Resto Druid Tier 10 Bonuses!!

So tier10 bonuses are up on MMO Champion!

• Item - Druid T10 Restoration 2P Bonus - The healing granted by your Wild Growth spell reduces 0% less over time.
• Item - Druid T10 Restoration 4P Bonus (Rejuvenation) - Each time your Rejuvenation spell heals a target, it has a 2% chance to jump to a new target at full duration.

Wow way to use some pretty sketchy wording there Blizz. It took me WAY too long to figure out the heck my 2 piece bonus actually is. It seems as though it removes the tapering effect on our wildgrowth. Apparently this isn't a huge thing because as we get more and more spellpower, the potency of the dropoff becomes less pronounced. 4 piece sounds really really interesting. More or or less a chance to proc a one jump Prayer of Mending off of every tick of Rejuv. So thinking about it more. Rejuv will have a 12 second duration, 15 when talented. Assuming any druid with 4 piece will have a 15 second Rejuv that's 2%*5 ticks = 10% chance for a full duration Rejuv to jump during the course of any one Rejuv. Factor in that that free Rejuv that jumped also has a 10% chance to proc another jump. I can't wait to see how this plays out on the PTR. Needless I'm much more excited about this than I was about critting Rejuvs.

/Rant (you were warned)

It's been kind of a meh week in wow, guild frustrations abound. I'm in a casual guild, we raid twice a week for 4 hours each, in theory, but lately we haven't been doing that. Tuesday is our loot pinata day in which we storm into ToC25 and destroy that then port to Theramore and one-shot Onyxia, then call it a night, and break up into two or so ToC10s to farm badges. Thursday we usually manage to scrounge together 25 people to try ToGC, but we constantly battling attendance issues and have canceled more than a few raids due to a shortage of people. Last week we put in a measly nine attempts on beasts before calling it. We weren't making much progress, wiping pretty consistently the first time we got toxin on the raid, but honestly? Tab out look up some strats, yell at people to ACTUALLY spread out and oh yeah major pet peeve, kick the healer who DCs 5 seconds into EVERY attempt. Our healing is having trouble keeping up and the fact that Miss Resto Shaman can't stay online thus we're five-healing definitely doesn't help. Basically progression raids have been incredibly frustrating due to lack of persistence and personal accountability.

Enough of that rant I have more! My ToGC10 is a collection of some of the better players in my guild: myself, my mage boyfriend, a couple people we've guild-hopped with (rogue, ret pally, prot/fury/arms warrior, shadow/disc priest [who's been flaky of late]) the GM of my guild (resto sham), officer #1 (prot pally) officer #2 (feral deeps/tank) officer #3 (hunter). So it's kind of a loaded group of friends and all of the important people in our guild. ToGC has proven to be very easy....until Anub. It took us I think two weeks to down him, mostly because of time constraints and not being able to find time to finish up our raid. When we finally downed him we got A Tribute to Skill and figured we'd be farming it from then on. This week we got to Anub with 50 attempts remaining (no pressure right?) Wiped the first time, which took off a little pressure, but as we got closer to 45 attempts, that pressure mounted again. We took a five minute break before our 45th attempt to try to relax, came in and wiped. My thoughts were something like "oh well, we'll get it next week. Pressure's off let's kill him" Officer #1 says in raid: "I have stuff to do I gotta go, night." What?! no heads up, no: "Hey guys I have to go in a half an hour or so." I almost feel like it was emo logging. Not everybody could make it Monday (the next day) and so that was it. Anub didn't die. I'm 3/5 T9, I've been counting on getting a trophy from 10m. Wow, so frustrating.

I know I'm in a casual guild, but I've always been a bit of a hardcore at heart. What's always stopped me is my terrible computer that gets me as low as 2-4 fps in 25m raids at times. Poison circles on the ground? Nope, can't see them. Nowadays, even with the same terrible computer, my friends keep me in casual guilds. We move as a group, and there are six of us. Hardcore guilds would never have six main raid spots, even though we're all very skilled players. I've always been content being casual, wanted more, but content. I'm starting to reach my breaking point, and the less we raid the more tantalizing the better guilds on my server look.

