Void Reaver

Last night something glorious happened, we killed our first boss from The Eye. Void Reaver is no more. ^^!

The fight itself was quite interesting for a tree druid. For those who have not yet experienced the fight, I'll explain why:

Void Reaver is tanked in the middle of the circle by four tanks competing for aggro (VR has an aggro reducing knock back move). All ranged dps and healers where spread out on the outskirts of the circle. We split the healers and dps into groups and assigned them corners of the room.

Void Reaver has a random secondary attack which sends an orb of energy to where you are standing. This orb then does 4675-6325 arcane damage in a 20 yard radius, which also silences the area 6 seconds. This attack doesn't track players, so when the attack happens all players in the vicinity must move 20 yards either to the left or right.

As you can imagine Tree of Life's -20% movement speed is a pain here, so more care is needed to watch Big Wigs/Deadly Boss Mods for an orb centered on you or party members close to you, so you can get out of the way in time.

Several tips I found useful during the fight:

• If you are under 8k health buffed, the Violet Badge trinket from Karazhan is very useful. While the 45 resist wont help a large amount alone, when combined with Gift of the Wild (+25 to all resistances) it becomes a more healthy 70 resist. I found the resulting extra orb attack which is occasionally resisted was a real morale booster.


• Maintaining a three stack lifebloom, with keeping rejuv and regrowth, swiftmending as appropriate on the MT can do wonders for stability in this fight. Especially as you can do the majority of that on the move (<3 instant casts)


• Make use of the default blizzard UI by dragging and dropping the raid members names you're looking after at into the middle of the screen, so its easier to see incoming orbs in case you miss a warning.

More items of note for this fight:

• Many guilds use several shaman to keep care of melee, so they can stay in during the pounding attack. If your guild only has one shaman (or one priest with circle of healing), then he may call out for more innervates to keep his mana going. Normally I disapprove of innervate being given to low spirit classes but this is an exceptional situation.


• As a result Bottled Nethergon Energy is your new best friend, bring a lot if you are just starting out and learning the fight


• Void Reavers Knock Away move can often knock tanks just out of range, this can cause you to lose a 3 stack of lifebloom, sometimes this is unavoidable especially if moving to avoid an orb.


• Finally the main tank tanking Void Reaver will switch in battle because of Void Reavers Knock Away aggro reducing move. Pay attention to the main tank window so you can see clearly which tank Void Reaver is attacking so you can switch the healing accordingly to.

While admitedly a lot of this is common sense :) I hope this helps other druids venturing into Tempest Keep.

Welcome to the Fold

Welcome to "Natural Perfection", a World of Warcraft blog that will focus on the Druid class, most notably the restoration tree. I hope to chart my progress through current PVE raiding and any tips/tricks I stumble upon, as a resource for other like-minded druids.

After being a long time reader of Resto4Life, I decided that it would be fun to join in and helping the druid community grow.

Firstly some background information about me, as I mention in the blog summary, my first level 70 main is a draenei paladin called Paradise. Healing used to be fun, I had two spells to choose from, and "pallyvate" (casting Divine Illumination and then spamming as many Holy Lights as possible on my other half - a protection paladin) worked wonderfully. Then came the paladin nerf, with Illumination being changed from 100% of the mana cost for the spell refunded down to 60% of the mana cost, and Spiritual Attunement being changed so over heals no longer provided mana. It felt very much as if the cost of Holy Light was suddenly too prohibitive and Flash of Light spamming was enforced. After several raids, it was quite clear healing on Paradise was not holding my attention.

So I levelled a level 70 priest Ameratsu, where my paladin had been a long slow arduous haul to level, playing as shadow was a refreshing change. Annoyingly enough, I suddenly had more invites to heal for parties once I hit level 70 than I ever did on my paladin despite being shadow specced.

Alas whilst priest healing is very varied and has many tools at its disposal, (using Prayer of Mending at Terrestian Illhoof makes me giggle like a schoolgirl, watching all five charges disappear faster than a speeding bullet, gleefully gloating about mana efficiency), many of them are situational, and mana efficiency as ever is still the priests main problem. The tools given to a priest to anticipate damage e.g. shields, prayer of mending, renew, clear casting and inner focus use to stay outside of the 5SR, never felt an acceptable way to regenerate mana whilst healing. I found that once again I was very unsatisfied with the direction priest healing took in the Burning Crusade. So Ameratsu is now specced shadow, and is my grinding character.

Which leads me to my current main, Aftereight, and I must say its nice to get back to healing in raids (<3 all the pretty druid spell icons). It felt very odd not staring at health bars ;) So I am now currently gearing up my druid for PVE progress within my guild who has been very patient with me and endured my search for the right character.

I hope you'll enjoy reading this blog, as much as I have enjoyed reading the blogs linked to here.