Roundup

As many of the druids have recently seen, there are a lot of interesting changes coming in the next patch for restoration druids.

• New relics are added to support all talent trees in patch 2.3 for Shaman, Paladins and Druids. Most of the arena-system existing Relics have been renamed to create a more consistent naming convention


• +Healing bonus will give 33% of spell damage as well (1500 Healing bonus will give you 500 Spell damage)


• Many new macro inputs as well as druid 'cancelform' becoming an instant like 'dismount'


• Cure Poison and Abolish Poison may now be cast in Tree of Life form


• Remove Curse may now be cast in Moonkin form


• Rebirth cooldown reduced to 20 minutes


• Intensity increased to 10/20/30% mana regeneration.

A few blogs have focused on mana regeneration or the reduction for the cooldown of rebirth.

But I'm quite excited about:

Many new macro inputs as well as druid 'cancelform' becoming an instant like 'dismount'

Let me give you an example; the other night I was in Karazhan with two other healers, second healer was great as always, but we took a second healing druid with us who was abysmal, didn't pull their weight partially because of skill and partially because of wearing some dodgy gear choices despite walking around with t4 legs, t4 hands and t5 shoulder (-_-) tokens in his bags because he wants to save them for when he goes Moonkin.

I have never used my emergency macro so much in all my times of raiding, which consists of NS + Regrowth.

So I'm very much hoping after the patch my emergency macro will be able to change to:

Drop out of tree form and cast OMGBIGMASSIVEUBER healing touch on my emergency target.

In a true emergency where lets say one of the healers aren't doing their job, Regrowth + Swiftmend only goes so far to help cover the health deficit, before another healer can help chip in the heals.

Roll on 2.3!

Improved Tranquility

Whilst reading the forums lately, I've seen a general attitude of negativity and disdain to this talent. As druids have no aggro dump (trinkets excepted), I feel this talent is essential for 5 mans and heroic instances; even in raiding its saved many a tricky situation (for example the pyroblast at Aran in Karazhan) and I feel its more than worth the two points used to get the talent.

Firstly lets talk about threat mechanics for the druid class. Healing causes 0.5 threat for each point healed to EACH mob engaged whilst the druid is in combat. With the Subtlety talent (-20% threat on all spells) this is reduced to 0.4 threat per health point healed.



Taking a working example from a recent Karazhan log, we can see that my tranquility ticks for 2026, and theres 4 ticks for the duration of the spell. This means potentially 2026 * 4(ticks to get the full duration) * 5 (party members) = 40,520 health restored, having a situation where all party members actually require full healing is unlikely. Its more likely that only half of the party is being beat upon, so changing the party members to 2, gives us a total of 16k health healed, 16,000 * 0.4 (threat modifier) giving a total of 6400 threat divided amongst all NPCs that are aware of the character.

Obviously if you have three or less mobs aware of you, then having a 2000 threat hardstart on the tank could be a death sentence if you are in a heroic for example. Even taking the Timelapse Shard as an reasonably obtainable epic threat reducing trinket, it only permanently reduces agro by -901 threat every two minutes. As you can see this doesn't entirely cover the approximate 2100 threat generated by tranquility. Improved Tranquility however negates this situation, and as panic buttons for druids go, this is as good as it gets.

Personally as mentioned above I've found that Improved Tranquility has been very useful in many situations including raiding. Its saved a few wipes, by bringing the group back from the point of death to a more mangeable situation.

Whilst I can see where the druids who think its the tanks job to manage all threat issues are coming from (even if it is generated by copious amounts of healing), at the end of the day this game is about cooperation and if you can work with your tank to make a situation more manageable then you should do so.

Improved Tranquility is worth taking a second look at.

NB. Many thanks go out to Karthis for the correction on healing threat.

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.