restoration-druid
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Shifting Perspectives: Restoration talents in 13066
Every week, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting feral/restoration druids and those who group with them. This week, we eschew the future in favor of the present, and are also delighted to discover that the Mac video capture bug appears to have been fixed on the beta. Many thanks to Raylis of Wyrmrest Accord for putting together a guide to troll form associations and allowing me to use it. We'll have a worgen version up once the barbershop starts cooperating! Resto's picked up a lot of interesting stuff recently. Whether these changes survive to patch 4.0.1 intact is anyone's guess, but today's column is a comprehensive look at all restoration talents as of build 13066 on a level 85 premade druid (average ilevel 335). Because the subject matter's on the dry side unless you're a healer, I've also included: Some notes concerning Cataclysm questing Why Anduin Wrynn is awesome Video of male worgen interrogation techniques (now that my video capture is actually working, you'll see more videos popping up soon) Video of said male worgen casting most of our heals with the user interface active to give you a sense of the numbers and efficiency you'll see at level 85 with pre-heroic blues
Shifting Perspectives: Healers, selfishness and trouble ahead
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them. This week, we stress the importance of pattern recognition. Cirocco: I enjoy a healing model based around triage, quick reactions and maximizing output. I very much doubt I'll enjoy a healing model based around parsimoniously doling out mana and yelling at people who snipe my HOTs. I've been guilty of a little pessimism concerning the restoration tree in Cataclysm. Many of my experiences healing on the beta haven't been good, and while I'm willing to allow for the likely possibility that that's just because I suck, it hasn't escaped my attention that a lot of druids have had the same hard time. Normal Cataclysm instances aren't bad if people are well-geared and play sensibly, but when things go wrong, it feels like you're emptying your mana into a group with nothing to show for it. To be frank, it really is too early to evaluate whether the 5-man experience is representative of what we can expect in raids at 85, but I'm not worried about the numbers themselves. As Ghostcrawler (lead systems designer) has reminded us, numbers are pretty easy to fix. What worries me is more systemic; right now, it's hard to escape the conclusion that what made the restoration spec succeed in Wrath of the Lich King is a bad fit for Cataclysm, and a lot of our effectiveness is going to depend on player behavior that I'm not sure is going to change. EDIT: Naturally I had to finish this article shortly before new information concerning beta build 12857 became available. It's not live on the beta servers yet, and may not be (12857 might be a purely internal build, in which case I wonder who Boubouille paid off), but there are a few things there that would have impacted how I wrote this column.
Shifting Perspectives: Beta build 12803
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting feral/restoration druids and those who group with them. This week, we ponder change. Beta build 12803 dropped late Friday, and with it a number of changes to the feral and restoration specs. Some are what you'd expect after some recent forum conversations with Ghostcrawler (lead systems designer), and others came out of left field. We'll take a look past the cut.
Cataclysm Beta: Restoration druid specialization and talents
So it goes that we've had another beta patch -- and it's been a highly exciting one, to say the least. Not all that long ago, Blizzard announced that they would taking the current 51-point talent trees and trimming them down to 31-point talent trees, much as what players had when WoW was first released. Further, players will no longer gain a talent point every single level; instead, it will be approximately every other level, and a level 85 character will end up having a total of 41 talent points to spend. The purpose of these changes is to make all of the talents more meaningful to players, in an effort to get rid of those talents deemed boring or flat. It's quite a lofty goal, but Blizzard seems to be pulling it off nicely thus far. Further, once players hit level 10, they will choose a tree to specialize in, granting them new abilities and bonuses which assist in their chosen role. Restoration druids, specifically, are getting some pretty major changes already in Cataclysm, causing this change to push things even further. The big change, of course, is the highly controversial Tree of Life change, wherein the form will now act as cooldown ability instead of a standard shapeshift -- yes, it had to be mentioned at least once. All that aside, the more interesting aspect is how Blizzard is going to handle restoration druid leveling. Although it's often brushed aside as a trivial issue, having a healing spec that is able to quest and function on its own is fairly important; with a majority of a class' damage potential being shifted to the new specialization model, it's going to be interesting to see how Blizzard balances and differentiates between the damage capabilities of a DPSer and a healer. Regardless of design philosophy, Blizzard did push a new beta patch this week that introduced the new 31-point talent tree as well as the specializations for each class. Before we go about taking a look into these changes, let me start by warning you not to get upset over anything that you might see. Blizzard listed in the patch notes that the druid class as a whole isn't very far along in the development for the new talent trees, and multiple things are still likely to change once another pass is made.
