I’m 80! \o/

Ok, so, actually, I’ve been 80 on my Druid for a while, and enjoying the end game. I’m sorry, really, I’m sorry for not updating sooner. I figured once I got 80 the mad dash rate of play may subside a little and give me a tad more time for here. Apparantly, that was not to be! No, you see, there are these badge thingies.. And they’re like, quite good for obtaining new shinies. <guilty look>

In any event, it’s been a lot of fun. I’ve personally found the difficulty curve of most instances and raids to be just right. Heroics are already approaching a similar level of ease as what our group experienced with the 70 bits by the end, I grant you, but we did get a taste of playing them undergeared for a while, and it was really quite exciting. We’ve taken down Sartharion in Obsidian Sanctuary in 10m and 25m, albeit with no drakes up yet. We’ve done Archavon in 10 and 25m also – although no drops for me yet, gosh! We’ve ventured into Naxx 10 and downed all of the arachnid wing and first bosses of plague and construct wings, and it’s been great. There have been wipes, and learning curves, but progression has been made as well. Winning against bosses here feels like an accomplishment without also venturing into the territory of banging your head against jagged rocks for hours on end.

Now, I will grant you, that we have never been what would be considered a hardcore raiding guild. Before 3.0.2 we were clearing Kara and Zul’Aman (beating bear timer, though!) but nothing beyond these. After 3.0.2, some of us got involved with guilds pugging out spots of the older raids, and I personally got to see all content up to and including Black Temple, just not Sunwell. But we did this when it was ‘easy’, and more often than not most people were overgeared and very familiar with the fights. We never had the sense of progression-via-wipenights, and thus this difficulty now seems spot on. I understand those that have had such experiences in the past find Naxx to be something akin to a joke, but it’s intended audience I think does bear some thought.

In any event, it is sufficient to say I’m still enjoying myself, and find things to be very well done. I’ll hopefully have something a little more useful in the near future! Suggestions are welcome!

The Split Specs of a Levelling Druid and How I Heal.

I used to think I respecced a lot before Wrath. To do dailies, fill in a DPS spot if another healer less suited to DPS was on, occasionally even tanking on our 10 man runs if we couldn’t find one of our ‘friend’ pug tanks. Then wrath rolls around, and I have the dual roles of healing instances as we get up to them, while also trying to level as rapidly as possible. This saw me respeccing sometimes several times per day between full boomkin and full resto. Let me tell you, this is by no means a good way for someone yet to get the training required for Swift Flight Form!

Eventually I realised my gold income was being seriously stifled by this, and I really had to find a compromise spec I could work with and handle both roles as desired. At 75, my spec looked like this. I leant more towards heal, taking resto right through to Swiftmend. If you’re comfortable healing without Swiftmend, and want more DPS, you could remove the regrowth talenting and SM and transplant it over into the Boomkin tree. If you leave it as I have, my next few points went into Improved Boomkin Form.

So how well does this work? Well, as expected, you do lose out on both DPS and Healing ability. A hybrid spec is never going to match the sheer power of a dedicated. But, it works well enough. I’ve healed through Violet Hold, Drak’Tharon and a bit later, Gun’drak on this spec without issue. Main thing I notice is the increased rate of mana consumption. It isn’t that it is intolerable or causes issues during fights, but it does mean I actually have to drink from time to time. If the DPS in the group is low, then occasionally even have to actually use the innervate on myself.

On the solo DPS side, it’s certainly no Doomkin. But it beats the pants off attempting to level in a resto spec. For me personally, the difference is of around 400-500 dps in full resto, 800-900 DPS in this hybrid spec, and 1200-1400 DPS full boomkin. This is while solo questing, and an average over quite long periods as measured by Recount.

For Glyphs? Still using Moonfire + Starfire. Can’t beat them for adding to your DPS. Rotation then becomes Wrath -> Entangling Roots while Wrath flies -> Moonfire -> Starfire until dead.

