Posts with tag restoration-druid-shifting-perspectives

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. Welcome to our feral cat edition, brought to you by Chase Hasbrouck, aka Alaron of The Fluid Druid blog. Let the face clawing begin!

Last week, I broke down the new druid talents that were released at BlizzCon with lots of discussion about how this may lead ferals in a new direction. I've had a week to think about things more, and I'm still blown away by the magnitude of the changes Blizzard is making to the specializations. Much of the fundamental assumptions about what drives our characters is being reworked, and we're not discussing the implications because OMG pandas! (For the record, I have a 3-year-old. Team Pandaren > Team Worgen.)

To quickly review, the traditional model of abilities has always been strongly tied to classes. If you were a druid, you got all the druid abilities as you leveled, regardless of what talent points you invested. There were a few key abilities for each spec that were unlocked via talents, but that was it.

With Cataclysm, Blizzard took its first swipe at reducing talent trees by introducing specializations. This served two purposes. First, it let specs have "cool" abilities earlier, instead of waiting until they were near max level to unlock them. And second, it once and for all eliminated the ability to have hybrid specs, such as the Dreamstate resto druid from The Burning Crusade. Previously, you were merely limited by your talent points; now, if the ability you wanted existed in another specialization, or below tier 2 in an off-spec tree, it was completely inaccessible.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, we reach End Time.

Every so often as a tank or healer, you get the uncontrollable urge to scream various profanities at your group and ragequit in the middle of a pull just to show the bastards who's boss. Unfortunately, there's not much content that's really forgiving to this approach, and it's kind of a jerk thing to do on its own. Most of the time, you either have to suffer in silence as the group blames you for everything that has ever gone wrong with their lives, or else drop group and eat the Dungeon Finder cooldown.

But that is no longer true. In patch 4.3, Blizzard has bestowed upon our little world a heroic boss known as Murozond, who upends the traditional responsibility to our groups and encourages us to care about nobody but ourselves.

The developers have given us the greatest gift that any tank or healer can get:

Revenge.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, we are still mulling over last week's subject.

When you blog professionally, you get used to an unfortunate truth: Most of the time, you could have written a better column if you'd had the advantage of reading the comment section first. Unfortunately, none of you jerks had the decency to comment on Shifting Perspectives: When healers run out of options before I published it, so I was stuck writing it without that advantage. Bad commenters! No biscuit.

Suffice it to say that people wrote a lot of interesting stuff on last week's article, and I've been mulling it over ever since.

In news unrelated to this or any other article, I would just like to state that the name Nosferatmoo (glimpsed on a tauren death knight from Misha-US while I was pugging on my goblin priest for the Low Level Tank Project™) is pretty much the best name ever.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, the upcoming Wild Growth nerf gets us thinking.

As with our previous Shifting Perspectives on tanking and healing the Zandalari 5-mans introduced in patch 4.2, I'd like to run an edition on tanking and healing the new Hour of Twilight, Well of Eternity, and End Time heroics. While I prep that, we've been left with an unpleasant but perhaps not totally unexpected nerf to Wild Growth as of last week's PTR patch notes.

Let us be frank, my brethren. Is Wild Growth overpowered? Yep.

Is it doing too much healing for too little effort? Probably. When even I can keep your ungemmed, unenchanted premade group's collective ass alive on my first trip into a new heroic despite getting lost and arriving at the group a minute late, a spell is way too good.

But is that completely irrelevant to why Wild Growth is really a problem? Yep.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, we find ourselves scrambling to read 100 pages on the forums in time.

Yes, I used a Troll kitty at the top of a bear and resto article. It was pretty and I liked it. That's my excuse.

Blizzard has an unfortunate habit of either invalidating everything I write shortly after it's been published or rendering an entire column out-of-date before it's even gone live. This past week was a unique variation on this practice, with the class feedback threads going live a few hours after I'd sent Shifting Perspectives: Rolling a new bear or restoration druid in Cataclysm to the editors. The druid class threads (on both the US and EU forums) had already started filling up by the time I reached a computer. Ack.

Make no mistake: These threads mean that the developers are starting to kick ideas around for class changes in the next expansion, so they'll be interested in any common concerns that result. Let's see if I can summarize what players believe really matters to the bear and tree specs.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, there can never be enough druids in the world.

Our editors have asked us to write a column or two about leveling new characters in Cataclysm, as we've been getting lots of requests and, uh, we haven't updated our leveling guides in a while. I was horrified to learn that my own were written two years ago.

So, without further ado, here's my comprehensive guide to druid leveling in Cataclysm:

1. Go anywhere.
2. Do anything.
3. Ding!
4. Go anywhere.
5. Do anything.
6. Ding!

I suspect this is not going to pass the laugh test with our editors, so let's see if I can rustle up some slightly more useful advice past the cut.

