I feel a little bit like I should find a way to work a Treebeard quote into the start of this post about haste, but then I realized that the movie really did Treebeard a disservice and those who have not read the books would likely not fully appreciate the significance or humor behind such a quote regarding tress and haste. As such, I have left out the intellectual quotes section from the beginning of this post and have instead replaced it with this somewhat awkward musing about how I was going to do something I found funny, but suspected had limited audience appeal.

Honestly, at this point, I should probably just let the quote fly and move on from it. But that’s not really my style!

*ahem* Let’s talk about trees that don’t involve JRR Tolkien, shall we?

I have been receiving quite a few questions on the topic of Haste lately. Those questions, in addition to something I’ve been quietly observing, have lead me to the conclusion that the topic of resto druids and haste seems to be a little bit confusing. So I thought I’d toss together a quick post that will hopefully offer some clarification on how we, as druids – not Treebeard – want to view haste this tier.

Haste vs. Mastery

There are currently two gearing options for this tier, which subsequently mean that there are two definitive haste breakpoints that you want to be looking at as you are gearing in SoO. 3043 or13163. Those are the options. There really aren’t any in betweens of note, which means any haste over 3043 that does not reach 13163 is essentially wasted itemization. This means that you are going to want to evaluate the gear you have available to you and make a decision on which of these two haste breakpoints is going to work best for you.

I’m sure that the question on everyone’s mind is: “Beru, what I really want to know is which one is better“.

Well, the truth of the matter is that they are fairly comparable and the higher of the two breakpoints is going to be highly gear dependant to reach. This means that there isn’t necessarily a cut and dry answer! Which breakpoint you opt to reach is going to be solely dependent on you! Let’s see if we can break it down a little bit!

The Mastery Build

For this build you will want to aim for 3043 haste. This will be the build for you if you are at lower gear levels – it will be very challenging, if not impossible, to achieve the higher breakpoint unless you are in heroic T15 gear or have a good amount of T16 gear. The stats are just not available on the gear before that point to make the switch.

But don’t worry! Because it’s fine! A mastery build still performs very strongly!

The first thing I want to reiterate is that if you are opting for this build, you want to be at 3043 haste. Do not try for a 6k breakpoint, do not try for an 8k breakpoint. If you can’t reach 13k, your breakpoint is going to be 3043.

Once you’ve reached the requisite amount of haste, you are going to want to reforge any excess stat (crit/haste) into mastery. You will want as many of your pieces as possible to have mastery on them. So, if possible, reforge mastery onto any piece that is lacking it! You will want to use artful, zen and fractured gems to complement this build – you should never need to utilize haste gems in this build, outside of maybe popping in a reckless to do some creative reforging.

 

The Haste Build

For this build you will want to aim for 13163 haste. You will want to consider this build once you have enough haste gear, plus higher secondary stats that make reforging over to this breakpoint feasible. You will likely not reach this point until you have acquired a good amount of T16 gear (or are already in higher level T15 gear). For this build, any gear that does not have inherent haste on it will require you to select a stat to reforge into haste. You can opt for Mastery, Crit or Spirit – but don’t gut your spirit past a point your are comfortable with regen.

You have a few tools to help bump your haste up if you opt for this build. You can utilize quick gems (+320 haste), Reckless gems (+160 haste) or Energized gems (+160 haste). When gemming, try to keep your socket bonuses as much as possible and if you have to, break break a weaker +60 one rather than a stronger +120 one. You can also pick up some extra haste on your gloves utilizing the greater haste enchant. However, do not forego Pandaren’s Step for the haste enchant – the run speed is too valuable for the minimal amount of haste you would be gaining.

Once you’ve reached the proper amount of haste, you will want to dump any extra stats that you haven’t converted to haste into mastery.

Just to Recap!

You will want to choose between either the 3043 and the 13163 haste breakpoints in 5.4. There is no breakpoint that is worth gearing for in between those two – so if you cannot reach the higher breakpoint gear for the lower one until you have the gear necessary for the other! If you opt for the lower one convert all extra stats to mastery. If you are using the higher one, you will likely be strapped for haste until you can acquire some of the haste rich pieces in SoO and will likely need to reforge and gem for haste!