Shifting Perspectives: Applying to raiding guilds as a druid
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting feral/restoration druids and those who group with them. This week, we are uncomfortably reminded of how similar the job and guild application processes are. Appearances to the contrary, the waning days of an expansion are actually a pretty good time to apply to a raiding guild. That's when attendance gets choppy, the pool and the grill issue a siren call from the deck, people go on vacation, or -- having "finished" the expansion -- they just take off, period. If you look at the recruitment forums, you'll see a ton of guilds looking for players right now. If you've ever wanted to raid but haven't gotten the chance, I think there is no better time. The Icecrown zone buff is a fantastic buffer for anyone who's not emerging with a bevy of best in slot from tier 9, and the raid itself is one brilliant lore moment from beginning to end. However, applying to a raiding guild -- particularly if you haven't done much raiding in the past -- can be on the intimidating side. With that in mind, here's a guide on how best to present yourself if you're applying anywhere as a feral or restoration druid.
The Colosseum: Diziet, Brutal Gladiator druid
The Colosseum takes us inside the world of the Gladiator (Relentless, Furious, Deadly, Brutal, Vengeful, Merciless, and otherwise), to interview some of the top Arena fighters on the battlegroups. Our goal is to bring a better understanding of the strategy, makeup, and work that goes into dueling it out for fame, fortune, and Frostwyrms. We're especially focused on the people who play these games, to further shed light on the world of the PvP player. If you'd like to be interviewed for The Colosseum, please feel free to contact us -- be sure to include your armory as a link! This week, WoW.com had the pleasure of interviewing Diziet of Lightning's Blade, a healer who plays a 2500+ rated druid-warlock-death knight 3v3 composition. He also balances competitive road cycling and a PvP blog on Elitist Jerks on the side! Diziet had a lot to say about arena and WoW PvP, in addition to some other things that might surprise you. WoW.com: Why do you play restoration druid? What is it about the class's toolbox that appeals to you for competitive arena? Diziet: I started playing a druid late in season three. I was overwhelmed by the extensive mobility and flexibility of the druid and warlock classes, having played a mage. The concept of playing a flexible class with a seemingly never ending repertoire of abilities was a very different experience than that of playing a mage during late season 3. Druids provided, and still provide, a great and easy to use amount of 'raw power', an amazing amount of healing output usable on the move. That was a very different and powerful play style rewarding basic and strong gameplay. Back then, and still now, druids could just stand in the open and out heal any kind of caster without casting a single spell, based on hots alone. I always stuck with a very defensive style of gameplay on my druid, utilizing tree form even in The Burning Crusade days. I would try to watch for any kind of hints of target switches or incoming crowd control spells from my opponents and I would try my best to prevent or negate them by doing simple things such as moving away, out of LoS (Line of Sight), or by putting hots before damage came. Back during TBC, druids had the ability to either play a more control based playstyle with feral charge (a tool I utilized a lot) or with a restokin spec to provide damage (something similar to what priests might do now). I enjoyed those play styles quite a bit too, especially in the 2v2 and 3v3 brackets. With the talent tree changes in WotLK, I was forced to play a more one-dimensional but effective play style. So, in a nutshell, I was attracted by the raw power of the class (in terms of heal per second, heal per global cooldown, and heal per mana), and used it to build a very defensive healing style.
