I haven’t played much WoW recently so I’ve not got round to doing anything about the Resto tree yet but a Resto Druid who I did a 5-man with today (hi Natora, if you’re reading) got me thinking about it so I figured I should put something up about being Resto in 3.3.

The main concern or change is with haste, due to the changes to Gift of the Earthmother.

• Pre-3.3: Reduces the base global cooldown of your Rejuvenation, Lifebloom and Wild Growth spells by 20%.
• Post-3.3: This talent now increases spell haste and reduces the base global cooldown by 2/4/6/8/10% instead of its previous effect. Now also reduces the base cooldown of your Lifebloom spell by 2/4/6/8/10%

I make that 10% off Lifebloom, a 10% haste increase and a 10% nerf to our base GCD, don’t you?

Personally, I wouldn’t worry about it. At all. If you know how to play your Druid well then you’re not going to have a problem. Some people have been dropping points in Resto to spec into Celestial Focus. This gave me a 0.04 second reduction in the cast time of Nourish. 0.04 seconds. At the moment we have about 5x that just in server lag. Maybe more. Plus, the amount of haste on the gear in Icecrown Citadel should keep everything covered.

My advice would be to spec for your role, as always. And to pick up the Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation.

I’ve tweaked my spec a little bit since the post I did on 3.2, I’ve removed Nature’s Grace because I’m doing more raid healing and not using Nourish as much. This leaves the only other non-periodic spell critting spells as Swiftmend (I only use it in emergencies) and Regrowth, which is cast once every 21 seconds. Do I need a 20% cast speed increase which isn’t certain every 21 seconds? Probably not.

I’m still sticking with my 5 points in Tranquil Spirit. I don’t know about you, but I like having mana. That little blue bar makes me think of blueberries. I like blueberries so I want as much of that as I can get. No blueberry in my bar makes me sad. Mana regen and useage isn’t really a problem but it’s less of a problem if you have 5 in Tranquil Spirit.

I then struggled to think where to put my last 4 points. Living Seed, I know, is very popular among Resto Druids but I thought back to my role within our raids and I’m only really casting a seedable spell on the tank once every 21 seconds (I very rarely Nourish the tanks) and it’s not guaranteed to crit. So, like the 20% cast speed increase…do I really need it? Probably not.

Do I want 3 points in Natural Perfection? Do I need 3% crit? What’s critting now? Nourish, not really using it and I already have a 25% increase in crits for Nourish and Regrowth from Nature’s Bounty, so do I need another 3%? Regrowth, meh, see previous sentence. Swiftmend, only when I’m desperate. Lifebloom’s bloom, no; whenever my Lifebloom blooms about 80% of it is overhealed.

Strangely, and I know all of this is potentially controversial amongst us Druids, the most useful for me is probably Revitalize. My two most used spells at the moment are Rejuv and Wild Growth. As a raid healer I have the Glyph of Wild Growth and now the Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation so having something that works with these is pretty handy. I know it’s not a massive amount but it’s free! And free…whatever you have on your bar, is never a bad thing. I suppose some could argue that having certain spells means free heals but I’ve got lots of other spells that do that.

I say this, but to be honest I’ve only got Revitalize for the pretty graphic when it goes off. Thanks, Marmite <3

Shadowpaws’ Spec in 3.3 – Unless I feel the need to change it, but I’ll tell you if I do!

Ahem, crikey, this hasn’t been touched for a while, apologies for that. It’s that time again though, time for another WoW related blog post so without further ado, let’s take a look at…

Exciting, no? Well, actually…it is a little bit. For me at least because there are some fun choices to be made.

So, what’s expected for 3.2? The main things we’re going to see are:

• Lifebloom: The final heal that occurs when this spell blooms has been reduced by 20% on the base and on the spell power coefficient.
• Innervate: Duration reduced to 10 seconds, and cooldown reduced to 3 minutes. This means each use of Innervate will give half as much mana as before, but it will be available twice as often
• Empowered Touch: Now also increases the amount of bonus healing effects for Nourish by 10/20%.

Having a spell like Lifebloom, which critcally blooms for about 20k (for me) on a Paladin, nerfed by 20% does seem like a big nerf but recount will show that a lot of overhealing comes from Lifebloom and it’s that enormous bloom that’s causing it. You can’t look at it singularly though, this nerf has to be looked at alongside the extra goodness we’re getting from Empowered Touch.

