My own healing output has improved drastically since I joined my guild last July when we were working on Ulduar.  I recently became an officer in my guild and succumbed to temptation, taking a peek at my own application thread from those days to which I now have access.  I found that the other Restoration Druids in the guild were scratching their heads over my performance when I joined the guild.  They knew that I knew my class, but were puzzled by my low healing output and my spell casting decisions.  It seems that I was focusing very narrowly on my healing assignments and relying on a wide variety of spells, rather than filling my rotation with the spells that had the highest throughput and efficacy, Wild Growth and Rejuvenation, and showering the raid with the HOTs.  I remember having a couple of conversations with them at the time and learning from them that what they wanted from me was to diversify my healing in terms of targets, while narrowing my healing in terms of spells used.  Eager to please, I learned this lesson well.

Last night, in a 3.5 hour run in which we cleared 10 bosses, 71% of my healing came from 2 spells, Rejuvenation and Wild Growth (76% if you count the Rejuvs that “jumped” to new targets from my t10 4pc set bonus).  75% of my heals were overhealing.  I don’t think I needed an innervate the entire night.  I have become an expert in the topping off of everything around me that moves.  My other spells have been relegated to “situational,” while these two spells are my bread and butter.  The results in terms of my performance on a numerical graph have been phenomenal.  The results in terms of the joy I take in healing have been pretty flat.

I remember raiding at the end of BC and the constant push to roll Lifeblooms on the tanks.  I remember the trepidation that I felt when I learned that in WOLK the developers were jacking up the mana cost of Lifebloom to the point where it was out of the question that this would be our role in raids going forward.  As the expansion opened, I embraced my full compliment of spells and truly enjoyed spinning out a web of spells to sustain my raid members.  When I learned that some of the strands of the web were much weaker than others, I jettisoned them one at a time.  Lifebloom became an afterthought as the expansion released.  Nourish was out when I left behind the 4 pc bonus from T7 gear.  Regrowth got dusty as my raid leaders stopped assigning me to anything but our strength, raid healing.  My wonderful toolbox got smaller and smaller.

Don’t get me wrong.  I still use all of my spells situationally, and I heal much differently depending on whether I’m in a heroic or a 10 man or a 25 man raid.  But my true passion in the game is healing raids, and it is there where I am the most limited in terms of spells to use to maximize efficacy and throughput.

Am I nervous about the upcoming changes in Cataclysm for Restoration Druids?  Sure.  There is not nearly enough information yet to have any solid idea of how strong or weak we will be as healers.  It is scary to come from a place of dominance and eagerly step into one of uncertainty.  But as a class that is both hugely powerful in some ways and hugely limited in others, I think our class is broken in its own way.  A tree that is too top heavy cannot bend in the wind, lest it become overbalanced and crash down. It is true that the goal of  making all healing specs at least viable in all situations and widening us out of niches will inevitably work better for some classes than for others.  We might end up with the short end of the stick for a while.   But if the developers are, in fact, successful in their bid to make our full toolkit of spells viable, it will be, in my opinion, liberating and exciting.   I don’t want to be a one-trick pony.  I want the fun of thinking on my feet, making quick decisions, having an array of choices for an array of situations.  I want to learn from mistakes how to approach things in a different way.    Of course I hope that the changes don’t weaken me to the point that I’m not a viable choice to bring on a raid.  But I trust that there will be enough testing and observation that if I’m unbalanced, the developers will do their damndest to set me back on my feet.   I believe that is just what they are trying to do now.

I watched the Blizzard Developer chat unfold on Twitter last night and thought there was some pretty good news for us trees coming up in Cataclysm.  Tranquility, for example, will be raid wide, last as long, but gain additional tics from haste.  Hoorah!  The New and Improved Tree of Life On a Cooldown TM (Batteries not included.) will “morph” existing spells making them behave differently, with some possible examples given such as Regrowth being instant cast and Lifebloom applying a 2 stack upon cast.  All of our spells are getting the once over to make sure they have defined niches.  But the one thing that really caught my attention and imagination was this: 

 Tree of Life is getting a whole new model (think Ancients of War)

Now, I’m sure it won’t go down this way, but the first thing I thought of was how HUGE those Ancients are out in Zangarmarsh, and how FUNNY it would be if we got not only something like that shape, but something like that SIZE for shifting into TOL.  Think of the advantages… we wouldn’t have to take any crap for standing in fire because we wouldn’t be able to help it.  We’d get all the best loot because we could threaten to shift into TOL and squash the entire raid if we didn’t get our way.  We’d do MASSIVE boss damage when we shifted and our butt pinned the boss to the far wall like a bug.  Awesome.  Awesome sauce.

