Mooonfire!

The place is a mess, there are posts that need fixing, the various lists on the sidebar are extremely old and you have no idea what I’m up to in-game these days. Also, I have a developing rant about what makes raiding fun.

You do not, however, get any of these things right now, because my first post back after a long, long hiatus, is about my current spec, what makes it fun, and what I might change.

You can find it by examining me on the armory, and it’s something of an odd spec- A variation of the Dreamstate healer (itself uncommon) without the classic support talent Brambles. It takes the DPS-enhancing talents intead.

So why do I like this build? Versatility.

We were in Karazhan last night. We had zero warrior tanks. Nada. We had only two healers (both druids, neither me). Majinbill, a paladin, was our main tank. Maj and I have this understanding, and we’ve now tanked, as a team, all of Karazhan (and upper Kara twice).

We started out fine. No priests, so no real CC against undead. One of the DPS face-pulled a second pull during the stables. We didn’t even notice until after the pull was down. Midnight/Attumen were cake and, coincidentally, dropped the scope schematic I’d been hoping for for a very, very long time.

Moroes? No CC. Shadow priestess, holy priestess, prot warrior, ret paladin. No real trouble. Maj held Moroes/Ret and I held Moroes/Crispin until the priests were down. Fury warriors went to work on Ret. Crispin was my buddy for the remainder of the evening. I died due to healer inattention, but then we were running with two healers where our guild traditionally takes three.

Maiden? Maj and I both put on our healing sets. He cleansed and did spot heals, I healed, one of the fury warriors tanked her (We had already determined that I could in fact hold aggro on her just fine with only my instants, but two healers was insufficient for the damage flying around).

Opera? Romulo and Julianne. What’s the problem here?

No dispel.

Lots of interrupts- no dispel. We tried it with me tanking Julianne and Maj tanking Romulo. Problem? Not enough healing. Okay, I put on the healing gear and strap one of the fury warriors back into their tanking gear, away we go.

Curator? Cake. I have a partial arcane resist set, so I soaked up bolts and pretended to be DPS while Maj took the big guy.

Aran? Double cake. I just pretended I was DPS (and took out two of the water elementals on my own).

Prince? Triple cake. Drop into the healer set and let Mr. Pally have all the fun. Once we hit phase 3 the healing requirements slackened off, but we needed DPS, so… wrath away!

So why this post? We were talking it over in the raid, and realized just how useful it is to have a raid member who can, at need, be any of the three roles.

I love my spec. It makes me all happy.

(It’s pure gravy that neither our prot paladins nor our prot warriors can hold threat against me if I decide to take the mobs away- something we used to our advantage in Karazhan last night. “Llanion, you take skull, I’ll hold the others. Burn skull, then grab one off me and keep going.”)

Is there anything I’d change? Honestly, yes- I’d like a point or three in Subtlety. My aggro is still sufficient to match a Warrior, and I would have a higher cap on my DPS in raids when I’m filling the DPS role. I’m still thinking about it.
Hopefully my next post won’t have such a long gap. Peace!

~Ll

It behooves me (ahahaha!) to learn that I should never make predictions about upcoming posts, either in particulars regarding date, substance, category or number. It seems that saying I’m going to post, no matter in what way or how nebulous the reference, leads to my being compelled to spend at least one week not-blogging.

In theory, I have now learned this. In practice, I suspect, not so much.

---

I respecced recently. I went from 17/0/44 “Angry Tree” Heal/Solo/Utility build to a 37/0/24 “Raid Support” Heal/Solo/Utility build. I am finding many things about this.

1. Dreamstate + Intensity = Mana Regen, whoa.
2. Nature’s Grace is my friend. Suddenly there’s a point to getting crits on spells.
3. I need to run a heroic to see how this changes my healing style. I do have a couple ideas involving spamming downranked spells to force crits.
4. I miss Swiftmend.
5. My raidmates love me; Improved Faerie Fire means that the hunters, rogues, enhancment shamans, tanks and fury warriors can pretty much slice 47 hit rating out of their gear without injury to their DPS. They’re all happy now about how they can put more gear, gems, and other enhancements towards straight-up damage stats. (In some cases, this means they can use buff foods they want instead of Spicy Hot Talbuk.)
6. Just the fact that Faerie Fire will be on the mobs means the damage happens faster and harder. If only Imp FF gave the same bonus to spells…
7. Insect Swarm. 2% chance to miss makes for happier healers. Just the fact that I can put this up during fights now makes for shorter fights, which also makes for happier healers.
8. Healing Touch can weasel its way back into my healing rota. In fact, I have this neat theory about a downranked Healing Touch- I can’t say too much here, lest the curse strikes again.
9. I can see my gear again. I’ll be frank, I don’t like looking like a wilted piece of broccoli, and I really don’t like the 80% movement snare. If Andriges’ skins (thanks to Phaelia for showcasing these on Resto4Life) were in the game, this would be a different matter, but they aren’t.
10. I have Moonkin form for the first time in my druiding career. It’s rather tasty, though I must admit I keep forgetting to use it. On the other hand, now that there’s no pressing reason for me to be glommed in with the tank group, I can be in the caster group, which means that there are some evil things happening on, say, trash pulls… or during Curator’s Evocates… or on Shade if he’s not hitting us hard enough…
11. I have found that I much prefer Control of Nature 3/3 to Nature’s Grasp+2 points of Impr. NG.
12. If I want to group and they already have a healer… I’m actually useful now. I don’t have to just mumble about raking my leaves and rustle off to sit in a corner. I can DPS in five-mans.
13. Spirit is now on-par, in my personal item-budgeting thoughts, with Intellect (Int takes the place of Spirit as regards the 25% bonus to +healing… though now it gives +damage as well. And even when not in tree form). This is great, because, uh, there are a lot of sources for +int. Including the [Flask of Distilled Wisdom]. An actual flask that has a point for healing now! It’s great. (Well, okay, so 16 +dmg/heal and 6.5 MP5 isn’t exactly gamebreaking. It’s more advantage than I got from that flask in my old build, and better than yet more mana regen).
14. MmmmmmmOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONFIRE!