Kind of curious to see how ToGC10 goes tonight nonetheless

I need to figure out how to make this pretty sometime, but I know nothing about websites

3.3 Oh No!!

I've been waiting for it for a while....but patches have gone by without a lifebloom nerf (Blizzard's all time favorite spell to nerf). We druids haven't been spamming lifebloom all that much though, Rejuv has been my ohsotasty go to button when the raid's gonna get hurt. We all got a preview with the nerf to the T8 set bonus (50% reduction in the initial heal applied). I don't know how many of us were too angry about that and honestly I was almost expecting it after I looked at my guild's World of Logs parses from a night's raid and found out that T8 set bonus was accounting for 10%+ of my effective healing, and any set bonus that's so juicy that it has me taking off my T9 to heal for our guild's raids might need a little tweaking. Anyway to get to the point, Blizz is applying a "bug fix" reducing the duration of rank 15 Rejuvenation to 12 seconds. This means one less tick before it expires. There seem to be two ways of looking at this bug fix (it's blatantly a nerf, even if it's fixing a bug). The first school of thought has been saying: well it probably all went to overheal anyway, it's just one tick less, while the second says that I'll have between 1 and 2 fewer rejuvs on the raid to tick when BIG DAMAGING ATTACK happens and it's gonna gimp my healing. I belong to the second school of thought. I'm definitely not looking forward to this change but as always, we'll adapt.

The other nerf on the horizon is what seems to be a 50% nerf in the armor Improved Barkskin provides us with: from 160% armor contribution from cloth and leather items, to 80%. This is going to hurt, literally. Barkskin is my ZOMG ROGUE OW OW OW button when I'm totally stunlocked and OMG I'M STANDING RIGHT NEXT TO A WARRIOR AND HE'S GOING SPINNY SPIN. I think most of the time I'll be able to live just makes me more squishy and I'm not good enough to carry myself through all that much more squishiness. I'm gonna have to haunt some arena junkies forums to see what the good druids think about this and how scared I have to be.

Another change seems to be more geared to my owly druid friends but affects the rotten broccoli among us too. Nature's Grace won't proc from periodic spell criticals anymore, which means when I get my 4 piece T9.245 (hopefully this Sunday finger's crossed) I shouldn't count on the constant Nature's Grace procs that Rejuv crits are going to supply to be around forever. I'm not too concerned about this, I've never been a Nourish/Regrowth spammer.

Oh, a whole mess of our spells are having their mana cost reduced for lower ranks. Makes leveling easier for baby druids, but I highly highly DO NOT RECOMMEND leveling resto :) I did it and it took a long time (don't regret it at all).

Edited: It's not 3.0 /facepalm

I'm terrible at this. I spend like an hour or more a day reading blogs but I can't seem to keep my own despite me always bubbling over with stuff to talk about.

So in reverse chronological order....I've been really into arena lately, mostly 2s even though the loot has been nerfed or at least, I can't get the best in 2s. I've actually started to have an idea of what's going on and it's showing, got to 1800 today for the first time ever! Means I can get my 245 mace and pick up some more resil (I'm using Guiding Star) and then my offhand next week to get spell pen capped without gemming for it. We were going to shoot for 1846 which would allow me to get both in one week, but I don't think we're up to it after doing 2s all morning. After a bit we start to get sloppy. Prior to this though we were kicking ass and taking names.
This picture proves many awesomes. Look at killing blows, that's right I ninjaed both of them. The match was a perfect cyclone cyclone blind dead combination.

On a more PvE note, downed 10m ToGC Anub'arak last night... FINALLY, and we got A Tribute to Skill. I've been min/maxing, if that's the correct term, for that fight. I don't need to save my potion CD for a mana pot so I stole some speed pots from a friend and pop them when healing get's a little out of control. In addition I glyphed Rejuv (heals for 50% more when target is under 50% health, which in theory they always should be for phase 3) which was hugely helpful. The sad but funny thing I discovered after he finally died was, I still had my PvP trinket on, and not the one with 150 spellpower, the one with resil /facepalm. No loot for me though. Eventually my luck has to turn.

