthstone if your friendly neighborhood warlock isn't around*. These are all trifling complaints; there's no good reason not to use Buffet.

Buffet does take just a bit of setup. Once it's installed, you get to the config screen with /buffet. From there, click on the Generate Macro button, and drop the resulting button into your action bars.

Download Buffet here.

FriendsWithBenefits

FriendsWithBenefits is a lot simpler to explain and operate than Buffet. In a nutshell, it gives you the same friends list across all your toons in a given realm. It works completely in the background and doesn't require any configuration. After you install it, it will keep track of your friends lists on various toons. When you load another toon, it will add those friends to the master list, and add all your other known friends to the toon's list. I haven't tested it extensively, but it seems to be smart about removing friends too; if you remove a friend on one toon, it then propogates that correctly to your other toons.

Download FriendsWithBenefits here. [Note: no actual 'benefits' are received from your friends via this addon. Don't expect any auto-cybering...]

StealYourCarbon

The basic premise of SYC is simple: it's a shopping list. Whenever you visit a vendor that sells stuff you need, SYC will automatically stock up. Use it for all sorts of things: Reagents. Food. Water. Arrows/bullets. You tell it how many of each item you want to keep in your bags. Then when you visit the vendor, SYC will automatically buy enough items to top you off.

It's pretty simple to configure. Type /syc to bring up the config window. Then drag an item you want to stock from your bags to the config window. You can use the up/down arrows to say how many of this item you want to keep; set it to 0 if you want to stop stocking the item. There are a few other config options, but nothing that's too complex.

I used to have a problem with SYC where it was reporting a huge memory footprint. It was likely a conflict with another addon, and may not have been Tekkub's fault. But it appears to be fixed now.

Download StealYourCarbon here.

tekJunkSeller

This is another no-config, dirt-simple addon. Whenever you visit a vendor, it sells all your gray items. Nothing earth-shaking, but if you've ever found some [Basilisk Liver] wasting space in your bag, you'll appreciate this addon.

The one thing to watch for is any gray items that you want to save. My bank toon has a small collection of the starting gear for various classes, like the [Novice's Robe] for druids. She doesn't visit vendors often, but for a while she was selling that gear whenever I would visit a vendor, and I had to remember to buy it back. I solved this problem by putting that extra gear in the bank. (tJS only sells gear in your bags — nothing that you're wearing.)

Download tekJunkSeller here.

OK — I've now written more text about these four addons than the code that makes them up! That's the beauty of these addons — they're small and simple; they don't require a lot of maintenance, and they don't tend to break or do weird things. They won't solve world hunger, or help you down Illidan... but they can make your life a little bit nicer. And that's good too!

*The Charged Crystal Focus is on his issues list. I guess he's concerned because you might be saving these for another use. But it's still an open question.

Raiding Zul'Aman

2008-11-05T09:58:00.000-05:00

Not much playing time last night, there was some other stuff going on. But I still haven't talked about my ZA run on Sunday night.

Let me take a step back first. Before October, I had not raided much at all. I had been in a handful of Karazhan runs and a single attempt at Zul'Aman. Because I wasn't raiding, I did a helluva lot of research on what kinds of gear improvements I could obtain. Over time I was able to build up a good set, roughly on par with T4 or so for PvE. Anyone in TK or SSC would be ahead of me, but otherwise I was doing pretty good.

With the 3.0.2 patch and boss nerfs, people are a lot more willing to PUG raids, so I've been asked along on a lot of things. So in a month I've now had runs into Karazhan, Gruul's Lair, Magtheridon's Lair, Mt. Hyjal, and now Zul'Aman. Along the way I've performed about the way I would expect given my gear: excellent in Kara, good in the middle stuff, and a bit behind the curve in Hyjal.

So how did Zul'Aman go? It was work. We did the eagle boss first (Akil'zon), and struggled for a while. It's the kind of fight where one person messing up will wipe the raid. There was one poor noobie, a warlock I believe, who couldn't get the encounter right. I don't know if he was inexperienced or what. After the second wipe he got pretty much harshed on and kicked from the raid. He really was pretty clueless but I still felt bad for him, it's not easy learning this stuff. We also lost a hunter and a priest at that point. The priest was our second healer, but we needed to add to that the healing split was 70/30 which is waaaay too much. So we got replacements and kept going. The paladin healer that came in was good, I ended up #2 to him, with more like a 53/47 split. (So he was better but I was still pulling my weight.)

It wasn't easy but we made progress. I think we wiped once more on that boss but then we got him. We also downed the Bear, Dragonhawk, and Lynx bosses. I think those four bosses overall resulted in 5-6 wipes. We fought up to Hex Lord Malacrass, and wiped two more times on him. By the second wipe it was midnight and I had to get to bed, so I bailed out. I haven't heard whether they got past him or not.

So as a healer, it was a good experience but a lot of work. I tested all my healing skill to keep up with the incoming damage. Rolling Lifeblooms and Rejuv on the tanks. Wild Growth on incoming raid damage. Swiftmend and/or Regrowth to save gravely wounded toons. Nature's Swiftness + Healing Touch for times when the grim reaper was nigh. I cast everything I could, kept pressing myself to do better, and very rarely felt like I could coast.

For the first time in a long time, mana management was a serious issue too. I was low on a few fights, particularly Lynx, and I went essentially OOM on the Hex Lord fight, both times. I'm sure this is because I've never had to learn to be mana efficient. (For example, my fondness for Regrowth can burn a lot of mana.) Also, the druid+paladin healer combo can lead to a lot of overhealing, especially with a PUG where we're not used to working together. So I used Innervate on almost every boss fight, and drank more mana pots in one night than I've used all month.

That kind of struggle is great! It's really interesting to feel like I have to work to learn my class better. Frankly, this kind of experience is why I'm still playing so much WoW: I am still having a lot of new experiences. But it's also kind of daunting, and hints at the whole reason why I didn't raid between March and October. In short: the hill was too steep. Not for me, but for our guild.

The first part of the hill was getting attuned for Karazhan. It wasn't a huge barrier, but it was time-consuming. Since this was all before the 2.3 patch, we had to run every toon through three instances. Different people were ready at different times, so this mean dozens of instance runs. Many players who were already keyed had to spend their time running Shadow Labyrinth and Steamvault in particular. By the time we had a plurality ready for Karazhan, people were just burned out. That was the biggest factor.

The second part though was Zul'Aman. After a few Karazhan trips, we took one step into ZA and it was obvious we were totally outgunned. The gap between the two raids, both in required gear and in tactics, was immense.

That left guild members with a big sense of despair. We were built around 10-man raids. We were making steady progress in Kara, but eventually that would top out and we'd be running the same content over and over. The logical next step would be ZA, but it was clear we couldn't step right out of Kara and be successful in ZA.

Also, these are big, long, complicated instances. Kara has 11 or 12 bosses and a helluva lot of trash pulls. ZA has six bosses. Unless you're highly overgeared, you'll spend hours getting through them. Compare that to Mags and Gruul's, with 1 and 2 boss encounters respectively, and few trash pulls. You can easily get through these in an hour, if you know the encounter. Moreover, the 25-man raids are inherently more forgiving. If you have 1 or 2 slackers, you're probably still OK. Even 2 people AFK only loses you 8% of your raid. One person missing (or undergeared, or clueless) in Kara is already 10% of your capability. And the 10-man raids seem to have more of the encounters where nobody can make a mistake — Shade of Aran or Akil'zon require everyone to do the right thing.

