guardian-druid-shifting-perspectives
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Shifting Perspectives: Spring cleaning
Every week (sort of), WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, the bookmarks folder gets the root cellar treatment. I've been away from the game since the holidays due to what I will politely refer to as technical difficulties. (I have a variety of impolite terms for it too, but this is a family blog.) During that time, I've watched the game from the sidelines and have grown bored enough to do some maintenance on stuff that usually gets ignored until I'm rooting through it in a hurry. Add-ons were updated, dead blog links were sent to their folder, interesting ones were added, and then I turned to my collection of bookmarks in order to prune there as well. I have a pretty sizable cache of druid or druid-related links that's grown over the years, and a lot of them are still pretty interesting. In the absence of the ability to talk about what's actually happening in the game with any fluency, I thought it might make a decent stopgap Shifting. This is a selection that's kept me absorbed for many an hour on a snowy weekend, and it ranges from comparisons between druid and warrior tanks in the classic game to where you fall on a healer's priority list when you're a jackass.
Shifting Perspectives: Reforging guardian druids for dummies (or better yet, crit)
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, a cheerful question-and-answer session comes to a screeching halt. The following is a partial transcript of questions I have received ingame or via email since the launch of Mists of Pandaria, accompanied by their answers: What's the hit cap for bear tanks now? Versus a level 93 raid boss, it's 2,550, or 7.5%. If you're only running heroics, it's 2,040, or 6%. Thanks, Arielle! What the hell is going on with resto in raids? I don't know, but I suspect it's a version of the problem that plagued resto in the early days of Cataclysm. More on this next week when I've looked at more World of Logs parses. In the meantime, don't forget that other healers' (cough, monks) being overpowered renders us underpowered only by comparison. Do I need to worry about the "hard" expertise cap? Eh. It should be fairly easy to reach the soft cap (or get close to it) once you're sitting on heroic-level gear. After that, whatever expertise you get up to the hard cap is gravy, because if your rage income is enough to keep Savage Defense at maximum uptime, additional expertise won't really have a serious impact on your survivability. How do you get blood out of a shirt? Hydrogen peroxide. (From my raid leader) When will our scrub-ass warlock get to 90 so we can raid? I don't know, sir. And the last: How should I reforge my bear tank? (Fidgets.) Uh, well ...
Shifting Perspectives: Gearing your guardian druid for Mists of Pandaria heroics
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, the four normal dungeons are a fat lot of help. The subject of today's article is, shall we say, an immediate concern. Due to the demand for tanks and healers in the new 5-mans, my main will hit 90 before she even makes it to the halfway point of questing through the Valley of Four Winds. This is good, because I get to relax and enjoy questing as an extended treat without having to worry about leveling. This is bad, because she's about 20 ilevels off from where she needs to be in order to access Mists of Pandaria heroics. This guide assumes that you will need an average ilevel of 440 to access heroics, because that was the number Blizzard was using on the beta. (Note: This is only true via the dungeon finder. Nothing prevents you from running out to the new heroics yourself with a group, but either way, 440's a decent number to aim for if you're worried about being sufficiently geared.) There are only four normal MoP dungeons, and only one of them (Mogu'shan Palace) drops gear that will help you clear this threshold. If I had to condense this guide's advice, it would be: Quest through the Townlong Steppes and the Dread Wastes. Be prepared to spend some justice points. Farm normal Mogu'shan Palace. If you have a good option available from professions (whether primary or secondary), don't ignore it.
Shifting Perspectives: Guide to patch 5.0.4 for guardian and restoration druids
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, the world has changed, as it is so often wont to do. I had the foresight to park my main in Taunka'le Village last night and set my scribe alt up with an array of inks. However, I belatedly realized that a few balance glyphs that I never bothered to get on my druid (as she hasn't been balance in years) may turn out to number among the new and fun glyphs I enjoyed on the beta. Well, I'll guess we'll find out what I'm missing soon. Man, life is tough for the lazy. All druids will probably find Chase's recent article on the 5.0.4 changes for feral and balance to be useful, as he included a section on very general changes for the class that I feel is kind of pointless to repeat here. Otherwise, let's go ahead and tackle the more guardian- and restoration-specific information for patch 5.0.4. I'll be publishing new 101 guides for both specs soon, but this should get you up to speed fairly quickly.
Shifting Perspectives: The joy of panic
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, it can happen to you. Back during The Burning Crusade, I knew an extremely disgruntled warrior tank (not Matthew Rossi) who was generally mad at the world about everything (again, not Rossi) and considered the universe to be implacably biased against his good self (may I repeat, not Rossi). While summoning raid members to Tempest Keep one evening, we were having a nice chat, by which I mean grousing about the hassle of tanking Al'ar in the age of the missable taunt. "&%*," he said. "Bears have it so easy. I have to &%($*% macro Shield Block to every $#$(%* ability in my &%()#@ action bar so I don't get ^%$(#( crushed. Not like you. You just sit there and ^%*#%( live through everything." "I'm sorry," I said, although I wasn't really. I envied warriors for many reasons, but Shield Block spam was not among them, and I was privately glad that despite the bear's many issues, I didn't have to keep hammering one button every few seconds just to stay alive. (Beta players are already reaching for the Valium. They know where this is going.) I'm not yet in the Mists of Pandaria beta, but while reading through the news emerging from the servers, I had to spare a thought for my Angry Warrior Tank friend of yesteryear and how &%#(%* pleased he'd be to hear that we now know his #$^@%# pain.
