I have been invited to be a part of a Resto Druid round table tomorrow night with the Waffle Cast crew. It will be at 7:00 pst, and will be live streamed if you would like to listen/participate. You can also head over to the Waffle Cast website and post any questions that you’d like to have addressed during the round table. The participants for the round table are as follows:

Arielle: Moderator
Diziet: Tournament Player (most recently WCG 2011 in Korea)
Beruthiel: 25m Heroic Raider from Falling Leaves and Wings
Hamlet: EJ Math/Theorycrafting Guru and creator or Tree Calcs
Synergy: Multi Season Gladiator
Lissanna: Restokin and Druid Class MVP

There is a very diverse list of participants, so don’t hesitate to ask any resto druid questions you may have on your mind and tune in to hear all things resto!

This topic is actually something that has been on my mind quite awhile, and in fact was something I brought up back in November when I was chatting on the Blessing of Frost podcast with Vidyala and Kurn. Back in November I questioned why Blizzard felt so strongly that they needed 10 and 25 man raiding to be considered “equal”. Which, frankly, has caused almost insurmountable problems as they’ve struggled with tuning and class/role balancing trying to meet this seemingly unobtainable goal – often times to the detriment of the player and their enjoyment in the game.

Put your torches away, and let me explain what I mean before you decide to torch me.

WoW has changed significantly since I first pulled those five CDs from the vanilla box and installed the game on my computer. One of the things that have changed for the worse, at least in my opinion, has become this focus on the progression “race” – which is heavily perpetrated by guild ranking sites like WoW Progress and GuildOx. But I’ve opined on that previously, and I don’t really want to go into a rant on my thoughts here as I’ve done that previously. However, I do think it’s important to acknowledge this change because it plays into what I do what to discuss: The “equality” of 10 man and 25 man raiding, or more specifically why there is such a push to make them equal.

On Snowpocalypse

It’s been a little quiet. There are many reasons for that, but one of them is that the Seattle area just had a big dumping of snow that kept both Brade and I house bound for 3 days. As such, rather than doing things like working on a Hagara guide or finishing one of the dozen blog posts in my draft folder, I spent some of that extra time with Brade. Amongst other things we discovered the glories of Castle and navigated our way through the first season. When he opted to play Star Wars, I spent some quality time curled up with the puppy, drinking tea and reading People. And…I enjoyed it.

Anyhow, we received 12 inches of snow, if the weatherman is to be believed – which is a ton for the Seattle area. We only lost power a few times, and in flickers, so we were fortunate on that front as many people in the area lost power for days (and some still don’t have it back). There was so much snow that after we walked the dog, we had to carry her back to the tub and use hot water to get the clumps of snow off of her feet.  Here are some pictures of what it looked like at the end of last week.

I’ve had a few queries about my thoughts on T13, how I am gearing for progression, and more specifically on some of my stat weightings as viewed in armory; as such I thought I’d take a few minutes to go over my thoughts on set gear this tier. The most common question I’m asked about are spirit and mastery ratings – and more specifically my spirit and mastery. And, honestly, depending on when I’m asked and what gear I’m wearing my answer changes.

The Great Four Piece Debate

There is a lot of speculation about how valuable four piece T13 is for resto druids. Unfortunately, I don’t have a solid, analytical answer for that question. What I can tell you, however, is that I’ve been playing around some with the set bonus. To date, I’ve not been successful at finding how often timeslip procs in the logs - or how much of the casted spell is overheal. What I can tell you is that on the two heroic fights I used the bonus on this week I did marginally better than the prior week, and had slightly more rejuv healing. However, without definitively knowing how much of that is attributable to timeslip, I don’t know that I can say anything definitive regarding how much of an impact the bonus had.

What I can say definitively is that I still prefer the extra mana gain from 2 T12/2 T13 for progression attempts – with heroic Yor’shaj being the only exception to that rule. I find that the extra mana return far outweighs any value from “timeslip”. It gives me more leeway to learn how to heal the encounter and let’s me be a little more aggressive during learning attempts. I started our Heroic Ultraxion attempts with 4 T13, and quickly swapped back into my 2/2 set and found myself significantly more comfortable. That being said, once I am familiar with an encounter and the damage patterns in the encounter, I’ve had no issues swapping over to the 4 T13. However, I am still uncertain of the overall value outside of just increased stats on the gear.