Shifting Perspectives: Restoration 101
Every week, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them. This week, a quick and dirty guide to raising one's tree from a young sapling to a mighty oak, or other suitably impressive arboreal species. Whenever other columnists here write really good columns, I sit at my computer and swear a blue streak, for I am a jealous god. Sacco, damn him, turned out a great article on the basics of elemental shamans, and for a while I've been kicking around bits and pieces of 101-esque columns for all four druid specs. This was the last shove I needed to get that done. While I expect our new balance blogger (a.k.a. Murmurs, the person I will be forcing to do all my number-crunching in the future with bribes or, when necessary, threats) will address moonkin, I'll cover bears, cats, and today, trees. A quick note on what I want to accomplish here: I'm addressing this to people with no prior knowledge of the spec who want the tools to become reasonably competent healers quickly. By necessity, that means we're going to gloss over a few finer points; this is a cheat sheet, not an encyclopedia. When I say (for example) that Improved Tranquility needs to be dragged out behind a barn and killed with an axe, I'm not going to spend paragraphs explaining why that is, or examining situations where you could actually get some use from it. If you think I've glossed over something truly important, please drop a comment and I'll direct readers to anything they really need to know.
Shifting Perspectives: Druid healing strats for Icecrown Citadel
Every week, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them. This week, we look at Grid and realize that the dumb buggers are dropping like flies again. Before I write anything else, I want to send a shout-out to Kalon, who is ending the influential feral theorycraft blog ThinkTank. Like many of you, I've been reading ThinkTank for a while and fell in love with both Kalon's analysis and the theorycrafting that he made understandable even to Luddites like myself. To this day I've been experimenting with an idea he suggested concerning Bear DPS (no, really) that I've been planning to devote a column towards for a while, and I now regret not doing it earlier. So, to my druidic colleague -- /hug and /salute. Kalon, you will be greatly missed. For strategy articles, I've gotten into the habit of trying to describe all four roles, and have arrived at the conclusion that it's more efficient to take matters one spec at a time. With all of the Icecrown raid content clocking in at a little more than a month old under the best of circumstances, I'm better off describing the roles I've done personally therein (tanking and healing). Because we've already covered Lord Marrowgar, we're going to take the rest of the bosses necessary for the Storming the Citadel achievement, and cover them from a restoration point of view.
Shifting Perspectives: 5 observations from a reluctant battleground healer
Every week, Shifting Perspectives examines issues affecting druids and those who group with them. Today we gingerly step back into battlegrounds and discover that the world can be a very unfriendly place. I love writing this column, but there's one thing that bugs me about it -- the druid class is tailor-made to defeat a sole writer's efforts to cover everything she can. No matter how hard I try, I'm never going to cover each spec and playstyle with up-to-the-minute and in-depth experience, because it would require the simultaneous mastery of ranged DPS PvE, ranged DPS PvP, tanking, off-tanking, melee DPS PvE, melee DPS PvP, healing PvE, and healing PvP. Even with all that, I'd be leaving out all the hybrid and kooky specs people dream up. This has been getting to me lately. Consequently I thought that, before we get to some end-of-year and patch 3.3 business, it might be a good idea to spend some time on topics that -- to be frank -- I haven't been that great about covering. Balance as a whole needs some love and so do our kitties, but before I do that, I'd like to address a topic that, in contrast to Balance and Cat, I've been willfully ignoring -- PvP. It occurred to me that roughly a year after Wrath's launch, it might be a good idea to pop back into battlegrounds and see how the class' most common PvP spec (Restoration) is faring in combat these days, so I dumped badges and gold into a PvP set and went for broke. And, well...a lot's changed.
