Lunchtime musings – Lv90 Talents Six of One, Half Dozen of the Other?

With the release of the updated tier 6 talents for druids there has been some discussion over the dedicated role benefit from each talent. As it stands now, ignoring secondary benefit, the following:

Heart of the Wild: 6% intellect bonus passive. Scales with gear

Nature’s Vigil: 30% healing boost, 30s duration 3 min cooldown. Scales with gear

Assuming you use Nature’s Vigil in a smart manner it could average out to the theoretical 5% healing bonus. At first glance you might think “Welp…6% is greater than 5% so that’s a no brainer!” Now you might be someone who prefers passive always on bonuses versus on demand cooldowns and I’m generally one of those people. I’d rather be pretty good all the time as opposed to awesome some of the time. This is personal preference though. What we need to keep in mind is that the Nature’s Vigil is an increase to all healing done. This includes the base healing component of the spell. For any math I may do in the coming month I am going to leave out any static bonuses that our class specialization applies to healing numbers as that would be constant regardless of the talent choice.

Now I expect in MoP our intellect levels will rise to ludicrous levels and they will dwarf the base healing components of our spells but they are certainly still there. Right now we know that a 30% increase to the healing benefit of our intellect equates to a ‘theoretical’ average of 5% overall (less than HotW) but we also get a 30% boost to base healing. As long as a 30% boost to base healing is equal to the effective healing gained from a 6% increase in intellect (or more) then NV will produce more throughput.

I’ve tried to come up with some good examples but I’m missing too many variables to produce numbers that make sense. What I can say is that going strictly on primarily abilities alone NV can theoretically produce a greater throughput bonus than HotW at least initially. Since NV scales less with gear there is always the chance that HotW can produce more eventually. We all know with healing cooldowns though that you don’t always get perfect uptime so it is incredibly difficult to really nail it down.

Heart of the Wild continues to be problematic as its secondary ability (or primary depending on whether or not you ask blizzard) isn’t that useful for restoration druids. Getting some neat offspec tools is nice in theory, but as every druid blogger has griped about taking the time NOT healing is the biggest problem regardless of what we may or may not be able to offer. Nature’s Vigil has the benefit of dishing out free damage that is more than likely less than what we’d be doing if we popped Heart of the Wild and went straight nuke. The fact that it does this damage while we continue to heal at the cost of no GCD’s from spells or shifting is priceless in my opinion. What it will come down to is fight mechanics. If the fight has a glaringly OBVIOUS burn phase with little to no damage that needs help from healers then sure Heart of the Wild will be the best choice there. If the fight is designed in any other way with standard healing hurdles then Nature’s Vigil is a good choice. If you’re the kind of person that HATES hitting cooldowns or forgets to use them then you could just take Heart of the Wild as the simpler option.

Moonkin will more than likely face the same dilemma as restoration druids but since they really won’t factor in the healing from NV at all, I’d expect that someone will calculate a threshold at which HotW’s static bonus does or does not overtake it. After that it is simply a matter of whether or not the fight has a dedicated burn phase.

So yeah that’s my lunchtime musings on the newer level 90 talents. Hope your day is going well I need to get back to work!

Healing Primer – Heroic Spine of Deathwing; Madness of Deathwing (25 man)

Healing Primer – Heroic Spine of Deathwing; Madness of Deathwing (25 man)

It’s been a while since I’ve posted on here and a lot of that has to do with end of expansion burnout and real life responsibilities creeping up. I’m not an alt-a-holic by any means so as things wind down at the tail end of the expansion as the nerfs render difficult content trivial I tend to lose a significant amount of interest in World of Warcraft. It picks up again with the next expansion but it does sap my motivation to post. I haven’t even had time to play the Beta but that is mostly due to me playing other games!

That being said I wanted to talk about the last two heroic encounters and discuss healing them. Before I begin though I want to mention that I am not discussing a lot of the non-healing strategy specifics here because honestly it never really registered what is being done. I tended to put my nose to the grindstone and focus on healing as these are probably the two most mana intensive and healing intensive fights in the zone.

 

Heroic Spine of Deathwing

Group make-up: 2 full tanks, 1 CatBear, 6 healers, 16 full time DPS

Healer breakdown: 1 druid, 1 priest, 2 shaman, 2 paladin; we have the option of adding either a shaman, paladin, or holy priest as needed

This fight has no distinct phases in the sense many other encounters do. The fight escalates in difficulty as time passes and certain moments are significantly more stressful than others. The way I generally break it down in my head is as follows:

-Amalgamation DPS and blood gathering ‘phase’

-Amalgamation Nuclear raid damage ‘phase

-Tendon Burn

-Amalgamation DPS and blood gathering ‘phase’

-Amalgamation Nuclear raid damage ‘phase’

-Tendon Burn

-Kill Corruption, Barrel Roll, and Clear Debuffs

This repeats two additional times for each plate. As the fight moves on the raid gains stacks of Degradation that reduces your maximum HP by 5% for each Amalgamation death. This will stack up to a minimum of 30% over the course of the fight. Given the chance for Searing Plasma and Fiery Grip combinations as well as people inadvertently taking Blood hits you have the potential for unpleasant deaths if you are not careful.

There is also another mechanic to be aware of and that is Blood Corruption: Death. I have personally never handled the dispels for this however I do understand how it functions. This debuff is a raid wiper if not managed, and must be dispelled until it morphs into Blood corruption: Earth. At that point you have a limited number of dispels to control who this comes to rest on and morphs again into Blood of Neltharion a massively beneficial damage reduction buff. Having this on your tanks is a high priority and monitoring these debuffs is a fairly intensive job. Because of that one of your healers is going to be paying a lot of attention to it and will not necessarily be healing at full capacity. Discipline priests work great for this because they can’t reliably contribute to Searing Plasma but their abilities and cooldowns are still very much desired.