Although I love Sylly dearly and raid healing on her is easily my favorite thing to do in WOW, I absolutely have my limits with her.  She’s a skinner and leatherworker, so she’s generally no good for farming gold (the endless slaughter of animals for profit doesn’t much appeal to me).  She’s so crazily over geared for heroic instances that they aren’t much fun at all to run on her.  She’s Resto/Boomkin, so she’s capable of a degree of DPS, but DPSing as Boomkin is not my favorite way to pass the time (wrath wrath ECLIPSE cast starfi… DAMMIT!  had to move!  etc.).  So I’ve been playing some alts for the last few months to keep things lively.  I still have Frivolous, the mage who was 70 when WOLK came out and who I actually leveled to 72 before I started bringing up Sylly to the new level cap.  However, poor Friv is still just level 75 and may rot and die at that level for lack of love, although I depend on her to remain my mining and jewelcrafting slave.  I feel bad for her that I despise playing her so much, and I’m not completely clear on where this distaste came from, but it is what it is.  I got to the point, though, that Ivery much wanted to understand fights from a DPS perspective, but would rather have not played at all than play my mage. To that end I leveled Harmonie, a hunter who I very much enjoy playing, and who is starting to have an ICC gear set of her own at this point.  She’s my flask maker and herbalist, so between these 3 toons I’m quite the industry unto myself.  The gold is piling up, too, because I have far fewer things now I actually need to buy.  So this unit of 3… druid, mage, hunter… along with Mr. Moneybaggins, bank alt extraordinaire, had me quite satisfied for a while.  The mage does nothing but the JC daily, gem cutting, and mining, but I was raiding on both the druid and the hunter when time and opportunity presented itself, and enjoying the more rounded understanding of the game I was beginning to have.

Then I got the idea to roll a tank. 

 If this rounded understanding of game mechanics reallly was the goal, shouldn’t I have a toon for each of the 3 major roles?  I thought so.  Thus, Whimsy the Warrior was born. Whimsy does not have the utility of needed professions that the other toons do.  I decided to make her an engineer because it looked fun, and a miner because she was an engineer.  And I made the decision to level her as prot and really REALLY try to learn to be a good tank with her.  So it has come to pass that, at level 50, Whimsy has done a mere 102 quests, and virtually all of the experience she has gained since level 15 has been from chain tanking random dungeons.  I fully intend to tank her right through to level 80, but I don’t know if it will be in an uninterrupted stretch.  Tanking nonstop randoms is both an incredibly fun thing to do and an unbelievably frustrating thing to do.  I recognize that I have not level capped, nor even begun to think about tanking a raid boss.  Even so, in 35 straight levels of tanking, I certainly have learned a great deal about tanking about which I had heretofore been utterly clueless, or had only vague notions.  I am certain that this knowledge will improve my overall gameplay, regardless of which role I am filling.  Here are some of the things I have learned:

1)  I can actually do this.  I really never suspected that I could tank.  The whole idea seemed bewildering to me, and I sort of expected Whimsy to languish at level 18 or so forever after having tried tanking on her.  Not only have I in the past chosen toons that were not tanks, they were all casters.  My comfort zone has definitely been standing at the back (often in a sissy robe.  <3 Tam!),  casting heals or nukes, or sending in a pet to do the dirty work while I flung deadly missiles from a safe and sterile distance.  To be right up there in the middle of the gnashing and clawing and stabbing was not anything that ever appealed to me in any way, and I was fairly certain I’d be a miserable failure at it if I had the temerity to try.  Happily, I have learned that not only can I do this, I can do it reasonably well.  I remember very few corpse runs since I started tanking, definitely less than five.  A healer has never died on my watch unless I, myself, died first.  And from time to time a DPS or a healer will casually drop the words that make me smile from ear to ear, “nice tanking.”   I understand what I need to do and how to get it done.  I try to minimize headless chicken tanking and maximize purposeful, well positioned tanking.  My rotation is clear to me.  I know what resources I need to be successful.  Overall, I am pleasantly surprised that I can get this job done, and get it done well.

2)  Being a tank can be punishing.  There are very often mouth breathing ohmadauns wandering about the WOW universe.  They do not discriminate as to class or role.  As a healer, it is most stressful when the fools are tanks.  As a tank, it is most stressful when they are DPS (admittedly, it may be only my BOA heirloom gear and the great advantages it provides me in terms of my own stats that is keeping idiot healers from becoming more stressful than idiot DPS.  Pally healers who consecrate before the tank can do damage will be summarily lumped in with idiot DPS.).  But DPS are just so often horrific players that they top my personal list of irritant extraordinaire.  An idiot DPS can be spotted  easily.  They will pull, either with their slackjawed face or their giddily preemptive spells, often while the healer is drinking to restore mana.  They will exhibit complete ignorance of, or ignore completely, their own threat on any given mob.  They will blame the tank, who is working with a handful of abilities on cooldowns for threat generation, when they have pulled threat away and subsequently have begun to be pounded into the ground like a ha’penny nail.  They are fond of exclaiming, usually in capital letters, such witty repartee as :  GO GO GO GO GO!  and ZOMG AOE RAWKS!  and WTF TANK!?!!!1! (this last is usually mumbled as they are lying face down and dead on the floor for having pulled a berzerking big bad ugly whatever down on them like the wrath of doom).  They will gleefully launch an AOE on 15 mobs roughly .032 seconds after the tank has pulled by tauntinig just one of those mobs.  Like a river through a canyon, they wear tanks down.

