restoration-druid-shifting-perspectives
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Resto druids vs. the world 2: War harder
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, we may hate numbers, but oh, they add so much to our lives. Story time! I first got a lesson on how to read healing meters while raiding Serpentshrine Cavern. One of our healers, an otherwise very competent holy priest, consistently ran OOM early on Morogrim Tidewalker and was next to useless during the final phase of the fight. The head of the heal team took an hour to look over the logs, and decided to give me a lesson on how to read them while doing so. It quickly became apparent that the priest was unwittingly covering for a resto shaman, who not only wasn't pulling his weight, but also seemed to take an unusual amount of damage. "Why aren't you doing anything during the add phases?" asked the head, a paladin. "Because our off-tank can't hold aggro for s$#t and I'm tired of dying to murlocs." This was actually true. Our head healer pondered for a moment. "Can't you just Chain Heal after he's already gotten all the murlocs?" "No, I die that way too. And we have to save BoP for the clothies who have to AOE the murlocs." Also true.
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: An early look at 5.2 for druids
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. Welcome to our DPS edition, brought to you by Chase Hasbrouck, aka Alaron of The Fluid Druid blog. This week, we discuss the future. Happy New Year! Hmm. I guess I'm a little late for that. Anyway, my no-notice household move is mostly complete, and I've finally had a chance to start breaking down the new changes for druids in 5.2. With the exception of Feral PvP, things look pretty positive across the board, so let's dive in! Cyclone a-no-no Cyclone is the crowd-control effect that everyone loves to hate. Unlike the vast majority of other CC effects in the game, Cyclone does not share a diminishing return category with other effects, meaning you could couple it with another CC from a teammate to lock down an enemy target for a long period of time. By itself, this wasn't the end of the world. While a "clone" was powerful, it had a short range and a cast time, making it difficult to land in the first place.
Resto druids vs. the world: Healer balance in tier 14
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. Today, it isn't enough that mistweavers are taking our gear -- now they're taking our jobs. The beginning of an expansion is usually a bad time to write deep, meaningful, and typically pompous posts on the "state of the class" and whither the druid and all that crap. For that matter, the beginning of Mists of Pandaria struck me as an especially bad time, because so much of what we were used to in WoW got changed and sent everyone scrambling. Toss in a brand-new hybrid class (the monk), and you've got the perfect storm of elements that make evaluating healer performance a dicey proposition at best. I poured myself a nice cocoa, kept an eye on World of Logs and Raidbots, and watched as the numbers rolled in and a legion of holy priests tore their garments and cried out in despair. Given that patch 5.1's now live, it seems an appropriate time to swirl that cocoa, take a look at how healers did in tier 14, and ask what's likely to change. As of now, it seems apparent that: Holy priests were actually right. Monks kicked your dog, seduced your mom, stole your XBox, and drove off in your car. Paladins are still topping the charts on certain encounters, but they're no longer dominating all of them. Shaman have improved a lot from their lackluster performance in Dragon Soul. Resto druids are back in same boat we were in at the beginning of Cataclysm, and it's not a very nice boat. Just for fun, here's a Shifting I wrote almost a year ago on healer balance in Dragon Soul, if you'd like to see how classes fared in the last tier of raid content.
Shifting Perspectives: Gearing your restoration druid for Mists of Pandaria heroics
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, masochists eager to heal a pack of early dungeon-runners sort through gear options. This picture's already a bit dated -- my main's been 90 for about a week now -- but you'll probably find yourself in Mogu'shan Palace for several runs trying to get some useful gear to drop. As an aside, the rush of leveling monks continues apace, and more and more of them will start appearing in your level 85+ groups. Get gear now, people! As NocturNamos pointed out in last week's article on how to gear a guardian druid for Mists of Pandaria heroics, the ilevel requirement for heroics (or more accurately, queuing for heroics through the dungeon finder) has been lowered to ilevel 435. As such, I've included some ilevel 437 quest rewards in this guide that I didn't think were usable last week. Again, most of this guide's advice can be condensed to the following points: 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: Resto's dismal PvP performance, and why it might get better
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, death is common to all trees. I'm not much of a PvP player. I enjoy random battlegrounds, particularly when I'm healbotting someone who cares whether I live or die, but I lack a certain something when it comes to better performance. I think that something is called talent, or perhaps just luck. We might even call it gear. Regardless, I'm not a great PvPer, so I usually sit on the sidelines and observe while the people who are great PvPers argue about arena team composition and rated battleground strategy. These people have not been enthusiastic about restoration druids in Cataclysm. That's not normal. Resto has been a strong PvP spec since season two of The Burning Crusade (although we need to make an exception for the dismal season five at the beginning of Wrath of the Lich King), so it was a surprise to see such widespread ambivalence among the PvP population. However, there does seem to be a broad consensus about why resto has so many problems in PvP, and people are cautiously optimistic that Mists of Pandaria will be better.
