In case anyone hasn’t noticed, Lilith and I have been pretty busy with a lot of things lately, both in and out of the game.  Lilith started an exciting new job and moved out of state with her boyfriend (sorry to break your hearts, guys) and is planning on staying away from the game until Cataclysm.  I have been working a lot, as well and have been focusing more on 10 mans and 10 man hard modes lately, with a close group of friends in my guild.  I have also taken up the mantle of a recruitment assistant and bringing in some fresh, strong talent to our ranks to hopefully down some more content before the expansion hits.

With everything happening, I felt like I wanted to take a stab at my own blog and try to bring in some more readership for myself, while Divine Aegis is sort of on hiatus.  At the end of the day, this is Lilith’s blog and I’m thrilled to be on the guest list to the party.  But it would feel weird being here and posting and having her not join me in that endeavor.  I wanted to be here, because we would be posting together.  If she isn’t here, it doesn’t feel right for me to kind of take over her space.  I know she doesn’t feel that way, but I would.  I came here to write with her, to have our entries kind of build off each other.  And that’s clearly not happening, lately.   

I decided to create my own blog at http://thestoriesofo.wordpress.com, with the full support of Lilith.  My plan is to build my own little following and then when the expansion comes, we can reform our ranks (hopefully with a new holy paladin advisor and possibly even a shaman) and really charge out of the gate strong.  There has been talk of Lilith even forming her own 10 man guild and I would love to be a part of that with her.  I think that could provide a neat perspective on the articles, if we’re in the same runs and just writing about it from different angles.  This blog has already proven to be a great resource and I think it can be an even better one, once we’re in the right place to make that happen and the stars can align.

Please stop by and say hello and hopefully we will be seeing you all very soon, in some form. 

Thanks for reading and have a great night!

Phase 1 for resto druids in the Heroic Anub’arak encounter is pretty cut and dry.  Keep a Regrowth and a Rejuvenation on the main tank and the add tank at all times.  Anub’arak will choose 5 targets for a DoT called Penetrating Cold.  Your raid frames or user interface should have a way of marking those targets and DBM calls it out, too.  Place a Regrowth on all 5 of the targets and possibly even a Rejuvenation on them, depending on how much you see them taking.  Regrowth should have a high enough crit chance, where you will eventually proc Nature’s Grace – so casting it on 5 targets shouldn’t take too long. 

The reason why I find Regrowth to be better for the PC is because of how long the DoT lasts.  You can put the HoT on the 5 targets and refresh your HoTs that you initially put on the tanks and keep it all going. 

Once Anub’arak burrows, then comes the scarab phase.  Regrowth is also going to be a big help here.  Players who are killing the adds are bound to get hit by a scarab and they leave a DoT on targets that also hits very hard.  Unlike PT, this DoT can stack and even a short stack can be rough to heal through.  If you see a target with the debuff, place a Regrowth on them, both for the initial heal and the lasting HoT.  Keep an eye out for people that may have missed their spike duties and keep a few HoTs on yourself, just in case you end up being that person.  You can possibly survive one hit from a spike, with a HoT or two on and a Swiftmend to burn.  Obviously, it’s not something you want to try and test out, but I have seen it done.

Rinse and repeat the above until Phase 3 happens and Anub’arak begins his Leeching Swarm effect.  The rest of the fight is going to take you drastically outside of your comfort zone.  It’s going to be up to Healing Stream totems, Judgement of Light and other passive forms of heals to keep the raid alive.  You will be doing very little direct healing and if you do, it’s going to be with one spell:  Healing Touch.  Dig deep in your spellbook, dust off the tooltip and put it back on your action bars – if you don’t have it there already.  Healing Touch will work best if glyphed and you will most likely have to perform a slight re-spec to get the most out of this, making sure you have  points in Empowered Touch and Naturalist.

The reason why this spell is best is because you are going to be assigned to heal the Penetrating Cold targets and the damage from that plus the Leeching Swarm ability is going to be too much for any other heal you have to cover it.  Even with a good amount of haste, Nourish still won’t be fast enough to keep up.  You have to do enough healing to keep the targets up, but not so much that Anub’arak is getting too much health back from the debuff.  Talented and glyphed, Healing Touch is the perfect solution to this.

