oneHoTnelf

I have two things to say.

Firstly, why don’t you guys leave comments? I have plenty of visitors. I suspect some of you may even be turning into “regulars”. Say hi? Let me know you’re out there? Tell me where I’m wrong, or what sort of advice you want next?

Bloggers, what kind of percentage of readership comments? Does it take 100 views to get 1 comment? 50? I don’t have enough information to have any idea yet.

Ok, second thing, and the point of the post. +Heals vs Spell Power. Now, I know that at my gear level, stuff got roughly halved. 2.2k “ish” heals become 1.1k “ish”. I say “ish” because I stopped being too interested in numbers: I have most of the end-game gear, short of the last 3 pieces of T6. Hell, I’m 2/8 T6 feral. I have several MH/BT feral drops even: I could probably TANK Hyjal if I wanted. Early BT even. LATE BT even, and I’m just about there with my FR tanking set. Yes, I’ve been VERY bored in the gear area lately. I don’t even need to use the Chromatic Wonder flask to cap my SR lately. *YAWN*.

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Okay, so I promised myself I would post tonight, and I started working on a WotLK dungeon drops post. BAD IDEA. Different sources disagree about who drops what, various sites have links to some items but not others, and there are a LOT of bosses to go over. I started out writing the post as I researched, and then I found myself making notes separately and copy-pasting links backwards and forwards, and finally I started to think about doing a spreadsheet to compare stats of various items.

Rest assured, this post WILL happen, but it’s a LOT more work than I anticipated, and it may take me a while. So in the meantime, you get…

Wild Growth: When it’s Awesome and When it Sucks.

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I’m sure most of us remember grinding our HH rep for the healing head enchant; Aldor/Scryer rep for the shoulders; maybe Lower City for the prayerbook. The question on my lips lately has been: What rep will be hot for druid healers once WotLK comes out? Well, I decided to do my homework. First of all, without going into how hard it might be to get rep, I just looked at the rewards.

** KEEP IN MIND ANY OR ALL OF THIS COULD CHANGE BY RELEASE DATE **

Kicking off with the Argent Crusade, I hunted… and I hunted… and eventually, at exalted, I found one haste ring, the Signet of Hopeful Light. No regen, but a nice stack of spell power and haste. With the lack of any healing gear before exalted, I suspect I’m going to pass on this one until I’m getting desperate to find other upgrades.

Moving on to the Kirin Tor, it’s a bit more promising, with Shroud of Dedicated Research and Helm of the Majestic Stag both available at honored. While these are both quite decent items, they’re side-grades at best for me, but may be very worth picking up depending on your current gear. At exalted, you can obtain Robes of Crackling Flame, which again, I may not pick up over my T6, but I am quite tempted.

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Having thought I had GridStatusLifebloom completely sorted, I went raiding last night. A roll over MH and a 2-shot of Brutallus. Good fun, except that I kept seeing PHANTOM lifeblooms showing up on grid. Well, it turned out they weren’t phantoms after all, but my fellow tree’s lifeblooms. Annoying much.

Anyway, I’ve had a stab at fixing it myself. I haven’t gone raiding with another druid since my change, so I don’t know that it worked, but I DO know that it hasn’t broken anything, because my own lifeblooms are still showing up fine.

Anyway, if you feel like trying my change, jump back into GridStatusLifebloom.LUA and look for the function called “GridStatusLifebloom:CountHOTs(unitid)”. Change this line:

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This is just a super quick one about an addon I’ve fallen in love with. Grid. Well, Grid + GridStatusLifebloom. It gives me a 0.1s-resolution countdown on any lifeblooms I have running, as well as a colour indicator for how many stacks I have. Fantastic for keeping track.

Sadly, with the new patch, it broke. It stopped updating the time remaining, and just stayed at 7s. VERY frustrating.

