Posts with tag restoration-druid-trinkets

• Paladin: 66%
• Warrior: 23%
• Druid: 11%

Before we get into this week's edition of our series on gearing a resto druid at 85, I wanted to drop a note here concerning an upcoming article on the plight of low-level bear tanks. Right now, the annoyance value of tanking on a new bear is pretty high; you don't get Swipe until level 36; the arrangement of talents in the feral tree means your mitigation is behind that of paladins and warriors for a while; and everything in your arsenal with the exception of Demoralizing Roar is a cooldown until you get Lacerate at level 66 (!). I'm curious if this is having an impact on druid tank representation among the new flood of people instancing in low-level content, and I have started keeping track of the tanks I'm getting through the dungeon finder.

So far, this is the class representation I've seen among tanks from levels 15 through 31. Because leveling in this range is fairly quick, the sample size isn't large. I don't know whether it's representative of what I'll see on the way to 85 (and obviously I won't encounter any death knights until level 58 at the earliest), but time will tell:

• Paladin: 55%
• Warrior: 30%
• Druid: 15%

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.