The result was strange and unfortunate. It was easy to be a big casual guild and run the 25-man stuff. But a small guild had to be pretty intense to get through Kara and ZA. You had to schedule 3 or 4 raids a week if you wanted to progress. For us, we just didn't have enough people. If more than one person took the night off, the raid was probably called, and that made for a lot of frustration on everyone's part. There was a lot of tension there and most of the players ended up leaving for bigger guilds.

I have high hopes for Wrath of the Lich King. For one thing, every raid can be run with 10-man or 25-man participation. That already gives 10-man groups a lot more instances to run; at launch there will be 3 (4 if you count the PvP-connected Vault of Archavon) with two more slated. That also allows for an easier progression path too.

It does come at a cost. If you eventually switch to 25-man raiding, you'll be looking at the same instances. They do drop better loot, so they're still worthwhile. But it will be more of the same in encounters and storyline. I'm a bit concerned that this will make the 25-man stuff seem less elite. Even if I don't plan to run it, I would like to know that there's some seriously hardcore stuff out there, even if I never see it.

My hope is to tackle 10-man progression in a semi-casual fashion. I don't want to raid four nights a week or feel like I'm obligated to show up every time. I do want to be able to progress, and do more than just 5-man instances. My hope is that this is easier to start and has room for everyone to grow. And I'm a lot more hopeful of that in Wrath.

Luck

2008-11-04T12:05:00.000-05:00

Luck is a funny thing. I'd been desperate to get my [Sinister Squashling] for the Hallow's End Sinister Calling achievement. Despite many runs on the Headless Horseman (and winning the roll on his mount), I didn't get the drop. I trick-or-treated as often as possible, including interrupting myself every hour when I was at home to drop in on the innkeeper. So no dice.

Saturday night, I had already been offline for a few hours when I decided to have one last trick-or-treat before going to bed. And so it was that with my last gasp, at 1:00AM, I was able to get my squashling. Now that's luck!

The other pet I want is Magical Crawdad Box. Last week I got only my second Mr. Pinchy ever. I think that's a bit unlucky, given how many Furious Crawdads I've fished up. My first two wishes got me the blessing and the gift box. So yesterday — after fishing in Deadwind Pass for some Lightning Eels and Skullfish, I popped the third wish.

Boy, was he mad.

He de-aggroed after a few minutes, so I left him there, hopefully as a confusing moment for a few Kara visitors. So that's 2 Mr. Pinchys — 6 wishes — without the pet. Back to fishing for the crawdads, I guess.

Last night got me into a Zul'Aman raid. It was interesting, and I'll post on it later.

Headless Horseman and Magtheridon

2008-10-31T11:44:00.000-04:00

Happy halloween everyone! We've been running a lot of Headless Horseman of course. It paid off for me, as I won a roll when the mount dropped. Sweet! But I still want to get a squashling; it's the only thing preventing me from getting the Hallow's Eve achievement.

I also had my second Mr. Pinchy drop. Cool! I've used one wish and got the blessing; here's hoping for the remaining wishes to get me the pet.

But I've been doing some more-meaty stuff, too. I joined a PUG into Magtheridon's Lair yesterday — another first for me. These 25-man PUGs are starting to feel familiar. First, it takes forever to get organized. Then, the big fights usually take a couple tries to get right. And then there's chaos at the end.

This wasn't an exception. We had a wipe on the trash, because someone didn't realize they were sitting in a bad spot and pulled both a patrol and another group. Then we wiped again on Mags, when we had poor coordination on our cube-clicking. The second attempt actually started with a messed-up pull, but we fought past it and got the big guy down with no deaths.

Here's the healing meter information. To be honest, I'm shocked that I did as well as I did, given that I was learning the fight. Fortunately that's easier for healers than anyone else. But there were chunks of time when I was just waiting and looking for damage — probably not being entirely useful. The splash damage was dominant of course, so it's no surprised that the Shaman led the meters. But Wild Growth did a decent job at helping too.

Name       Class    +SP   Tot H    HPS    % of Tot
Sophiablue shaman   1101  922061  1449.6  23.2%
Om         druid    1131  848356  1222.6  21.3
Alamein    druid     932  781601  1082.5  19.7
Diemaggots paladin     ?  560411   753.8  14.1
Ironjaw    paladin  1078  371442   767.1   9.3

I don't have good data for Diemaggots. The Armory shows him in Ret spec and gear, and I'm not sure how he healed last night — whether he respecced, put on Holy gear, or both. Otherwise though I was pretty happy with where I came out, given the gear levels.

Here's a look at how my spells worked out. I used a lot of Wild Growth for raid healing, and it worked pretty well. I should have pulled similar stats for Om but forgot; I know he used even more WG than I did (it may have even topped Lifebloom for him if I recall correctly).

Spell       #   Tot H   % of Tot
Lifebloom  645  369050  47.2%
Wild Grow  514  176002  22.5
Rejuv       95   97188  12.4
Regrowth    70   87717  11.2
Swiftmend    5   23496   3.0
Healing T    3   16969   2.2
Living Se    6    6843   0.9
Glyph Rej    9    4336   0.6

It's nice to see Living Seed work a few more times. The healing is still not huge, but by definition it works when it's most needed. The Glyph of Rejuvenation is in the same category.

I also saw a bit more use for Replenish. The Pally tank I was healing got something like 4000 mana out of it, which seems better than before. I wonder, was it hotfixed? I hadn't seen anything. Maybe it's just a case of keeping Rejuv up more.

I'm hoping for more interesting runs like this in the next couple weeks. I'll post back!

Edit: I forgot to add a crucial story about the raid: the loot rolls were totally f'd up. People failed to pay attention and ended up rolling on items they didn't need. Then, the loot master failed to verify who the loot was going to. The T4 Chest token for Druid, Warriors or Priests ended up with a Mage. And the Eye trinket went to a healer who can't really use it.

Fortunately I got lucky and won the [Pit Lord's Satchel] with a 98 roll. I've been extremely lucky with loot rolls on these PUGs. Who knows if it will last...

I hate Kalimdor

2008-10-23T07:50:00.001-04:00

I do love me my achievements. I've been slowly working to get a lot of the exploration achievements and Hallow's end achievements. Yesterday that led me to Kalimdor, to work on both Explore Kalimdor and Tricks and Treats of Kalimdor.

And Kalimdor is a pain in the butt! I had to spend a lot of time on the Draenei lands of Azuremyst Isle and Bloodmist Isle. That's not surprising, since they're starter zones that a night elf typically doesn't see. But the little, isolated corners of places like Stonetalon Mountains and Azshara really drive me nuts. These zones are really spread out and require a lot of riding to get through.

There's nothing wrong with big zones. I like the sense of space, and I'm OK with requiring travel time to get from place A to place B. But there's a point when it becomes tedious. Compare Kalimdor to the Outland zones. Most of the Outland areas are significantly larger — I would guess 25-50% larger in area. The difference is that Outlands zones tend to be rounder rather than strung out. This means that different corners of the zones are closer to each other.

Consider Azshara0. I had to track down two sub-zones: Jagged Reef (52,10) and the Tower of Eldara (89,33). The Tower is the worst; it's at the very eastern tip of the upper peninsula of Azshara. That's a long ride in itself from the flight point in the southwest corner of the zone. But also you have canyons and mountains in the way, so you have to ride a long circuitous route to get there. I'm sure it was a 10- or 15-minute trip. Once I got there, I faced a long ride back; instead I teleported to Moonglade and took a gryphon ride to my next destination.