What is up with your spirit and haste?

I’m glad you asked! My question to you would be “what was I wearing when you armoried me?!”. Because I’ve been toying with the 4 T13 bonus, but most of my gear is shared outside of the set items, and I want to be able to flip between the two seamlessly, I’m limited in what I can do with reforging on my sets. My 2/2 set sits at exactly 2005 haste, which means that I can’t tinker with any of those items when dealing with my 4 T13 set. This limits what I can do with reforging and means that my spirit in this set is a little high (2700) and I have roughly 80 more haste than I need. My mastery also takes a bit of a dip in the T 13 set.

Until I can decide what I’m going to do with the gear, I imagine that my 4 T13 set is going remain a little off stat wise. In time, I am sure that I will go straight T13 and be done with it. But for now, I’m not ready to give up the extra regen from the 2/2 set and want to continue having it as  an option for progression.

As far as spirit is concerned, I can tell you that I’ve upped mine from T12 somewhat significantly. I ran roughly 1700 spirit by the end of T12, but found that was not sufficient for my healing style in the T13 content. As such, I’m currently running around 2400 spirit and feel comfortable. I’m not yet to the point of having a surplus of mana left at the end of encounters, but as gear increases, I imagine that I will get there – and when I do I will be reforging some it back off and likely back into mastery. As far as spirit is concerned overall, you just need to find a number that works well for you.

And that is what is up with my gear! Please keep that in mind if you are running an armory on me. I’d love to know if anyone has found a way to track timeslip in WoL. Additionally, I’d love to hear any experiences that you may have with the set bonus and what you think!

Druids can’t heal that! Yes, yes we can. While it’s true that we don’t bring any of the goodies that the other three healing classes offer the raid (Barrier, SLT, Beacon of Light), and there are plenty of arguments for why those other classes are more valuable to the raid on this fight – Druids are still viable healers for this encounter and it can be done with a leafy healer in the raid. Let’s talk about how to navigate through this content tier’s “druids are terrible” encounter.

Please note that this video will be best viewed at one of the higher resolutions.

A few tips!

• Don’t stress the mana void! I talked about this in the video, but forgot to mention one thing: when blue is out it’s a license to go nuts with your mana. The mana void is going to drain it all from you anyhow, make good use of it before it’s gone! Additionally, I forgot to mention that I always save my mana pot for a back to back blue void as the mana void tends to take a little longer to die due to not having as much time to DPS it down between voids. I found that a well timed mana pot could work wonders. Additionally, many of the blue combinations are the easiest! Learn to love seeing that blue slime creep in towards the boss.
• Love your melee. One thing that we learned was that as long as all of the ranged and the healers were at range, the melee were never targeted with  the green ooze. This made it significantly easier on both the melee and the raid. Let your melee pile right in and have the range eat all of the green.
• Purple, Shmerple. The only really challenging purple combination is a black/purple. The rest of them are fairly easy to navigate once you get a feel for them. The biggest piece of advice I can give for surviving the purple is to make sure you raid is topped up before the purple ooze hits.
• Who is healing MY group?! We used 6 healers and assigned one to the tank and one to each group. During purple phases healers were given very strict assignments and did not heal outside of their group. We used a shaman on the tanks, with a paladin who healed group 1 bouncing Beacon of Light between the tanks (more below).
• Deep Corruption. Make sure your raid frames show deep corruption stacks. No matter how good you are, when things get hairy it’s easy to forget if you healed that person 2 , 3 or 4 times.
• What do you mean I can only heal the tanks FOUR times! Tank healing on this encounter gets tricky, and requires a combination of good communication and smart cooldown usage. We had one healer assigned to heal the tanks directly during the purple phases. When the tanks would taunt, our paladin would beacon the non-active tank (who had four stacks of deep corruption) and go nuts to keep him up, while our tank healer would swap to the new tank. Once that tank became unhealable, our paladin would swap his beacon again to deal with the damage the new damage on the tank. We utilize both tank cooldowns and external cooldowns (Hand of Sac./Pain Suppression/LoH) to help keep the tank up during the sticky parts where they could no longer receive  direct heals but were still taking heavy damage. Additionally, towards the end of the purple phase, stay with the tank and time a heal to hit the second deep corruption drops off to get the tanks back in order for the next phase. There will be a fair number of tank deaths while you work through what needs to be done to keep the tanks alive during the purple phases, it’s just part of the learning curve as your tank healer and paladins work through finding the perfect combination of timing heals, swearing and prayer.
• ToL/Tranq. Unless you are trying to wipe your raid, never utilize Tranq during a purple phase. I panicked once and did this, and the raid was dead before Tranq finished casting. Oops. Additionally, save your ToL for a Red/Black/Blue or a Red/Yellow/Black phase were the extra healing and can be useful. While I suppose you could test it out during a purple phase, I feel that is a lackluster time to utilize it due to the nature of Lifebloom and your limitations on healing during that phase. I tend to favor mine on the Red/Black/Blue because LB is dirt cheap, but will also utilize it on the Red/Yellow/Black phase should we see that one first.