We’re losing 20% from Lifebloom’s bloom but our Nourish is getting a yummy little buff. Although, saying that, we are waving goodbye to our Tier 7 set bonus. /weep You were a wonderful companion and I love you dearly. QQ.

Innervate, whilst one of the main changes, is a little on the unimportant side when you think about it. I don’t usually have mana problems while raiding so Innervate is often left untouched, being saved for another raid member just in case. Having it available twice as often would mean I could potentially help out a DPS or top up a healer, but I still can’t see it as being particularly important. In a way, I suppose it’s like a Range Rover’s off-road prowess, you don’t use it but if you need it, it’s there. Did I just compare Druid healing to a Range Rover? Moving on…

Raeina from Druidlove’s post got me thinking about my 3.2 talent build. I can’t see it being very different to what I’m currently running, which is good. However, we do have some choices.

Personally, and I know a lot of Druids aren’t with me on this, I love Nourish. I’ve been using it, and telling people to use it more, since Paws hit 80. When the Glyph of Nourish came out I was even more pleased. The buff to Empowered Touch makes it a definite talent choice in 3.2 and Raeina’s 3.2 build looks to be a good one.

However, both Raeina and I have similar current specs and I noticed an extra point was slipped into Subtlety. Completing my current build with the addition of Empowered Touch does mean losing two points in Living Seed. It’s no big loss and I tend to think of it as a luxury talent. But this spec, and there are talents such as Tranquil Spirit and Gift of the Earthmother which are dependent on how thirsty you are for mana and how much haste you have, leaves me with one point left over. The last to be picked. The kid in P.E. with the off-white shirt and pink-stained shorts from a mixed colour wash. It needs to be put somewhere, but where?

Living Seed? As a 10 man, mostly MT healer, I quite like Living Seed. It’s a free heal and even with a 33% chance on crits, it still could prove to be useful. It doesn’t do a massive amount of healing but it’s a heal your tank gets without you actually having to do anything…and that’s not a bad thing, right?

Revitalize? This would depend on your raid makeup, and let’s not forget, my spec and advice is based on my raid makeup, gear/gems/enchants and play style. What works for me might not work for you, but there’s no harm done in trying new things – unless you spend hours wiping because your new spec doesn’t work…which isn’t my fault, don’t hate me, please, I’m sorry! If you have enough replenishment in your raid then I wouldn’t bother with Revitalize. If it’s a little low you might want to look at dropping points from somewhere and speccing into it properly.

Natural Perfection? With the increase in crittable resto spells and the logical increased use of Nourish, having an extra 1% crit sounds quite appealing. You could also conjoin this respec with a re-gem as well, either to reduce your gemmed crit in favour of spell power or to boost your mp5. Whatever!

I’m torn between Natural Perfection and Living Seed but leaning everso slightly towards Natural Perfection and a small re-gem. I’m sure I’ll change my mind a few times though. For now, this is my spec for 3.2.

After <Ferocity>’s first few jaunts in Ulduar we’ve experienced trash doing ridiculous amounts of damage, then doing about half that, bosses not doing what they’re meant to be doing, adds not appearing or twice as many appearing. Suffice to say, Ulduar has been hit and miss for us in our little 10-man progression guild. Despite the hiccups and bad luck we’ve managed to down Flame Leviathan and XT-002 and got Razorscale to 5%. We’re doing okay when Ulduar behaves itself but we’ve had to rethink a few things.

XT-002 was a fight which had us really struggling with tactics. Not so much the tactics for XT’s abilities but for our own personal ones. For the most part, the focus was on the healers during tantrum. As a Druid I tried Wild Growth, which did diddly-squat. I tried Nourish, which worked okay on the four or five people I could cast it on before the rest died. I tried Rejuvs and Swiftmend but that only worked for one person before they all died. Lifebloom was the same and would’ve worked okay if people weren’t getting lightbombed, which meant I was healing them (usually myself as it happens) and not popping Lifeblooms on people.

The only thing left to try was Tranquility. We split the groups to have a Druid in each and it worked fantabulously…until the next tantrum came along and Tranq was still on cooldown. Fel suggested a respec so I quickly put one together on WoWhead and we both popped back to Moonglade and implement the new talent build with two points in Improved Tranquility which has brought the cooldown to 4 mins instead of 10. Doing this means we can Tranq the first tantrum, people have to rely on pots and healthstones for the second tantrum and if we get lucky, Tranq the third tantrum but there can be a few seconds left to wait on the cooldown.