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: Lifebloom is like broccoli, and other lies my mother told me
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, Lifebloom prevents vitamin deficiencies. When I was a small child growing up on the mean streets of a rural farming community, my mother used to hector me into eating my vegetables. "You'll get rickets if you don't eat your broccoli," she said. "Children in some parts of the world would kill to have string beans," she said. "You'll flunk your SATs if you don't eat zucchini," she said. So I'd choke the stuff down in resentful silence, assuming that dessert would be forthcoming in the typical quid pro quo of the childhood dinner table. (My lawyer father lived to regret teaching that phrase to small children.) It took me until freshman biology to realize that my mother was exaggerating the odds of developing scurvy if we didn't eat a sufficient quantity of vegetables at every meal. And you know what? Playing a resto druid on the beta is kind of like being a small child getting Lifebloom and Harmony endlessly stuffed into your face. In the meantime, there's a bowl of deep-fried, bacon-crusted, chocolate-dipped Wild Mushrooms just ... out ... of ... your ... reach on the table. I ate the green stuff, Blizz. Now where's my dessert?
Shifting Perspectives: Being mean to tanks, healing the unhealable, and the 132% speed bear
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, we do not get much pleasure from what we are about to say. I don't like being mean. However, after a certain amount of beta testing for each expansion and the slew of questionable experiences that that tends to bring, I've noticed that I will eventually write something that veers into the realm known as "unpleasant." For Wrath of the Lich King, it was over the raft of players rolling death knights who had never played a melee class before and were making life hell for their groups. (Although it turns out that "Most of you are awful" was a less controversial opinion than anticipated.) For Cataclysm, it was to Blizzard over the fact that resto druids couldn't hit anything except Nourish or Lifebloom without gasping for mana, and I'm pretty sure our subsequent experience in tier 11 bore me out there. (In short: It sucked.) In the Mists of Pandaria beta, I figured I'd hit the old Cataclysm heroics first for a more forgiving playground with the new skills and talents, and lots of other players had the same idea. Consequently, I've run into a pretty wide variety of tanks and healers with different gear and skill sets, and something has become horribly obvious after running a slew of 5-mans. Nor can I blame unfamiliarity with the content for poor performance, including my own. We know these dungeons. The only new variable is whatever's in your spellbook that wasn't there before. This is where things get mean, and I apologize: If you are a bad tank and aren't interested in getting better, Mists of Pandaria might be a good time to find something else to do.
Shifting Perspectives: Scribbles from an alternate universe
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, we joyride through Pandaria with fountain pen in hand. Old school, baby. I'm back to scribbling. Every beta, a pile of poorly organized notes starts to grow at the side of my computer with numbers, observations, witty column titles (these I seem to have misplaced this time around), questions, gripes, and a truly stupefying amount of cat hair. I turn this pile into a series of articles on how druids are doing and try not to think too hard about having possibly misread my chicken scratch to ruinous effect. (In unrelated news, until linking the above articles, I hadn't revisited the video I shot of a premade druid in level 85 blues off the Cataclysm beta and was horrified by the set of responses. Or better yet, here's the video I shot of female worgen casting animations. Oh, YouTube commenters -- you never fail to deliver!) This is actually a collection of notes from the last several weeks on the beta. Most of them are bear-flavored, because there's not much point to questing as restoration unless your other hobbies include watching paint dry, snail racing, or the complete works of Schopenhauer.
Level 90 druid talents take a level in badass; shapeshifting breaks roots again
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday was supposed to be an "off" week for the column, but screw that. You know what? I think I finally nailed why the druid experience on the Mists of Pandaria beta has felt so bizarre at times. We've seen the re-emergence of stuff we used to take for granted (shifting out of roots and the return of permatree among them), and you know what it all reminds me of? Someone once described the boot camp experience as one in which "all of your God-given rights are stripped, only to be doled back later, one by one, as privileges." Yep. That's what this is like. Anyway, Ghostcrawler hit the forums last night to give us some news on a revamped set of level 90 druid talents that have completely altered the ratio of win to suck in the bracket.