Shifting Perspectives: A 3.3 miscellany
Every week, Shifting Perspectives examines issues affecting druids and those who group with them. Today we root around our inbox and herd a series of scribbled notes across our desk, trying to get what we actually know about patch 3.3 in order. Also, Zach Yonzon's PhotoShop skills for the win, but we already knew that. This week's column is going to be a little bit of a grab bag in much the same way that our patch 3.1 miscellany post was, because there have been a few changes on the PTR recently that we haven't yet discussed. Before we get any farther, I'd also like to give a shout-out to our readers and commenters on last week's column, "The disappearance of the bear." I was a little antsy over how it was going to be received (lengthy articles on what's going wrong with a spec can get derailed into QQ-fests pretty easily, and that wasn't my intent), but was heartened to see so much quality discussion. One of the things I realized after reading through the comments was that Blizzard may actually have succeeded a little too well in their quest to make tanking more attractive and fun to the average player. WoW's four tanking classes (warrior, paladin, druid, and death knight) comprise 4 of the 5 most popular classes in the game right now. As I've written previously, the druid functions as the proverbial canary in the coal mine as a harbinger of class balance concerns, and with each of the game's plate classes numbering among the most played at 80, it's impossible for this not to have an impact on druid spec choice. Anyway. For the moment, we are going to turn away from this rather depressing situation, and concern ourselves with what's going on in patch 3.3.
Patch 3.3 PTR: Undocumented druid changes
Our esteemed colleague Boubouille has datamined some undocumented changes to druids on the patch 3.3 PTR, so while I'm waiting for it to download (53 more minutes.../sigh), let's take a look:BALANCENATURE'S GRACE: Now procs from non-periodic spell criticals (old: all spell criticals).So direct-damage spells (e.g. Wrath, Starfire, Moonfire's initial hit) or direct-healing spells (e.g. Regrowth's initial heal, Nourish) will be the only ones that can trigger the 20% haste effect from 3/3 Nature's Grace. This is definitely a nerf for Balance concerning Starfall and Hurricane crits, but it's also a nerf concerning specific gear sets. Moonfire's DoT component can crit if you're using Balance 2-piece Tier 9, and a Restoration druid rocking 4-piece Tier 9 gains the ability for Rejuvenation to crit.For Balance's AoE situations and Starfall cooldowns, it's an out-and-out nerf, albeit a limited one given Starfall's cooldown and the unlikelihood of Hurricane playing a major role in any given boss fight. Otherwise, it's also a nerf directed at Tier 9 bonuses, unless Blizzard's planning on future tier bonuses (or class changes) that will make periodic damage and/or healing crits a routine thing. Stay tuned.
Raid Rx: What's a good raid healing makeup?
Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a WoW blog for all things UI, macro, and addon related. What's the ideal raid healing team for 25-man raid groups? As your guild starts acquiring better and better gear, you'll soon come to the conclusion that you can scale down the amount of healers that are needed in a raid. On several boss fights, your raid can get away with as low as 5 healers. In fact, 5 healing a raid is the norm now. During Burning Crusade, a majority of raids set up healing teams of 6-7. In Wrath of the Lich King, there's been more of a shift towards increasing the DPS. Nowadays, healers are far more equipped to handle the different forms of incoming raid damage.
Shifting Perspectives: Leveling 10-20 and how to spec
Every week, Shifting Perspectives examines issues affecting Druids and those who group with them. This week, we begin to enjoy our brand-new Bear and Cat forms in earnest.Hail and well met, Druids. I apologize for my lack of comments on the last Shifting Perspectives, but I was away that week on vacation with abysmal hotel wireless. After spending 20 minutes trying to send a single reply, I gave up and decided that my time on vacation was better spent gorging myself on the offerings of the resort's culinary school. 4 days of coquilles St. Jacques, filet mignon, and venison sausage in puff pastry left me unable to move, but fortunately I have recovered sufficiently to roll myself, Violet Beauregarde-style, in the direction of the laptop for today's column.Levels 10 through 20 will be among your most interesting and frustrating as a Druid, and they're certainly among the most volatile; as of patch 3.2, you will gain 4 of the Druid's possible forms within these levels, with the biggest alteration to your playstyle likely to occur at 20 with Cat form. Be forewarned that this resulted in a fairly lengthy, 3-part article.Ready to go?