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

This past Friday, the Healer Proving grounds were finally fixed and I decided to spend a little bit of time over the weekend to give them a spin. I have been pretty excited about proving grounds since they were announced, and was very disappointed when they were bugged shortly after being released, so I was pretty excited about going in and playing them finally. I think my favorite thing about proving grounds is that my success in them is wholly dependent on my individual performance and how I execute each challenge that is presented.

I went in Friday and snagged my “Proven Healer” title pushing into wave 48. Saturday morning I decided to give it another go, and went through two rounds with my first getting into 48 again and my second seeing 55. Not satisfied with that, I came in Sunday morning and did another round, this time making it into wave 63 before running into trouble that ended my run. Each time I reach a wave that surpasses my previous performance I find myself exhilarated and have to remind myself to stay calm and play smartly. Each time I fail, I think through what caused the wipe and how I could have done something differently to achieve a different result and look forward to getting back in there to try again. In other words…I’m addicted! I really enjoy that they make me look for solutions to new problems the further I get, which in turn I think makes me a better player. So far, the only downside to proving grounds is that it now takes me in excess of an hour to get back to the best point I reached in my prior runs and back to the challenge of pushing further into additional endless waves. Which can be a little cumbersome.

Since proving grounds are relatively new and require some out of the box thinking and tricks, as well as smart healing, I thought folks might be interested to see how I am approaching them. As such, I thought I’d share some things I’ve picked up over the past few days, in hopes that it will be useful to someone just getting ready to start on their own proven healer journey!

With The Siege of Orgrimmar just around the corner, I thought it might be a good time to take a look at what changes we will be seeing as we had in to take down Garrosh!

Innervate – Now restores mana based on the Druid’s spirit

This now means that your return from innervate will not be a set amount, but will be based on how much spirit you are using. This is a good change at the end game, when you are likely to have more spirit on your gear – but may make early restos a little mana starved until they are able to soak up some spirit gear. Basically you will want at least 12,000 spirit to keep your innervate at the same size that it is now. Anything lower than that will make your innervate restore less mana than currently, and anything higher will grant you more mana return from your innervate.

Wild Mushroom Bloom – The restoration version of the ability now summons a single mushroom at the friendly target’s location. If the mushroom is recast, the mushroom moves to the new location and retains its accumulated bonus healing. A single mushroom now heals for as much as what 3 mushrooms combined healed for previously. The amount of healing stored on a Wild Mushroom is now reduced by Battle Fatigue. Wild Mushroom and Wild Mushroom: Bloom now have a shared 3-second cooldown.

When you summon mushrooms now, you will only have to summon one mushroom! This is a fantastic quality of life change for everyone! The healing from the mushroom will still heal as if you had planted three in 5.2/5.3 but only one mushroom is required. Additionally, you will now retain the stored up healing in the mushroom if you move it to a new location – which is a fantastic change and makes mushrooms much more forgiving if your raid moves and/or you need to change where you’ve placed your muhsroom. And you will be able to place a mushroom under a person – rather than utilizing the targeting reticule. This will mean that you can plant your mushroom via your raid frames, if you are so inclined.

There will be a three second cooldown between when you plant your mushrooms and when you are able to bloom them – which, while a change, isn’t bad. And if you PvP the amount stored in your mushroom will be reduced while under Battle Fatigue.

Wild Mushroom: Bloom is no longer capable of critical strikes, and accumulates overhealing done by Rejuvenation by 100%, down from 150%. Overhealing bonus no longer benefits from Naturalist or Mastery: Harmony.

The accumulation rate of this is basically just a reworking to compensate for the fact that we now only have one mushroom, as opposed to three. However, the Crit, Naturalist and Mastery changes are a small nerf – but likely one that was needed, since the output of mushrooms is already very powerful. While the change will probably be slightly noticeable, and maybe a little bit of a bummer, I don’t really expect it to have a massive impact on the PvE side of the game.

Genesis is a new Restoration spell learned at level 88. Genesis targets all party or raid members within 60 yards and accelerates the casting Druid’s Rejuvenation effects, causing them to heal and expire at 400% of the normal rate. Costs the same amount of mana to cast as Rejuvenation.

This is a new addition to our toolkit. What it does, in a nutshell, is allow your rejuvs to become a more burstier heal. It will take all of your active rejuvs, and speed up the rate at which they tick so that they will all heal much more quickly. This ability also has the potential to have some interplay with charging your mushrooms very quickly, if needed.