 

Healing Strategy

This fight is basically whack-a-mole for you as a restoration druid. There are no significant positioning requirements except for the barrel rolls and you pretty much free to focus entirely on your healing. Because of this you should be able to maximize your throughput, perfectly time your innervates concentration potion and tree of life and, should you use it, your Jaw of Defeat activations.

Working with your teammates cooldowns – we often find ourselves running with two shamans and two paladins for the great raid wide cooldowns as well as the mana regeneration from mana tide. Each barrel roll is given an aura mastery and spirit link totem. Each nuclear blast is given an aura mastery as well. The second spirit link is used for one nuclear blast and power word barrier the other. This does not include the prot. Paladin cooldown or warrior shouts which are used in a rotation as well. I tend to use my tranquility during the barrel roll as it harmonizes perfectly with spirit link distributing your healing and helping to break or put dents in most of the Searing Plasma debuffs.

Spec – Right now I’m still running the 8/2/31 spec with points in Furor for maximum mana though I could probably switch over to 10/0/31 at my gear level. I do raid healing predominantly as the paladins have the tanks covered for the most part.

Managing mana – I will often use my Jaws of Defeat for this encounter though it isn’t normally one of my main trinkets. I enjoy any added effective mana regen I can get that doesn’t come at any drawback. Maximizing the benefit of Jaws of Defeat as well as your T13 set bonus when innervate is cast (with power torrent up for even more benefit) can also make a world of difference. These aren’t things I can necessarily prescribe exact times for as you need to make a judgment call on when to activate them. It will also depend on your raid composition and what portions of the fight are more strenuous for you. During each plate you can expect the nuclear blast portion followed by debuff clearing during the burn to require a significant amount of casting as well as going into and out of the barrel rolls. During the last plate it is going to be fairly intense at any point so it is all fair game. I tend to hold off on my concentration potion until just after the first tendon burn on the second plate (or later) if I can as I can sustain a pretty substantial portion of my mana until later that plate going into the third one.

So what do I do exactly?

This fight is very spammy. I find that my healing rotation for this fight is actually based on a priority system. This isn’t the perfect order but I generally try to following this logic string:

1.) If lifebloom isn’t maxed out on a tank max it out

2.) If swiftmend is off cooldown use it, check for a feral druid or resto shaman candidate first

3.) Prime a heal on anyone that has Searing Plasma as well as Fiery Grip (non-tendon burn grips should be quick)

4.) Cast rejuvenation (or free regrowth) on anyone that has Searing Plasma

5.) Address anyone injured that does not have searing plasma, this jumps up the list if they’re severely hurt

CD 1) Tree of Life leading into one of the two nuclear phases per plate to mitigate damage and clear debuffs

CD 2) Tranquility during barrel rolls alongside SLT

CD 3) Use barkskin liberally, best used during Nuclear Blast or Fiery Grip if you have Searing Plasm

I find that this fight is largely dependent on how everyone else plays. Since other players can greatly minimize the amount of damage the raid takes you will find that your job and all healer’s jobs for that matter, will get a lot easier as the raid becomes more familiar with the encounter. Some examples of this are: killing bloods properly, people not taking too much damage from the bloods, better blood kiting during third plate, timing grips so that you don’t have full duration grip during a burn phase, and DPS precasting and breaking grips almost immediately. If these types of things are handled then you are free to do your work and maintain a fairly constantly stream of rejuvenation spam. If things get hairy and you are forced to use more direct heals without clearcasting then you will have mana problems.

When first learning this encounter, and on your first kill, you will probably be reaching OOM just before or just as the fight draws to a close. It takes some experience balancing your mana expenditure to achieve this. I have to credit Beruthiel over at Falling Leaves and Wings who gave me some points as we were about a week or two behind her guild working on this encounter. All it really took me was swapping to Jaws of Defeat (I know I wasn’t using it! Crazy) and better cooldown management and I was good to go. This is a fight where healing meters are fairly useful though normally I dismiss them entirely. Throughput is a significant part of the healer game plan here and you do need to make sure everyone is pulling their weight especially with all the Searing Plasma going on.

 

Heroic Madness of Deathwing (25m)

Here’s a video I made about a month ago of our first heroic madness kill. This is a good lesson in what NOT to do for mana management. While I played well enough and was top in healing my lifebloom uptime was down to 86% which is a significant loss of mana. I very much felt that at the end of the fight when things were getting extremely hairy. Since this kill I’ve learned to manage and throttle my mana usage to allow for liberal casting  through the entire head phase at the end.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCoAJb20b_A

Group Make-up: 2 tanks (paladin, warrior, or druid), 6 healers (no specific classes except usually two shamans), 17 DPS

Phase 1 (Platforms)

Strategy: Our platform order is Ysera, Alextrasza, Nozdormu, and then Kalecgos. We get two rounds of blistering tentacles that we must kill as a raid and one elementium meteor that is un-slowed. From what I know this is considered the conventional approach to the encounter.

On each platform you will face the same obstacles that you do on normal, with one exception, prior to returning to the limb tentacle though they do more damage. Strong tank or healer cooldowns are required to handle the Corruption’s impale burst damage at the end of its countdown and a raid wide cooldown (or two) is advisable for the last platform when the elementium meteor lands. For two platforms the raid is responsible for killing the blistering tentacles in much the same fashion as on normal though a smaller raid cooldown like Aura Mastery can help to soften the damage if they stay up for a little longer than desired.