3) Tanks are moody and crabby for good reason.  See #2.

4)Although healers may get irritated at tanks for chain pulling, there is often good reason they are doing so.  This one does not apply to Paladins or DKs, but it does apply to Bears and Warriors.  When combat has ended, two things happen which, in some ways, are almost in opposition to one another.  Mana classes start to regenerate the resource that thay need to continue on.  Warriors and Bears (and rogues and Cats) begin to LOSE the resource that they need in order to continue.  Rage falls off over time.  So there is this tension I feel when waiting for caster mana to regenerate.  I know that they need it, but it is at the cost of me having what I need.  I do have a cooldown that will allow me to generate rage out of the sky before a pull, but the mechanic is not always available to me.

5)  I now know the geography of the places I’ve been. I don’t know about you, but as a healer when moving through an instance between pulls, I am generally completely oblivious to just where it is I’m going.  I’m sort of like the horse at the end of the line on a trail ride.  I follow the butt in front of me and might try to sneak a bite to eat when no one is looking.  As a tank, I’ve actually had to learn my way around.  This part probably doesn’t seem relevant at all if you are thinking about WOLK instances that, for the most part, are like being on a track in an amusement park ride.  The fun is up ahead and there ain’t nowhere else to go.  But in the Vanilla instances?  Very, very different.  So, although I’ve played through these dungeons before on 4 toons, it is only now that I have a pretty clear idea of the layout of places like Mauradon and Sunken Temple (I’m learning BRD now, God help me!).  Sure… I don’t HAVE to figure out where I’m going and remember it for the next time.  But I find that group confidence in me drops immediately if I admit that I don’t know my way through the dungeon I’ve found myself in.  Taking on the role of tank is, by its nature, taking on the role of leader.  Hi Ho Hi Ho it’s dragonslaying we go!

6) Tanks help healers.  Although I’ve been aware of tank cooldowns and their functions in a vague sort of way in the past, I think that much of what my tanks have done along the way to take care of themselves has escaped my attention.  As a tank, I pay as much attention to my own health as I pay to the tank’s health when I’m healing.  When things get hairy, I do what I can to ease the burden on my healer.  I’m sure that tanks have done this for me endlessly over time and I was almost completely unaware how often they do so.

7)  Tanking is FUN! I’ve spent 2 and a half years playing WOW now, and always, always, ALWAYS it has been alarming in a high degree if I do anything that might come close to aggroing anything at all.  Healing, and DPS to a degree, is a reactive endeavor.  It is just a blast to run headlong into a huge group of slavering beasties like Captain America and spend the next five minutes continually pissing them off so much that they are actually killed off without even noticing.  There’s this feeling that I have never had in another role that the show unfolding is all around me.  I charge in, flex my muscles, make jokes about mob’s mothers, and they eventually fall dead at my feet.  There is a sense of power that goes along with playing a DPS class, where nothing can stop you from ripping through it like butter.  But it’s a different feeling, because in this case, not only am I the hero standing literally toe to toe with the dragon, I am also protecting all of those around me from its ferocity.  It is… so… damn… fun!

Tanking makes me a better DPS, and a better healer.  I know a great deal more about boss mechanics and the tools in their toolboxes than I ever knew before, so I am getting better at thinking like a tank when I’m healing and thinking like a healer when I’m tanking.  And I sure as hell wait longer to launch nukes when I’m on my hunter, use misdirect more often, keep feign death handy, and generally try to be as polite a team mate as I can to help my tank out.

Tanking is a whole new way to play and to see the game.  I am confident that I will get Whimsy to 80 and, later, to 85, and that she will become a well worn old soldier full of tales of gore and glory that would leave Sylly scratching her head.  I’m certainly glad that I had the chutzpah to start this experiment in the first place. I am hoping that my embrace of my inner meat shield won’t leave me an illiterate knuckle dragger, but I suspect that even it it does, it will also leave me happy.

Did anyone else see this post from Ghostcrawler in response to a post saying that, now that Heroism/Bloodlust was going to be given to more than one class, Blizzard should now remove the remaining buffs exclusive to one class?  Hold tight, this is a little painful…

Obviously things like Rebirth can’t just be handed to out to more classes unless we did something like a second exhaustion mechanic for battle rez or whatever. For now we’re going to try the cooldown at 30 min again. In Icecrown’s world of limited attempts, a 30 min cooldown likely meant you just cooled your heels until the cooldown was available again. In Cataclysm the hope is sometimes you’ll have the benefit available but not every time, which scales back on how much of a game-changer it is.

