We had our final raid last night, and I decided that I would play around with Soul of the Forest a little bit. I know, I know – after last week’s raid disaster you’d think that I would just go with what is familiar to me. But between last week and this week, with the help of a friend, I managed to get my groove (and confidence) back. As such, I ran a LFR on Tuesday night where I played around a bit with Soul of the Forest, and then used it for the first six fights in Dragon Soul last night (I used ToL for spine and madness due to mana concerns on those two encounters). I’m not sure that I’m drinking the Soul of the Forest koolaid, but I’m not dumping it into the nearest potted plant either.

Conclusion
Yes, I am starting backwards! And I’m going to answer the ultimate question on everyone’s mind “which is better – SotF or ToL”?

Ultimately I think the choice between Soul of the Forest and ToL is going to come down to two things: Your preferred play style and mana constraints of a given encounter. While Soul of the Forest looks to be providing more output, just based on numbers alone, the other benefits to ToL should not be discounted and will be equally as valuable.

Early Thoughts on Soul of the Forest

I’ve gotten a few questions about what we should be doing once 5.0.4 goes live on Tuesday, so I thought I’d put together a quick FAQ on preparing for the patch and offer my thoughts on the changes that you will be faced with.

How Should I Spec?

I think the first question that is on the forefront of everyone’s mind is “what do I do with these new talents”. Here is my recommendation:

I’ve already talked a lot about the talent trees in other posts, so I’m not going to go into too much detail again here. I will say that you should explore the other options in the 45 and 75 tier if you haven’t had a chance to play around with them on the beta. I would also encourage you to play around with the level 60 talents to get a feel for them as well if you haven’t been on the beta. However, when push comes to shove, these are the talents that I think will work best at level 85 for our last few weeks of Cataclysm.

What haste breakpoint do I need?

Since we are still at level 85, our haste breakpoints will remain the same. You will still want to have 2005 haste. Keep in mind, however, that you will be losing your idol. So if you had any haste on your idol, you will want to be sure to find somewhere to reforge or regem so that you are at 2005 again.

Do I really only have 100k mana?

You do! You will also be losing revitalize as a source of regen and intellect no longer has an effect on your mana pool or regen. From my play on the beta, I think that you will probably feel the pinch a little, but not an extraordinary amount at level 85. If you find that you are running out of mana too quickly during encounters try backing off of your rejuv use some. If that still isn’t sufficient, reforge some of that spirit back onto your gear. I ran at about 2600 spirit at level 85 on the beta, so if you are one of the players who dropped down below 2000 you will likely want to reforge some of that spirit back before stepping into your first post-5.0 raid.

Heroic Scarlet Monastery

I finally had some time this weekend to get into a couple of LFR groups and do some raid testing. Having been unable to participate in almost all of the other testing because of the times testing was available, I was excited to get in there and see how druids played out in a raid setting. Even though this was just LFR, and the weakest of the 25 man raid settings, I was able make a few observations with regards to our stat priorities and our toolkit. As such, I wanted to talk a little bit about how I felt we fit into the overall picture.

I did two front half LFRs comprising of three bosses. The first one I did we couldn’t get past the second boss – as in grand LFR fashion a wipe meant half the raid dropping and having to refill (even in beta!). The second one I was able to kill all three bosses in the first half of the zone. Overall I found the bosses to be fairly fun; however I strongly suspect that the second boss will see a nerf to phase 3 in its LFR version before it goes live.

Let’s move on and talk a little bit about the healing. If you have any specific questions about the raid or bosses themselves, let me know and I’ll try to answer them to the best of my ability!

Hello Internet. My name is Beruthiel, and I’m a meter whore. I’m competitive, I want to be the best and when I’m not I do everything I can to make myself better. Each raid is a challenge, each boss a new opportunity. I’m not ashamed of these things. However, I also recognize that in addition to putting up big numbers I have a job to do, I need to keep everyone alive, and I don’t neglect this job in favor of my ego.