The one dangerous ability that is added to the encounter is the Corrupting Parasite. Twice per platform a raid member will be infected and have a short period of time to run to the time bubble left by Nozdormu. This debuff does increasing damage over time and must be healed through as a failure to do so risks killing additional players and a poor placement of the resulting add. Once the debuff expires, through duration or death, a Corrupting Parasite spawns and begins casting. If it is allowed to finish its cast then it deals damage to the raid relative to the amount of hit points that it has remaining. The time bubble helps to slow this cast to allow the raid to kill it outright prior to finishing its cast or make it so that it has so little HP left that it is negligible. The damage from the parasite will more often than not be a non-issue until the fourth platform when the raid is missing most of the aspect buffs. It is ideal to have a raid wide cooldown available for each explosion if possible but they are primarily required for the fourth platform when it will hit the hardest relative to everyone’s life total.

There are three impale hits per platform if I recall correctly with the tank’s major cooldowns covering the first for each of them and one external major cooldown covering the third. Warrior cries are also great to use if you have enough of them in the raid to cover all three impales. We tend to run three to four in our raid so there was never any issue in doing this.

Ultimately it boils down to the following:

Platform 1 – DPS Corruption tentacle and heal through smashes and use cooldowns for impale, Drop parasite into time bubble and kill before it pops, Kill elementium meteor before it lands, Drop parasite into time bubble and kill before it pops, Kill Corruption, Kill Regenerative Bloods, DPS body tentacle without dealing with Blistering Tentacles. Use dream as necessary. Ranged DPS start on platform 4 in order to drop it to 91% before jumping to platform 1 to deal with Corrupting Parasite.

Platform 2 – DPS Corruption tentacle and heal through smashes and use cooldowns for impale, Drop parasite into time bubble and kill before it pops if possible, Kill elementium meteor before it lands, Drop parasite into time bubble and kill before it pops if possible, Kill Corruption, Kill Regenerative Bloods, DPS body tentacle without dealing with Blistering Tentacles.

Platform 3 – DPS Corruption tentacle and heal through smashes and use cooldowns for impale, Drop parasite into time bubble and kill before it pops if possible, Kill elementium meteor before it lands, Drop parasite into time bubble and kill before it pops if possible, Kill Corruption, Kill Regenerative Bloods, DPS body tentacle while also killing both sets of Blistering Tentacles. Cooldowns become more important with HP decrease.

Platform 4 – DPS Corruption tentacle and heal through smashes and use cooldowns for impale, DPS parasite as hard as possible and use cooldowns as needed to live through its explosion, Stack up and use a cooldown to minimize Meteor impact then kill elementium meteor, DPS parasite as hard as possible and use cooldowns as needed to live through its explosion, Kill Corruption, Kill Regenerative Bloods, DPS body tentacle while also killing both sets of Blistering Tentacles. Cooldowns become critical on platform 4.

 

Phase 2 (Head)

This phase functions primarily the same except with much more damage going out and the addition of one very dangerous new ability. In normal and heroic Deathwing’s AoE damage pulses do more damage every time he hits a new 5% mark (e.g. 15%, 10%, and 5%). In heroic a swarm of healing bloods will be spawned in a random location on the edge of the platform each time he hits one of those 5% marks. These bloods can be snared but not rooted and make their way to Deathwing. If they reach him they heal him and are capable of bringing him back over the 5% increment you just got him below meaning that you’ll get another wave of healing bloods taking him down past it. For example if you take him to 14%, get a wave of bloods, and they heal him for 2% back up to 16% you’ll get another wave of bloods taking him down past 15% again. In theory if you don’t have enough AoE to handle these bloods you will be stuck in a loop forever and die. Make sure the bloods are slowed 100% of the time via rogue FoK spam, moonkin mushrooms, frost traps, blastwave, or whatever works best for you. If properly slowed you should have sufficient time to AoE them all (or enough of them) in time before they reach Deathwing.

For this phase we damaged Deathwing over the course of the first set of small adds and big adds down to 16%. Once the first set of big adds was dead we lusted and burned him through 15%, killed the healing bloods, and then burned him through the 10% transition as well killing off those bloods. We then cleared out small and big adds and worked through the 5% transition. It’s a bit daunting at first given the timing, damage, and dps needed but you’ll find you’ll make lots of progress with each attempt. Now that the 20% nerf is in effect for those that haven’t killed it yet I’m sure the threshold is a bit lower. The most frustrating part of this phase actually the fact you need to complete phase 1 to get here. That’s really it.

 

Healing:

Over the course of the four platforms this fight is not necessarily healing intensive from a moment to moment perspective (though there will be times people get low and close calls will happen) but it tends to be more of an exercise in mana management. You’ll find yourself having time to line up innervates with power torrents and mana tide/concentration potions will prove critical to keeping you well stocked.

Cooldowns:

Since you are not necessarily part of the cooldown rotation as a druid you can freely time your abilities such that they are available when you need them the most. My method may not necessarily be the best but it tended to serve me well enough. The way I went about it was the following:

Tree of Life on platform 1 purely for mana saving purposes

Tranquility on platform 2 when limb tentacle is low just to raid heal some on a budget

Tree of Life on platform 3 during first blistering tentacles to save mana

Tranquility on platform 4 just before elementium meteor if people are low from a crush, or just afterwards as required

Tree of Life on platform 4 on second blistering tentacles if needed, otherwise save for Phase 2

Tranquility and Tree of Life as needed in Phase 2 as raid damage increases

Corruption tentacle healing is actually fairly straight forward and does not really differ from your normal mode healing except in magnitude. Roll lifebloom on the relevant tank and actively rejuvenation spam on raid members to heal them up from tentacle crush damage. Wild Growth on cooldown and only if the raid isn’t fully topped off from the last crush. Don’t mindlessly spam it as mana can be a concern for your first kills. Swiftmend can almost always be used on cooldown with little to no overheal. This damage does not change in absolute magnitude but once the maximum HP buff is lost you will find it threatens your raid that much more. Exercise some caution in how much mana you spend on your rejuvenation spam, as you learn the encounter you may not be able to be as liberal as you’d like.