Apparently the tantrum on XT has been changed and <Ferocity> are back in Ulduar tonight so I’m hoping we’ll go straight to XT after Leviathan. We’re hoping to one shot both of them and then spend some time on Razorscale and Ignis but I’m looking forward to seeing how the changes have affected the healing.

G x

I hope that works for you too =)

Now, for the person who searched “resto druid 3.1 rotation” and arrived at my blog, I apologise if it’s a bit late, but let’s bounce some ideas around. As a Resto Druid, I’m guessing that pre-patch you will have been using the Rejuv > Lifebloom x3 > Regrowth/Nourish if needed rotation? Our main focus in this rotation was our three stacks of Lifebloom, which cost very little mana and, with the three stacks, was a great HoT to have on the target as it ticks every second. The whole idea of using Lifebloom was that we kept refreshing it every 8 seconds as that one application refreshed all three. Excellent.

I was on main and off-tank healing at various points when the guild went to Ulduar and I thought it’d be a good opportunity to test out a new healing rotation. That was the plan anyway. In reality we seriously struggled with damage as some points. I found my initial thoughts of a Lifebloomless healing rotation went completely out of the window and I was having to cast everything I had to keep the tanks alive. At one point, though, this happened…

Yes, I had to read the combat log after I saw 20,002 in big green numbers on my screen. “What the hell did that?” I thought to myself, “I haven’t cast Healing Touch (my previous ‘big heal’) on anyone.”

I was really not expecting to see a 20k critical heal from Lifebloom. So let’s have a look at the post-patch Lifebloom:

Okay. Don’t panic if yours looks a little different, especially Mana cost, I have the 5% reduction from the T7 set bonus. Now, to translate the above into numbers that make some sense, I’ll do some heals on myself. With just Mark of The Wild cast on myself and in Tree form.

1 stack – 373 per second / crit = 4589 / mana returned = 490

2 stack – 745 per second / crit = 9177 / mana returned = 978

3 stack – 1118 per second / crit = 13766 / mana returned = 1468

Pre-patch the bloom didn’t scale with the number of stacks present on the target but the HoT did. The bloom part of the buff now does scale with stacks as can be seen above. Over the full rotation of a Lifebloom on a three stack bloom (with the above data) you’re looking at a total of 23,828 healing over 9 seconds. Awesome, huh? No, not really. Because we want efficient healing, not just big heals. What’s the point in having a heal of 20,000 if, when it goes off, the target is at full health? What we would really like is a 20,000 heal when the tank needs it but such is the way with Lifebloom, we would need to predict how much health the tank is going to be down 9 seconds in advance. Yeah, that’s not going to happen.

With the new mechanics of Lifebloom – the increased mana useage and the return upon bloom – we are wanting it to bloom so we can get a little bit of mana back. The three applications of Lifebloom will cost you in the region of 2199 mana, so getting 1468 of that back is quite helpful.

The way I found myself healing, after adapting very quickly to the notion that I need all the healing I can get in Ulduar, was to stack up my 3 Lifeblooms and let them bloom, then quickly re-apply them, using a Swiftmend or my ‘Panic Button’ if the tank’s health drops whilst re-applying, then topping off with a Nourish. Whilst this level of healing certainly keeps me on my toes, there is no room for error like there used to be in Naxx. On main tank healing I rarely healed at full ability, which meant I always had some room to play with if one of the other healers went down. This was illustrated on Thaddius when the two other healers unfortunately killed themselves, leaving me up to do raid and tank healing. My level of healing in that fight was still not quite as intense as it is in Ulduar 10-man on trash. Wasn’t far off, but still not quite as bad.

I think our only option is to heal with everything we have, let our Lifeblooms bloom so we can grab a slice of the mana cake back and use our Nourish and Swiftmends when we need to. If anyone has any other tips, feel free to let me know =)

Oh and that Panic Button I mentioned before is a macro:

/stopcasting
/cast Nature’s Swiftness
/cast Healing Touch

G x

So Patch 3.1 is here. Ulduar is here. Let’s talk about it!

Just before the servers went down for the patch implementation I parked both my level 80 characters in Darnassus because 1) it has target dummies, 2) it’s quiet and 3) it has a Druid and a Hunter trainer. I knew Dalaran would be packed as soon as our realm came back online so I was glad to avoid it. People in the guild were confirming my assumption, poor folk!