The gryphon taxis are another example of the changes in Outland. There are more flight points per zone in Outlands than in old Azeroth, and they're better positioned. Kalimdor in particular tends to have these long stringy zones with flight points in one corner. To Blizzard's credit, they have been adding more flight points to places like Stranglethorn, Felwood, and Dustwallow. The new Zul'Aman flight point saved me huge hassles when I had to explore the Ghostlands.

The flights in Outlands take less time, too. I'm not surprised that something like Moonglade to Tanaris takes 15 or 20 minutes. But even something like Moonglade to Ashenvale takes 6 minutes or so. Going from memory, even the longest flight in Outlands takes less than 10 minutes.

I understand the reasoning. Lately I've been interested to see how Blizzard tries to manage the rhythm of play in WoW. It's a balance between periods of relaxed, less-intense play, serious focus, and balls-to-the-wall excitement. That pumping cycle drives a lot of the enjoyment of the game, and they pay serious attention to it.

Travel is one of those rhythm tools. A taxi flight is a serious downtime — the most you can do is browse quests or achievements, swap some gear, or chat with friends. (You can also do a good bit of web browsing, of course!) Overland travel is more focused, because you have to watch where you're going to avoid mobs and cliffs and the like. In a higher-level zone it can be fairly intense; I have fond memories of early quests that require a trip to Darkshire. Those woods were creepy and scary at level 18! Outlands flight is somewhere in between. You have to pay some attention, or you'll miss your destination, fly off the edge of the map, or maybe fly over an opposing-faction town. I still remember flying to the Throne of Elements in Nagrand, getting shot down over Garadar, and crashing into Skysong Lake.

I think what Blizzard has realized is that they just overestimated the optimum downtime when they first designed Azeroth. The biggest reason is that you still do a lot of travel at level 70 or 80. (How many of us Alliance made the long ride to Scarlet Monastery in the last few days?) The travel is a good feeling when you're first seeing the zone, but that one time must be balanced against the dozens of times you'll travel the same route later on.

This reevaluation shows up in a lot of ways: The new flight paths added to old Azeroth. Adding free-flight capabilities for Outlands and Northrend. The design of Outlands zones and flight paths. Changing your first mount from level 40 to 30. All this makes travel less time-consuming and more convenient. It's another example of how they adjust their approach as the game evolves. Despite what you might read on the forums, they're actually pretty good at this and it's a major factor behind their success.

Now, if they can just fix Thousand Needles before I go explore it, that would be great!

Weird stuff in 3.0.2

2008-10-22T07:23:00.000-04:00

I spend a lot of time keeping up with WoW news. I'm usually "that guy" who has details about what's changing, how to prepare, and when it's likely to happen. As usual, I was well informed before 3.0.2 dropped, but still there were some things that surprised me.

Some were details that I'd known but forgotten. A good example is the use of Entangling Roots in instances. Sure, I would have told anyone about it days before or after 3.0.2. The problem is, I've never remembered to use it in instances. I just don't have that habit yet.

Another example is the new entrance in Caverns of Time. This will eventually be the portal for the Culling of Stratholme instance when WotLK drops. I knew that was there, but I hadn't worried about it much, and eventually I just forgot. But last night we jumped in to CoT to do a quick run at Escape from Durnholde. (I was 500 points from Revered and the guys offered to help me out.) I was riding around to find the entrance, and noticed the new stuff there. Pretty cool!

Other details I just hadn't heard before. I didn't know that the battlemaster for Strand of the Ancients was going to be in Shattrath already. I'm already registered with his faction, too. And I hear that the boat that used to go from Menethil to Auberdine is no longer running; I hadn't realized the routes were changing that much.

I was surprised to start fishing up rank VI scrolls in Inscribed Scrollcases. I also heard similar stories about Froststeel Lockboxes. Those are even more surprising because nobody can open them yet; it requires more skill than is possible at 70. At least the scrolls are useable!

Even more surprising was the new food and drinks. I was in Ironforge and happened to visit the innkeeper. I was shocked to see that he's selling Pungent Seal Whey and Honeymint Tea. The tea isn't drinkable until level 75, but you can drink the whey (ugh) right now. Out with the Purified Draenic Water! They're also selling comparable food items, so if you're a non-healer you might pick up some of that too.

But there's just a lot of weird stuff going on too. I'm not talking about server instabilities; I'm talking about stuff that appears to be happening in game, and might or might not be intentional.

The first thing I noticed is that when I shapeshift, my size is... off. I'll shift from cat to bird form, and my bird will start out tiny and grow to normal size. Or I'll shift from bird to elf, and my elf form starts out huge and then shrinks to fit the room. Quite odd. Is it intentional? A known artifact? A bug? No idea.

Hunters are dealing with a more serious issue, though it's one they can work around. Pets are taking off after a mob as soon as the hunter fires a shot. Before, they would wait until the mob was in melee range. The new behavior is dangerous when a hunter is trying to pull a mob away from others, because the pet will be close to aggroing more mobs. Hunters can work around it by setting their pet on Passive, but that's more work. I can't believe this is accidental but it must be difficult to adjust.

I'm also seeing some strange behavior with daily quest drops. Take for example the daily fishing quests. Previously, I would fish for a while before getting the special fish I wanted. Sometimes it would be in the first couple casts; other times I'd catch 15 or 20 fish before I got what I needed. Since 3.0.2, I've caught the special fish on the first cast, every time. Even weirder, I'll catch two things at the same time — the special fish and some other normal fish.The same thing is happenening with skinning and the Nether Residue collection. Before it seemed like about a 25% drop, but now I'm getting it every time. It's kind of nice, but I'd like to know if it's intentional or not so I don't get my hopes up if not.

The honor calculations for battlegrounds have changed quite a bit too. It's actually a bit annoying to me because I'm seeing myself with a lot less honor than before. My fear is that it's because I'm healing and doing other useful things rather than killing. I am usually good about sitting on a flag until it's captured. That's something that needs to be done, but it's time when I'm not fighting; I'd hate to lose honor for it. And there was a fight where I was #1 in healing, yet I took less honor than about half the raid. That's kind of annoying, and I hope that more adjustments are still to come.

Overall, 3.0.2 went down quite well. I'm glad however that I can still be surprised by things even when I do follow the discussions so closely!

3.0.2 Druid healing: Gruul and Hyjal

2008-10-21T07:19:00.001-04:00

Yesterday I talked about my runs into Gruul's Lair and Mount Hyjal. I wanted to give some stats about how I was healing through these runs, to provide more data on how Druids are healing.

First, some background. My Druid is Alamein. Unfortunately the Armory doesn't seem to have updated in weeks, so don't read much into what you see today. (Maybe after today's maintenance.) Her gear is roughly at T4 level; the Gruul's run replaced a couple PvP pieces (helm and shoulders) with roughly T4 equivalents, which slightly boosted her for Hyjal. She should be reasonably geared for Gruul's and somewhat undergeared for Hyjal. And as I had mentioned, I'd never been into either encounter.

I also recognize that the encounters have been nerfed quite a bit with 3.0.2. I believe the stat is that boss health is down about 30%. Certainly we did better than we should expect. Gruul's was a total PuG. Hyjal was mostly a guild run, with four from my guild joining Seditio and a few other additions. This was their first attempt at Hyjal.

So that's all for level-setting. How did the numbers stack up? I have details for Gruul and a quick summary for Hyjal.