Now though, I have hit 78. We’ve gained another healer in the guild – a Holy Priest – so I’ve returned to a full boomkin spec to power through these last two levels to join my friends  in heroics, raids, and all the good stuff at the end. Which is not to say I haven’t enjoyed levelling in the new content Wrath has provided, especially with all the lore injection and new quest types, but I’ve certainly reached that point where I have a great desire to just be done with it so I might work on beginning the end game.

Last thing I want to talk about here is the setup of my keybinds. It’s a setup I’ve been using for a while now, and have become very comfortable with. It took a while initially though, which surprised me. I thought a shift from WASD for movement to ESDF would be a trivial affair. Not quite so! But it was one that ultimately paid off a lot. You see, before, I was a clicker. I clicked more or less everything. I was pretty good despite this, but knew it definitely could be improved. Using WASD for movement though really didn’t leave me with a great deal of room for easy access keybinds. Thus the shift to ESDF.

With the new movement buttons down, I then had easy access to 12345, QW, RT, and to a slightly lesser degree A and G. I use a barmod called Bartender4, which comes with the handy ability to enter /kb and then mouse over any of it’s buttons and then bind a keystroke or click to the button moused over. So what I ended up doing was leaving the left side of bar1 with 12345, and taking the rightside to use AQWRTG.

W and R are my easiest keys to reach, and for the most part are bound to Rejuvenation and Lifebloom respectively. Q and T are next easiest, which are bound to Healing Touch (+Nature’s Swiftness when it’s up) and Regrowth respectively. A and G are generally taken by Wild Growth and Swiftmend. Further to this, all of my heals are set up with a macro to be cast on the moused over target if one exists (or if none exists, to cast on selected target). This means that I can keep my focus on the tank at all times, while also tossing heals off to the rest of the party with a move of the mouse and a single keypress. As I mentioned above, my Healing Touch is also setup so that it will use Nature’s Swiftness first if at all possible.

So how is this achieved? Well, it’s really quite simple. Here is an example of my Lifebloom macro:

#showtooltip Lifebloom
/cast [target=mouseover, exists][] Lifebloom

The first line simply makes it so that when the macro is moused over on the bar, it shows the spell details for my current highest rank of Lifebloom. The second line is where the magic happens. Within the first set of braces, it sets the target of the spell to be the moused over target, if it exists. If it doesn’t exist, it moves onto the second set of empty braces, which does not change target, not check for any conditional, thus it always evalutes to true and will cast the spell in question (Lifebloom) as per stock standard behaviour – that is, on your currently selected target. Or if no valid target exists, it will give you the cast-pointer-hand-thingy.

And that’s it. You can use this for all your heals, by simply replacing ‘Lifebloom’ with the name of the spell you like. I have all of mine set this way, with the only difference being in Healing Touch, due to the added attempt at Nature’s Swiftness. That macro looks like this:

#showtooltip Healing Touch
/cast Nature’s Swiftness
/cast [target=mouseover, exists][] Healing Touch

This is exactly the same as the above, other than it also attempts to cast Nature’s Swiftness first. If it cannot, it will just move on to HT.

As you can see, it really isn’t difficult to set this up, and it can be very beneficial in removing a click or keystroke in the process of healing someone other than your tank. All you have to do is mouse over the relevant unitframe and tap the right key on the keyboard. You can also mouse over the person you want in the world view, and mouse over their actual character, but I find this to be far less reliable.

As a last little note, I use PitBull for my solo and party unitframes, and Grid for my raid frames. PitBull in particular can be quite difficult to get configured precisely how you like it – especially on your first attempt at doing so – but is ultimately the best I’ve found. And this is saying something coming from me, a lover of X-Perl for a very long time now! X-Perl is still a great system, and certainly far more able and ready to go right out of the box. So if you’re not looking for a major configuration job, it may well be the better way to go. I highly reccomend checking these out!

Oh, turns out I lied. There is one more ‘last’ little note. Clique? Yeah.. I’ve tried it now. Not a huge fan. Basically what it does is let you bind spell actions to your mouse buttons without having to put the spells on your bar. You can then cast – by mouse over selection – through the button clicks on your mouse. Sounds good in theory, in practice I found it to be problematic. Except! I love love love, having Cure Poison on Button5 and Remove Curse on Button6. Basically if you have a mouse with a couple of extra ‘nonstandard’ buttons, it is very much worth while looking into. I didn’t really have any graceful way to do these two with keybinds, but they’re very important. Of course, with Bartender4, you could place these two spells (with a macro like my heals) on your bar somewhere, /kb and bind these buttons to your mouse clicks for the same effect..But hey, this clears up a couple of buttons for you, and saves a couple of macros. So it might be of benefit.