Shifting Perspectives: The return of Permatree and other badass glyphs
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, our friends keep mounting us and -- for whatever reason -- we encourage it. I'm currently prepping a column on the bear experience on the beta, but seeing as to how so much of the recent experience consists of disconnecting, lagging my way to parts unknown, launch problems, and finding colorful new language with which to greet these events, let's put that on the back burner for now. One of the things that was instantly obvious about the new set of Mists of Pandaria druid glyphs is that a lot of them are, for lack of a better term, really, really fun. One lets us confuse people endlessly about our actual spec. Another lets us be mounted by friends and groupmates for totally platonic purposes. I hope. Now, these are by no means all of the new glyphs available on the beta right now, but with so many class abilities being retuned and changed, it's tough to evaluate how most of the major glyphs stack up. However, even a few of the major glyphs are things that'll pretty obviously have a positive impact on how you experience a spec, so I've included the ones that really pop out here.
Shifting Perspectives: I am starting to hate resto druids
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, one of our specs appears to be faring better than others. Much, much better. Certain people are very good at this "life" thing. For example, a relative of mine phoned the other night to let us know that she's thinking about buying a beach property in Costa Rica and that in order to supplement her six-figure commodity broker's salary, she'll probably rent it out whenever she isn't there to surf and drink mojitos herself. "Gotta go," she said. "I think the Mercedes dealership is trying to call me back." Now, this is a fairly soul-destroying thing to hear, and not just because you had to interrupt your dinner, a "freelancer's special" consisting of tomato packets mixed with water. But let's be fair: Nobody gets that lucky by accident. Does it involve hard work? Yep. But it also involves the unerring ability to zero in on a path in life that pays out like a broken slot machine, and then tireless effort to keep your boxcar hitched to the gravy train. Let's not blame the folks who are simply more astute than we are at picking one of life's better roads. After a little more than a week in the Mists of Pandaria beta, something has become horribly obvious: If this relative ever picked up WoW, she'd be playing a resto druid.
Shifting Perspectives: This month in WoW druid history
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, those who do not learn from history will be entirely unaffected by it. My four-year anniversary on WoW Insider came and passed in February without my realizing it at the time, but that's OK. A fourth anniversary is kind of a weird one to single out for special attention, so I think I'll leave any back-patting or celebratory champagne until next year ... assuming the editors still haven't canned me by then. But the anniversary did poke me into trawling through old team email lines and reading my older articles on the site. (That's how much I love you guys: I read my stuff so you don't have to.) I started kicking around the idea of doing a March 2008 through March 2012 retrospective. March 2008 and March 2009 (my first and second years on the site, respectively) jumped out as being especially compelling months for druid players, with a lot of issues being discussed that wound up being pivotal to the class' development. But March 2010 and 2011 weren't quite as interesting, although it would probably be more accurate to say that they were interesting in ways that weren't very class-specific. Since we haven't gotten any major class news from the recent Mists of Pandaria press event (although you'll probably want to see the five new druid glyphs), I thought we'd buck the dominant trend this week and spend some time in the past rather than trying to get a handle on the future. Predicting the future is a difficult business that is best left to people who charge $5.99/minute over telephone hotlines.
Shifting Perspectives: Making life hell for groups with Mists of Pandaria druid talents
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, we are delighted to discover that we are still able to create localized black holes in the next expansion. To me, the best thing about Mists of Pandaria talents is how they benefit me so much more than the rest of my colleagues on this column. Tanks and healers do not, as a rule, care about anything that affects their damage. They care about survivability and a lot of stuff that looks suspiciously like what we call utility and -- perhaps most of all -- outrolling the hunters on Kiril. To see a talent tree full of things that do not improve anybody's damage gives me great pleasure. After finishing this article, I realized that I had considered many of these talents largely in the context of how annoying I could make life for a 5-man group by using them. Hmmm. We meet again, Mr. PuG. But this time, the advantage is mine.