On Being a Dynamic Healer

This is a post that I’ve been sitting on for awhile, because I’ve debated how to address the topic. We all hear jokes about how druids do nothing but glide to glory on Tranquility and Rejuv, how paladins face roll on Holy Radiance, how priests have broken their Prayer of Healing hot keys and how shaman have…well, had a hard time this expansion so I won’t pick on them. While this is all true to an extent, there is something inherently wrong with people who truly believe, and subsequently practice, that this is what a successful healer does. Sure, a healer who is doing these things might be topping your meters, but does that make them a skilled, or even good, healer? It’s unlikely.

I pretty firmly believe that one of the biggest indicators of a truly exceptional healer is how they act in dynamic situations. Do they ignore that DPS that just got a parasite? Do they assume someone else is healing the tank as his life plummets? When everything goes wrong, do they adjust to the circumstances or do they continue to be one button wonders? Personally, I think you can tell more about a healer based on how they react when things are bad than you can by simply observing their output.

This weekend I spent some time in the beta trying to get a feel for both mana and healing at level 90. Since I learned early on that I was likely going to be unavailable for just about all of the raid testing that was happening on weekdays while I was still at work, I was fairly unmotivated to continue my level push to 90. I wasn’t going to be able to contribute where I wanted, being raid testing, and there were better things I could spend my time on. However, after the surprise round of weekend testing (which was blatantly obvious in being scheduled to combat a Guild Wars 2 beta weekend), I decided to get my ass in gear and push out the last two levels on the beta. Granted, I would be shocked if we see another set of weekend raid tests, but nonetheless if they are appear, I will be ready.

Anyhow, this is just a really long winded way of saying “I’m not qualified to tell you how your mana is going to be in raids”. I’ve talked to a few people who are doing some of the beta testing, and they’ve indicated that mana is tight – but that it’s tight across the board and all healers are in the same boat.

What I do feel qualified to spend a little bit of time talking about is how your mana and spells feel before you enter a raid environment. I spent quite a bit of time on Sunday running five of the nine heroics available: Gate of the Setting Sun, Scarlet Monastery, Scarlet Halls, Scholomance and Mogu’shan Palace. I ran all of them with Brade tanking and three PuG DPS. I’ve captured FRAPS of all of the bosses for each instance, and throughout the week I will be posting them, starting with Gate of the Shattered Sun below. I intend to run the last four of the heroic instances throughout the week, and will also offer some feedback on those as well. One thing that I’d like to make a note of with regards to these videos is that we moved the beta off of my SSD to free up space on it, which means that the beta is now running on the same drive that I assigned for FRAPS to write to, which in turn means that I have a little more lag running FRAPS and you may occasionally see some choppiness in the video as a result.

Now that I’ve gotten all of the qualifiers out of the way, let’s get down to my thoughts, shall we? (Man, no wonder my posts can be so long, it takes me hundreds of words just to get to the point!)

I’m not going to lie, I’ve been avoiding this post. At first it was because I told myself “I want practical experience with symbiosis before writing about it”, but even as I sit here today I’m trying to think of other things I can do to avoid talking about the big pink elephant in the room that is Symbiosis. I suspect that part of the problem that I’m having with this is that I can see a good number of things being really great for our PvP Resto brethren, but it still doesn’t remove the underwhelmed feeling that I get when I think about the ability for PvE restos.

The Problem: I think the biggest issue I have with symbiosis is that I don’t really feel compelled to utilize it. That is to say that in most circumstances, the things that I gain from the ability just aren’t something that I resort to when the shit hits the fan to make things better. While some of the abilities can potentially be lifesaving for me individually (ice block, ice bound fortitude), I am having a real issue resolving the fact that I feel really indifferent about having to use our staple “new” ability for this expansion. I understand that it’s going to share around some raid utility, which will be more important in smaller raids and groups than larger raids, and that we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water before we see how it works in a raid setting; but to me, the fact that I can completely ignore the ability in my most “oh shit” moments to date and still be just as effective as I was before symbiosis is really hard for me to reconcile.