Gruul's Lair

As I described yesterday, we had an abortive attempt on Maulgar before restocking the raid with PuGgers and trying again. I reset Recount with tne fresh attempt, which went through all the trash as well as both Maulgar and Gruul. Here's the report:

Character     Class      Tot H     HPS    %Heal
Thaddx        Paladin    689198   1242.9  18.8%
Doireann      Shaman     529918   1136.6  14.4
Alamein       Druid      525971    717.3  14.3
Stastris      Paladin    511488   1034.1  13.9
Maxxus        Shaman     446992    701.2  12.2
Humansheild*  Paladin    317886    410.7   8.7

*Humansheild is a tank, so this represents the first non-healer. He did quite a bit of off-healing for the encounter.

Armory is borked so I don't have a good way of comparing all of us. But I would judge that we were all roughly close in gear levels. Given that — and given that I didn't know the encounters — I feel reasonably good about the healing meters. Obviously the HPS numbers are pretty low, but I suspect that's due to a lot of instant-cast spells and rolling HoTs rather than more bursty heals.

What did I cast? I started with rolling Lifeblooms on the main tank (a warrior named Avith). He was the Maulgar tank for that encounter, and the MT for Gruul. I did 51.9% of my healing on him, mostly from rolling Lifeblooms and Rejuv. He died early in the Maulgar encounter — I'm not quite sure why — and I did a Rebirth followed by some big heals to get him back into the game.

I also did raid healing in between refreshing the above. A lot of that was Regrowth, which I use probably more than I should, and Lifebloom. I also tried to use Wild Growth where it made sense.

Here's the data:

Spell         Count  Total    %
Lifebloom      504  273284  52.0%
Regrowth        85  122565  23.3
Rejuvenation    92   85352  16.2
Wild Growth     78   26043   5.0
Healing Touch    2    9723   1.8
Living Seed      6    5139   1.0
Swiftmend        1    2828   0.5
Glyph of Rejuv   2    1037   0.2

My thoughts on this:

Lifebloom still works darn well.
I like Regrowth a lot! I'm sure those crits are what spawned the Living Seeds that did proc.
My overhealing was 17.6%, which doesn't seem like a lot, though I don't really have a point of comparison.
I didn't get much from the Glyph of Rejuvenation. But that's 1000 points of healing that came when the tank needed it the most.
Wild Growth is pretty powerful, but I still need to learn it better.
Mana was not an issue, though I had to watch it more closely than previously. I used Innervate a couple times, but I don't believe I needed a mana pot at all.

So a bit more on Regrowth. I like it a lot for raid healing, because it gets a good chunk of health back in the initial heal and then keeps working through the HoT. The big problem is that it takes too long to cast. That's a delay in healing received, as well as an opportunity cost in the other spells I could cast. (Note, however, that it's still faster than casting a Rejuv followed by Swiftmend, due to the two GCDs you have to eat.)

Life will be a lot more interesting at 80. On the one hand, we'll have Nourish. That may be the go-to spell in a lot of these situations. On the other hand, we'll have a good shot at taking Nature's Grace in a Resto build. That proc will shave casting time off either spell, making for a fast Regrowth or a blinding-fast Nourish. I suspect we'll be using Nourish a lot, and watch for Nature's Grace to proc; when it does we'll drop a Regrowth into the mix.

Replenish Watch: Like I said, I kept Replenish up on the tank about 90% of the time. The result? 80 rage gained, over the course of the whole raid. Still not worth it.

Finally... I also did 6 rezzes. Yay, Revive!

Mount Hyjal

As I mentioned, I'm rather undergeared for Hyjal. So I wasn't expecting to lead the meters, and I was right. I was #7 on healing done, for 7.9% of the total. I did however do 872.9 HPS. That's up more than 150 from what I did on Gruul. That's probably partly because I had gear upgrades, and mostly because I was just using a lot more of my GCDs. We had no shortage of damage!

There were two resto Druids in the raid, and we were tasked with raid healing. A bit unusual, but I gave it my best. I don't know how it works for more experienced Hyjal guilds, but for this one there was a ton of raid damage. Since I was so busy I used a lot of Lifebloom as a first response to damage. I also tried to keep Lifeblooms rolling on at least a couple of the tanks. That lead to Lifebloom doing almost 70% of my healing — much more than Gruul's. Regrowth was #2, followed by Rejuv. I tried to use a lot of Wild Growth too, but here I think it fell down a bit because it's difficult to spam. I would cast it once, but as I wasn't sure who would receive it, I didn't want to cast it again without knowing who'd been hit by the first. I think there will be WG mods for Grid which will help with this.

On the other hand, I had more Living Seed healing, especially considering how much I used Lifebloom. Regrowth plus Living Seed combines nicely for this type of crazy raid damage. Also, it was nice to be able to rez with Revive between waves. It seems to take a long time though, and I'd find that someone else had already rezzed before Revive finished casting. That's a lack of experience from me as much as anything.

I also did a ton of Remove Curse — more than 100 I believe. I'm not sure how painful that curse is, but I felt it was a useful task for me since I wasn't the most powerful healer there. Hopefully I did some good damage mitigation through that.

All in all, Hyjal was an interesting experience. I certainly felt that I wasn't quite doing the healing I needed to for the raid. On the other hand, I didn't feel useless either. It's a difficult encounter and I can see why it takes some time to learn.

So that's my raiding story. The TLDR reaction: I still feel like Druids can do a lot of good healing. We're still disadvantaged on healing meters, but that doesn't represent our true healing strengths anyway. And despite the Lifebloom nerf, it still works quite well.

Weekend Fun

2008-10-20T07:58:00.000-04:00

Talk about progression! As of last Wednesday, I hadn't been in Kara in something like 6 months, and that was the most raiding I'd done. Now that's all changed.

As I wrote earlier, I was asked to participate Thursday night in a Kara run. It went well and we got through to Illhoof. I intended to join up with them again Friday night, but instead had a nice long dinner with friends, so I missed the last part of the run.

Still, it was fun to be back in Kara.

Saturday night, I was goofing around when I got another request from my pally tank friend. This time they wanted to pull together a PUG for Gruul's. I'd never done a 25-man raid before, so I thought it would be a great experience. Firegrin and I took part.

It didn't start all that well. We took two tries at High King Maulgar, and wiped both times. At this point things looked bleak and we lost about 7 people from the raid. Firegrin and I hung in while the leaders tried to recruit more — including recruiting in trade chat. We weren't very hopeful, and I expected they would call the raid.

After half an hour of recruiting, they were able to reform the group, and we tried again. Trash had respawned so we had to redo the whole instance (not that this is a major hassle). Whether it was because of better gear or better players or just better efforts, we were able to get High King on the first shot. We then moved forward and also one-shotted Gruul. Quite impressive for us and a lot of fun too.

It was a ton of fun and we got very lucky too. Firegrin won his T4 pants from Gruul, and I won both my T4 shoulders ([Shoulderguards of Malorne]) and the [Cowl of Nature's Breath]. So quite a success for all!

Then on Sunday, four of us (me, Firegrin, Cargarios, and Wyrmm) joined another guild for a run at Mount Hyjal. So, wow... in one weekend I've gone from Kara to Hyjal! More than anything this points to how much the raids have been nerfed; they are a lot more accessible now. This guild had never taken on Hyjal before, so it was new to them. The raid leader (who used to lead our Kara runs, months ago) knew the fights and had a good sense of what to do and how to instruct us.

The good news is that after one unsuccessful attempt we were able to kill Rage Winterchill. Everyone seemed pretty laid back about it, but that's actually quite impressive for a first attempt. We took two cracks at Anetheron and couldn't really make a dent in him. I believe we had positioning issues and needed to individually learn the issues and tactics involved. It's one thing to know that Carrion Swarm is coming; it's another to recognize what it looks like and know how far you have to run. We were learning rapidly, but with the night growing late we called it a successful night and packed up.

