druid-cataclysm-changes
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Shifting Perspectives: Patch 4.0.3a and the road to 85
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This week, we write ourselves a cheat sheet to haul ass to level 85. Last week, I promised I'd take a look at individual articles' popularity after the "Why (or why not) to play a druid" series finished, and here it is. In order of most to least popular: Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a worgen druid Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a night elf druid Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a tauren druid Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a troll druid I'll look at the numbers again a few months to see if they steady a bit; the troll article hasn't been up for as long as its night elf counterpart, so I wouldn't have expected it to be competitive regardless. I will say that the Alliance druids enjoy a significant pageview advantage over their Horde counterparts, and that doesn't give me hope that future population numbers will equalize. I wrote a lot of today's article because I'm lazy as sin and wanted a quick reference guide available. Past the cut you'll find information for bear and cat druids on hit caps, reputation grinds, the numbers you should have before stepping into heroics, reforging, and a host of other things that would otherwise have required me to get off my butt and Google something. Resto players, I haven't forgotten about you! Your version will go live later this week. By the way, the above video is a quick look at healing one of the earliest pulls in heroic Grim Batol. I was sorting through my beta videos and realized I'd forgotten to upload it for the worgen lore article.
Shifting Perspectives: Fear itself
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting feral/restoration druids and those who group with them. This week, we condemn vuvuzela abuse while secretly hoping that someone manages to sneak one into Wimbledon or the local maternity ward. The above video has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with druids or World of Warcraft but I promised myself I'd try to sneak it on the site anyway. The official version of the Cataclysm restoration talents doesn't differ hugely from the one we saw back in mid-May, so I'm not going to repeat a talent-by-talent rundown like we did for the resto talents then and their feral counterparts last week. However, we do have a better sense of the spec's future due the clarifications afforded by blue posts, and what Ghostcrawler's written on the forums shed a lot of light on what Blizzard sees for the spec. I've been in contact with a number of people over common worries for the spec's future in Cataclysm, and below the cut I've collected a number of them (many of which I've previously expressed myself) with potential answers for these concerns. EDIT: Shortly before this article was set to go live, I wound up excising the last portion, which concerns how the new Tree of Life cooldown fits into Blizzard's raid design in Cataclysm. I'm going to bump it to an expanded column next week.