Please do not hesitate to let me know if you have questions!

I’ve gotten quite a few questions on this bugger of a fight, and I know that I’m a little slow getting this out, but I hope it’s still timely enough to be helpful! I only have kill footage of this encounter – which went beautifully until the very end where we squeaked by on the skin of our teeth,  so please forgive the “oops” at the end.  I will tell you what was supposed to happen as the fight came to a close and point out where that went awry. I dealt very specifically with druid healing in this video, but will add a few more comments/tips below.

Please note that this video will be best viewed at one of the higher resolutions.

A Few Tips!

• How many healers did you use? We heal this with seven healers. Our first kill was 2 druids, 1 paladin, 3 priests and 1 shaman. Our other druid healed one of the tentacle tanks during the black phase. We’ve used any number of combinations since then and been successful.
• Oh God, my mana! This is an extremely heal intensive encounter, and mana will be very tight. I opted to run with 2 T12 and 2 T13 while learning it so that I had extra regen for the encounter. Additionally, I found that, for myself, if I didn’t innervate before the first black phase things were so hectic and every GCD in the black phase was so precious, that I often forgot to innervate until we came out of the phase and I was often sub 50% mana. As such,I try to make a point to innervate before entering that first black phase to maximize my innervates through the fight. Additionally, don’t forget to maximize your trinkets if you have additional  regen focused trinkets so that you can utilize them  the maximum number of times in the fight.
• Love Nature’s Grace. I can’t stress this enough! Whether you are solo healing a group or healing with a partner, make smart use of Nature’s grace so that you have it available during heavy damage phases to help boost the healing you can do during those times.
• Tree of Life. As I stated in the video, I preferred to use ToL while the debuffs were active so that I could do more effective healing for less mana and it ensured that I could maximize ToL twice in the encounter. I, personally, found it somewhat lackluster for dealing with the black phase damage and found that I often reverted to rejuv/regrowth even if I was in ToL so it made the most sense for me to use it as more of a conservation tool to help support the aggressive healing needed in the black phases. This worked very well for me, but you will need to play around with it to find the best time for you and your raid team – you may well find that you like it better at a different time in the encounter.
• Tranquility. Also as stated in the video, I favored using Tranquility during the first and third black phases. This meant that I had it available for two of the phases where the healers are spread out and have to focus on keeping their group alive. I found this imperative for solo healing a group, and extremely helpful when working with another healer. While it meant that I did not have it available for the final push – we had many mitigation cooldowns available to get us through those final seconds of the fight during that fourth black phase where you ignore everything and just burn through the boss.
• Don’t be afraid to ask for help. When your raid is first learning this fight, navigating the black phase as a druid is brutal. Our tool kit lacks any burst AE healing, which means that you need to do a lot of prep for the black phase and smartly utilize your cooldowns and toolbox to navigate through it. If you also 7 heal, one of your groups will have 2 healers in it – and if you are struggling with the black phase do not hesitate to ask to be placed in the “team up” group. We found that priests of both specs were especially adept at solo healing a group, and that paring up our shaman and myself made life a lot less miserable for the both of us. Asking for help doesn’t mean you are a bad healer, it just means that the black phase sucks and our toolkit isn’t the most adept at navigating the damage. By our third kill, with some gear upgrades and the raid more familiar with the fight, I had no issues solo healing a group – but during progression trying to solo heal it was one of the worst healing experiences I’ve ever had.
• Mitigating Damage. Something to keep in mind is that the gaze from the eyestalks can be brutal when all 8 of them are active (especially in those 5-10 seconds the flails are alive), however, those buggers can be interrupted! You probably don’t want to make it a priority to interrupt each and every one, DPS can (and should) interrupt the ones they are DPSing to help the black phase damage be more manageable. While they do not have a cast bar, you can easily tell when they are casting because they “squat”. Additionally, everyone in the raid with damage mitigating abilities should be sure that they use them during black phases.
• Raid Cooldowns. You absolutely want to have a raid cooldown rotation for the final black phase “push”. (This would be the part in the video were we made a mistake and blew up). We set up PW:B rotations, as well as Aura Mastery and 4 piece tank cooldown rotations. Once you hit that phase it’s pure survival mode. Cycle your cooldowns and keep as many people alive as you can. I might also recommend prayer.  Additionally, we used Aura Mastery and 4 piece tank cooldowns during the black phases, and PW:B throughout the fight while the debuffs were active. We found that having a PW:B as the debuff comes out immediately after your first black phases to really help keep the raid stabilized - as that set of debuffs occurs almost immediately upon entering the light phase and many people are still low life from the black phase.