The corrupted parasite can be deadly but it’s only partially your responsibility. Swap to the afflicted person as soon as they get the debuff and make sure you have rejuvenation on them and swiftmend at the ready just in case. Provided they live until the Parasite spawns your only real concern in regards to the parasite is prehotting the raid if you think it’ll finish its cast. On platform four it more than likely will finish its casts so a raid cooldown coupled with aggressive hots is required to stabilize the raid. Again this isn’t anything more than you would normally do as part of your rotation, it is more a matter of conserving mana so you have it when you really need it.

The Elementium meteor is a non-issue until the fourth platform. On the first three platforms there is only some minor raid wide damage that goes out once it lands. On the last one however you have the impact to deal with. With something like power word barrier (or PWB and a Spirit link totem up) you can mostly trivialize the impact. The issue for us tended to be an unfortunate corruption crash into a bulk of the ranged just prior to the meteor landing. What I opted to do was pre-hot the raid like mad and pop a harmony infused tranquility a few seconds prior to the impact. This helped stabilize those that were low as tranquility front loads some of its healing tick wise and having the hot’s rolling improved the effectiveness of SLT.

Blistering tentacles aren’t necessarily any more deadly on heroic than normal if you actively mitigate them with some form of raid cooldown or healing throughput cooldown. Things like 4pT13 shaman spiritwalker’s grace or paladin cooldowns are great along with Tree of Life for you. There should never be a shortage of those around and provided DPS is on the mark (unfortunately that’s the gate item) you won’t find the blistering damage to be overwhelming. If they are up too long it will be but that is NOT your fault so don’t beat yourself up.

I can’t stress it enough that this fight is a marathon and not a sprint. Rejuvenation spam is incredibly strong here especially when the large corruption tentacle is keeping people from topped off so utilize your strengths. Mana management is the hardest part of this boss in my opinion as you need to give yourself as much as possible going into phase 2.

 

Phase two starts off a non-issue for healers and then gets progressively worse. Until Deathwing gets lower the only sources of significant damage are Shrapnel hits from the small adds which should be mitigated to less than lethal status via Dream usage and the tanks getting pummeled by the big adds. If DPS is on track, the small adds should only get one set of shrapnel off meaning you will have plenty of time to heal those people up, and the big adds will die before the tanks are unhealable. Yes you may lose tanks to this damage while learning the fight but be aware how much the difficulty of this phase scales with how trained your DPS is to kill tings fast and hold when they need to.

Once Deathwing starts increasing his raid wide damage to a noticeable level (10% marker and 5% marker) then the fight gets exponentially more difficult. Having people drop low from shrapnel or people potentially being low from AoE damage prior to taking a shrapnel hit becomes a much bigger problem. Similarly healers will be split between healing tanks and the raid so there is a greater risk of tank death if a heal is poorly timed. As a druid we shine when it comes to healing the raid wide damage through our standard tool set and maintaining lifebloom on the tanks in preparation for the worsening incoming damage. When first learning this fight the 5% mark was when the poop starting hitting the fan. I found myself popping tranquility, tree of life, and using direct heals much more liberally in order to save people who were dropping very low from the AoE pulses. Having the mana saved up to dig deep here at the end is pretty much your main focus throughout the rest of the encounter. There is no comparison between late phase 2 damage and any other moment in the fight.

I fear that I have not been entirely helpful here because honestly, as a druid, you aren’t really going to do anything different than your standard rotation. The fight’s difficulty scales with the strength of your healing core as a whole (strong dedicated tank healers, good synergized AoE healer group etc.) and not necessarily healer gear level. The fight’s difficulty does scale a lot with DPS gear level and skill level as many of the mechanics in the fight that need to be healed through are directly linked to how long they are alive: Corruption, Corrupted Parasite, Blistering Tentacles, Deathwing’s Limbs, Large adds in phase 2, and how much Deathwing heals with each set of healing adds. Each of those has the potential to suck MUCH more mana out of your healing core than required if allowed to live too long.

Conclusion:

I apologize if these guides aren’t as descriptive as they could be. This is more anecdotal advice as opposed to a solid “this is what you do” guide. I just want you to know how I approached these fights and hopefully that can help you even a little bit!

 

Personal update:

In the meantime I haven’t been playing WoW much at all. I log in for one night of raiding a week and don’t touch it for the rest of the week. This is why I haven’t had the gumption to post much of anything in a while. I assure you that I am not quitting or anything I have just taken this opportunity to try other games and do other things (like buy a house!). My current interests are finishing Kingdoms of Amalur, play lots of Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, try the Secret World beta, refinish my Star Control 2 playthrough, and possible dabble in a few other games in my pile of shame until other games I want to play come out. I will try to do more with the beta now that I am reinvigorated with updated level 90 talents.

Beta: First Impressions! Talents, Glyphs, Abilities, and Symbiosis

Having had a chance to play on the beta some and do a little testing I have some feedback that I’d like to report here. I plan to continue testing and researching and crunching numbers as things change along the way. The things I’m most concerned about are throughput, longevity, raid viability, ease of play, quality of life, and potential side-effects of certain buffs benefits or new abilities granted to us.

TALENTS

First let’s talk talents! Right now every time you swap specs in the beta your talents get reset. This is nice because it gives you an easy way to unlearn them while we are all still getting our feet wet. The only drawback is that if you place them onto your bars and keybind them they will disappear if you swap specs and swap back. Minor nuisance but enough of one that I try to minimize spec swapping for the moment.