In my experience, guilds usually assign one healer to cover each PT target and sometimes they get assigned two.  This is your focus – nothing else.  No tank healing, no self healing, just your target or targets.  Using only Healing Touch.  Pop Barkskin when it’s on cooldown to mitigate some of the Leeching Swarm damage or to help out if you end up being a PT cold target 

Do this until Anub’arak is dead and then celebrate your victory!

I just wanted to post a quick update about my hiatus in posting on here and to thank everyone who has still been adding us as readers and who have been following along and eagerly awaiting new posts from us.

Personally, I had taken a month off from the game and rolled an elemental shaman, just to relax and get psyched up for Icecrown Citadel.  Throw in a generous helping of holidays, a new position at work and redecorating my loft and it’s been nothing short of hectic, lately.

I’m getting back into the scene, with a great new guild and I’m learning as much about 3.3 as I can (from Heroics, glyphs and everything in between), so I can keep my fellow druids updated with the best advice and opinions that I can.  I’m still deciding what I want to cover first, but it will be very soon, I promise.

I do frequently keep in touch with the other bloggers and I know we have some great things in mind for our readers in the coming weeks and the start of the new year.  There has been talk of another new section on the blog, that is more reader oriented and even rumors of a very special guest blogger in the near future.  You won’t be disappointed!

Again, thank you all for sticking with us and you will be seeing more of us very soon.

Off we go! 

What is the name, class, and spec of your primary healer?  Oestrus, restoration spec druid (currently 14/0/57)

What is your primary group healing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans)  I mostly heal 25 man and 25 man hard modes, with the occasional 10 man and 10 man hard modes.  I dabble in PVP, but nothing too serious. 

What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why?  Lifebloom, because I miss the good old days of rolling them on numerous tanks and I love the chime it makes when it blooms. 

I like it because it’s a HoT, but it doesn’t fit in the normal boundaries for such a spell.  It’s strong as it is, but you can let it bloom and enjoy a nice sized heal from it.  It’s not too hard on the mana pool and it’s fast enough to be used on multiple targets.  It can provide a nice buffer for a  Nourish, too. 

And I also feel it’s one of the few spells that has versatility and that has made a strong crossover from PVE to PVP.  Most druid spells still help in PVP, but this one can really save your butt and it can be good against PVE spike damage.  Not many spells can demonstrate that efficiency between play styles. 

What healing spell do you use least for your class and why?
That would be Tranquility.  It’s only good for use in parties and even then it’s extremely case sensitive.  I mostly just use it for screenshots, due to the great graphics and sounds. 

I would have normally said Healing Touch, but that spell is making a comeback in guilds that are taking on 25 man heroic Anub’arak (which I will probably touch on, at some point).

What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why?
I would have to say the mobility.  I love being able to do almost everything we would normally do, while constantly moving – which has a huge payoff on so many fights that involve not standing in things.  

What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why?   I honestly don’t feel that we have any weaknesses.  I have always felt that we can do anything any other healer can do, either as well or better. 

But if I had to choose, I would say we lack any kind of damage mitigation on people we’re healing.  Shamans have Stoneskin totem, paladins and priests have bubbles and we have Barkskin, for ourselves.  But we don’t have anything to cushion damage that a tank is receiving. 

Some count a full stack of HoTs as a form of padding, but it’s not the same.

In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you?  Druids definitely excel at raid healing, but we do have the capacity to be strong tank healers, if needed.

What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why?  I can’t really say that I have a favorite.  I know what I don’t like healing with.  See below.

What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why?
Other druids.  Anything more than two druids gets really complicated, I feel.  Especially if one of the druids doesn’t glyph for Swiftmend (rare, but it does happen) and you find your HoTs getting consumed when/if they use it.

At that point, it comes down to who can HoT something faster and I feel like heals tend to get clipped more and overhealing becomes more of an issue.  But that sparks another kind of debate, best not explored on a simple survey!

What is your worst habit as a healer?  Being too thrifty with my mana.  I tend to play it very conservative and not too aggressive.  I could probably stand to go “all out” a bit more, but I think that’s also a compliment to the other healers I’m lucky enough to raid with.  I think we all do our share and no one person has to compensate for others not doing their job.