So… it looks to me like they are considering not only keeping battle rez exclusive to Druids in order to limit its use, they are also planning to extend the cooldown not by doubling it, but by tripling it.  This makes me so sad.  I understand why they may not want it to be ubiquitous, but it has been SO nice when learning new boss fights that our druids have had their battle rezzes available for virtually every attempt.  This 30 minute thing?  Well that just sucks. 

Edit:  GC has been posting on the thread more today, adding this:

Also keep in mind that Rebirth is much more useful in today’s game where people tend to die from massive damage. In a world where people sometimes die because the healers have run out of mana, then Rebirth doesn’t buy you quite as much.

In a 25 player raid, you’re most likely going to have a druid of some kind. The challenge is the 10 player raid. We don’t want a druid to be required (just like we don’t want a shaman to be required). You can argue that using Rebirth to recover from a death is just inherently harder in 10s since the opportunity cost is larger when 10% of your group is down, and yet another player is going to have to donate some time to bring that person back up. Beneficial, definitely. Mandatory? Maybe not.

Sylly prepares to play a tree at the masquerade ball

 Hey, hey, everyone!  It’s been ages and ages since I’ve posted here.  I enjoyed the break for the most part, and was considering letting my account with the hosting company lapse and letting Rolling Hots roll right off into the sunset.  But there were many, many topics over these months that I considered posting about while I was away, and several that I sort of framed out in my head, as in, “this is how I *would* post about this if… you know… I were blogging.”  Then I got an email that told me my bank account was charged via the convenience of automatic renewal with the web hosting service I use and, without necessarily meaning or deciding to, I had purchased my blog for another year.  So I’ve had that rolling around in my head for a couple weeks.  And then the Cataclysm class previews started rolling out and I, like so many others, sat on the edge of my seat waiting for the druid preview to come out.  I was also asking myself in the back of my mind if I would be motivated to write about the changes.

I read all of the unfolding class previews with a great deal of interest and enjoyment.  Not only are some of the new abilities for other classes going to be fun for them, they are going to make playing alongside of them more fun and interesting.  Healing rain?  Camouflage?  Dark Intent?  Bring it, Baby, bring it!  So when the time came around for the druid preview, I was practically salivating with excitement.   Our preview was finally posted, I tore through the content of it, and, admittedly, my first reaction was a sinking heart.  No new toys to play with, a new talent that wasn’t explicated enough for us to do anything but guess how it worked, a mastery bonus that seemed questionable, and no healing in tree form.  I felt like someone stole my Easter Basket. 

As I am wont to do, I started reading voraciously around the internet on the topic.  I read expansively on the official forums, looking at the reactions of other players.  I read each of Ghostcrawlers responses on the topic.  I read all the Resto druid blogs I could get my hands on to see what bloggers were saying.  Although much of what I read out there completely backed up my own initial response, I have to admit, timidly, that my opinion began to change.  And while I saw some posters on forums feeling the way that I was starting to feel, I do not believe that I ran across a single blog post from a Resto Druid who wasn’t either lamenting or lambasting the decision to move tree form to a cooldown. 

 It was this silence in the blogosphere that finally led me back here to my own blog, which, by the way, was a mess.  I had dozens of comments that had never been approved, tons of spam comments that needed deleting.  My Word Press had not been updated to the newest version, nor had 14 of my plugins.  I had to reset passwords and update my Hostmonster account.  I then had to download and install WOW Model Viewer in order to monkey around in photoshop and create an image for the post.  In short, I decided to write a post and it took me just under 24 hours of work before I could write the first word.  Please remind me not to stay away so long. 

Want to know how I feel about the changes?  Pretty good, overall. 

Now wait.  Before you start lobbing rotten tomatoes at me, hear me out.  Am I bummed that I won’t get to heal in tree form all the time?  Well, sure I am.  I love being a tree.  I identify with being a tree.  I love that “mmmBLUARF! sound I make when I shapeshift into tree form, dancing as a tree, running as a tree, the casting animations of tree… all of it.  I like that being a tree makes me a special and unique snowflake in the world of WOW healers.  But, here’s the thing.  More than I like that, I like playing a healing class that has a very well defined role and the tools that it needs to do it well.  If tree form were essential to that, I’d jump on my sword for it.  But, as Ghostcrawler has pointed out, it is not. 

Although I started playing Warcraft during the Burning Crusade expansion and distinctly remember dinging 50 and dancing around happily in my newly acquired tree form on the floor where all the Dragonkin pulls are in Sunken Temple, I know now that tree form was not original to the game, but was  added in BC.  So there is that. 