Tier 1 – Wild Charge! The standard 15% move speed talent is very nice and may very well prove to be the “stock” option however Wild Charge is incredibly fun to use. There is a reason intervene is used by warriors in raids to move around and Wild Charge is no different. The fifteen second cooldown feels very short as well. I expect that you might find yourself swapping to this ability for some fights given that our mobility outside of tier 1 talents is still very good. One interesting find is that you can Wild Charge to a Mushroom. While this seems silly, and may be a bug, it does allow you to use it in unique scenarios as almost a warlock teleport. Right now the graphic is simply a pair of glowing wings on your back and may or may not be a placeholder.

Tier 2 – Nature’s Swiftness and Cenarion: Word Shield. I’ll be honest I’m not entirely enamored with the druid bubble given its reactive nature and fairly long cooldown. I still feel like the 1 minute Nature’s Swiftness will prove more useful in clutch situations. Depending on how offsensive dispels play out in PvP the HoT from the Cenarion shield may not be worthwhile enough. If this shield grants an absorb component as well then it may end up proving useful. More testing to be performed on this later.

Tier 3 – Faerie Swarm, Mass Entanglement, Typhoon. This tier is pretty much a wash as far as choices go though I tend to stick to typhoon by default. I will say this that the new graphics for Faerie Swarm and typhoon are pretty nice. Typhoon is no longer a phantom blue tsunami but instead it is a violent spew of air that blows out from you complete with leaves and debris. Note the damage component of typhoon is gone.

Tier 4 – Incarnation or Force of Nature. This one isn’t so cut and dry honestly and we won’t know the math behind it until we try it out in a raid environment and see just how smart the treant AI is when it comes to healing. The treants summoned look like the common brown variety with greenish leaves and cast healing touch and wild mushrooms. From what I have seen treant scaling is significantly improved in Mists so hopefully they continue to be worthwhile as our gear improves in order to compete with Incarnation. I don’t have a lot of numbers on these specifically but expect more shortly. Incarnation is as good/useful as you’d expect as it basically is our tree of life currently. Now that I’m getting perma-tree back I’m less attached to this form should there be encounters where Force of Nature provides better throughput. We’ll learn more about this once we have a shot at leveling up and trying new dungeons.

Tier 5 – Ursol’s Vortex. While the other two options are nifty I haven’t really had any opportunity to try them out nor do I think they seem all that useful in general. Mighty Bash, being a stun, may very likely be a spell used in some raid encounters and disorienting roar might come up during an add control phase. Ursol’s Vortex , being the new ability, looks pretty neat when cast. It creates a swirling vortex on the ground in a rather sizeable area (the graphic is a little rough right now and almost looks like a weird photoshop effect on the area it’s in). The ability does not pull anything outside of its area of effect in and only pulls mobs back into its center ONCE as they try to leave. I originally thought it worked differently so I’m a bit less in love with the spell than I was previously.

Tier 6 – While we cannot access tier 6 of the talents at this time I want to mention one change from the online talent calculator to live. Heart of the Wild reads differently for Restoration. It now says that it grants additional intellect on top of everything it gave us previously. This means that, provided the benefit was large enough, It could be a throughput cooldown of some kind which, given its long duration, may be interesting.

GLYPHS

As you might know there are a host of new talents that have been added, many of which are cosmetic updates and a good portion of them are risk//reward modifications to existing spells in our arsenal. Given that we only have 3 major glyph slots and 3 minor glyph slots it does mean that there are going to be some tough choices to make.

Major glyphs worth using:

Lifebloom – Whenever lifebloom is moved from one target to another (outside of Incarnation) it keeps the same number of stacks

Rejuvenation – (Nature’s Bounty) Whenever rejuvenation is on three or more targets you gain 30% casting speed boost on Nourish

Regrowth – Increases Regrowth’s crit chance by 40% (to 100%) and removes the HoT portion of the spell

Healing Touch – Healing Touch reduces the cooldown remaining on Swiftmend by 1 second

Wild Growth – Increases the number of targets by 1 and increases the cooldown by 2 seconds

Rebirth – targets are revived with 100% health

First thing you probably notice is that our Rebirth glyph directly competes with our healing ones which means it will probably fall by the wayside pending encounter limitations. It is difficult for me to say just what glyphs I think are going to be staple for the moment because it depends on the encounter. If there are tank swaps you’ll need the lifebloom glyph for sure. If you’re in a 25 man raid the wild growth glyph will be more important to you. If you tank heal often the Healing Touch glyph seems marginally useful. The only glyph that I think may, at least for lower levels of gear, be required is Regrowth as it allows the spell to pack a wallop and guarantee a Living Seed trigger (see math section below).

Minor glyphs of note:

Treant – perma tree. It’s about as awesome as it sounds though oddly ANY spec of druid can take this and waddle around as a tree

Stag – be a stag, get ridden. I think It is cute but serves no real function

Orca – be an orca. Again it is neat and people will enjoy it but I don’t think that it is for me

Feline Grace – reduced falling damage ability native to cat form in all forms

Mark of the wild – same as before

Master Shapeshifter – reduce shapeshifting costs by 90%

Astral – change Moonkin form into an astral form that can mount though I haven’t tried it

Unburdened Rebirth – same as before

I may be forgetting some other ones

More than likely I’ll be using Treant, Feline Grace, and Unburdened Rebirth/MotW

MATH

I had a chance to test a couple of things out so far on the server but I haven’t been as thorough as I would have liked but the results were fairly interesting. Right now I tested using mark of the wild, a flask of the draconic mind, and an item level of ~406. I believe there may be some healing number inflation, though I cannot identify whether something is a little haywire in the build or if there is a buff/ability I have not accounted for.