World of Warcraft Patch 3.2 Druid Guide
WoW.com has covered patch 3.2 extensively. Everything from the surprising changes to flying mounts, to the latest and greatest loot, and all the changes in between. In our patch 3.2 class guides we take a look at exactly what changes in each class and how the changes will affect your playing. In case you can't tell, I really loved the series of pictures I got to shoot on the PTR of the new Night Elf cat loping across the frozen wastes of Dragonblight. It is almost impossible to take a bad picture with the new forms, but there's just something about them that inspires you to hit the road looking for the best contexts in which to show them off. I foresee this may prove troublesome in the poorly-lit reaches of certain dungeons, where Druids will be loath to walk for fear that their beauty may only imperfectly grace the monitor. Such is life, my friends. Where was I? I had to stop there to weep into a sherry. Well, no matter. Patch 3.2 is here, and with it a number of changes for the Druid class, both good and bad.Read on for a guide to all 4 specs in 3.2 and the changes likely to impact Druids in both PvE and PvP.
Shifting Perspectives: Getting started and leveling 1-9
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting Druids and those who group with them. This week, we begin at the beginning, and we will go on until the end. Then we will stop. Then we will ask ourselves why we are taking advice from 19th century children's literature rather than the books that are relevant to our interests, like Why Buying a House You Have No Idea How To Renovate Is Probably a Bad Idea, or Smoked Salmon and You: A Guide To Not Eating Yourself Into a Coma.Greetings, Druids. I took the liberty of rolling a few new Druids to test out the improved leveling process, and if possible I'm going to level a brand-new one all the way to 80 to make sure everything in the guide's been personally tested and accurate as of the 3.1/3.2 game world. Today we'll start off with a baby Tauren Druid on the PTR who's now level 9; later I'll be switching between a Night Elf and a Tauren.Level Feral.This is the single best thing you can do for yourself, at least for leveling in classic content. As we've previously discussed, the Druid is still hobbled by its initial design as an endgame secondary healer, but you can skip a certain portion of this early weakness by leveling feral. Piggybacking off all of the DPS leather that went into the game to support the billions of people who rolled Rogues is a nice advantage, but the real attraction of leveling Feral lies in the ability to DPS in forms that don't require mana. Being able to save your mana bar for healing and buffing decreases downtime enormously (more so as you gain levels, as our mana efficiency and damage aren't that great early on).
Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a Druid
Every week (sort of), Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting Druids and those who group with them. This week, in the anticipation of a patch likely to bring many new players into the fold, we descend into the depths of an ancient library in pursuit of Druidic history, lean back in our chair considering the modern form of the class, cast a gimlet eye toward the future, and then wonder how many more clichés we can shove into a sentence before readers start writing angry letters to our editor.Dear new Druids,Welcome to the class -- and for some of you, welcome back. I've observed a flood of players rolling premade Druids on the PTR to try out with the new bear and cat forms, and with the promise of new moonkin and tree forms arriving at some point in the future, I think it's reasonable to expect lots of you trying (or rediscovering) the class on the live realms. You are most welcome, and we are glad to have you. This is the best class in the game.Now, I'll grant I'm prejudiced, because I have loved this class since the first day I started playing. I love it so much that it's difficult for me to remember that there are 5...or 8...or...however many other classes there are. I don't know. I haven't checked lately. I'm told Blizzard added another one, but I can't be expected to keep up with every little thing.So.It is possible that we have changed more than any other class between the beginning of the game and July 2009 as I write this. I want you to know what the Druid is all about, why it might be a good choice for you, and why (as much as I find this difficult to write) you may wish to steer clear before we start a series on leveling a Druid.