But I also remember that tree form in BC was pretty damn gimped.  It had a snare effect that slowed down your movement speed, and, although it was a healing form that buffed some healing spells, it completely prohibited you from casting others.  In fact, you couldn’t automatically shift out of tree form to cast, say, Moonfire, or even Healing Touch!  You had to click on caster form, then cast, then click back on tree form.  There was a tradeoff for tree form.  There were compromises.  And Resto druids did not always use it.  It was a choice.

When WOLK came out, many of these restrictions were lifted.  We were able to cast our full healing arsenal in this form, making all of our spells benefit from the buff.  The snare was removed.  Somewhere along the line we also got the ability to autoshift out just to cast a damage spell.  And, because we could fully heal in this form, our healing and boss encounters were balanced around the assumption that we were in this form always.  The Tree of Life buff stopped functioning as a buff and started functioning as part of our healing composition.  It became a given.

Now, I don’t really agree too strongly with Blizzard’s rationale for moving Tree of Life to a cooldown from its current iteration.  They want to have one spec showing off the armor they design?  Ok, fine… pick one of four.   Or… wait… who cares?  Do YOU look at your own or your raidmates’ armor while healing?  I sure as hell don’t.  The argument that each of the druid forms unlocks some unique resource ability (i.e. rage for bears, energy for cats) but Tree Form doesn’t?  Bullshit.  Neither does Moonkin. 

 The argument that we have to give up too much to have access to damage dealing abilities, while other healing classes do not… well… that is true to an extent.  A Holy Priest doesn’t have to rotate between gimped damage spells and gimped healing spells if they feel like DPSing a mob at some point.  If they are bored and DPSing and someone takes a collosal hit, they can pop off a full strength heal without having to use an extra click to get into their healing form.  But that doesn’t hold as much water for me as the fact that our Crowd Control requires a shift out then back into tree form, because Crowd Control is something I actually use, believe it or not, and not just because I’m bored.  I Cyclone mind controlled raid mates on Deathwhisper; I occassionally root a blood beast on Saurfang.  And I don’t PVP.  I am certain that I would use this sort of ability, and damage spells, far more often if I did.  Although I’m usually up at the front of the line grumbling when some PVP issue accounts for changes in my own abilities, I do recognize that the game and specs have to function for both PVP and PVE players.  It’s not my favorite part of the game that this is so, but it is what it is.  So, in the end, this argument from Blizzard is, for me, stronger than the others.

But that argument is not compelling enough for me to feel good about the preview.  Certainly not.  So… what has changed my feeling?  These five six things:

1)  Because our healing is now balanced around us being in tree form, and all of our spells are also balanced around us being in tree form, but in Cataclysm they will not be and tree form will be moved to a cooldown ability, we ARE getting a new toy.  We’re getting a new cooldown.  As I have said, I love being a tree, but when it comes down to it, what I really love is healing a raid and doing it well.  If I have to give up some pixels for part of the time I’m healing in order to get a new mechanic that has the potential for awesomeness?  I’m sorry to say it, but /target pixels, /wave.  Of course, I’m very eager to see where they go with this change and what the cooldown looks like.  If it’s lackluster and not a good trade, I’ll be pissed.  But what if… just what if… it’s something really cool?  really fun?  really engaging?  really interesting in terms of theory crafting and game play?  If that’s the case, then it might just liven up our healing experience in unexpected and energizing ways.

2) GC did say that they would consider a minor glyph allowing people to keep in tree form for those who really just want the damn art, dammit!

3) HOTs benefiting from Crit and Haste? OMG yes PLEASE!  That change is just awesome!  I don’t know about you all but I tried Glyph of Rapid Rejuv and dropped it like a hot potato.  The shortened time between Rejuv ticks was not nearly enough of a benefit  for me when the Rejuvs fell off so fast that I was jumping around like an idiot to reapply them constantly.  But if those Rejuvs had ticked more often for the same duration of time?  Pure… freakin… win.  And Crit benefitting HOTs is just as tasty.  No longer will I feel like Crit is a waste if I’m not using a very specific sub set of my spells.  It will always be good.  Oh, so good.  Om nom nom.

4)  The Mastery Bonus, when I first read it, left me depressed.  Who cares if HOTs increase in effectiveness on low level targets?  Isn’t the point of HOTs to keep people topped off?  But then I remembered that I had read that one of the changes that they are moving toward in Cataclysm is larger health pools and that healers would no longer need to keep people topped off just to keep them alive.  I have a feeling that we are going to have to get used to seeing health meters somewhere between the two extremes of topped off and Holy Shit! that we are now accustomed to.  I believe that HOTs will function less as a means to keep people topped off, and more of a means of keeping incoming damage mitigated.  Now… I am almost exclusively assigned to raid healing in my guild’s 25 mans.  And I do a very good job of it.  All the druid healers in my guild do.  We’re insanely good as raid healers.  But… it makes me a little giddy to imagine how much of a benefit we would be with these larger health pools and more steady damage.  I don’t know about you, but a ridiculously large amount of my healing is wasted, either in overheals, or when other healers stomp my HOTs.  I think we may just have a very solid, and very fun healing niche in Cataclysm to look forward to, and the Mastery Bonus will help us to be strong not just as topper offers, but in a real healing crisis.