Apparently while I was somewhere over the Rocky Mountains yesterday, Blizzard made a change to the level 90 druid talents. I think that it is safe to say the it was pretty unanimously agreed upon that a change was needed, as the old talents were very lackluster and didn’t really offer any dynamic decisions. Druids sat by the wayside turning green with envy as other classes were tended to, and growing ever greener as new things were announced and druids seemingly continued to be overlooked by the developers. Well, the crab himself emerged and gave us a bit of hope and a lot of needed developer presence. While my green isn’t entirely gone, I have gone down a few shades with yesterday’s announcement. While I’m still pretty sure that none of the devs are playing a druid, at least I know we are finally getting some much needed attention.

The question that we have to address with the announced changes is “are these the changes we were looking for?”.  Well, in an attempt to answer that from a resto perspective I think we need to take a look at what we were presented and talk a little bit about what the changes offer us. As such, let’s take a look.

I had some time this weekend to fraps the four bosses in the first instance in the beta, Temple of the Jade Serpent. At level 85, I’ve yet to have any mana problems, but will touch back on this subject when I hit 86. I haven’t reforged back any spirit, and I’m still sitting at about 2600. A few things to note: I had some trouble dropping mushrooms on the last boss, I would drop them, but the third shroom just would not drop. It was getting increasingly frustrating. Tree of Life, when utilizing the lifebloom glyph, is currently instantly adding 3 stacks of lifebloom to each target you cast the spell upon (you can see this on the third boss). And lastly, I found a particularly nasty bug on the last boss involving ToL and Mushrooms. If you pre-plant your shrooms and swap into ToL during the shadow phase of the encounter, and then try to detonate them, you will critical error out. I only caused us to wipe three times to this

I’m a little clunky as my keybinds still aren’t second nature to me yet, but it should give you a relative feeling for how healing is looking so far.

Please don’t hesitate to let me know if you have any questions!

I am the owner of three raid ready resto druids, each of varying gear levels. One who is almost full BiS and raids progression 25 man raids. One who is in a mix of LFR and normal mode gear and putzes around in a one day/3 hour a week 10 man alt group that just started toying with heroics. And lastly one who is a mix of BoE, VP and LFR gear, whose raiding pretty much extends to one LFR per week. One of the most rewarding things to come out of all of these druids is that I get to experience raiding in different raid formats, and at different stages of gearing. This helps me to better understand the different struggles and limitations that druids experience in more diverse settings than my main raid, which helps me better understand is happening at different levels of play. However, one of the side effects of this is that I also have the opportunity to observe my own faults along the way as well.

This post is going to talk a little bit about my experiences with the latter.

I pretty commonly log every raid that I participate in, be it a PuG BH or a LFR experience, so that I can take a look at how I did and analyze my play to look for areas of improvement. Earlier this week, I did the back half of LFR in an attempt to acquire any of the following: A helm (for the LOVE OF GOD, could I please get a meta gem already?!), an off hand or a Maw. When I finished, I perused through my logs, and noted that I had fairly exceptional uptimes on LB and strong uptime with Harmony for each of the four encounters that I participated in that night. Which, in turn, got me to wondering if I was as cognizant of these things when I was raiding on Beru. So I took a look and here is what I found:

Aryas - LFR Warmaster Blackhorn

Beru - Heroic Warmaster Blackhorn

Last week I explored the problems that we saw in hard mode raiding with the resto druid toolkit. The identified issue was our significant lack of ability to deal well with burst AE healing situations. The next step is looking for ways to address this issue in MoP. To do this, I think we must first start with the solution Blizzard is proposing, and then discuss what issues we may have and why we may need changes to that proposal to make sure that it solves the issue, rather than exacerbate the problem. Since I’m a pretty firm believer of “don’t bring me a problem unless you have a suggestion for a solution”, I also think it’s important to offer some alternative thoughts on how the issue can be addressed.

Blizzard’s Fix – Healing Mushrooms

In recognizing that something was missing in the resto druid toolkit, Blizzard made an effort to fill in the gap for MoP by implementing a change to the current level 85 ability that druids received in Cataclysm – Mushrooms. Rather than detonate them so that they explode, if you are a resto druid your mushrooms now “bloom” and heal.