Living Seed effects can now stack, up to 50% of the casting Druid’s maximum health and will no longer be consumed if the target is already at full health.

This is a good, and much-needed update to how Living seed functions. Basically, Living Seed will now build up and they won’t trigger from a hit if they party that the living seed is on doesn’t require any healing. There isn’t much more to say here, but this is a good change for Living Seed!

Swiftmend’s area-of-effect healing effect is now called Efflorescence.

Not too much happening here, other than making digging through combat logs a little easier and creating less confusion.

Dream of Cenarius has been completely redesigned to reduce complexity and increase usability, but maintain the spirit of the effects. Benefits now varies by specialization. Restoration: Causes Wrath to deal 20% more damage and heals a nearby friendly target for 100% of the damage done.

This basically turns DoC into our version of Atonement. Only worse. While this talent had a lot of potential, the cost of wrath coupled with the interaction it’s going to have with healing makes this talent somewhat prohibitive and lackluster compared to the other two. It may have some niche uses, but isn’t likely to be the top choice for the tier.

Heart of the Wild when activated, now also provides a 25% bonus to healing for Restoration Druids

A nice change to this ability that makes it more than just a passive Intellect increase and offers a bit of a healing bonus for utilizing the spell – somewhat similar to the extra output from ToL.

Nature’s Vigil when activated, now increases all damage and healing done by 12% (up from 10%), and causes single-target healing spells to trigger an additional heal on a nearby ally for 25% of the amount healed. This is in addition to the existing effect where it damages a nearby enemy target for 25% of the healing done.

This is a pretty nice change to Nature’s Vigil, and will likely make it the top choice in talents for us in SoO. It’s basically going to take any single target heal (Rejuv, Regrowth, Swiftmend, Healing Touch, etc.) and heal nearby person for 1/4 of the initial heal. This has the potential to be very powerful in high AE damage situations, especially given the short 1.5 minute cooldown on the ability. I would expect that this will be your go-to talent in this tier, unless there is a niche encounter that will favor one of the other two talents more.

Nature’s Swiftness is no longer a talent, and is now an ability learned by Restoration Druids at level 30.

This is a fantastic change for us, as it means that we can actually explore some of the other talents in that tier, and it removes having what is essentially a mandatory talent. Other than that, nothing else about the ability has changes.

New talent: Ysera’s Gift. Ysera’s Gift replaces Nature’s Swiftness, and heals the Druid for 5% of their maximum health every 5 seconds. If the Druid is at full health, it will heal the most injured friendly target nearby instead. This talent fills the spot vacated by Nature’s Swiftness.

Since the departure of Nature’s Swiftness left a gap in our talent tree, they have created a new talent to fill the gap. In looking at the other abilities offered, your two main options are going to be either Ysera’s Gift or Cenarian Ward. Right now, I’m leaning towards Ysera’s Gift being the stronger of the two talents, but may change my mind after playing around with it a little bit. It’s a nice self heal, with a perk for being at full health. Given the other two talents in the tier, I feel that this one will likely be the strongest in a PvE setting – but not so dominantly that the others might not have a place given the encounter you are facing.

Soul of the Forest has been partially redesigned to make it more attractive to Balance, Guardian, and Restoration Druids. Restoration: Now causes the Druid to gain 100% haste (up from 75%) on their next spell after casting Swiftmend.

This is a fairly basic change for us with regards to SotF, and doesn’t change a whole lot with regards to the ability for us – but what is going to make it interesting is that we will now have the ability to decouple Efflorescence and Swiftmend via a glyph, which now makes SotF a much more attractive option. With this in mind, I would look for SotF to start edging out the other talents in this tree and for people to start favoring it over ToL in more situations.

Teleport: Moonglade now returns the Druid to a location near their original departure point when the spell is cast while in the Moonglade area.

This is a nice little change to this ability. Essentially, if you teleport to Moonglade, casting the ability again will return you to where you were standing when you teleported there. I see myself visiting the trainers in this nice, serene location more frequently now!

Glyph of Innervate now causes Innervate to give both the Druid and the target 60% of the normal effect of the spell if it’s cast on a target other than the Druid.