Patch 3.2 Druid changes
3.2 approaches! Sort of. The PTR itself isn't up yet (at least, not as I write this), but nonetheless, 3.2 approaches on little cat feet.I'm going to examine the 3.2 PTR patch notes line by relevant line, just because there are several changes that impact Druids while not being class-specific. If you want a quick summary without being massively spoiled, Balance is getting a huge and welcome change to the functionality of Eclipse, Cats are getting bonked by the nerfbat, and PvP-Restos are really getting bonked by the nerfbat. Bears, well...not much is going to happen to bears this patch, which is a little demoralizing given the improvements being made to Pally tanks, but that's OK. We still have our, uh, amazing Tier 8 set bonuses and...um...the best -- sort of -- tanking cooldowns in, uh, the...uh......Oh, screw it, just stack the hell out of stamina and pray to the gods of RNG if your guild's dumb enough to try Ulduar on hard-mode. Congratulations; you have now done all you can possibly do to prepare yourself for modern tanking.Sad lolbare is sad. But cough syrup for everybody! Is nise! Now let's take a look:
Shifting Perspectives: Restoration and the Tree Druid's future
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting Druids and those who group with them. This week, rather than plagiarizing from Stephen Hawking, we plagiarize from ourselves, and for the second time in column history, we shelve our Previously Scheduled Guide in favor of an emergency summit concerning Tree conservation.A question for Druids from Ghostcrawler himself; is Tree of Life form fun?I'd like to get the question a bit more exposure both here and on the forums, because it's a thought-provoking issue. No other healer, as he observes, has to sacrifice anything in order to use a key talent in their healing tree/s, and from how Ghostcrawler's worded his post, it seems pretty clear that the PvE and PvP healing output of the Restoration spec is explicitly balanced around the use of Tree of Life. That's fine -- it is our 41-point talent, and a good one at that. It's not unreasonable for Blizzard to expect that we'll use it. However, It does have implications for game balance when 3 of 4 healing classes retain all of their offensive capabilities, crowd-control, and interrupts while healing, and the Druid relinquishes all of the above in order to provide the same level of healing throughput.I took a look at the thread in question, and if you want my honest opinion, some of the issues being described are the logical evolution of problems from October 2005 when Tree of Life went live. The game has changed, and while the flagship Restoration talent has slowly changed alongside it, the inherent design of the form still reflects realities from the classic game rather than Wrath. Interestingly, many of these same problems affect moonkin as well.
Shifting Perspectives: A brief history of time
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting Druids and those who group with them. This week, we plagiarize from Stephen Hawking, jack a WABAC Machine, and begin a joyride through the evolution of the Druid class.Dear Blizzard,There are too many bosses to write about in Ulduar. I find this vexing. Please eliminate 5. Sincerely,Sleepless in SilithusSalutations, Druids. As is probably obvious, we're going to take a detour out of Ulduar class strategy this week, because I'm going to shoot myself if I have to write about another boss I haven't been able to smack around since the PTR. We'll be back for Freya, Thorim, and assorted vaguely Norse-sounding entitites wishing to destroy the world for some unspecified reason but they drop phat lewtz so who cares next week.Anyway, one of the things that's fascinated me about the Druid class since Burning Crusade is the growth in its popularity. Historically we have never been among the more commonly-played classes, and for a wide swathe of classic WoW and BC, were actually the least-played class or within the bottom 3. While there are various reasons for this (and I could devote a column to how this probably happened), Druids became more popular as time went on, and an increasing number of people began to play the class without knowing just how far it's come. A little time spent reading through Wowwiki's list of the game's patches makes for interesting reading. A little more than 5 years ago, Druids could Feign Death, the Feral 31-point talent was Improved Pounce, and Moonkin form wasn't even in a gleam in a designer's eye.
Shifting Perspectives: An Ulduar class preview, part 2
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting Druids and those who group with them. This week, we watch the Ulduar trailer again and ask ourselves over and over why Jaina Proudmoore couldn't have been a Druid. The obvious answer is that she just wasn't cool enough, but this is the source of much cognitive dissonance at the moment. I'm going to take a quick moment from the rest of the column and just write, in case any of the people who made it are reading this, that the Ulduar trailer was so stuffed with win that pieces of win are dribbling out of it into little win puddles and spilling over into the Sewer of Awesome. And, as NaitFury on the MMO Champion thread points out, "Those of you who say it is boring should probably go back to watching another Undead Rogue 1-shot people with Linkin Park in the background." Amen!We're one week into Ulduar (and by "we" I mean "other people," because the game has become virtually unplayable for me post-patch, and having the game crash my computer every 5 minutes is forcing the Sewer of Awesome to run to the Vast Delta of Self-Pity), so let's pick up where we left off and tackle the Deconstructor, the Iron Council, and Kologarn.