Lifebloom was ticking for roughly 3400/3500 non crit and rejuvenation was ticking for 7500 or so (going from memory) which seems a bit on the high side.

Regrowth was critting for 40,000 or so one hundred percent of the time with the glyph which is…impressive to say the least. This would consistently leave a 12K-12.3K living seed on the target. This number is simply too large and clearly is an indicator of some form of artificial inflation due to an outside source.

Healing Touch was hitting for 38,000 or so non-crit and roughly 75,000 or so crit.

I didn’t have time to play around with Effloressence and Swiftmend that much but expect that I will make an update here this weekend when I do.

Wild Mushroom: Bloom! We all know the issues with handling this spell when it comes to the three mini-GCD’s and its placement and there is a warranted concern over how we’re going to weave dropping these into the middle of a hectic boss encounter. I’m not entirely convinced the spell will be everything we want it to be in real encounter practical situations but I can report what I see numbers wise. Bear in mind these numbers may be subject to the same form of healing inflation my other numbers are.

Each Mushroom is healing for approximately 9,400 per person with harmony active upon detonation. There is no player target limit as far as we know or diminishing returns. If all three mushrooms make contact with a player then they will be healed for 28,200 not including critical hits from the mushrooms. If a whole 25 man raid is clustered on the mushroom then you will heal for 28,200 x 25 = 705,000. At level 85 we have ~20% critical strike chance in a raid which would increase the amount to 846,000 healing done. Numerically this looks extremely impressive but before getting too excited we need to consider – a.) there is something funky happening with my heal numbers to inflate the results at this time; b.) Unless everyone is taking damage there will be sizeable overheal; c.) positioning, unless the raid is guaranteed to be in a known location, is a limiting factor in maximizing throughput; and d.) we cannot always guarantee that all three mushrooms can be placed prior to detonation.

SYMBIOSIS

This one is a bit of a doozy. Currently this ability is only being data mined so we don’t know exactly who is getting what for sure, but it looks like we may have another Dark Intent problem on our hands. I want to break down what people are guessing, from the data mining, restoration druids will be getting and what we will be giving to other players.

Gain-

Death knights – speculation: Anti-Magic Shell

Hunter – speculation: Deterrance

Mage – Ice Block

Paladin – Hand of Sacrifice

Priest – Leap of Faith

Rogue – speculation: Cloak of Shadows

Shaman – Spiritwalker’s Grace

Warlock – speculation: Demonic Circle: Teleport

Warrior – speculation: Initimdating Roar

 As you can see some of these are clearly better than others.

Gives of note-

Paladin (Holy) – Rebirth*

Paladin (Ret) – Tiger’s Fury

Paladin (Prot) – Might of Ursoc (unconfirmed)

Priest (Disc) – Tranquility*

Priest (Holy) – Wild Growth*

Hunter – Dash

Warlock – Rejuvenation

Mage – Healing Touch (unconfirmed)

Shaman (DPS) – Solar Beam

Shaman (Resto) – Prowl

Warrior (DPS) – Enrage

Warrior (Tank) – Frenzied Regeneration

Rogue – Survival Instincts (unconfirmed)

The ones I take slight issue with are marked with * above. Rebirth I don’t mind as much because we’re hardly unique snowflakes when it comes to in combat resurrection anyways so the more the merrier. My real complaint is what the priests get. Tranquility and Wild Growth are fairly potent spells and one of them us our major raid cooldown. Handing these off to other classes stings a bit and I’m not too thrilled about it. It will have the exceptionally long cooldown on tranquility but that isn’t really the point. I refuse to let this ability shake out like Dark Intent and I plan on putting it whichever raid member offers me the greatest benefit for that particular encounter. As my ability I think I have the right to make sure it benefits me as much as possible for whatever situation I am in.

KNOWN BETA BUGS AND MISSING FEATURES

The only bug that I have experienced are the following:

Astral balance form, via the glyph does not deactivate by pressing the moonkin icon on the shifting action bar a second time and must be right clicked off

Currently the features that are missing that will be important shortly are: Insect Swarm (not available currently) and any damage boosting balance glyphs. This makes evaluating balance quite a bit harder at this time.

INITIAL THOUGHTS

Hard to say at this time. The healing numbers are astronomically high and might very well be up there for all healers currently. I’m not entirely sure why it is happening but stay tuned and I’ll keep checking throughput numbers. The talents look interesting but somewhat underwhelming. There’s little that is actually new that we will be using often in raids, only situational stuff. The quality of life improvements by way of AoE looting, interface changes, lifebloom glyph, and new minor glyphs are all nice and I’m glad they are working to change these things this late in the game’s lifetime. I look forward to getting more information online this weekend and continue to play my baby Pandaren Monk.

Mid-week Musings – Planning Mists of Pandaria Keybindings

It has been fairly hectic for me these last couple of weeks and while I would have liked to write a Blackhorn or Spine of Deathwing primer I haven’t gotten around to it. I think I will be shortly though depending on availability. There has been a ton of news and at this point it is pretty much old hat to most of you but I will say that I am fairly excited about getting permanent tree form back in the coming expansion. I am one of those people who couldn’t care less about showing off my gear…heck I transmog it anyway so no one can see what I actually have on. This lets me get back to my roots so to speak and I enjoy that.

I was thinking about the coming expansion the other day and how I’m gaining four new button clicks to join my arsenal. While I really wish they’d use my lifebloom tank swapping suggestion there’s no way to know whether a new or unique ability will be created to handle this In the future. What I do know is that I will need to accommodate additional keybinds in my setup. I currently use an older Razer mouse so I do not have additional mouse buttons beyond 4 and 5 so you may have access to a deeper bind arsenal than I.