The awkward first post

Hello, I'm Sem, a night elf resto druid from Mug'thol. I'm an avid reader of several WoW and druid related blogs (I won't name drop yet) and decided after reading so many blogs, perhaps I should give it a try myself. I'm a pretty casual player, I play at night and on the weekends in between keeping up with my work in college.

I'm currently level 75, and specced full boomkin. First time ever specced boomkin, I went 10-70 in the resto tree. The story behind it is that I was going to be taking some time off Sem, not buy the expansion, and level my priest. Right after Wrath came out, nobody, NOBODY was playing their low level alts, so when it came to instancing, my boyfriend would run me through stuff with his mage, and in return I'd run his pally alt through instances. All of you tree specced people know that it's more fun and easier to run damage specced, and since the whole spell power conversion, my resto gear isn't half bad for boomkin.

...and I never went back. I miss healing so much in 5 man instances, but I'm loving the ability to run into a crowd of mobs, blow starfall, pop barkskin and hurricane them all down without heals or pots. Also makes it easy to farm leather. What amuses me is topping dps in instances with zero hit from gear. I'm glad I have something like 3% from talents because I definitely am not dedicated enough to balance to socket any of my gear with hit, or lose stats switching to (still) inferior northrend blues. I'm looking forward to speccing resto again, but with my guild nagging me to get to 80 already, I'm better off staying balance in the meantime.

This all makes me VERY excited for dual speccing, possibly coming in the next patch. Seeing all those big crit numbers popping up is just as exciting as seeing the neverending stream of green numbers when I have hots on everybody and anybody in range, and while I can't wait to be healing again, it'll be nice to have another option. It'll be especially nice for doing dailies and, once again, farming leather. I won't respec freely unless they make it free for me. The only times I've respecced have been with talent resets lately...I'm just really cheap.

My current projects are trying to figure out how to get leatherworking up to 440 so I can craft my epics at 80, figuring out where to get all my 80 dungeon blues and sporadic epics, and what the heck I'm going to do with all this haste and crit...

• on leatherworking: Blizzard made it nice and difficult for us, making no new patterns between 425 and 440 so I think my only options are crafting epic leg armor until it's green. This seems terrible to me! I don't have that much arctic fur! I think I have like ten or twelve. Another downside is that the market is going to be flooded with these because they're the only thing people can make short of gear that requires tons and tons eternals. If anybody has some tips, help me out
• In terms of gear, I've been scouring the internet, Phae from Resto4Life filtered wowhead for us and gave us all the gear with our stats on it. Sydera from World of Matticus then went through the filtered gear on wowhead and wrote an article, Dressing Up Your Druid in Blues and Greens, which more or less did exactly what I'm trying to do (cheat sheet, nice). Matticus himself has a nice article on healing trinkets. Even with all of this being put out right in front of me, I've spent time analyzing lootrank, trying to figure out which blues I'll keep the longest.
• haste and crit....why?! haste has never really had me happy because it just means I go through my mana faster. With Blizzard trying to make mana an issue for healers again, this feels like something I'd try to avoid in favor of increasing my overall healing thoroughput. Also with so much of my healing being instant cast HoTs, and that I'm running WoW on a completely subpar computer seems to add up to a bad combination. In raids pre WotLK I was getting 7ish fps. With Wrath came updated minimum computer requirements, which means that the demands on computers is higher, which means I'll get fewer frames per second. Combine that with faster casting....I'm going to have no idea what's going on, just spam heals and pray. So, crit....don't have too many spells that use that, and we don't really get much of a benefit from critting. News to me, I heard whispers of a .8 second nourish after a crit, which has made me warm up to crit a little bit, but it'd still be a lot nicer if we had more than three spells in our aresenal, and two (for most of us) that we actually use (regrowth and nourish) that crit. I wish some of the budget for haste and crit went elsewhere.

On a random other note: I can't seem to find a weapon that I like. Why don't they make healer weapons with spirit?