This is a major glyph and has some potential to bring back Innervate swapping as an option to increase the amount of mana gained from Innervate. That being said, I don’t really see it being stronger than the other major glyphs available and I’m not a huge fan of not being in control of my own innervate. Which coupled with the fact that there are stronger major glyphs, I, personally, won’t be considering this glyph.

Glyph of Lifebloom’s effect is now baseline and has been replaced with Glyph of Efflorescence.

This is a very nice change for Lifebloom, and I’m very glad to see that this quality of life change is now permanent and will no longer require us to eat up a major glyph slot to benefit from it!

Glyph of Efflorescence increases the healing done by Swiftmend by 20%, causes the Efflorescence healing effect to be triggered by Wild Mushroom instead of Swiftmend, and lasts as long as the Wild Mushroom is active.

This is pretty much going to be a must have glyph as it essentially makes Efflorescence a permanent effect as long as you have a wild mushroom active. This is going to be pretty powerful in most, if not all, raid settings. In addition, it decouples swiftmend from efflorescence and means that you no longer have to worry if you are “wasting” your swiftmend by using it on the tank, or someone not grouped up with the rest of the raid (*cough*hunters*cough*). The interaction that this will have with SotF also means that talent is no longer going to tie your Efflorescence to WG and lock you into utilizing Swiftmend/Efflo when it’s not really needed. Overall, this is a fantastic glyph and should be utilized is just about every PvE setting.

Glyph of the Sprouting Mushroom: Allows the Wild Mushroom spell to be placed on the ground instead of underneath a target.

This is a minor glyph that gives you the option to continue to utilize the targeting reticule to place your mushrooms – as opposed to placing it underneath someone.

Glyph of One with Nature: Grants the Druid the ability to teleport to a random natural location.

A fun little minor glyph that seems reminiscent of what I might call Wormhole Generator: Druid.

Tier 16 Set Bonuses

• (2) Set: Rejuvenation ticks have a 12% chance to grant a Sage Mender, reducing the mana cost and cast time of your next Healing Touch by 20%, stacking up to 5 times.

I think that this is an interesting bonus. Essentially, at 5 stacks you have a completely free HT. It’s almost like another NS added to your toolkit. It will definitely be worth tracking, but I’m not 100% sure it will be worth picking up until you have your four piece bonus – as I’m not sure it’s worth losing your 4 T15 bonus.  That being said, if you are not in T15 Heroic Gear and/or you don’t have your T15 4 piece bonus – the item upgrades may be worth moving to right away, so keep that in mind and consider it as you make a gear plan for yourself!

• (4) Set: Targets of your Wild Growth spell are instantly healed for (Spell power * 0.25).

This is a pretty powerful four piece bonus, and is something that you will want to try and pick up as soon as you can. It’s a very nice boost to Wild Growth, and give it something it sorely needs in today’s healing environment: the ability to offer a nice heal instantly.

Jina-Kang, Kindness of Chi-Ji – The Legendary Cloak

I wanted to go ahead and make mention of the cloak, simply because the proc that it offers is going to do an impressive amount of healing – and there will be a noticeable difference between those who have the cloak and those who do not.  the equip effect of the cloak is as such:

Equip: Your helpful spells have a chance to grant you Spirit of Chi-Ji, increasing all healing done by 5% and causing all overhealing on players to be redistributed to up to 5 nearby injured friends, for 10 sec. (Approximately 0.58 procs per minute)

As a druid, this is going to be especially powerful given the nature of HoTs and the relationship that they have come to have with overhealing, especially in today’s healing environment. You will want to try to acquire your legendary cloak as soon as it’s feasible for you to do so, and it will be your best in slot cloak for the remainder of the tier. In fact, I would not be surprised to see some tweaks to the proc once 5.4 goes live and we see more practical use from it.

Overall, I think Druids look to be in a very strong place with 5.4.

It’s certainly going to take us some time to tinker around with our new and/or improved toolkit to find the best ways to utilize and maximize them, but we are definitely looking very healthy going into battle with Garrosh. Many of the changes are strong and supplement our current toolkit very well. I am looking forward to get to try out some new things, and explore some options that weren’t always available previously. It looks to be an exciting tier and an exciting time to be a resto druid!

I wish everyone luck as they head in to overthrow Garrosh! And I can’t wait to see who will be leading the horde moving forward!