So I logged on and went straight to my respective class trainers to grab Dual Talent Spec for both characters. After doing builds and glyphs for both ‘geebs (Hunter) and ‘paws (Druid) and, of course, learning Call Stabled Pet, I took both over to the target dummies and met up with a couple of friends to chat about the new specs – due to talent and spell changes – and get some numbers from the dummies.

This was where I found one of the first problems. I’m sure I’m not the only one but it would appear my chat box is not showing me what everyone is saying. I had a couple of friends ask me why I was ignoring them yesterday, but the simple fact it…I had no messages from them. I also had no ‘yellow text’ to tell me when someone had joined or left my group, I couldn’t see rolls (which was annoying in Ulduar!) so that was my first frustration. Any ideas how to get around this? And yes, I’ve disabled all my add-ons and it still does it.

So, Hunter first as I was most interested to see what was happening with Beast Mastery as it was my original build – and I missed my Spirit Beast after being Marksman for a while. My primary build on ‘geebs is still MM because he’s already glyphed so I decided to do a quick burn down on mana to get some initial figures. Self buffed my MM build was running at about 2500dps on a lvl 80 dummy with a wolf for a pet. This I was pleased with, it brightened my day to see an MM build DPSing similarly to an SV build, still a little behind but not bad. I know it shouldn’t have done, but it did get my hopes up for BM. With the new pet talents I was hoping for 2500dps or thereabouts. Change build (I love this!), open Call Stabled Pet and grab Spirit Beast. Re-talent Spirit Beast, check spellbook to see no pet abilities. Dismiss pet and re-call..ooh, look! Abilities! Blizzard, you need to fix this. Anyway, BM put down about 2300dps. I’m going to be playing around with some rotations as I’m not satisfied with that. I want BM to put out about 2500dps or near to, this will be my off-time mission.

With initial figures and thoughts of how to improve them going through my head I popped over to ‘paws to try out Boomkin DPS. 3000-3300dps. *re-reads Recount*

“Blue, does that say 3,000dps to you?”

‘I’m not looking.’

I did another DPS burn down and yes, it was about 3,000dps. Now, I know this is not a proper test but it’s nice to get some baseline test results. In an instance with raid buffs I’m sure the DPS figures will be different. What worries me, though, is the fact a hybrid class in Restoration gear is doing so much more damage than a pure DPS class. I hope it’s not the same for the likes of Mages. I really do think this needs to be looked into by Blizz.

Anyway, let’s look at Resto as it’s my main-spec now. Whilst I’m not overly happy with the changes they’ve made to the likes of Lifebloom, I am quite excited to get back to figuring out the best healing rotation I can for both group and tank healing, whilst being as mana efficient as possible

Lifebloom: Mana cost of all ranks doubled. When Lifebloom blooms or is dispelled, it now refunds half the base mana cost of the spell per application of Lifebloom, and the heal effect is multiplied by the number of applications.

Now, pre-patch the way I and many other resto Druids used Lifebloom was to not allow it to bloom and to keep the three stacks running at all times. This, with 700+mana per application doesn’t seem to be particularly efficient at the moment. Aside from the nerf to mana regeneration, which is only out of combat – something I don’t actually understand – and the Lifebloom changes, not much has happened to Resto Druids. We’ve had a few minor changes which are nice but nothing major aside from Lifebloom. See the full list of changes here.

I tried out a new healing rotation without Lifebloom when <Ferocity> went to Ulduar for the first time. We managed to down the first boss (see picture at the start of the blog) but really struggled on the trash afterwards with an issue with damage. There was a lot of raid damage and a lot of tank damage as well. For our usual set up with me on tank healing, I was really struggling to keep him at full health and I think I’m right in assuming I put out the most HPS in the guild so it wasn’t filling us with confidence. One other issue seems to be with swapping talent builds. Blue entered Ulduar and switched to SV spec, which unlearnt all his talents and all his skills. This meant he had to go back to the trainer and re-learn a load of spells he’s already learnt, using all the money he didn’t have in the first place.

We’re off back to Ulduar now to see what we can do with the trash we struggled on last night and to see if we can get any more bosses down. Flame Leviathan was an interesting fight. It was fun because it was different but I fear it’ll be a bit gimmicky and its fun will wear off. I hope not though.

Must dash, healing to do!

G x