Happily, I found this post, in which Calico0 gives a very satisfactory fix. Find your GridStatusLifebloom addon folder, make a backup of GridStatusLifebloom.LUA, and then open the original up in Wordpad (Notepad doesn’t like the file much I found).

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Wow. Just Wow. 3.0 is one HUGE patch. Stormwind Harbour, Achievements, Pet/Mount Learning, and a three hour BT clear.

That’s right. Three (or so) hours, with a bunch of new talents we haven’t really worked out yet. RoS phase one without an enrage, using only one tank. Teron down just as our second lot of constructs came out. Illidan down WITHOUT SHADOW DEMONS COMING OUT. My God.

Wild Growth. Oh. Em. Gee. I love it.

And… A fellow tree in my guild taking Replenish. If you read my last post, you may remember I didn’t really write it off, but I wasn’t thrilled by the talent. My guildie, however, decided to give it a try, and I must admit, I saw a few procs come up in my buff bar. The first time I noticed it, I threw up my character sheet to see what my MP5 was, only to find out it hadn’t changed. It restores a certain amount of mana, but not by boosting your regen.

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Word around Aman’thul is that we should see the new talent trees once the current shutdown is over. I’m not sure if this is official, but there’ll be some surprised players tomorrow if the 51-point talents AREN’T available.

Of course, there’ll also be some surprised players if they ARE. Not everybody follows out-of-game news, and there haven’t really been any in-game hints surrounding the new talent trees. I don’t want to be caught off-guard about my spec, however, and so I thought I’d better do some homework. After all, I will be expected to go pwn some BT bosses this week (NOW WITH 30% LESS HEALTH!), and I don’t want to show up to raid saying “So, I heard there were some decent balance healing talents… Anyone know a good spec?”

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A while back I wrote about how versatile us resto druids can be. About how we can carry around a bear-set, and a caster-dps set, and so on. I do this myself: my bear set is probably up to tanking MH and BT if I spec feral (and I occasionally do; spec feral that is, not tank MH and BT). Only last night I tanked some AQ20 and ZG for fun. I’ve tanked heroics, I’ve tanked Kara. But not every druid who’s carrying around a few pieces of defense and stamina gear knows what’s going on with bears. Not every druid did lots of levelling as feral, and not every druid really knows much about tanking mechanics in general.

In fact, my first attempt at tanking as a level 70 (having spent all of 50-70 healing) was fairly poor. I didn’t even know there was an ability called lacerate, and while I wasn’t dying immediately, I just wasn’t putting out enough threat to let the dps kill things fast enough.

So, this post is for the tanking-noob who wants to carry around a bear set and tank sometimes. It contains a few of the lessons I’ve learned, and while it won’t give you all the tips and tricks of druid MTing, it will at least give you a rough idea of what to do.

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I recently had the pleasure of mentoring a new Tree in our guild into T6 content, and I learned a few things along the way. First of all, I got a bit of an insight into a few bad habits people learn when their group outgears content (this happens more and more with the new 2.4 badge rewards). Secondly, I had the chance to think about my own spell selection (while trying to teach the ideas to somebody else), and I came up with a few tips which have improved my own healing performance.

First of all, one important tool for tuning your healing output is Recount. Now, the first important tip with recount is that healing meters DO NOT MATTER. The second one is that HEALING METERS ARE EVERYTHING.

Confused? Good.

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We’ve all seen the holy pally on LFG advertising 2.2k +healing. Wearing greens, with no spell crit or mp5. We all know better, right? Right? We wouldn’t be caught dead wearing greens of healing?

At the same time, gearing to heal isn’t just about throwing on a bunch of blues and purples with +heals on them, and spamming lifebloom. Especially when selecting gems, you have to balance different stats, and the main stats you’ll be looking at, for resto druiding (can ‘druid’ be verbed?), will be +healing and spirit. You may also end up looking at intellect eventually, but the balance between spirit and intellect is another whole article, and rather than writing it, I’ll just suggest you go read Phaelia’s great work at Resto4Life.

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