While away from WoW right this moment here is a rough draft of what my keybind situation is going to look like. I do not use mouse-over macros click to cast binds for heals with my mouse. The only one of those that I do use is Shift + Mouse 1 for cleansing.

I think it can definitely work though it will take a shift in my muscle memory as these will be new buttons for mushroom drop and detonate compared to what I have in my balance spec currently. This is probably the hardest part of updating buttons I have found as of late as everything has to be instinctive. I’m curious if anyone else has thought out their keybinds or planned for their Mists of Pandaria layout.

Quality of Life: Brainstorming a Fix to Lifebloom

I was sitting around brainstorming last night about things that I would love to see happen as part of my wish-list for restoration druids in Mists of Pandaria. Some things have been addressed, some are clearly outstanding, but one idea got lodged into my head and just wouldn’t leave. I kept trying to hash out how it could be represented, or worded, or set up for our specialization and while I couldn’t get it quite right I think I have a workable idea. This infectious idea has to do with tank swapping. This is arguably one of our greatest quality of life issues in current raiding content. It doesn’t affect our utility and throughput outright, but having to spend countless GCD’s stacking lifebloom back and forth on tanks is laborious and inefficient.

This is nothing new really.

Right now we have two versions of lifebloom that we cast. The first is our normal version which I will refer to as the primary cast or target. Tree of Life (Incarnation) lifeblooms, or Lifebloom! In the same manner as Pyroblast!, are additional or supplemental and may have to be exempt from the ability that I’m brainstorming. If it could be coded as I’d like it though, they might not need to be exempt just clearly identified as different.

Here is what I’d like to see (the wording will be fairly crude, I’m no tooltip maker):

Specialization: Restoration only

Name: Flourish

Type: Passive

Whenever your primary lifebloom ends prematurely the target gains stacks of Flourish based on how many applications of lifebloom were present to a maximum of two. If lifebloom is ever cast on a player with the Flourish buff, the number of lifebloom stacks applied increase for each Flourish buff present. Flourish lasts for 45 seconds*. Only one** stack of Flourish may be active at any time.

*the duration of the buff is entirely debatable at this time, this is a placeholder

**might want that to be two stacks at any time to allow for three tank fights should they ever come back in 25 man, or for larger PvP activities

I liked this idea because it has a couple of really awesome advantages and play skill involved. The player must be watchful of his tank lifebloom and take care not to let it drop off by way of the bloom because there is no compensation for that. The tank swap ability would only apply if the lifebloom is forcefully removed. This is something we should be doing anyway (though sometimes you want the bloom) and should not really pose a problem to those who are diligent when rolling their blooms. Besides the obvious tank swap issue, this has great PvP usefulness. It gives us dispel protection by allowing lifebloom to reapply on dispel targets immediately. It also lets you aggressively swap lifebloom between two players in PvP as required.

I know it isn’t the same as a new ability that dropped three lifeblooms on a target with a cooldown that some people have been suggesting but I thought this might be a pleasant and elegant solution. It would also save me one keybind. I know that shouldn’t be an issue but given that I will be adding four or more combat abilities to my bar for MoP (mushrooms, mushroom: detonate, ironbark, assorted utility talents) I’d rather streamline the number of active keybinds used.

What are your thoughts on this idea and would it even be feasible?

Dovahkiin, Naal ok zin los vahriin – End of a great journey

My Dovakiim is a powerful Breton woman thrust into the heart of a frozen lands struggle with little she could do about it. She was never intimidated, she was never worried, only determined to live out her destiny as her blood right foretold. She did not let being a woman in a world of fierce Nord men get in her way and she befriended many strong women as allies along her adventure.

In Skyrim, a land of blinding snow, lush green fields, and perilous mountain ranges life is difficult. Bandits and thieves pray on the weak and a civil war rages. In the midst of all of this, dragons terrorize the land leaving its citizens quaking in fear. It is because of this my character was forced to take a stand, make the warring parties form a truce, and banish the evil from the world.

Skyrim is a game where everyone’s story is going to be a little different. It is these differences that makes the game so personal and dear to the player. I know some people have given Skyrim a hard time because it isn’t so obviously narrative driven like Mass Effect, or Final Fantasy etc. While I enjoy games with a heavy story, there is an appeal to a game like Skyrim. A living breathing world with endless things to do and see where you can get lost inside its wonder. I don’t love open world games in the GTA sense, but I make exceptions for Elder Scrolls Games.

I did not spend as much time with the game as others may have. I think in total I racked up roughly 150 to 160 hours of game time. I became a Thane in every major city, became the leader of all the major guilds, developed my Thu’um power to its fullest potential, and mastered many different forms of combat. Despite all of this I know there are things STILL left undone and I may still go back and finish them.

I cannot recommend this game enough to those who love a deep role playing experience especially if you have access to a decent PC. I have been lucky and experienced zero game breaking bugs or glitches of any kind and even if I had, the PC version has access to the console which can fix just about any of them.

And with that, a parting shot of the great warrior Arboria, Dovakiim, slayer of the great evil, and savior to the people of Skyrim.

There are many Dragonborn, but this one is mine. Adorned in heavy dragonbone armor she shows courage in the face of imminent danger. Unafraid she wades into the heart of combat and slices through foes with her deadly Legendary Daedric Longsword. No foe has bested her in battle to date and likely never will.

Combat development for those who asked:

Perk build:  http://skyrimcalculator.com/#94814

I initially thought you stopped getting perks at level 50 but you definitely do not. It let me expand my development and really enjoy my combat. If you are going with melee, the time dilation effect under the Blocking perk tree is a lot of fun and adds a lot of depth to battle.