It’s been awhile since I’ve shared any updates that I’ve made to my Weak Auras, and while not much has changed, I have added a few new auras into the mix this tier. Because of the size of the auras, and how they present, rather than copying the entire aura here like I have in the past, I’ve uploaded the imports to pastebin and provided the link. Hopefully that makes them easier to copy and import! (When I think of it and have time, I will probably do this for the auras in the original post as well).

VP Trinket

Trinket: http://pastebin.com/XwHsJeFU

I hate “on use” trinkets. Largely because you have to remember to use them. I made this aura to help remind me that this trinket is available, and to use it each time it is off cooldown.

Mushroom Charges

Mushrooms: http://pastebin.com/aREKxcSU

The credit for this wonderful weak aura belongs to Stenhaldi. It’s been the one I’ve been using to track mushrooms since they introduced the charge up mechanic and it’s worked wonderfully for me. Since several folks have asked about what I’m using to track this, I wanted to go ahead and share the aura for everyone. I went ahead and made Sephinia’s updates to the aura so that it tracks the new, increased charge amount. As such, the aura posted above is 5.3 compatible. With mushrooms doing a decent amount of healing since the patch, it is important to have a way to monitor the charge to help judge when to bloom them.

Legendary Meta Proc

Legendary Proc: http://pastebin.com/MZYVeqaL

Since your meta proc is essentially four free rejuvenations, it’s important to keep track of when it activates, so you don’t lose the proc and can maximize the healing you do with it. I make use of this aura to track mine. I altered the coloring a bit so that it is easy to differentiate between the legendary proc and Clearcasting (since the icons look the same).

Hopefully these are helpful! If I’m missing an aura for something you are looking for, please don’t hesitate to ask if I’ve got one tucked away somewhere

The other night I was able to see the buffs that released with 5.3 in action. I had the opportunity to do some farm heroic content, some normal content and some progression heroic content. And as such, I have some opinions on them and thought I’d go ahead and share my early thoughts!

Helllllooooo Mushrooms!
Before I say anything else, I’m going to start with confirming that mushrooms are still absolutely horrible in implementation, a complete pain to use and the bane of my tree existence. However, they are now capable of doing an incredible amount of healing when used well, and should absolutely be worked into your tool kit.

The to the right is from our Mageara kill this week. I had the misfortune of being targeted with a frost beam right before the final rampage and died at the start of the rampage as a result – but nonetheless, I did five million worth of healing and only utilized them once during each rampage (and missed the last one!). On top of that, I think I likely could have a) timed my blooms better; and b) perhaps redropped them and bloomed them a second time at the end of the rampage. By the end of the night, when we got to our new progression target (which also favors them a bit), I was much more aggressive with using them and blooming them prior to having full health stored in them and they did a completely ridiculous amount of healing (while I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this as a best practice, it was effective for this particular damage pattern). By the end of the night on that one encounter they were just under rejuv for my healing done. So while they are still a pain to set up, I think it is safe to say that the effort is finally worth it in prime situations.

That being said, all of the downsides to mushrooms are still present. The set up. The charging. The huge penalization for having misplaced them or your raid moving. Being the most effective when the raid is grouped up. There were definitely encounters where I felt they were extremely powerful (such as Megeara above), and others where I felt they were not nearly as strong (Heroic Council/Ji-Kun). But I do think that the output they provide fully makes them worthwhile.

Tomorrow’s release of Patch 5.3 brings a few changes that are important to know for Resto Druids. As such, I thought it might be worthwhile to go over a few things that you want to be aware of and ready to handle upon arriving home and logging in!

What to Expect!

Healing abilities and spells which automatically pick targets now follow consistent rules for tageting logic. Targets with lower % health will be preferred, and players are weighted more heavily than pets”

What, exactly, does this mean? It means that if you cast WG while everyone is at full life it will favor players instead of pets! This is a pretty great change all around, and one that will be favorable for resto druids.

Tranquility now targets 12 raid members (up from 5) each time it heals when used in a 25-play instance.

This is pretty great change for druids raiding 25s. While I’m not entirely sure it’s going to really even the mitigation playing field, it is certainly a step in the right direction and will give tranquility a bit of a much needed boost in 25s. As always, I encourage you to find the best time to utilize tranquility in each encounter and maximize its use throughout the fight. There are lots of prime opportunities for Tranquility in ToT!