If I felt like situations were getting tight or we were shy on healers, I would definitely push myself harder.  Not to say I’m lazy or don’t impact the meters, or anything.  I just keep an eye on how hard I need to push myself on any given night.

What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing?  People who request a battle res or who I get asked to battle res and who can’t be bothered to ping the map, to let me know where the corpse is.  And then I spend so much time trying to locate them, that I either die or I lose sight of other things I should be doing.

Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other healers for PvE healing?  Absolutely – Blizzard has been quite kind to us, I think.

I do enjoy the debates that the developers have about us having to take a form to be competitive.  It would be interesting to see if they made enough changes where we could enjoy the benefits of Tree Form without necessary having to shape change. 

What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer?  I tend to run on instinct and by how well the raid is progressing.  I was at a point recently where I couldn’t take my eyes off the meters and I didn’t like the way it made me feel or how easily I got wrapped up in the competition factor.  It wasn’t healthy for me.

I also go off raid consensus.  We have pretty vocal officers and I would like to think if one of us were suffering, we would know about it.  Or the healers communicate well enough with each other, where they would work together to fix something, if they noticed something we were doing wasn’t working.

If people are surviving and you’re downing content, you all did a good job.  It’s easy to forget the main goal and get lost in competition and all of that nonsense.

What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class?  I haven’t really heard any misconceptions about us – maybe you could tell me some and I could clear them up that way

What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn?  That we don’t need that much spirit.  I see a lot of new druids just drowning in the stuff.  Two spirit trinkets, spirit enchant on the weapon, pure spirit gems, etc.  It’s nice and God knows we love it, but not that much.  You should never be passing up chances to increase other stats, just for the sake of spirit. 

If someone were to try to evaluate your performance as a healer via recount, what sort of patterns would they see (i.e. lots of overhealing, low healing output, etc)?  The overhealing has definitely increased, since Blizzard made it where HoTs continue to heal, even when a target is topped off. 

I tend to heal in the same cookie cutter fashion other druids do, though I noticeably use Nourish a lot less.  My bread and butter is Rejuvenation, Wild Growth and Lifebloom.  I have been trying to Swiftmend more and there is the occasional Regrowth. 

Haste or Crit and why?  I think a nice balance is important to have.  I use crit head and shoulder enchants, to help out with my tier bonus and I just go with the flow, in terms of gear choices.  I can’t say I have ever favored a piece of gear over another, simply because of haste or crit.

What healing class do you feel you understand least?  The idea of healing as a paladin bores me to tears.  I don’t think I could do that for a living – lol.  I would imagine I’d have really empty action bars.  I can’t see having too many spells that you need to put on there.  Your choices seem kinda limited.

What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing?
Right now, I am enjoying a new interface called VuhDo and I use the basic raid addons, like Omen and Deadly Boss Mods.  Otherwise, I try to run pretty mod light.

Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why?
Balance is extremely important as a druid (no pun intended) – especially given how versatile the class already is.  Right now though, I’m at a point where I need nothing more than pure spell power.  I have a good sized mana pool, strong mana regen, a good amount of health and I just need stronger heals. 

I do make sure that gear upgrades or swaps provide a definite stat increase, in most areas

I can’t say that this particular post will have a lot of advice, per se, but hopefully people can relate to some of the opinions I have and maybe even a healthy debate can come from this.  I’m also going to suggest that you pre-HoT before reading this one – wall of text definitely incoming.   

Rejuv was too good. We nerfed it. The change got labeled as a bug fix, because technically it was a bug. We didn’t mean to buff Rejuv’s duration but once we did we didn’t think it was breaking anything for a time so we let it stay. For 3.3 we decided it was breaking things and reduced the duration. We understood the confusion this caused with the community by labeling it a bug fix so we changed the patch note to no longer refer to it as a bug fix. It doesn’t really matter what it was called — it was a nerf.