There is a lot going on in this encounter, so I may well have forgotten to address something.  Please do not hesitate to let me know if you have questions!

Have you ever watched and really listened to those TV commercials from drug companies that are trying to sell their medicine and encourage you to talk to your doctor to see if Drug X is right for you? I’m sure that you know the ones I’m talking about. The ones with the laundry list of warnings about potential side effects and dangers that make you think “I think I’d rather suffer through whatever ailment than take this drug”. Well, Brade and I watch them and make a little game about what side effects each drug is going to have. Death? Thoughts of Suicide? Heart failure? It’s sort of like medical bingo, get five right and get a prize!

Until one of them hits close to home.

It wasn’t until a couple of nights ago that we were listening to a commercial for an arthritis drug called Celebrex that something clicked. We’d seen the commercial a million times before, because it’s heavily advertised, and I’d always thought “thank god I’m not taking that medicine for my hands!”. But this is the first time that a light bulb went off in my head as the commercial played. As they started listing off the possible side effects of taking the drug, one stood out to me. Depression.

There is this delicious gelato shop a few blocks from where I work that I love. After I ate the (mostly) healthy lunch that I brought from home today, I decided that I needed some gelato and walked down to get some. Next to the gelato shop is a hat shop. Not a division of a store that sells hats, but a shop that is dedicated to nothing but hats. Every time I walk by it I stop and wonder how a shop that sells nothing but (high-end) hats can stay in business. I mean, I never see anyone in the store, and even though it’s always very rainy in Seattle, you don’t see many people walking around sporting hats.

I remember the first time I went by the shop, and there was the giant Stetson advertisement, and I sort of figured that it mainly sold cowboy hats – and while I didn’t really see a lot of cowboy hats around town, there must be a popular market for them in the Seattle area. Maybe Bill Gates was a huge fan of the Stetson or something. In the window next to the cowboy hats were “old man hats”. You know the ones I’m talking about, with the flat bill and the button that snaps down. My Great Uncle Ray used to favor them when he went out. But then came something I wasn’t expecting. In the window next to the old man hats were some of the most lovely ladies hats that I’d ever seen. I was mesmerized by the array of woman’s hats in the window. (And I had flashbacks of the Disney short, you know, the one with Alice Blue Bonnet and Johnny Fedora).

Anyhow, every time I walk by the hat shop now, in addition to wondering how the shop thrives, especially in this economy, I always look at the ladies hats in the windows. Not only the hats, but the hat boxes. I’ve never had a hat that requires a hat box or has warranted a hat box upon its purchase. In fact, I didn’t even know that hat boxes still existed. But the hats are beautiful and have so much personality and panache.

Today as I walked by the hat shop, I again stopped and looked at the ladies hats in the window. And even though I’ve never really worn hats (unless you count the baseball cap I threw over my bed head on the way to class in college as I was running out the door…), I decided that I’m going to buy a hat from that front window. One that warrants a hat box.