So how did my healing go? I'll post a look at the Recount reports tomorrow, with the full details. In general though it's about what you expect. When I looked Alamein up on Be Imba (before the Armory went kaplooie with 3.0.2), she'd be rated to perform well up through Gruul's or Magtheridon. And that's exactly what happened. I was near the top for healing on Gruul's, with no serious problems. On the other hand, I was well behind in healing for Hyjal, coming in about 6th place overall on the meters. I'm pretty sure I was useful — I know I did about a hundred Remove Curses, and I still did around 2 million points of healing using mostly Lifebloom and Regrowth.

Spells worked pretty well for the most part. Wild Growth is not giving me a huge boost, but it's somewhat useful; I expect it'll be even better for 5-man runs. The main problem is that it's unpredictable, making it pointless to spam and not very helpful for widespread raid damage. Replenish is still not helping at all; I'm curious to see if that will get buffed, because I'm certain now I won't bother with it.

I'll post more detailed thoughts tomorrow. But for today, I'm going to enjoy memories of my first 25-man runs. Good stuff!

Druid healing in 3.0.2

2008-10-17T08:08:00.000-04:00

I had my first chance to do serious Resto work last night. I'd healed a run in heroic Underbog for a paladin tank a few weeks ago, and we friended each other. Last night, he pinged me and asked if I wanted to heal a Karazhan run. It was a great chance to test out druid healing, so I took him up on it.

I respecced into full resto. (I really wish they had reset the respec fees along with the talent point refund.) Here's the 5/0/56 Resto druid build I took. My one change from my earlier intent was that I skipped Improved Tranquility and the one point in Empowered Touch, in order to take Replenish. This was only because I wanted to give it a real test, and not because I thought it would be helpful.

We had a pretty good pick-up group. Four or five players were from the tank's guild, including my friend Hazek. In about three hours we were able to get Attumen, Moroes, Maiden, Opera (Big Bad Wolf), Curator, and Illhoof. We had one wipe due to an accidental trash pull, but were able to one-shot all the bosses. That was surprising, especially with no crowd control on Moroes; we had no priests along. It's pretty clear that the bosses have been nerfed quite a bit.

We started with two tree druid healers. I don't remember the other guy's name. His skills were fine but he was undergeared; I healed a little less than double his amount. (Due to this, I pulled a lot of aggro and had about 8 deaths.) After the Opera, he had to leave, so we brought in a Holy paladin instead. He said he was a 'raid noob' but he did a great job. I reset my Recount stats when we brought in the paladin, so that I'd get some clean numbers. So these numbers reflect Curator, Illhoof, and the trash in between. This is a good test, because it's got a good bit of raid damage due to the flares on Curator and the mana worms.

I didn't use Swiftmend at all during the run. Just forgetful on my part! I have been healing as Restokin for a long while now so I'm just out of the habit. After the first half though I made a point of using Wild Growth whenever it made sense, so that I could get an idea of how well it worked. Also, I haven't glyphed for anything yet, so nothing to account for there.

Overall healing: it was good. I did 838.9 HPS which accounted for 47.0% of the healing done. The holy Paladin did 34.0%; #3 was the paladin tank at 6.7% — healing after rezzes and so forth. That number is mostly due to better gear on my part, but it supports the point that resto is still very good.

Healing breakdown:My strategy was fairly basic. I used Lifebloom stacks on the tank and off-tank. I also kept a Rejuvenation up on the tank. When someone else took isolated damage, I'd use Lifebloom and/or Regrowth depending on how bad it was. On raid-wide damage I used Wild Growth, followed by other heals as needed.

Here's how that sorted itself out:

Spell         %-tot  count
Lifebloom     59.9%  1294
Wild Growth   14.9%   481
Rejuvenation  11.9%   132
Regrowth      11.6%   108
Healing Touch  0.9%     2
Living Seed    0.7%    10

The first thing I saw is that Lifebloom is still working pretty well. Now I'll note that I outgeared the instance, which may have affected things. And I'd say that Lifebloom was definitely less powerful than before; I had to use more other heals than I'm used to. But LB still gets the job done.

Next: Wild Growth is cool. It does a good chunk of healing and it is an easy fire-and-forget quick heal. The biggest problem is its randomness. I don't think Grid knows enough yet to track who's been hit with it, and so I was guessing on who needs supplemental heals beneath it. I'd kick out a WG and then start dropping LBs on whoever looked in danger. But even with that limitation, it did a lot of healing. I can live with it!

On the other hand, I didn't get a lot of use out of Living Seed. That's mostly an effect of my healing tools — I didn't use much that could crit. I didn't cast enough HTs or (any) Swiftmends, which left just Regrowth to proc it. Now Regrowth is a great spell to use, because talents get it to crit something like 60% of the time. I'm a big fan. But even if LS procs, it won't take effect unless the toon is hit again within 15 seconds. So for isolated raid damage, it'll be lost a good portion of the time. But I can see some places in the stats where it probably helped keep a toon alive. I'll place this in the "continue to watch" category.

Finally: Replenish. I started out optimistic about the spell; it's a very cool concept. But the numbers looked bleak and I turned skeptical. How did it play out?

I tried to keep Rejuv up on the tank all the time, for Replenish as much as the healing. And the result? Over two boss fights and a good chunk of (mana-draining) trash, Replenish gave him 1134 mana. This was 1.9% of his total mana gained. Of course a paladin gets a lot of mana from Spiritual Attunement, but in any case Replenish just didn't make a big difference. I'm guessing that in the budgeting process, Blizzard decides that adding 2% to the mana returned (or rage or whatever) is worth 3 talent points. But in practice, it's so small as to be unnoticeable. If the tank is going to go out of mana, that extra 2% is unlikely to make a difference.

I keep trying to find arguments for Replenish, because it would be a sweet capability to have. But one night's trial just reinforces my existing opinion. I don't think many druids are going to take Replenish. Even at level 80, I think we'll use those points to get into Balance for Nature's Splendor and Nature's Grace. I'd love to be proved wrong!

Edit: I forgot to say something about my mana observations. In short, I noticed a difference, but I could live with it. I had to watch mana but never went OOM. I had the most trouble on Moroes, as we had no crowd control and a lot of Garrotes to heal through. But with a potion and an Innervate I was fine.

Other random thoughts:
Revive still rocks! We had a Feral druid as off-tank and DPS, so we had several chances to use it, including a few where the paladin tank had died and Soulstones were on cooldown. LOVE IT!

Similarly, it's really nice to have a tree that can move at full speed. It felt funny... but in a good way! I'm sure that arena druids are thinking through all sorts of new tactics.

Very nice to have Gift of the Wild hit the whole raid. It's a simple convenience that makes life a lot simpler. I'm going to love it in AV.

I really miss Blessing of Salvation. Of course, 8 deaths due to healer aggro will do that to you. I'm going to have to get in the habit of waiting for more incoming damage before starting my heals.

So that's the story. I think we might try for the last half of Kara tonight; if so I'll post more complete thoughts later.

3.0.2 Fire Mage Build

2008-10-16T12:36:00.000-04:00

I didn't do much productive last night — still playing around with all the new stuff. I need to get Alamein out into the battlegrounds, but last night I needed sleep more.

For the first part of the night, we were bugged. All of Outlands was down for Shandris, so we were limited to any toons that logged out in old Azeroth. I took the time to respec my lower-level toons. The most advanced is Gazala, who's a level 43 rogue; everyone else is a lot lower level than that. So the respecs weren't very informative — though it is interesting to see what talents have moved in each tree.