Shifting Perspectives: Symbiosis, druids, and you
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, sum durids is covetous of others' skills. SCENE: A 25-man raid of Lord KillMeIHaveCandy in Mists of Pandaria. The raid is buffing before the pull while class officers discuss strategy. Allie opens the bidding war. Allie: Alllll right. Who gets Symbiosis? Let me think. Paladin: Me! Allie: Last time I gave it to you, you blew my Rebirth cooldown on the guy who dies every fight. You are now my mortal enemy, and I will remind you of this on your deathbed. Death knight: I could use it. Allie: I don't know what I get from you yet. Bug off. Warrior: Me me me! Allie: Oh, come on. Enrage isn't that great. Monk: I could use it. Allie: You roll on my gear and want a favor from me. You're funny. Priest: Oh, look! I accidentally tripped over 5,000 gold on the ground for which I have no earthly use. Would you like it? Allie: Let's talk.
Shifting Perspectives: Probing healer balance in Dragon Soul
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, some numbers frighten us more than others. Frostheim's work to compare DPS specs in raid content has always interested me, and for a while, I've been toying with the idea of doing a healers' version. However, healing's always been a lot tougher to analyze from meters than DPS. The whole point of DPS is to do as much as you can, but healing is more about doing as much as you can as efficiently and intelligently as you can. There's no point to topping the meters one minute into the fight if you're running OOM doing so. And then there's the minor point that it takes a lot of experience to parse healing meters accurately. I imagine most discipline priests have at least one horror story about a PUG raid leader trying to kick them for "low healing." Nevertheless, we shall do the best we can. Frostheim uses Raidbots, which in turn pulls its data from World of Logs. World of Logs I was already familiar with, as my guild has used it to upload data after its raid nights, but I'm still new to Raidbots. For both that reason and my comparative inexperience trying to use these tools to generalize about a huge player population, I'll be blunt: This is going to be a much more tentative outing than you'd get from Frostheim. While acknowledging these limitations, I wanted to take at least a quick peek at how healers are faring in Dragon Soul less than two months into patch 4.3, with the promise that we'll revisit this topic in a few months with a much more in-depth look. Fortunately for me, some trends are so obvious that even I can't screw them up. (I think.)
Shifting Perspectives: The druid of 2011
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, Allison's grip on reality is less certain than her grip on a bottle of cough syrup. Sadly, I do not have a cool poem for this past year. 2011 was not a particularly poetic experience, and not just because I spent like two weeks of it without power or with trees on my house or with a new Maine Coon kitten that literally bit through my headphone wires, occasioning a small crisis on my end before I realized they were the cheap ones I got for like five bucks on sale somewhere. But still. If you're new to this tradition (four years running!), I spend the last few weeks of every year catching various illnesses from my relatives, mainlining cough syrup, and then stumbling to a computer to write a year in review column that the editors have to publish because they don't have anything else in the site queue. So now, dear readers, I will take you on a small tour through the year that was. The other alternative is I take everyone on a run through Zul'Aman, but you'd be safer next to a Cub Scout with matches and poor impulse control, so we're not going to do that. Oh, and if you care about this sort of thing: The druid of 2008 The first year I got sick and unwisely decided that a surfeit of cough syrup would allow me to finish a column on time. The druid of 2009 "The ridiculously-popular death knight was, in many ways, designed to counter the restoration druid, although I am hedging this somewhat by saying in many ways instead of definitely, and counter instead of annihilate." The druid of 2010 Letitia, the official fashion consultant and Snark Passenger to the Shifting Perspectives column, makes her second appearance to remind me that I am not a shirtless Christian Bale.
Shifting Perspectives: Guide to druid leveling in Cataclysm
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, we steal from our colleagues. All three of WoW Insider's druid columnists have collaborated on a Cataclysm-era druid leveling guide, because we love you very much. Also, Alex Ziebart made us do it ... but mostly because we love you very much. If you're looking for a comprehensive piece on why X talent will give you a 0.072% increase in awesome at a particular level, this guide is not for you. If you're interested in getting a druid from 1 to 85 and successfully convincing everyone that you know what you're doing, this'll be more up your alley.
Shifting Perspectives: The best and the worst of patch 4.3
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, we chortle our way through 5-man trash. Oh, patch 4.3. I didn't know what to expect from you after so many bad, ugly, or just plain bizarre PUGs on the public test realm, but you turned out to be pretty cool. I don't have to wear ugly gear anymore, the Dragon Soul raid is live, Vengeance blows up like a grade school volcano science experiment, and Deathwing no longer roasts all my archaeology dig sites with the sadistic glee of an NPC who knows that I will never get the Crawling Claw if I am dead. On the downside, I have to deal with Echo of Tyrande trash ("Hey, where'd the healer go?"), and Thrall still does not seem to have realized that the rest of the world moved on to epic mounts several years ago. You win some, you lose some.