In order to utilize two fighting styles I crafted two sets of dragonbone armor. One of which was blocking, health, and one-handed damage based along with magic resistance; the other was sneak, bows, and magical resistance. I found renaming each set greatly sped up my gear swapping: Bahamut’s Wargear (one-handed) and Tiamat’s Regalia (archery).

If you are pursuing blacksmithing you can create some amazing weapons and armor. Make sure to craft and enchant (if you can) some armor with +Blacksmithing bonuses on it. I believe there are 4 item slots that can have that enhancement placed on them. This coupled with potions that increase blacksmithing by 50% for 30 seconds lets you temper your weapon, bow, and armor into extremely awesome legendary versions. Worth looking into.

Heroic Ultraxion Primer (25m)

I’ve been meaning to post this mini-guide on Ultraxion for a long time given how fairly easy he is (execution wise, I know that DPS check wise he was tougher for some guilds pre-nerf). Now that the 10% nerf is live I really have no excuse for not having something up here. I’ll be posting a Blackhorn primer on the site this weekend if possible. My learning for that fight was during the 5% nerf however everything still applies.

 

Ultraxion Heroic Primer (25 man)

Our relevant class make-up:

Tanks: 2 of any type, we used druid and paladin

Healers: 5, we generally use one druid, two shamans, and either two priests one paladin or two paladins and one priest

DPS: 18, at least 9 players have some ability or cooldown that allows them to survive Hour of Twilight

The trick to this fight is adhering to mechanics and being accountable for your own survival from instant kill mechanics. As a healer you aren’t responsible for fading light or staying out and surviving Hour of Twilight making your job that much more simple. Hour of Twilight casts come at known intervals and have a three second cast time as opposed to the painfully slow normal mode one. If you are concerned about missing it you can always keep Ultraxion as your focus in order to watch his cast bar.

Outside of Hour of Twilight the only other major decision comes in the form of the three buffs available to you from the Dragon Aspects. They are unchanged from normal:

Red: Healing Increased by 100%

Green: Pulses a heal every second divided among raid members based on how much you healed in that time

Blue: Mana costs reduced by 75% and spell haste by 100%

While Green and Blue offer bonuses that are better for some healing classes than others they are not nearly as good as red is for restoration druids. Green just doesn’t put up the numbers you need and it isn’t a smart heal in any fashion. Blue makes a class already very mana efficient unnecessarily more mana efficient and increases spell haste when so many of our spells are instant or are GCD capped (rejuvenation). These facts coupled with the fact that the green and blue buff come so late make them less than ideal.

With the Red buff though you are getting an even bigger benefit than you’d think. Increasing all healing done by 100% is fantastic, but its interaction with Effloressence is even better. Under the benefit of this buff your swiftmend will heal for 200% of its normal value. This amount is then used to set your Effloressence tick amounts which are in turn also multiplied by two. This means Effloressence is healing for 400% of what it usually does AND it is a smart heal. If you have a feral druid available then your Effloressence can, by way of Nurturing Instinct, heal for 480% of its baseline value (a shaman with 15% increased healing nets you 460% of baseline). You will find Effloressence, if used properly, making up a substantial portion of your healing done for this fight.

Strategy:

As the fight is about to begin we had the healers activate Heroic Will roughly two seconds before Ultraxion lands and becomes attack-able. When he is, or just before, TimeLust is activated such that all DPS players get it but healers do not. This is NOT a requirement however and you could probably activate it at any time that works best for you if need be. We prefer doing it at the start in order for all player DPS cooldowns, trinket ICD’s, and pre-pots to line up perfectly. You also have the most time with everyone guaranteed to be alive and in the “normal realm” less.  TimeLust is activated again at the end of the fight to give healers the additional haste required to keep up with the heavy damage during Nozdormu’s Timeloop.  Any players that may have died during the fight will be able to benefit from this second TimeLust.

I tend to hold off on spending too much mana until the Red buff goes out. I will roll lifebloom, as painful as it is on a fight with fairly constantly tank swaps, and WG/Swiftmend on cooldown along with a modest smattering of Rejuvenation. Once the Red buff goes live however then I will go into my full AoE rotation using Innervate with Tier 13 set bonus, and Tree of Life as needed for longevity. Remember to place your Swiftmend on players with the 15 or 20 percent increased healing taken buff to maximize your throughput. The damage is going to be fairly slow at first and will ramp up to fairly severe around the 5 minute mark or so and continues to become more severe, then unhealable without a major cooldown, and then he berserks and kills everyone should you take too long. Rationing your mana usage is fairly important which means making every swiftmend and wild growth count. Tranquility can be used twice during this fight and one of those times will have to be during the endgame. To make sure it is available I would advise you to not use your first tranquility any later than the two minute mark.

There’s little that can be added beyond these few tips and “PRESS ALL THE BUTTONS” because that’s pretty much how you’re going to feel during the last couple of minutes in the fight. Once the blue buff is out it’ll feel like people are just getting topped off before your HoT’s can do much and then it escalates very quickly into ZOMG everyone is dying. My memories of learning this fight come from before all the nerf’s so it is probably much less painful these days but if you are just learning this fight be prepared to heal everyone and mash your buttons and GCD lock yourself. If you make good spell choices and aggressively and smartly use your healing abilities with short cooldowns you’ll find yourself putting up solid numbers (65K+ is easily attainable).

As stated I’d like to have a Blackhorn primer up this weekend and a Heroic spine primer up sometime in the next couple of weeks. I haven’t written as much other than these guides lately as I’ve been a little busy but I expect that I’ll do some more theory crafting and probably non-WoW related stuff as well in the coming weeks. I will also be at PAX East; if anyone else is going and wants to say hi feel free to let me know!