Once Outlands were back, I logged on to Sali and respeced her too. I know much less about the mage talents — either old or new — than I do about druids. So I'm much less confident that I've chosen a useful spec in any sense. Still, I wanted to share my thoughts.

I don't have my exact spec available, but I chose something pretty close to this: Level 70 Deep Fire Mage: 0/61/0. As with Alamein's talents, I consciously focused on a deep Fire build so that I could understand the available abilities. Based on about 10 minutes of testing, here are my initial impressions:

Firestarter is awesome. It gives you a natural combo of Blast Wave -> Flamestrike, limited only by the GCD. This will be great for AoE farming or damage as a fire mage, providing you can survive a few hits. The knockback on Blast Wave is fun too, and a bit more useful as a mage (compared to Typhoon on a Moonkin druid).

On the other hand, I couldn't really use Living Bomb, because I was testing on lower-level mobs. They would just die before the bomb went off. I suspect this spell will be rather situational, so I'll have to understand more about when to use it. Similarly, I never had a chance for Hot Streak to proc, so I'll have to test with that some more.

Burnout is a weird talent, particularly when you combine it with Master of Elements. Spell crits refund 30% of their cost due to Master of Elements but then lose 5% of that back to Burnout. It works out in the end, which is all that matters I suppose.

Burning Soul is a nice addition. Fire mages never had a lot of pushback protection, so this is a big help. I was also very tempted to take Burning Determination but ended spending the points elsewhere; this is probably more useful in PvP than PvE but still could be nice.

I think in a real build, I will be inclined to take some points in Arcane. Unfortunately none of the Tier 1 arcane talents are very appealing for a fire build, but beyond that there's some nice stuff. Arcane Concentration is a good talent, and Magic Absorbtion looks like it will be powerful. Spell Impact is a nice chunky damage boost on a lot of bread-and-butter spells. Focus Magic looks interesting, but unfortunately only works if you're partied with someone. No benefit for soloing.

So that's a quick look at fire-based mage talents. I'll test them out a bit more and report back!

Echoes of Doom: First impressions

2008-10-15T08:47:00.000-04:00

Pretty chaotic last night! Shandris was several hours late coming back online, and seemed to be unstable at least early on. (I got a 5-minute "World Server Down" while in Ironforge at one point.) But by the end of the night, everything seemed to be working as intended.

Addons were a bit wonky. I got enough running that I could live with — Pitbull and Clique, plus some of Tekkub's pieces and a few other random parts. Some were pretty wonky. For example, Fubar was mostly working, but putting the wrong titles on the drop-down menus. And I'm still coming to grips with the new Cartographer — nothing to do with 3.0.2 though.

But with all that, I was able to get going. Here are my first impressions.

Druid abilities

I specced Alamein into Balance as planned, with a slight variation. I decided to take 3/3 in Nature's Focus, giving me 58/0/3. The resulting spec looks like this. If I were serious about doing damage as Balance, I'd spec differently, but this gives me a chance to try out just about everything in Balance.

I did a couple different things in my play time. After traveling to Moonglade to train and respec, I traveled to Winterspring and killed a few furblogs to try out my damage spells. Then I grouped up with Cargarios, Wyrmm, and Firegrin to take a stab at heroic Ramparts. I was healing with a Balance spec and we only had four people, so it wasn't going to be a clean run. But all of us were also trying to figure how to deal with the changes. Suffice to say: it wasn't pretty! But we learned a lot, which was the goal.

Subjectively speaking, I felt like I was doing a huge amount of damage. My Starfire crits were hitting for 4000+ damage. TopScoreFu wasn't working, but I'm almost certain that's about 30-40% higher than anything I've seen before. I don't know if that's due to talents, changes to the spell, or to the conversion from +heal to +spell power on my DPS gear (which actually uses a lot of my healing gear). From what I heard, everyone else was seeing similar improvements.

Starfall and Typhoon both were fun to play with. They do feel rather situational, and I'll have to play with them a while before I understand when to use them best. Starfall is probably the more powerful of the two. Hurricane is a better pure AoE spell, but Starfall is both instant cast and moves when you move, so it works when you're on the move. That will be nice, but the 3 minute cooldown will keep it very situational. And they key to Typhoon will be understanding when to use the knockback effect, which I'm not firm on yet.

With the passive talents, I was actually impressed with Eclipse. One point makes the proc too infrequent to be worthwhile; I think this will be either 3 points or 0. But the graphic on the proc makes it easy to notice, and it's powerful enough to make it worth following. I was also impressed by Improved Moonkin Form, at least subjectively. I felt like my casts were significantly faster and the GCD change really helped.

Earth and Moon was less showy, and for soloing furblogs it's not really useful. I typically couldn't get off more than one or two casts before they were dead, so no real chance to take advantage of it. I'm sure it will pay off for instances however.

Nature's Splendor made no obvious difference to my DPS — not against furblogs anyway. But in healing it was a huge improvement. The 8-second Lifebloom gave me a lot more time to cast other healing spells before refreshing my LB stack. I really think that a level-80 PvE healing build will spec into this more often than not.

I was surprised by the new audio effect for Insect Swarm... but I like it!

And finally, I had a few chances to use Revive. That felt really good! I used to feel a lot less useful when I had to ask a player to run back rather than get rezzed. No longer!

Achievements

Of course I knew this was coming, but it still captivated me. I'm sure I'll spend a lot of time on these. I am at heart an OCD completist, and this is a mechanism to feed that part of my personality. I was surprised to have slightly more achievement points than my friends, though in retrospect that's probably because I'm inclined to engage in exactly these sorts of quixotic pursuits.

I started down the path of completing some of the easier achievements before coming to my senses. I did however get the Going Down? and Captain Rumsey's Lager achievements before logging out. At some point I know I will spend a few hours crossing off fishing and exploration achievements.

I also like the announcement in guild chat. It's a nice way to share your activities with guildmates. I just wish there weren't so many achievements that require WotLK.

Other impressions

It was very nice to log in and find my PvP tokens gone from the bank — and into the Currency tab. I was disappointed however that things like Spirit Shards and Arcane Runes weren't included. They're soulbound tokens, used to purchase goods. They should be included!

It was also nice to get my mounts and pets out of the bank. I bought four more pets when I was in Stormwind; I'm sure I'll accumulate a lot more. I'm going to have to find an addon or macro to spawn random pets. I'm not sure whether I'll grab a whole slew of mounts or not. I will probably avoid flying mounts since Flight Form is so much better, but ground mounts are a different story. But that could be a real money pit.

The barber shop is fun, but the hairstyles are very limited. I wish there was a lot more to do with it. I did however get a haircut for Alamein... for the achievement, of course!

I'm disproportionately happy with the new loading screens, title screen, and title music. We spend too much time staring at these, so it's very nice to see some changes.

Finally: Stormwind Harbor is huge! I think I'd be disappointed if I played Horde — they kind of got shafted.

That's a lot of stuff going on. I will soon respec to Resto to check out the new spells there. I still want to visit the sites of Dalaran and Naxxrimas to see what's changed up there. And I'm most excited about the prospect of world events that lead to the launch of Wrath. Lots to explore!

First draft talent builds: Druid for 3.0.2

2008-10-14T07:52:00.000-04:00

Well, it's official: 3.0.2 will arrive today. Official 3.0.2 patch notes are now available, and we'll definitely see all the new stuff when the realms come back up. Remember, all your talent points are refunded — on all your toons. So all those alts will have to respec too. And you'll want to visit a class trainer to learn new spells; some of them are available even at quite low levels, so everyone should train up.