5) This may be too optimistic, as they have had trouble balancing our full arsenal of spells in the past, but it is exciting to think that, because it seems to be a goal not just for us but for all healing classes to make healing about interesting, engaging choices, they might actually fix our toolbox of spells to the point that they are all fun and interesting to use.  Ghostcrawler talked about using Lifebloom as a tank healing spell again, possibly allowing Healing Touch to renew a Lifebloom stack (!), and changing Tranquility to act more like Divine Hymn instead of just pouring healing only on the druid’s own group.  Those are interesting and exciting changes and I’m really looking forward to seeing how they play out in the Cataclysm world.

6) Because of the current balance around us always being in tree form, Tree of Life is currently wasted space in our talent tree.  My hope is that it will be removed, freeing up space for options that add utility and help us to improve our game.

If these things don’t motivate you past your sadness of losing tree form, I am sorry.  I am Sylly Sad Tree for you.  Even for myself I am sad about this change.  But I guess for me, while I love being a tree and being in tree form itself, the majority of the fun I find in the game is not in the art of my toon.  Don’t get me wrong, I do find tons of fun there.  But most of my fun comes from raiding, from pulling together with a group of friends and solving the steps of the puzzle and executing them perfectly in order to beat a boss, bring him down.  I LOVE the mechanics of healing on my druid.  The way our class meets the challenges of the game are nothing short of elegant.  It is a joy.  That is why, although I wouldn’t be happy about it, if I had to assume the guise of a naked male leper gnome in order to heal raids as a Restoraion Druid, I would.  And, though it makes me shudder now, I strongly suspect that, given time, I’d develop some affection for my pathetically ugly avatar.   So, in the end, I am sadly willing to trade out my constant tree form for flashes of tree laced with super awesome.

/ducks from incoming rotten tomatoes

Treebeard says no way, Jose!

Patch 3.3 hit the PTR today!  I’m pretty stoked about this development, as I’m sure many of you are.  I’ve been downloading the patch for the last hour or so, and it’s nearing completion.  I will probably take a premade character for a spin on the PTR this time around as a) I’ve never done that before, and b) I’m just getting started on T9 gear on Sylly, so I’d really like to have a fully geared toon to try out Icecrown.  But maybe I’ll bring Sylly over too, let her have a look around.  Wouldn’t want her to get jealous now, would we?  As things are just getting rolling for this patch, I’m sure there is much more information to come, but the web was aflurry with news today.  In everything I saw, there was quite a bit to be excited and happy about, despite the bop of a nerf bat on our Rejuvenation. 

So let’s just take a quick look at the bad news first, lest the post end on a down note which wouldn’t match my mood about this patch business at all.  Rejuvenation at max level is losing a tic, returning it to a 12 second spell from a 15 second spell (15 down from 18 if talented into Nature’s Splendor).  Will this hurt us?  Well, sure.  It will.  Some.  When we’re all out healing AOE madness balls to the wall and throwing up Rejuv on every breathing raidmate within our casting radius, we’ll come up 3 raid members short before we have to start throwing them up again (assuming a 1 second global cooldown).  If we’re not healing everyone, we’ll still have 3 seconds less to be doing other things in between our Rejuvenations.  The spell will get a 20% nerf, assuming that every tic was actually doing healing and that final tic wasn’t going to be overhealed.  So, yes.  It hurts.  But, in the end, I’m not overly concerned about this change at this point.  Is there anyone out there who’s going to disagree that Rejuvenation had gotten a little big for its britches?  The best Druids in my guild stand far and away above the other healing classes in terms of total healing in the vast majority of Ulduar encounters, and the majority of TOC as well.  In addition, we have no idea what the boss fights in Icecrown are going to look like.  It’s quite possible that laying down a thick blanket of Rejuve over the entire raid is going to be pointless there, as it’s had less application in TOC than in Ulduar.  I’ll wait and see before I cry foul.  Also, the devs watch the PTRs closely.  We’ve seen nerfs melt away there before patches go live in the past.  If the nerf is too strong, there’s a good chance they’ll adjust accordingly.  So… easy goes it out there.  Let’s just keep ourselves rooted and see what happens with this.