Update: A few hours after this column was submitted on Monday morning, Blizzard went live with its class feedback series on the forums, seeking input from players on potential changes to their classes. The last time they did this was around the time they were tossing around ideas on class updates that later appeared in the Cataclysm beta, so this is your chance to weigh your experiences in this expansion and write suggestions. The druid threads are here (US version) and here (EU version), and we'll talk about this next week.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, hunter polearms are tossed into the trash bin and are then very quickly retrieved.

As many of you know, transmogrification -- from the ancient Greek trans, meaning "To make one's gear look better," and mogrification, meaning "Than it actually is" -- is coming to the game in patch 4.3. As such, we are joined again by Letitia, the official fashion consultant and Snark Passenger to the Shifting Perspectives column. Some of you may already know her from Shifting Perspectives: Fun with race choice, in which we pronounced one particular human model a perfect in-game example of Stalinist realism, and Shifting Perspectives: The druid of 2010, in which Allison was scraped off a bus station bathroom floor in order to write the article.

In the interests of not seeing a flood of druids run around in uncoordinated ensembles, we have assembled a set of suggestions you may wish to review. They were compiled and ranked according to the scientific rationale of not wanting to flinch whenever I shifted out of form. Our priorities are the helm, shoulder, cloak, and chest slots -- the ones that really define an outfit -- and I'll revisit the series on some future date, or whenever I can get Letitia away from her chosen career of throwing garbage at Los Angeles stylists.

Oh, and as an important aside -- Anne's World of Wardrobe series has a lot of good tips for anyone looking to put together a complete tier set. Reddit's WoW Transmogrification subreddit also has a lot of good tips, as do Wowhead's blogs on unique items and NPC sets to copy. The Visual Roleplay Gear List is also an incredibly addictive site, though not all of the sets it features will be possible to use for "mogging."

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, we finish gearing up in Firelands.

Greetings, my fellow trees. This week we're going to finish off our series on gearing a restoration druid in patch 4.2. Part one included headpieces, neckpieces, shoulders, cloaks, chestpieces, bracers, gloves, belts, legs and boots. Today we'll address rings, trinkets, weapons, off-hands, and relics. Yes, the tank threat changes from this past week merit commentary as well, but before we do that, run -- don't walk -- to your nearest tier 6 raid in search of Thunderheart.

Aaaaaand ... transmogrify!

With God as my witness, I will never wear a hunter polearm (or at least give the appearance of doing so) again!

As before, if your druid is brand new to level 85 or still leveling, you'll probably find the older series of guides a bit more immediately useful:

• Helm, neck, shoulders, and cloak
• Chest, bracers, gloves, belt, legs, boots, and rings
• Trinkets, weapons, offhands, and relics

Read: Gearing a restoration druid in patch 4.2, part 1

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, we turn our attention to intellect leather.

As a quick note, I'm going to revisit our bear gearing guide over the next few weeks in order to add PVP gear and to split normal/heroic versions as per the request of our commenters; I agree that the present version probably isn't as convenient as intended. I'll drop another note in the column once I've finished with that.

There's lots of new gear for restoration druids to look for in patch 4.2, so -- as with the bears -- it's high time to update our gear lists. Once again, I've split the guide, and the ring, weapon, offhand, relic, and trinket column will run next week, as they require more discussion.

As this guide addresses gear that's been added to the game from the Zandalari heroic level through Firelands, it's probably most helpful to people who are already sitting on a few epics (or at least heroic blues). If you're a fresh level 85 restoration druid or still leveling, you'll probably find our previous series on gearing a resto druid more immediately helpful, but please keep in mind that stat priorities have shifted more toward mastery these days:

• Helm, neck, shoulders, and cloak
• Chest, bracers, gloves, belt, legs, boots, and rings
• Trinkets, weapons, offhands, and relics

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This week, we turn our attention the most recent developer Q&A ... and we all know what happened the last time we did that.

I spent the weekend being a trifle distracted (and then heartbroken) by the Women's World Cup, but at least we can feel good about the winner. Oh, and for all those of you who utilize musk deer glands in your health regimen, please remember to check them for steroids, in much the same fashion that one would check flour for boll weevils and rice grains for moths in one's pantry. This has been a public service announcement by your friendly local World of Warcraft blog, which takes an interest in this matter because a commenter once accused it of fomenting unrest in North Korea.

What the hell is this column supposed to be about? Oh, right. Anyway, the final developer Q&A was published this past Friday, and within it were a few nuggets of interest to restoration druids. We didn't get any questions that specifically dealt with our spec, so I am not required to Hulk out over the lack of answers that Blizzard has traditionally provided to such questions, so let's spend today being happy and relatively sane.