Ironbark now has a cooldown of 60 seconds, down from 2 minutes.

This is another pretty great change for Resto, and helps add a little more diversity to the resto toolkit. At 60 seconds, ironbark can (and should!) be tossed around freely on your raid anytime someone is in danger and could use the extra survival.

Swiftmend’s area-of-effect component now heals injured allies within 10 yards, up from 8 yards

While not a bad change for swiftmend, I’m not entirely confident that it’s going to have much of an overall impact on the ability. As it is, you either dump it on melee (or another clumped up group) or opt to use it on a single target (such as the tank, or someone in need of quick healing). The extended range won’t hurt, but I don’t really think it’s anything that is going to have a significant impact on our overall output either.

Wild Mushroom: Bloom: Healing from this spell has been increased by 100%, which includes all bonus healing from Rejuvenation overhealing. In addition, the radius has been increased to 10 yards (up from 8).

Oh Mushrooms. You have the potential to be something great, and yet we are still brought down by your cumbersome placement mechanic and overall lack of cohesion with the resto toolkit.

This change is a good one for Mushrooms – bigger heal, larger heal radius – but still suffers all of the main issues of the base spell itself. When I was talking about this with Brade the other day we decided that 2/5 of the time mushrooms will be largely overheal; 2/5 of the time mushrooms will be in the wrong spot at the time they need to be used; and 1/5 of the time mushrooms will work as intended and be moderately awesome. It’s just really hard to get excited about a buff to a spell that is horrendous in practice.

In places mushrooms were good previously, they will be even better now. In places where mushrooms make you want to kill small kittens, well…just remember that neighborhood cats will be missed.

All of that being said, the buff to mushrooms will make a single mushroom more potent, so it may be worthwhile during downtime to spread some out amongst the ranged in encounters that are very mobile and it is unlikely there will be given stack points or the melee will be all over the place (for example, I find they are pretty great during Ji-Kun’s Quills, or to quickly top up damage from Caw). Let them charge and use them during raid damage to help top folks up. It will also likely be worthwhile to try to plan in advance to drop them for significant damage phases. While it would be nice if they retained at least some of their charge if you have to replant them, it will be smart to try to keep them planted in key locations when applicable.

Force of Nature is no longer on global cooldown and summons a single Treant. The Treant no longer has a control bar, immediately uses it special abilities on the Druid’s current target and accumulates 1 charge every 20 seconds up to a maximum of 3 charges. Restoration version of the Treant now casts Swiftmend on the Druid’s target when summoned. This version of Swiftmend does not require or consume a heal-over-time effect on the target.

While this is a significant upgrade to this talent – it will be very hard pressed to be competitive with ToL or SotF. There may be times where it might be useful, but its usefulness is not likely to be outweighed when compared against SotF or ToL. My advice would be to play around with it in LFR, see if you like it, but to continue to stick with your preferred staples in this tier as I still don’t foresee FoN outperforming either of the other abilities available.

Important Changes that aren’t Resto Specific, but you should still know about!

Players can now choose to receive loot for specializations other than the one that’s currently active. This feature can be accessed by right-clicking on the character portrait and selecting the option from the drop-down list. Loot specialization is available for bonus rolls, Raid Finder, and Pandarian quest rewards

This is a fantastic change, and one that I hope will prevent people from queuing into raid finder as a healer/dps and then changing specs to their preferred roll. It should also significantly help with the acquisition of off spec gear via raid finder.

Protection for bad luck streaks have been added to bonus rolls. Each bonus roll that does not provide loot has a progressively better chance to award loot to the player

Say it with me! “AMEN!” I don’t know about you, but using coin after coin and never having loot show up can be so discouraging. I’m happy to see that this is something that was noted and an action taken to fix. It should also make the ease of gearing an alt a little better.

Completing the Challenge Mode daily quest now awards a Heroic Cache of Treasures with a chance to contain an epic item

One more reasons to look into challenge modes! (Which I think everyone should be doing anyhow!)

Voidbinders are back in capital cities and shrines. Items upgradable by Valor now require 250 Valor to upgrade per 4 items levels, for a total of 500 Valor for 8 item levels per item. This is retroactive to all items that use Valor

I’m really torn. While I think these item upgrades are a relatively elegant way to “nerf” current content, having to continually VP cap is tedious and time consuming. The plus side is that the cost to upgrade an item is significantly decreased – which is good. But the time commitment to VP cap outside of raids each week continues to be cumbersome. Either way – if you are capped come Tuesday, you can do a total of 12 upgrades (or 6 total items fully upgraded).