I think this argument could go either way.  Yes, Rejuvenation is good.  But I also think based on the healing assignments that most druids are given, it’s the best spell we have for what we are asked to do.  I don’t know of many druids that are asked to stay on tank healing.  Now we certainly assist on certain fights, but it’s rare that we are asked to focus solely on that.  We include the tanks in our raid healing, but that is usually assigned to paladins and priests. 

The other spells we have, like Healing Touch or Regrowth and to some extent Nourish, don’t make the best choice for raid healing.  It’s far more efficient to spread a number of Rejuvs on the raid and follow them up with Wild Growth, which also allows you to set the groundwork for Swiftmend, if those targets need more attention.

So it’s not necessarily the Rejuv alone that makes it so good.  You have the HoT itself, which is strong and is boosted by talents and an amazing Idol and then the potential for a Swiftmend, a buff to Nourish and also some forms of regen, if you put talent points into Revitalize. 

A guildie of mine had crunched the numbers and deduced that the reduction of the extra tick  really wasn’t a big loss.  We would still be healing for the same amount per tick, with the loss of some global cooldowns.  Meaning the healing per second and healing power would remain the same, but the number of Rejuvs we could blanket the raid with may slightly go down. 

But I do appreciate Blizzard coming forward and stating that it wasn’t simply a “We didn’t realize this tick was there all along” thing. 

In the same patch, we decided to change Gift of the Earth Mother because it was adding a gratuitous amount of haste and at the same time making druids avoid haste where they could. We have been too generous with some of the haste talents that coupled with gear and buffs are causing problems.

I have always had a love/hate relationship with Gift of the Earthmother (GotE).  It was something I initially put talent points in, just to spend the points and I remember re-speccing for PVP one day and realizing how slow my HoTs seemed to come out when I didn’t have those talent points there.  It was very underrated and it became something I noticed I couldn’t do without in PVE. 

In the early raiding scene in “Wrath,” we didn’t have that much haste available.  Don’t get me wrong, we had a lot.  But I don’t feel it was as abundant.  I didn’t picked up my Tier 7 4 piece bonus, because I have never been a big fan of Nourish (more on that later) and I felt there were other pieces that were much better.  Most of the available pieces that were best for me already had a large amount of haste on them.

Pieces from Ulduar continued the trend of resto druid gear still coming with a lot of haste, despite Tier 8 being more crit oriented.  Also, some resto druids were still using spellpower trinkets like the Egg of Mortal Essence or had moved on to Scale of Fates, which both come with either a chance of proccing a lot of haste or that come with an “on use” effect that did that. 

The transition to Tier 9 seemed to cement the notion that druids were being directed to have haste on their gear, especially considering the quality of gear available (specifically cloaks, rings and weapons) that happened to have good amounts of haste on them.  This is strange, because the awesome 4 piece bonus seems to thrive on us having a higher critical strike rating.  It’s certainly not something you should be gemming for or going terribly out of your way to improve, but swapping out some of the haste on the more noteworthy pieces for crit would have been a blessing.

Overall, I would agree that we do have too much haste right now.  I personally have more than I know what to do with.  And while I admit that, I also kind of wonder what would happen if I didn’t have it anymore.  I dread the thought of my HoTs coming out that slowly again and I think this is one change I would really have to experience, before I can comment any further or more definitively on. 

While we didn’t change Gift of the Earth Mother with the express purpose of nerfing druids, it still had that effect. We considered the Rejuv nerf and the GotEM nerf and decided we liked the second one more and reverted the first one. Rejuv is back to 18 sec for 3.3.

I certainly won’t turn down an extra tick on Rejuv and since I didn’t feel the change was a nerf, I feel this is pretty positive.  I do think there is a chance the GotE change could be the more negative of the two, if we aren’t casting as many HoTs or casting as fast as we could be, without all the haste we’re used to.  I’m just going by what I remember happening and what I would think would happen if the mass output of our heals wasn’t there.  Again, this is something I believe could be bad, but I hesitate to say for sure until I see it in action. 

We realize the GotEM nerf hurt PvP Resto druids a lot and that is still something we are evaluating.

GotE wasn’t something I remember seeing in any common PVP builds and it wasn’t something I had room for in mine, though I wish it was.  I’m not sure how true this is.