Also: barber shops!

I spent some time last night taking photos around Dalaran and the old Naxxrimas; I'll post some comparisons later on. I'm curious to see how they change things. It was a little wistful, even though I'm looking forward to the new stuff. And that goes for talents as well as terrain; all my familiar specs and builds are out the window. What next?

I specced out three talent builds that I might try using in the next month. I'll share the details, but here are the constraints I used:

61 points: I built for level 70, as I'm only expecting to use these specs for the next month.
All spells: I made a point to build out all the way to Starfall in Balance and Wild Growth in Resto. Part of what I want to do is learn how these things work, so I built all the way down.
Casual play: I don't expect to do any raiding in the next month, so I'm less concerned about optimizing. When in doubt, I took talents with new mechanics (Living Seed) instead of generic boosts to healing or damage, so that I could learn how they work.

So: my specs.

Balance: 61/0/0

I am still not sure whether the change to Moonfury and Earth and Moon will be in effect for this build — will they be 5-point or 3-point talents? As it stands though, 3 points in each is enough to understand the effects, so I'll stick with that either way.

I didn't take Genesis, because I think that solo play won't give me enough chance to see the effects of more-powerful DoTs. I also didn't take Natures Focus in Resto, even though that's probably an important talent, because I want to understand more about how the new pushback mechanic will play out.

I was very tempted to take points in Resto. Eventually I think it might be important to build down to Omen of Clarity, and maybe even Natural/Master Shapeshifter. Furor could be very nice too. But I couldn't spend those points and take all the possibilities in Balance too.

I suspect that eventually I'll decide to skip Eclipse, and maybe some other talents too. But for now I want to understand how it works, and what proc-watching will entail. So I'll give it a try.

Resto: 5/0/56

This would be the spec I'll use to heal through some heroic instances prior to WotLK. So it's designed to both test out spells but also to make sure I can heal well enough.

I took 5 points in Genesis — unlike in my Balance build — because it should be a major boost to HoT-based healing. At level 80, I fully expect to try a build that goes into Nature's Grace/Nature's Splendor, but I can't spare the points just yet.

I'm a little worried about mana management — it's going to be worse than today, but I'm not sure how much worse. If it's really bad, I might regret skipping Tranquil Spirit. We'll see.

I didn't take Replenish. I'm inclined to second-guess that, because I'd really like to test it out. But I just don't see any way that the talent will pay off. Maybe I'll change my mind and give it a try — to make sure.

Restokin: 31/0/30

I also decided to take a stab at a level-70 Restokin spec. There's a good chance I'll choose something like this as my leveling spec when WotLK hits.

It's nice to see Dreamstate a tier below Moonkin form now. On the one hand, that means you can get 3/3 in Dreamstate with only 31 points in Balance. On the other, it means you could get a non-boomkin Dreamstate/Nature's Swiftness build that only takes 28 points in Balance. It really opens some options.

With both Intensity and Dreamstate, I'm less worried about mana management, so I feel OK about skipping Tranquil Spirit. I'm less sanguine about skipping Furor; I might move the points over from Improved MotW and Nature's Focus. I also might try for a build that takes Natural/Master Shapeshifter. But I'd probably have to skip Naturalist to do that, and I don't think I can give up the half-second savings on HT if I want to heal instances as I level.

So, there's some quick thoughts. I'll probably spec into Balance tonight to try out the fun new toys, but move back to Resto as soon as I can get an instance group together. We might try for an easy heroic tonight to test things out; Cargarios in particular is going to have to learn how to run his Paladin again as they have major changes. Should be fun!

WotLK: new balance druid talents

2008-10-13T08:27:00.001-04:00

OK, I need to complete my four-part series. This time, I want to look at the new talents in the Balance tree. Get a beverage, because this will take a while. The Balance tree has changed a lot.

(I already discussed a few of the talents in my Resto talent post. These are all very relevant to healing, but they're also good for Balance of course.)

Tier 1

Changes start at the top: Nature's Grasp is gone, now available as a baseline ability. Gone with it is Improved NG, as the spell now has a 100% chance to proc. Very nice. This is basically replaced with Genesis, which boosts our DoTs — Moonfire, Insect Swarm, and (I believe) Entangling Roots. Meh, it's decent for mana efficiency.

Tier 2

Control of Nature is gone too. In its place we have Moonglow, reducing mana cost for a host of spells. Another spell that will greatly help your efficiency, but isn't an attention-grabber.

Nature's Majesty is really just the old Focused Starlight, but now also applies to Starfall, Nourish, and Healing Touch.

Tier 3

Brambles is more exciting than it used to be. Along with boosting the damage of Thorns and Roots, it also adds a daze effect to both your Force of Nature treants and to your Barkskin buff. That's going to be extremely nice for PvP, giving us a counter for both casters (by dropping the treants on them) and melee. It also boosts the damage of your treants by 15%, which will help in PvE too.

Nature's Grace is now a three-point talent but otherwise has the same effect. Nature's Splendor, which I discussed in Resto, also adds duration to Moonfire and Insect Swarm. Another example of an ostensibly boring talent that will probably prove to help with overall DPS and mana efficiency in raids.

Nature's Reach has an important change for Balance druids: more than just increasing your range, it now also reduces your threat by 10/20%. That's key because Subtlety in Resto will no longer reduce threat from Balance spells — only Resto — so we needed a threat drain somewhere. This is it!

Tier 4

Celesital Focus replaces its old pushback protection with spell haste, probably due to the changes in the pushback mechanism. Vengeance is basically unchanged, just adding Starfall to its list of affected spells.

Tier 5

Insect Swarm is now found here, rather than tier 3. It will be more of a defining spell for Balance druids now. There's also a Improved Insect Swarm talent here, but it's a bit weird. It's a synergy talent, boosting Wrath damage if the target has Insect Swarm on it. But it also boosts Starfire crit chance if the target's affected by Moonfire. Odd — but it gives you room to play with different spell rotations now.

Lunar Guidance is nerfed by about half, only giving 4/8/12% of your Intellect as Spell Power. Still pretty powerful though.

Tier 6

Fairly stable — neither Moonfury or Balance of Power have changed much. We've been told that Moonfury will be reduced to 3 points (instead of 5) but keep the same effect, to free up some of our talent "bloat". We also have Dreamstate here, down slightly from Tier 7. Speaking of:

Tier 7

Well, here we get Moonkin Form, of course. But the lazer chicken has changed:

                Old Moonkin      New Moonkin           Nerf/Buff
Bonus armor     400%             370%                  Nerf!
Spell Crit      5% to party      5% to raid            Buff!
Melee AP        150% of level    none                  Nerf - who cares?
Mana regen      Chance on melee  Chance on spell crit  Buff!

Ultimately, this is a big buff to the form. I don't know yet how much mana we'll get back from spell crits, but it's got to be better than the melee mechanism we had before.

We now also have Improved Moonkin Form. It's got two benefits: it gives 3% haste to Moonkin aura, and it gives you spell power equal to 15% of your Spirit. Finally, a reason for Moonkin to use Spirit!

To wrap up Tier 7, Improved Faerie Fire now adds 3% immproved chance for spells to hit, as well as buffing your own spell damage on afflicted targets. It's nice that it does good for the Moonkin now, too.

Tier 8

Owlkin Frenzy looks like fun for PvP. It's a 'further improved' moonkin form that, when it procs, will give you both 10% damage bonus and spell pushback protection. Wrath of Cenarius is unchanged.

Tier 9

Typhoon was discussed in the new abilities post. Force of Nature is unchanged. But there's a lot more in Tier 9.