In terms of what there is to be excited for, topping my list with a bullet is Icecrown!  Woohoo!  I am so excited about this upcoming raid that I’m practically doing a happy dance in my chair.  I never made it through TK or Sunwell in B.C.  There just wasn’t enough time.  I never bought the game until halfway through that expansion, so by the time I really hit my stride raiding and was in a guild that was starting on T6, WOLK was released and we were all hell bent for level 80.  Because of this, I never got to experience the full raiding progression to end game.  Not in the pre B.C. level 60 raiding, and not in B.C.  I had no idea how exciting it was to have the true end game set in my sights.  After witnessing Arthas whining and bitching all over the damn place these many months (could there BE a bigger drama queen?!?), I am looking forward gleefully to breaking out the whoopass and smacking QQ Boy down!  Woohoo!

Apart from these delusions of grandeur on my part, I’m also really energized about the upcoming raid just because of the somewhat anticlimactic experience of TOC.  One of the things I always really savored about raiding is seeing the amazing artwork and environments of the raiding instances.  I remember being blown away by Kara when I first went there.  What a magnificent stage Blizzard set there for adventurers!  And traveling through Ulduar is just a sensory buffet of wonder for me.  TOC?  Hell, the whole raid (save the final encounter) takes place in the same single room as an entire 5 man instance.  It’s not a long raid, it’s not a challenging raid, it’s not an interesting raid.  I’m so looking forward to having that “holy shit!” experience that I have had in other raid instances once again, having to battle through unfolding terain and gaining a sense of forward momentum toward ever more challenging bosses. 

Another innovation that I am anticipating is Blizzard’s introduction of daily (weekly?) raid quests for Emblems of Frost, the newest tier of emblem to be released with 3.3.  The quests range through WOLK raiding content, which will provide many guilds with additional incentive to run old content and allow people to gear up new raiding toons or alts in a way that is otherwise more difficult to arrange.  It will allow people just entering that content to gear up more easily and make them more quickly viable to raid at the higher tiers of content.  I know there are those out there who think that moves like this on Blizzard’s part are dumbing the game down, taking away the relevance of earning a certain level of gear or accomplishment.  I disagree.  The harder it is to progress, the more guilds are limited in choices in terms of members, the more likely it is for people to quit playing the game because they feel blocked out from the best the game has to offer, the less viable the game becomes as an ongoing enterprise.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that anyone who gets gear by the easiest imaginable route will be a viable raider.  But good guilds have vetting processes, application periods, ways of weeding out the players who don’t make the grade.  But just because someone came late to the ball game for some reason doesn’t mean they won’t be a talented player.  Hopefully this new system of raid related dailies will present more opportunities for a wide variety of players to experience more content and earn gear that will open up more of the game, and will bring more talented players into the raiding pool.

So, Icecrown?  Bring it, Baby!  Someone go run out and tell Arthas he is NOT prepared… mwahahahaha!!!!

So 3.2.2. is here today.  Yay?  I suppose that I should just be happy that they’re leaving us well enough alone for the moment, but I’m not sure that I am.  I’m not thrilled with where Restos are at at the moment.  It appears that we can stay competitive with other healers, which is nothing to take for granted, but we have to do so at the price of sacrificing almost all of our heals the vast majority of the time to a mindless repetition of Rejuv and Wild Growth.  Anyone remember being enslaved to the 7 sec Lifebloom timer?  Is this so different?  I’m not sure it is. 

So with 3.2.2… Meh.  There is a “new” raid encounter with Onyxia.   I wasn’t around playing WOW until the middle of the Burning Crusade expansion.  I never got a chance to raid Ony in the good ol’ days, so I’m looking forward to seeing the old gal in her new incarnation.   The 25 man loot table isn’t complete yet, though, so it’s hard to say whether there are yummies in there to get excited about.  In terms of things that directly affect us trees, although they are not monkeying around with our class and nerfing one spell or another which is always nice, there are very few changes that affect us at all, and certainly nothing in a positive direction.  It does make me a little leary that there are, essentially, no changes for any of the healing classes in this patch.  While it is possible that they are just hap-hap-happy with healing right now, I suspect that it is more of a “we’re planning a massive overhaul for healing and are timing it to come out with 3.3 or the expansion” kind of thing where we’re going to get tossed onto our heads all over again.  Time will tell.  As for the patch at hand, in perusing the patch notes, I see that:

1) Leatherworkers can craft Drums of the Wild, which give out a buff equal to the highest untalented rank of Mark of the Wild to raids without a druid, making us druids less vital in raid composition.

2) And this… “Druid Tier-8 Healer 4-Piece Set Bonus: The amount of healing this set bonus grants on the initial cast of Rejuvenation has been reduced by 50%.” 
Man, this one really bums me out.  I’ve had my T8 4pc set bonus for a grand total of… 2 days.  I picked up my pants on Sunday to complete the set bonus, and my shoulders last night to complete the entire set.  And let me tell you… it made a difference.  A big difference.  I was rockin the Recount at the top of the healers for a good bit of our raid last night.  And now that boost is going to be cut in half.  /sniffle!