Overall effect though? Everything I need to do is within a single click or keypress, and it’s glorious.

Still levellin’…

Yep. Still going. I never played during the beta, so it’s all new to me. The rate of progress has definitely been a lot slower than I’m used to – yes, even before the XP reduction patches of 2.3 and 3.0! – but it isn’t quite as horrific as I first imagined, while playing madly away upon my arrival home on the night of release. I didn’t actually get to start playing til around 2:00am and I only endured through to around 5:30am (last half hour of that on a Death Knight, just to see what all the fuss was about) before going to sleep.

At that point it seemed I had barely put a dent into my xp bar! Back up at 7:30am (yes, I was weak and went to bed, but at least it wasn’t for long!) and didn’t hit 71 til some time much later in the day. I think for the early wrath levels I’ve averaged around 12-13 hrs played per level, which is just crazy! But no longer quite so intolerable. As much as I really want to get back into heroics and raiding, I actually am enjoying the content on offer in wrath, I love that there is so much lore in the game, and so much diversity in the questing. The siege engine mechanic has been well used in a number of places. (Don’t skip the Zul’Drak quests!)

I’m getting there, though. Level 77 and airborne once more. No longer does my Flight Form button taunt me so by being lit up yet not actually being enabled. I can ride off cliffs and transform in the air once more, and it is glorious! Although, it also goes to remind me just how much I need to save so that I might afford the flight training for artisan flying, and run the quests for swift flight form. Yes, yes. I know I can simply train it now, but I’ve never ran the quest line before – although I have seen the heroic sethekk boss several times – so want to give it a go first hand.

Now honestly, this wasn’t actually what I intended this post to be about! I wanted to discuss my levelling spec, my mix of instance and questing, and how I finally resolved the respeccing back and forth issue and whatnot! But this is getting a little windy already, so I’ll save that for another post. If you inspect my talents right now, you’ll see it’s full boomkin, but this is because our guild recently picked up another holy priest so I haven’t been relied on as the sole healer all the time. If you are in a position of having to heal instances all the time, but also want to quest level a lot of the time, I’ll have some help for you soon!

Prepared for Wrath?

I am. I think. I mean, I likely could do with a lot more funds than I currently have, and heck, I could probably do more in the way of getting quests done to hand in for a quick xp cha-ching before racing off to Northrend for the first time and gettin’ me tootsies cold.

But even so, there is much I have done! I’ve found a store in New Zealand offering a midnight launch – granted, it’s the 14th for us, since we’re a day ahead, more or less. Unfortunately midnight 14th for us is still a bit behind midnight 13th for you guys! <shakes fist> – but nonetheless, it’s not a terrible deal. Hopefully if there are going to be any server issues that night, ya’ll can have them in that initial 6 or so hour window.

I’ve also roped my brother into ordering from the same place, so he’ll be comin over to my place that evening to eat a healthy dinner – it may be our last good meal for a while! – and perhaps rest a bit before our late night showers, excursion to pickup the game and a myriad of easily edible snacks. (Seriously people, don’t forget to clean.)

After returning home and installing, it’ll be time to stare down the maw of the beast. Judge server stability, take a look at what our professions offer us, see whom we know online and what dungeons we can defeat first without the aid of guides or prior knowledge. If this isn’t an option – pansies! – then it’ll become a flat tack endurance race, to see how far we can get with quests and the like as a Mage (brother) / Druid (me) combo of doom before we turn into whimpering lumps of jello in need of being shovelled into bed by my probably at that point eye-rolling partner.

She is aware of my plans, and has already told me in no uncertain terms that if I awaken her to fetch us coffees in the night, that ‘bad things’ may occur. I’m half tempted to try it out, merely out of a sense of morbid curiosity. But I have a feeling it might involve a substantial cut in Wrath time, so I think I shall refrain.

