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  • Shifting Perspectives: Gearing a restoration druid at 85

    by 
    Allison Robert
    Allison Robert
    12.28.2010

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This week, we find ourselves rolling against a legion of hybrid casters ("It's for my off spec!") in PUGs. The above is yet another snippet of beta video that never made it into a Shifting article, mostly because I thought it was just a funny little clip. I don't know about other games, young lady, but in this expansion, we obey the laws of gravity. Of interest is the almost complete lack of Omen of Clarity procs despite Malfurion's Gift (I'm not sure how much I like RNG's impact on our efficiency these days) and the healing done by the death knight's bloodworms. The amount of "free" healing that adds up from tank and DPS specs was (and perhaps remains) a real concern, as Paragon observed after testing tier 11 raid content back in November. We'll see how that plays out as more players approach raid content. This column originally started out as a guide on the road to 85, similar to Shifting Perspectives: Patch 4.0.3a and the road to 85 for bears and cats. However, the more I worked on it, the more I felt I was just rewriting information already published by several excellent restoration bloggers. I've included links to that information here, but this article is going to be concerned with restoration gear in Cataclysm, where you can get it, and how you can gem/enchant it. Over the next several weeks we'll be bringing you as comprehensive a gear list as possible given certain limitations (i.e., we're only three weeks into Cataclysm), and I hope you'll have a good idea of where you are with respect to gear advancement with it.