I haven’t picked one out yet, but just because I’ve never worn hats before, doesn’t mean I can’t wear one now. And I intend to wear my new hat gracefully, with personality and panache.

It’s been said that laughter is the best medicine. I don’t entirely know that it’s true, but I figured it can’t really hurt to try. Since Brade and I found a few giggles earlier today, I thought I’d share to see if the supposed best cure was contagious or not.

Last night I almost left my guild. I had to literally stand up and walk away from the computer to prevent myself from typing a phrase that I hadn’t typed in seven years: /gquit. I didn’t want to make a rash, emotional decision that I would regret in the morning. Only when I woke up this morning, after crying myself to sleep yet again, I regretted that I hadn’t done it.

Amongst other things, I had it out with one of our officers last night. And after feeling like I was being placed as a scape goat for everything, I flat out told him I would offer a simple solution: I would leave. I mean, let’s face it, I haven’t been happy in months, I’ve noted that in multiple venues, including my guild forums - if people were truly unhappy with me it seemed like a win/win solution for everyone. I advised him I wasn’t being melodramatic about it, I was truly miserable, tired of dealing with it and I wanted to leave. And I was told that if I did that everything would fall apart and I was needed to keep the guild alive. I found this odd, considering that I was supposedly at the root of all of these problems we are seeing in the guild at the moment.

Which lead me to wonder: If I’m not a replaceable member of our leadership team, why am I treated so poorly by the people I work so hard for day in and day out? Why is it that when I tell people that I’m at the end of my rope, and what is causing me to be there, they continue to perpetrate the exact things that drove me to where I am right now? Why do I feel unappreciated and outright disrespected by many members of our guild? Why do I not feel like I am not welcome or wanted any longer?

I was left with a heavy decision that I thought about while I was showering this morning, as I drove to work and as I booted up my workstation at the office. I was leaning heavily towards leaving, as I removed a few more of the “pros” from a pros/cons list that I’ve been building in my head for the past two months. And then came the PM that should have never been sent.  From a raider that is equally, if not more, emotional that I am at times. A person that I had specifically directed to Brade because I couldn’t deal with it anymore. And my resolve eroded.

I wanted out. Now.

I responded less than charitably, because, well, I’m fresh out of charity to give. I’m tired of putting my feelings behind others, often to my detriment. And I’m tired of putting everyone’s needs and feelings ahead of mine. I’ve been doing it for seven years – and people (that I willingly invited into our guild) have unintentionally done to me what a group of people who set out to destroy our guild couldn’t do: they have made me want to leave my guild and look for a new place to call home.

I quietly closed my office door and started to weep in earnest. Ashamed and embarrassed that I was this upset over a recreational activity and couldn’t control my emotions enough that it was impacting my ability to work – especially when I have always prided myself on being able to bifurcate my personal life and my professional life when I stepped into the office.

I called Brade, looking for direction and advice. Hoping that the person who lovingly strokes my hair as I cry myself to sleep would offer me some semi-objective opinions. When he told me I should leave because I am clearly unhappy, I cried harder. The truth is, I still don’t know what I want to do. We talked about it a bit (well, mostly I cried and he tried to make me feel better), ultimately, effective immediately, I abdicated myself from all raid leading responsibilities going forward. (And you are probably learning about this change before half of our guild).

I haven’t decided whether or not I’m going to stay and see if things get better with the guild or not. The truth is that my head knows Brade is right – when it gets to the point that I am crying myself to sleep at night and locking myself into the office for the same reasons, it’s probably time to move to something that is more healthy for me, regardless of where that leaves the guild.  But my heart, lord my heart. It wants what it wants. It slaps on those rose colored glasses and romanticizes about the change that will happen with me stepping back, and tries to convince me that everything will be better now. It doesn’t want to walk away and abandon something that I’ve nurtured for so long.

I don’t know where I’ll land when this storm settles.

I know that I’m not done with WoW yet, but I do not know if I’ll be finishing out my love affair with the game with Monolith. Which is, quite honestly, not something I’d ever thought I’d say and may in the end kill WoW for me, as my guild has been a driving force for me in the game for so long. I have a lot of emotions and thoughts to sort through before I find an answer – and I strongly suspect the atmosphere of the guild over the next few days will play heavily into that decision.

In the end, is it so wrong to want to be happy and have fun again?