Also, I’m still sick. Not so sick that merely thinking of getting out of bed pains me, but certainly enough that I can legitimately take some time off work with a medical certificate and everything, so that helps too! Now all that’s left is just to see how far QuestHelper has come along with updating for Wrath quests.. It might be that I need to reinstall LightHeaded as well just in case!

Gee, Thanks Priests! /glare

Now, this has been mentioned by other places already, but it got my leaves rustled enough to chime in myself. If you’re still unsure what exactly I’m talkin about here, it is a statement from Ghostcrawler on the blizzard forums that a nerf is incoming for Circle of Healing and Wild Growth.

Circle of Healing and Wild Growth are definitely on our radar. This would be a good time to discuss them.

Our concern is that they are turning two classes with a large arsenal of healing spells into single-button healers. Meanwhile, ironically, the other two healing classes have fewer heals to use in the first place.

We have seen raid parses where 75 to 90% of a priest’s healing is through CoH. It’s a good spell, useful in a variety of situations. But I think you can understand our concern.

A Priest said to us the other day “Please nerf Circle of Healing so I can push another button!” He’s even thinking of going Disc.

Now, while trying to remain as objective as I can here, I can certainly see his point about CoH. I can. I’ve ran with enough CoH priests in various circumstances now to know that there is definitely an issue here, where CoH becomes the generic i-win button for almost any situation presented to them. But I honestly don’t see the same problem with Wild Growth. I haven’t as yet seen any Druids – myself included – use it as their faceroll button of choice. It just isn’t worth it. Yeah, it is handy to cover people when there is raid wide damage as a fast – but small – tick while you get some more serious heals into play.

But there is the difference! With Wild Growth; there is something else to follow it other than more Wild Growth. I don’t see how the story given about priests there can be so directly tied to WG. It is just rediculously mana inefficient to even consider spamming WG because we wouldn’t see anything remotely close to it’s full heal potential. CoH of course, being a full heal burst, well, that’s another story.

So that’s definitely got me gritting my teeth a little. Nerfs for good reason? Sure, I’ll take those and not QQ over them a great deal. But I really can’t see how these two can be struck with the same bat this way. Does anyone actually heal this way? Has anyone seen another druid heal this way? Was it really all that effective to spam Wild Growth to the exclusion of other heals 75-90% of the time? I could maybe see this working overgeared through a normal instance as a sort of ‘lolrun’. But in a heroic or raid environment? Really?

The ‘Meh’ bug finally bites me

Or maybe it might just be that I’m sick in general. Had what I thought was a mere nuisance flu for the past week and a bit, was finally cajoled into going to the Doctor only to be told it’s actually a chest infection. So that’s why it hasn’t cleared up on it’s own.

Whatever the reason may be though, I’m finally beginning to hit that same wall of apathy that so frustrated me in others not too long ago. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still quite excited for Wrath. Especially now that I actually stop and think about just how close it really is now, but it requires a conscious effort to draw enough motivation to actually log in now, let alone actually run through a heroic or raid.

Nonetheless, I did so yesterday and played through some heroics followed by a ZA with some friends, and some of the spark returned. It was revitalising to some degree, and some of the fun returned with the banter over vent, even if I did sound something akin to a barking seal at the time.

So here’s to hoping this is merely a side-effect of feeling somewhat sorry for myself at the moment, rather than genuine burnout. You know you’re genuinely ill when the thought, ‘I’d rather go to work tomorrow than still be sick’ crosses your mind. Nonetheless, I’m certainly quite ready for Wrath now, and have gained perhaps a little perspective into the idea some people had that everything was kinda pointless now. Admittedly, even if hypocritically – I think I am winding down a bit now just anyway, even if I was well – it will probably continue to annoy me.

Kitty DPS in 3.0.2 is…

…Still dissapointing, sadly. Now I’m the first to admit that my cat DPS set is far from mainspec, and thus is not as well geared as say my healing set is. But it is by no means a slouch set. Running with my regular group through heroic Shattered Halls yesterday, in cat form I was touting 3.2k AP, 38% crit and enough hit to just about ensure -5% chance to miss. For practically any other physical DPS class, these stats would border on the incredible for the gear access he’s had. (This character has been up to Hyjal, but has not gained any kitty DPS pieces from anywhere higher than ZA.)