Resto druids have a lot of heal spells. Which ones you go to the most is going to be a function of things like set bonuses, idols, your role in the group as well, as well as the encounters themselves. Druids healing the raid currently seem to use a lot of Rejuv and Wild Growth while those healing tanks use a lot of Nourish and perhaps even Lifebloom. Lifebloom still gets a lot of use in PvP. Regrowth has slipped off the radar a little, IMO, but it has been good at various points in LK and I don’t think it would be that hard to bring it back (and we’ll see what the GotEM change does). Bringing it back would probably slide something else down the bar, at least temporarily. We’re pretty much okay with that. Healing Touch (and maybe Tranq) is the only Resto spell for which we’re really not interested in carving off a major raid-healing niche. It still has situational uses with NS or in 5-player dungeons.

Rereading the above, I am making sweeping generalizations a lot. Your mileage may vary and there are a ton of exceptions. One thing that hits me a lot in my position is that players assume the way they do a thing is the way everyone must do that thing. Players exhibit some pretty diverse behaviors and still get the boss down. Keep that in mind whenever you try to adopt the “accepted” or “cookie cutter” spell rotation for any class.

This is the statement I agree with the most.  I agree with their spell usage being based on your assignments and that Lifebloom does seem to be used more in PVP and that the mechanics behind it seem more intricate in that setting.  Regrowth could stand to see more use and it does see a fair amount in tank healing and even some raid healing scenarios (for serious DoT debuffs or effects like Kologarn’s grip, pot healing on Ignis, etc).

It is nice to note the idea of not necessarily going down the accepted route to get things done.  Sure, you have a job to do and your job is to keep people up.  But you shouldn’t feel limited to only do it one way.  There are fights with various gimmicks where doing it one set way, all the time won’t work.  Understanding that versatility and knowing when you need to switch it up is the key to staying competitive in the current raid environment.

Particularly angry druids like to talk about Nourish getting “shoved down their throat” or whatever. We added Nourish because we recognized the druid need for a “Flash Heal.” Healing Touch is too long to cast without NS and both NS and Swiftmend have a cooldown. The hots all do great healing, and they can definitely save someone’s life, but they just aren’t reliable for e.g. someone being focused by faction champions. In the BC era where we basically mandated that druids are just one arm of the healing machine that must also include paladins, priests and shamans it was okay to have a very narrow niche. In a world of 10-player raids, we want you to be able to heal with say 2 Resto druids and a Disc priest. “Hey, I’m just here to hot the raid,” is fine if it works for your group, but that can’t be the only thing that works. (And this applies to all 5 healing specs.)

Particularly angry druids like to talk about Nourish getting “shoved down their throat” … because it was shoved down our throats.

I have never had a problem with Nourish, per se.  I think it is a wonderful situational spell that is very useful, for the occasions that it is suited for.  For anything else, I really don’t think it’s that great.  What I really resented about it was how I feel Blizzard strong-armed us into using it.

They could have taken the stance of “We have this neat spell and you guys can give it a shot when you’re ready and let us know what you think.”  Instead, I felt like I was dealing with a sleazy car salesman who was leering at me and saying “Well, we’re going to nerf Lifebloom, but we have this neat little spell called Nourish.  Have you heard of it?  Nourish – it’s in your spell book right here…”

The druid community still wasn’t too sold on it, so they had to up the ante a little bit.  “The newest batch of druid glyphs will be a waste and you probably won’t want to use any of them – but we did add a Nourish glyph.  Remember Nourish?  And if the glyph really isn’t working for you, we’ll throw in this incredible offer to include Nourish in some talents that you already have and can’t really avoid taking.  Because we know you are going to love, love this spell!”

No pressure or anything, right? 

Now as the last post mentioned, I find Nourish extremely useful in 10 man raids, particularly the hard modes.  I use it quite a bit there.  I also use it frequently in PVP (thanks to all the healing reduction debuffs) and in the odd situation in 25 man raids (i.e. Plasma Blasts during Mimiron, Deconstructor’s tantrum, Incinerate Flesh on Jarraxus, etc.) 