But I still get to look goooood!  =)

Hahahah!  My Photoshopping is cracking me UP this morning!  Eat your heart out, Will Smith!

Ok, ok, so my version isn’t perfect and it’s kind of messy and yaddah, yaddah, yaddah.  It’s still cracking me up.  =)  Besides, I had to clone stamp out an entire Will Smith AND add a Spam costume.  /rofl!

Sorry, I digress.  There really is a post coming.  A post about spamming. 

Under pressure of fail, I have made many changes lately.  As I’ve mentioned here before, I’ve moved my talent spec more toward the cookie cutter variety.  I’ve changed out my glyphs.  I’ve upgraded my gear.  And now, I’ve become a spambot.

Because of the highly overpowered state of Rejuvenation right now, making it arguably our best spell, my healing has been reduced to the following:

1) if raid healing, spam Rejuvenation on everybody on every possible GCD.  Punch Wild Growth when the cooldown is up.  Rinse.  Repeat.

2) if tank healing, throw up HoTs on Tank.  Keep one eye on tank’s health bar in case oh, shit buttons are needed for supplemental.  Spam Rejuvenation on everybody on every possible GCD between renewing tank HoTs.  Punch Wild Growth when the cooldown is up.  Rinse.  Repeat.

How do I feel about this?  Well… I have mixed feelings, to be certain.

There is no doubt at all that the changes I have made are improving my healing output.  Take a look at the WWS standings from one of my first nights healing with my new guild (You can click on images to enlarge them).

If you are having trouble seeing that, I’m coming in at #5 healer with 10 percent of the heals and 34% overhealing.  I was… appalled.  Here’s a look at the spells I was using that night.

That’s a lot of Nourish, right?  But keep in mind I was still rocking the T7.5 4pc bonus and had the glyph, so Nourish was strengthened considerably by every HoT on a target.  But the resulting 53% overhealing on that spell shows that much of that casting was wasted effort.

On the other hand, there is a really nice variety of spells going on here.  I was reacting to different situations in different ways, throwing out what I felt were the most appropriate spells for each healing situation.

Well, I got callled out on this a bit, and rightfully so, by my new guildies.  “Sylly,” they were too nice to say, “wtf are you doing? Pull yer head out of that barky arse!”

And so I set out on my quest to become a spambot.  I haven’t transformed completely.  I still waste oodles of time in my spamming in comparison with the other trees in my guild.  But the results of this change, in combination with the other changes I have made recently, are obvious.

Here’s last night’s WWS report showing healing standings:

Again, you can click on that to make it bigger, but the summary is I was 2nd in healing at 16% of healing for the night, and my overheals dropped to 20%. 

Here’s my spell usage:

Yea, that’s Rejuv at 57%.  Wild Growth at 20%.  80% of my healing came from these two spells. 

So, although I know just as well as the next guy that I should have a care when looking to a healing meter ranking to judge my healing performance, last night my assigned targets certainly were not dying through any fault of my own, and my healing output certainly shot up noticably, which is cause for great relief and internal celebration on my part, I gotta admit it.  But…

But I’m a spambot.  I’m not a creative practitioner of the healing arts, weaving the healing magic.  I’m a spambot whose goal is to use every possible cooldown to cast one of two instant cast spells.  And that makes me sad.

Jeez I take a zoo day and Blizz puts up their Druid Q&A on the official forums!  That’ll teach me to go to the zoo!  When I came home and read the Q & A, I was exhausted from fighting the crowds at the Bronx Zoo and spending the day with 2 very sweet but very cranky 3 year olds.  So I decided to take my somewhat befuddled dismay with a grain of salt and read over the Q & A in the morning when some sleep had restored my clarity.  Unfortunately, although less befuddled, I still find myself somewhat dismayed.

First, a disproportionate amount of the Q&A was dedicated to ferals, so there were relatively fiew questions answered in regard to Resto druids.  And what there was was… I guess disheartening is a good word for my reaction.  Let’s go through the information, shall we?

In addition to having to give up utility in order to heal as a Tree of Life, we have become less enamored with druids locking themselves into one form. In fact, you really never see the basic tauren or night elf druid form (you know, the one that actually shows off the awesome armor art) because all druids are in cat, bear, tree, or moonkin form nearly 100% of the time.

Note to other healers: this is why you are unlikely to see any kind of “Holy form” ever. Giving up healing to do damage works okay. Giving up everything to heal is lame.

Q: Do we have plans to improve Healing Touch or Tranquility?

But GC, you ask, if you know the talents are lackluster why haven’t you improved them? The answer is that Resto druids are in a really good spot now. If we changed the HT and Tranquility talents to boost other kinds of healing, then Resto druids might become too powerful.