Now I grant you, for the first parts of the run, much of the low DPS could be attributed to poor playing on my part. It was difficult to resist a simple mangle spam given how early it was available relative to Shred when both were talented for less energy cost. I was under utilising the new power we have in Tiger’s Fury and the amazing energy return ability it has when talented. I wasn’t using Rip nearly enough. And while I had placed Rake on my bar again, it wasn’t really hotkeyed very conveniently because I still felt somewhat poorly about it as a skill due to pre-patch experience.

Playing like that, it was doing a little over 600 dps. This was by far and away the worst in my group, where our hunters can semi AFK DPS for over 1k.

So! Not having a bar of that, I fixed up the issues above and started playing a bit differently. Tiger’s Fury every chance I could after depleting my rage, became stricter on mangle use – debuff only, please! – ripped and raked, then moved onto the next mob while those were still ticking (along with pounce, if it was first mob).

Doing this, and getting up to 3 mobs with rip/rake running on them – although usually all 3 wouldn’t be up for long together – I was able to bring things up to an amazing 850 dps or so..! *sigh* And of course, this wasn’t applicable on bosses, where there was only, you know, the boss to work on. Nonetheless, playing better I was able to maintain at least 720 dps on bosses.

So there is no question that how you play can have just as much impact as gear, in my mind. An improvement of around 250 dps on trash in the same gear is nothing to sneeze at. But bear in mind as well, I was only able to do this because I run with a fantastic pally tank that I know and trust. In a pug, I’m not sure that I would want to push that too hard. Overall though, yeah, I must say I did find it somewhat disapointing. I was imagining grand things for kitty DPS in 3.0.2, but it seems it just isn’t there (yet?). For comparison’s sake, in a Boomkin spec, which is far less specifically geared for than my feral dps set, to the point where about 80% of my Boomkin gear is actually also my resto gear, where I lack +hit like you would not believe, hitting 1k DPS is trivial even on trash where it tends to die so fast that the cast times can be a hindrance. I’ve even gone to ZA like this where on bosses I could hit 1.4-1.5k DPS.

So is there more yet to come for kitties? Is it simply that it’s balanced around another 10 talent points we just don’t have yet? That’s possible. It’s currently not possible to obtain both Berserk and Omen of Clarity in a single build (I went with OoC, if you’re curious). And this may make something of a difference. Not to mention the extra points to spread around like in Master Shapeshifter for a further DPS increase. I don’t know on these things for sure. My gut tells me that talents alone won’t make up the difference entirely, so if gear itemisation doesn’t do it either, feral DPS will still be a bit of a ‘lolwut’ spec. But I’m not going to worry too much about it at this stage. We’ll just have to see where it all ends up!

Druid Tanking in 3.0.2

It’s… Nice. Surprisingly so. I used to tank a lot as a warrior before these changes, and a little on my Druid, just to learn the differences between the classes before throwing myself head first down into the at-that-point untested waters of Resto.

But tonight, neither of the Paladins that I usually run with were in the mood to tank, so I decided to blow the dust from the corner of the bank which contained my tanking set, drew it out, put it on, respecced (I went 0/56/5), and headed off into heroic Arcatraz.

This is a good place to go for a rusty tank, many of the pulls are single – if you do it right – and for the first parts of the instance, the ones that aren’t consist of mostly non elites so are not quite so tragic if you don’t keep up with the agro. On these initial pulls, I quickly learnt just how much of an improvement we’ve received to our threat output levels. On a single target, there is no chance that anyone will be pulling from you. On the large packs of non elites, unlimited target swipe is a god send.

What I found perhaps the most enjoyable though was into the latter half of the instance, where you finally do start seeing pulls of a reasonable size. Gone are the days where only a Paladin could easily forgo all CC, now we, as druids can do the same. Popping Berserk – and Barkskin if you feel the need, don’t forget about this in bear form now! – and just letting loose is amazing. It is quite possible to outDPS the DPS on pulls where you’re able to use this.