Players can now use items that are in the bank or Void Storage for transmogrification

Always look good…without having to pay to take items in and out of void storage! Of course, if your Void Storage looks like mine, it’s chock full anyhow and you are already transmogging from your bank because that is where your gear lives anyhow.

Enjoy 5.3, and may you fell many new foes upon its release!

As always, I am happy to entertain discussion or answer questions. I’d also love to hear about your favorite 5.3 additions.

It’s been awhile since I’ve done one of these types of updates. I could probably tell you I didn’t have much to say – but since I often did updates that were almost completely devoid of WoW information, I’m not sure that’s entirely true. I think it would probably be more accurate to say that I’ve been busy…and lazy. I mean I could have easily offered an update on any number of things, but when I had my down time I simply found I wanted to do something other than write! As harsh is that might sound…honesty is best! (Right? RIGHT?!).

/sigh

Whatever! I have both time and desire to write at this moment, as well as things to say! So I suppose that we should get to that before I lose any of the above.

On Raiding

Wait, what?! (It’s okay, I know that you are probably thinking it, I can hear the wheels turning from here!). Remember that post about the 5.3 PTR I did the other day? The one where I said I had reason to believe that I’d probably have a little more to say about druids as we moved forward? No? Okay, perhaps we should start from the beginning here.

Yesterday there were some Druid changes announced for the PTR. While these aren’t guaranteed to make it to live, I still think that it’s valuable to explore them and consider what the changes will do, and any potential consequences that may arise as a result. As such, let’s take a look at what we might be seeing here in the next couple of weeks!

Ironbark now has a cooldown of 60 seconds, down from 2 minutes.

While it could be argued that this wasn’t strictly necessary, it is a very nice change that I’m in favor of seeing. While a lot of people view this as a “tank” CD, I’ve often found use for it on members of the raid that are in danger. Being able to use it more freely in this regard is going to be quite nice and a very strong update to the ability itself. I think it’s a very good change and I’m happy to see it go in – hopefully everyone will be a little more aggressive in using it!

Swiftmend’s area-of-effect component now heals injured allies within 10 yards, up from 8 yards.

While I’m happy to see an increase in range, I’ve long since taken the stance that I’m either throwing this on melee, I’m using it on myself and positioning it where I want it, or I’m using it on the tank (or someone else not grouped up) and may not be taking full effect of the ground effect. It’s nice that it’s bigger, I just don’t see it really having a huge effect on the ability overall. I could be wrong and the extra two yards could be profound! I’m just not certain that is going to be the case. Either way, it’s not a bad change. So, yay?!

Wild Mushroom: Bloom now heals all allies within 10 yards (up from 8 yards) for 100% more, and includes bonus healing from Rejuvenation overhealing.

This change is very interesting. While I’m not entirely thrilled that they still haven’t fixed the main issue with this ability (the extremely clunky targeting mechanic) I’m also not positive that this change, as it stands, is going to go live. Ghostcrawler clarified that both the base healing and the bonus rejuv healing is getting increased by 100% – and, well, that has the potential to be just ridiculous!

Right now a set of fully charged mushrooms can pack a punch – just placing them, charging them and blooming them is incredibly cumbersome and heavily penalized if your raid has to move after they’ve been placed/charged. With the buff, this will be even more true than it was before. Not only that, but the amount of healing mushrooms will now have the potential to unleash is going to be enormous. Like mind blowing levels of enormous. Like I’d be surprised if this pushes to live like this enormous.

That being said, if the change makes it I think it supports using your mushrooms singularly when your raid isn’t clumped up. Right now, on certain fights, I’m already just placing them under ranged or lining them up along the path the raid will be moving.

I do worry a little bit if such a big change doesn’t risk running them back towards rotational. I also dislike the fact that they encourage some poor healing to maximize their effectiveness (much in the same way I disliked the original version of Harmony). I also worry that they are going to become so much of our healing that we are going to be slow to see any changes to them (if we ever were to begin with), simply because druids will be making even more concerted efforts to use them. I suppose we will have to wait and see how it plays out. I would very much like to see some mechanical changes to the ability emerge, but it seems like Blizzard is very hesitant to head in that direction to date.