I just feel like it’s something that we could have discovered on our own and that we didn’t need to have our focus shifted to, by reducing the effectiveness of other spells or altering talents to make room for it.  It was fine as is and would have continued to get more attention, as things progressed.  It also didn’t help that many of the early raids in “Wrath” had no use for it.  The healing in Naxxramas, Malygos and Sarth was entirely manageable with what we already had.  I would like to think most druids would have picked up on the increased need for Nourish in Ulduar and ToC, by simply experiencing the fights first hand and picking up on a need for what Nourish could offer.

In closing, it was great to see Ghostcrawler give some insight into the changes and I look forward to experiencing a number of them for myself and to see how other druids deal with the changes. 

Thanks for reading and look for my post on druid gemming in the next week or so.  You won’t need to pre-HoT for that one, I promise.

Cut to today, where Lifebloom has gone through a string of changes that led one blogger from WoW.com to refer to it jokingly as “FFS, just put it out of its misery.”

How did we get here? How did Lifebloom go from being a revolutionary spell that led to renewed druid healing prevalence in both PVE and PVP to something that most druids barely have room on their action bars for? Is there a place for it now and if so, where is it?

To answer that question briefly, Lifebloom does still have a place in the repertoire of a raiding resto druid. It has taken a backseat to other spells, like Rejuvenation and Wild Growth and may even see less action than Regrowth or Nourish would. But it has a purpose and we will get into what that purpose is and just why those changes over the last year or so may not be so bad after all.

The mechanics behind Lifebloom used to be quite simple. Keep it rolling (a slang term for keeping a full stack up constantly). With the changes that have taken place, letting a Lifebloom bloom is no longer a bad thing. Rolling Lifebloom was still pretty common through Naxxramas and even through most of Ulduar. Most druids were starting to experiment with early blooming and more use of Rejuvenation, but didn’t really start to catch on until hard modes came out, with patch 3.2 and more specifically, with Trial of the Champions.

Keeping a stack of at least 2 or 3 applications of Lifebloom on your main tank is always a good thing. Follow that up with a Rejuvenation and then a Regrowth. See how the fight is going. If you see the damage being pretty even and predictable and the other healers are keeping up with it, feel free to keep the Lifebloom rolling. You shouldn’t be having a problem with mana, where this is too taxing on you. You should also have the free time to spread some Rejuvenation on raid members in between refreshing your stacks.

But if you see your tank taking a lot of raw, hard hitting damage or spike damage (meaning it goes from small to very large hits very quickly), let the Lifebloom bloom. You should start seeing some impressive crits and that heal can be a saving grace in fights where there is already enough going on and tanks can die in the blink of an eye. I always keep a stack of 2 or 3 up, I let it bloom and then I place a whole new set on. Rinse and repeat. Keep other HoTs on the tank and share some with the raid, too. Throw in a Swiftmend (Glyphed, of course) or some Nourish, if the incoming damage is still a bit much.

Lifebloom can also be useful on the raid if they are taking steady damage or face increasing amounts of damage. Examples of this are during Light Bombs on the Deconstructor fight or targets of Legion Flames during Lord Jaraxxus. The best example I have found as a renewed use of Lifebloom is during the Leeching Swarm effect that Anub’arak emits, as the final boss in Trial of the Champion. This effect deals damage to the entire raid and heals him for a portion of the damage he does. For the healers, they have to find a balance between keeping the raid up, but not so much so that Anub’arak gets more life back than the raid can chip away at.

Lifebloom is perfect for this. I literally spend the rest of the fight, from 30% on just Lifeblooming everything. Just one per raid member. Put it on and let them all bloom. It does just the right amount of healing, but not too much and the mana returns from all those blooms will make sure you can keep it going until Anub’arak goes down.

There is also some speculation as to whether Lifebloom blooms can proc Forethought Talisman. I adore my Talisman and the talents we have for improving HoT effects makes the HoT from it very potent and I have seen some blooms do this. It doesn’t seem to happen all the time, but it can happen. Just another good reason to get in the habit of letting Lifebloom bloom, I think.

All in all, it may not be what we were used to and it may not be our bread and butter anymore, but Lifebloom is still entirely relevant and can provide a useful and sometimes surprising healing element to our already impressive array of HoTs and direct heals.