If anything *does* miraculously get away from you? Growl now has a 20 yd range, you can pull it back to you without leaving the spot, or even changing target if you use a mouseover macro like so:

#showtooltip Growl
/cast [target=mouseover, exists][] Growl

What does this do? Well, if you have your mouse over a target, Growl will apply to this target. If you have no valid target under your mouse, it will apply to your currently selected target.

Ultimately, I enjoyed my run as tank. It had been a while, but it still went a lot smoother than I had feared it might. I am aware that there was a lot of fear for the druid tank before the patch actually hit, what with all the loss of bonus armor on our leather. But honestly, we’ve fared far better than ever before. Our dodge is way up (30% before patch, to 36.42% now), we’re completely uncrittable by talent alone freeing up our gear choices considerably, and while our mitigation from our own armor in bear is down (61% from 69%), with Protector of the Pack, we end up with a net gain in mitigation, and, it counts for spell damage as well.

It is fantastic. Tanking is now more than bearable, it’s actually fun again, even without the (still relatively) incredible AoE prowess of the Paladin tank. I still feel that I like being a tree more than a bear, but knowing that I can take on the roll of tanking with my face, and still enjoying smooth runs? <smile>

The Changes 3.0.2 Brought

The patch has been with us a couple of weeks now, and it’s certainly been an interesting affair. Even despite the myriad of server issues that many of us have been facing, I’ve been able to get some serious play time in (on my Druid at least).

For some this patch has been like all their christmas’ come at once, be it through long overdue buffs to a talent tree (Hai 2 U, Ret Pallies and Arcane Mages!), creating a whole new batch of loot pinatas via 30% less vital raid monsters, or more simple joys – such as stacking clams! (Glee!)

I find though, that life as a druid of leafy persuasion has not really changed. At least so far as PvE is concerned. Yes, we have new talents to play with, and yes, Wild Growth actually ended up not being as terrible as may have been feared. But the play style is the same. I still never have to drink to regain mana. The increase in cost of Lifebloom has not been so severe as to force me to cease rolling it almost indiscriminantly. I’ve tried builds both with and without Wild Growth and find myself doing just fine in either case. (Although you can certainly get some impressive HPS with Wild Growth!)

Perhaps the full weight of the changes are yet to be seen. We don’t yet have the higher ranks of Lifebloom which may well be too costly to throw around willy nilly. We don’t have Nourish available to us to see if that impacts the way we play. Nor do we have the – in my opinion – best of the Restoration glyphs available until after Wrath goes live.

What I have noticed though, is that the conversion of +healing to +spellpower has made me far less inclined towards gouging my eyes out with a spork while trying to do dailies that involve killing things. Another nifty change which I somehow completely missed in all patch notes I had read, was the fact that Thorns now takes account of spellpower. This is perhaps one of my most favourite changes brought by 3.0.2, right after the fact that clams can stack now!

What about you? Have you noticed your playstyle change as a leafy druid much? At all? Any favourite changes that took you completely by surprise like my discovery of the new relationship between Thorns and Spellpower?

I’d like to talk about my warrior too. I’d like to. But I just haven’t given him the time of day in far too long. With the free respec I was given, I tossed one together and ended up doing it wrong (doh) and haven’t taken him through a single instance yet. I have, however, tested his DPS on normal mobs and found it to be very rewarding. Damage Shield is a fantastic mechanic that I love very much, almost to the point of actually giving my warrior a serious play through again.

Right now though, I’ve never felt more at home with a class than I do my druid. It was the class I was made to play. My warrior was a struggle to level, it felt a lot like work. As much as I enjoyed tanking with him, even before this patch, he was stained in my mind by the arduous task he had been to get there. On the other hand, my druid has been an absolute joy. He can tank – and has, up to Zul’Aman level anyway – He can Heal – which has taken over as my joy! From one high stress job to another! Really? Yes. Really. – and now, he can even DPS. I don’t much want to go into the Moonkin side of things, but suffice to say, I really quite like this form now.