(And yes, I still hate mushrooms. So very much. I don’t care how much healing they do, until they are less cumbersome to use I will always take issue with them!)

Tranquility now targets 12 raid members (up from 5) each time it heals when used in a 25-player instance. This change also applies to players using the Symbiosis version of Tranquility.

This is a very nice change to tranquility and a buff I do think is needed to the ability. It’s very cool that they are opting to adjust it based on raid size so that it mirrors what it is able to achieve in a smaller setting. I am happy to see this change go in, and I hope that it is a buff that makes it live.

That being said…I don’t really feel that this change is going to solve much in regards to Druid woes. I talked a bit about this a couple of posts ago – but I feel it’s important to reiterate. Throughput is not the number one issue facing druids right now. Is that our toolkit is ill equipped to deal with today’s healing environment and that mitigation healing is so dominant that it stomps on the potential effectiveness of throughput healers. Sure, it’s going to promote slightly higher throughput in the situations that we utilize it – but I suspect in the big scheme of things it’s not going to be make or break (I’m hesitant to say it will have a negligible effect, because I don’t think that’s entirely true, I just don’t think it’s going to all of the sudden right resto druids).

Overall, I think these are good changes.

While I’d like to see more to even out the mitigation vs. throughput playing field I’m not really sure this patch is the place we’d see that play out. I will also admit that I was hoping for a little more relative to Ghostcrawler’s “druid changes” tweet, but will also concede that if all of these go through it is not a terrible haul.

I’m curious what all of you think about the changes! Need? Un-needed? Fixing all the wrong things?

I haven’t posted specifically about druids on my blog about druids in four months. To be fair, I haven’t really posted about much in this space in the same amount of time. However, I’m recently feeling reinvigorated and revived, and I have reason to suspect that you may well start to see an increase in my posting habits again. But more on that later! Today I want to talk about druids.

A while back on Twitter, someone commented that they were surprised that the 5.2 changes to resto druids really didn’t seem to have the results that he was expecting to see – and that they felt a bit bad for the resto on their raid team (I think it might have been Derevka). At the time, I made a snarky comment that amused me greatly – but followed it up with the more serious comment that a druid’s mileage is likely to vary largely depending on the number and strength of their disc priests and holy paladins. It’s the latter part of that comment that I’d like to explore a little more today.

I think I heal just fine

Anytime that the topic of resto healing comes up, there are always two groups of people: those who are incredibly frustrated and those that come out of the woodwork (see what I did there?!) and state “I heal just fine” or “I always top my healing meters”. The statement of that second camp of folks ultimately leads to the declaration that they feel “druids are fine”. Which is then followed by an uproar of those who disagree and, of course, nothing ever good really comes from the subsequent conversations.

The great monk Nerf has occurred – and it’s pretty much done jack and shit for the current state of the Resto Druid. Our toolkit problems continue to be reflected in our output in 25s. And, honestly, with Blizzard indicating they feel we are “fine” I’m running out of energy – and feel a bit like I’m wasting my time – continuing to try and show we continue to struggle and have problems.

Here is the breakdown over the past few weeks.

Since this is the fourth time we’ve taken a look at this, with no indication that our life is going to improve, I feel I don’t have much left to say on the topic.

Our Monk overlords have been summarily replaced with disc priests. The monk nerfs were steep (maybe too steep), and the bubble lords swooped in and have mitigated their way into the position formally held by monks. Mushrooms still suck. Our healing model still does not work well in the world of MoP healing. Our fixed mana pools still do not support the toolkit we have to work with. And well, that’s about all I have to say on the matter.

If I hadn’t devoted the past eight years to the Druid class, I would seriously be considering a reroll at this point (and have, in fact, given it consideration). But I don’t feel that I should have to give up a class I’ve put so much energy into, and enjoyed for so long. I pretty strongly feel it should be Blizzard’s responsibility to make sure that classes are fun to play. That they are equally competitive, that they have tools suitable to meet that goal, and that players can continue to feel like viable assets of their raid team and enjoy the game based on skill rather than be frustrated because of artificial limitations set by the game.

But maybe that’s just me.

Please feel free to review the prior three posts in the series for more in depth looks at the problem and potential solutions.