Gale Winds buffs both Hurricane and ~~Tsunami~~ Typhoon, adding 30% to their damage. It also adds 6 yards of range to your Cyclone. The latter buff is nice for PvP, while the former two will depend on those specific spells. Personally, I'm salivating over the AoE-tanking ability of Moonkin with Hurricane.

Eclipse is designed to be a tricky talent. Basically, it's designed to reward proc-watching, giving you a synergy where Wrath crits buff Starfire and vice versa. I suspect a skilled raiding Moonkin will take this and watch carefully for the right time to change rotation. For solo play or PvP this seems rather forgettable. It will however see a damage increase soon.

Tier 10

Earth and Moon is another raid-scale damage increase. This spell (which will, like Moonfury, be reduced to 3 points) procs off Starfire and Moonfire. It grants 13% damage bonus for all spell schools except, I believe, Holy. It also grants you up to 5% increased spell damage individually. This flat DPS increase would make it worthwhile, even apart from the aura affecting other raid members.

Tier 11

Finally! We've topped out on Starfall, which I've discussed previously. This is a spell which firmly falls into "wait and see" territory for me.

Resto Talents

There are also Resto talents that will benefit the Balance druid. Most notably, Omen of Clarity will now proc off spell casts, so it's very intersting to pick up. Along the way you might grab Nature's Focus, which adds 70% pushback resistance to Wrath, Entangling Roots, and Cyclone, along with a slew of healing spells. And Master Shapeshifter will give a tidy 4% damage boost to Moonkin form.

One other possibility to consider. When you reach level 80, you'll have 71 talent points to spend. That opens the possibility of a 50/0/21 build, taking Nature's Swiftness along with 50 points in Balance. You'd have to skip Starfall, but otherwise you could have a full-featured Balance build.

Summary

The balance talents are completely torn up and rebuilt. The tree is a lot better for it. I think that solo and 5-man play will be about equal to what they were before, but that was very good so we're fine. Raid play got a huge buff, with the raid-wide aura changes and increased utility. (And don't forget CC with roots!) I can't really assess PvP; it looks like we've got more tools to use but I'm not sure how well they'll stack up.

Hope you enjoyed this. Tomorrow I'll post my first-draft level 70 builds for both Resto and Balance. That's what I'll use Tuesday night when I respec.

WotLK: Balance druid abilities

2008-10-09T08:45:00.001-04:00

Here's a new catchphrase for Alamein: "Balance for show, resto for dough."

Feel free to quote it! I may be goofy, but that's a pretty accurate way to describe my druid experience. Resto is the real payoff for a mana-using druid; it fills the biggest need in either PvE or PvP. But Balance is a lot more showy. I mean, come on... lazer chickens! Don't get me wrong, I love healing, and it's going to be my first preference in groups or raids. But I really have a lot of fun switching back to Balance.

So I did my look at Resto already, but now I want to spend some time with Balance. To be honest, I've spent less time with this, because I think it's easier to learn on the fly, simply because I can't learn healing skills in solo play. (Even with tanking, you can try your stuff for a while on your own. But there's nothing in solo play that's comparable to healing a group — your only practice option is to run battlegrounds.)

New Balance Abilities

There's only two new Balance spells, both coming from talents. I still don't feel like I have a firm grip on how to use them, but they both look like they'll be pretty cool.

Typhoon (talented): This is an instant cast cone attack; it does both damage and a knockback effect. (They should have named it Tsunami, which makes a lot more sense. The visual effect even looks like a wave.) It requires 40 points in Balance, so it's comparable to Force of Nature — deep Balance. It's got a chunky mana cost (36% of base mana) and does moderate damage; it's on a 20-sec cooldown.

This is a killer spell for PvP. The instant-cast damage is good, but its biggest use will be to knock away melee attackers. It'll also be good for interrupting spell casts. The knockback also has potential to be deadly if players are near an edge or cliff; I shudder to think of the carnage on the bridge leading to Dun Baladar, for example.

I'm less sure of its use in PvE. From a pure damage perspective, you'll want to save it for groups of mobs. Against single targets, Moonfire will do a bit more instant damage for 60% of the mana cost. So you about break even on 2 mobs, and get ahead of Moonfire against 3 or more. You'll have to be tactical about the knockback effect. I can imagine a Typhoon-Roots combo being useful against single mobs, or using it as an escape mechanism when you're jumped by a pack. But you'll have to be careful about where the knockback will take your mobs — don't knock them back into another group or (egads!) over a bridge in an instance. They'll come looking for you, and drag half the instance with them.

Starfall (talented): This is the new crowning 51-point talent: the ultimate Balance ability. It's another instant-cast effect, doing pure damage. It operates in a circle around the caster, dropping up to 20 stars on targets within 30 yards. If you move, the effect will move with you. The stars do direct damage to the target, and then splash damage to targets 5 yards around the target. Overlapping circles! Costs 35% of base mana &mdash about like Typhoon — and it's on a 3-min cooldown.

The interesting thing is that this is both an AoE and a single-target spell. If you have one target in range, it will receive hits from the stars every second. (I believe half the stars are 'lost,' however.) But if you add more mobs, the stars spread around, and you also get the splash damage effects. If everything is tightly packed, the synergy will grow quickly, as each target will get its own star and splash damage from all the other stars falling nearby. Damage will fall off somewhat if you can't get things packed in around you, but the stars will do good damage.

This will rock in both PvP and PvE; the only challenge will be the cooldown. It'll mostly be used to deal with groups, but I can also see popping it to up your DPS against a boss or other elite target. It'll be very cool for AoE grinding, except that it's only up once every 3 minutes. And don't forget, it's an instant-cast buff, so you can do other things while it's working. Even better, it uses Celestial Focus just like Starfire, so you can talent for a chance to stun the targets it hits (especially nice for PvP).

There you go — two new abilities. Pretty cool stuff! But there are big changes to our existing abilities too.

Changed Balance Abilities

Entangling Roots (baseline): This now works indoors. Wow — you'll be able to CC using roots in your instance runs. This burden will mostly fall on Balance druids; a druid who can kite and chain-root a mob will be really useful. Also nice in PvP of course. But remember, the target is still awake and active. Don't bother rooting a caster, and make sure everyone stays away from rooted melee.

Hurricane (baseline): Pretty simple, really: no cooldown. Hurricane still uses a big chunk of mana, so it's not like you can endlessly chain-cast this. But it's there when you want it. Nicest for AoE grinding and battleground PvP.

Hibernate (baseline): Now works on Dragonkin, which should help you CC in some of the WotLK instances. No PvP impact.

Nature's Grasp (baseline): Yeah, Nature's Grasp is now baseline. It's also bumped to a 100% chance to proc — no more Improved NG to worry about. This will be great for PvP and somewhat situational for PvE. It also means the damn button will stay on my action bars when I respec. Yay for that!

Soothe Animal (baseline): Now affects Dragonkin too. Um... might be slightly situationally useful in a few pulls in dragonkin-infested instances? I'm struggling here. The only time I use Soothe Animal is when I'm fishing in Terrokar Forest and want the wolves and warp stalkers to leave me alone.

This should really have been with the Resto stuff, but:

Barkskin (baseline) is now useable in Tree form. It's a great change for trees, and also removes the biggest source of druid irony.

So: some significant changes for Balance druids. The new spells are pretty cool, but the biggest effect is going to be indoor roots and dragonkin CC. These won't make Moonkin into CC kings, but they do make us a lot more useful, and will really change our playstyle.

The Balance talent tree has seen a pretty big overhaul too. I'll talk about that next.