Geez. Sorry for the alarm, folks, your local druid needs to remember to check his talent points when they might, say, have gotten reset during the patch. Appropriate strikeouts are in place below.

You know what I hate right now?

A number.

The number is this: 0.4.0.7958.

It’s the patch number for the current version of Patch 2.4 currently under testing on the test realms. My hatred for this number currently comes because of one line in the Public Test Realm Patch Notes.

Let’s talk Lifebloom.

I’ll warn you now, this post is going to get long, it’s a wall of text because there were no relevant images, and it makes no assumptions about how familiar you are with the game’s mechanics or the math that goes into them. If you want the short version, please, press CTRL+F or your browser’s equivalent and search for the text “Self? This isn’t going to make sense for a lot of people.”

You’re familiar with the spell Lifebloom, I’m sure, if you group with (or are) a restoration-specced druid.

• It deals a small amount of healing every second for up to seven seconds, then delivers a ‘bloom’ of healing at the end of the spell.
• If it’s dispelled, the ‘bloom’ goes off instantly.
• It’s instant-cast and fairly mana-cheap.
• It can be stacked on a single target up to three times, and re-casting it refreshes its duration (as well as adding a stack if it’s not already fully stacked).
• I have remarked before on how it’s a passive form of mind control.
• It’s the major staple of druid healers.

So, now that we’re on the same page, why is this post about Lifebloom? Well, I’m not the only one who’s talking about this, but here’s the down-to-earth, nitty-gritty details.

In Warcraft, there are two statistics intimately known by all casters, healer or otherwise: Bonus damage and bonus healing. They’re commonly abbreviated +healing and +damage, and are seen on caster items. What do they do, and why are they useful? Well, just as noted in their description, they improve healing and damage spells by ‘up to’ the amount listed. Some spells get more advantage than others, generally (but not always) based on the cast time. Once you get to level 66, give or take, a caster can increase their efficiency by garnering large amounts of these stats. Clearly, one cast of, say, Fireball does X damage. Now, in order to do 5X damage, you can do one of two things:

• Stack enough Intellect and/or mana regen gear that you can do 5 Fireballs. Of course, you’ve just spent five times as much mana, and taken five times as long, not to mention provided five times as many resist chances.

OR

• Stack enough spell damage to make your Fireball, say, 2.5 times as powerful. Then you only need twice the mana and time of a single Fireball, but do five times the damage.

Let’s translate this to healing. Let’s pretend I’ve totally lost my mind and am using Healing Touch. Let’s further pretend that I have some mystical magical rank of Healing Touch that does exactly 1000 health.

We’re going to keep pretending- it takes 1000 mana, and 3 seconds to cast. This means that I can spent 1000 mana and restore 1000 health, every 3 seconds.

Okay. Now I put on gear that has exactly +500 to healing. Further, assume that Healing Touch gets 100% of my +healing effects (it actually does!). Now I can restore 1500 health every 3 seconds for 1000 mana. My health per second- important in heroics and raiding- has gone up significantly. My mana efficiency (also important) has also gone up significantly. Before, 3000 points of damage would take me 9 seconds and 3000 mana; now those figures are 6 seconds and 2000 mana. Note the (major!) improvements.

So how does all this relate to Lifebloom? Well, Lifebloom as a basic spell is: 39 health restored to the target per second, per stack, and a 600-point bloom.

With my gear (armory link to the right, or click here) as it stands now, I do about 175 healing per sec/stack. That’s the result of not quite 1400 +healing on my gear. Yes, I’m epicced out. The trick of it is, the only way to improve Lifebloom is, basically, with +healing. ‘Spamming’ it won’t help- because there’s no direct heal until the over-time effect wears off, and because every time it hits the target that effect is refreshed, Lifebloom cannot be used to rapidly increase a target’s health. In tree form, your only option for spamming is Regrowth- which has a drawback. Even assuming it crits (not an unhealthy assumption, when you’ve got +50% crit chance on that spell from talents), you’re talking about a 3000 point heal.

The drawback? It sucks away a lot of your mana pool. It’s not a spell you can really afford to spam. Plus, spamming it ‘eats’ a long HoT that you probably wouldn’t mind having on your tank.

Swiftmend can be used, of course, but at once per 15 seconds, it’s not spammable either.

So what does all this verbiage boil down to? Druids are not really meant for healing large chunks of damage fast for long fights. Priests do that. Paladins do that. Shaman do that. They do it (honestly!) better than we do. Our job, as druids, is to give a nice buffer with our healing-over-time spells that keeps the tank from ever needing big heals, if we can. We can, of course, do the nice spike heals at need, but our skills aren’t balanced around that; we go out of mana relatively fast doing that sort of thing. By and large, druids are designed to even out spikes, to make a ’spam’ healer’s job easier. Healing in that way, with a priest, paladin or shaman partnering with us, as a team we can endure long, long fights.

 

So… why this post?

 

Well, I was on the Public Test Realms over lunchtime. I’d heard about Lifebloom getting some changes, so Lanion went and threw himself into the air in Shattrath, then dropped onto the ground. (Incidentally, I want to know, really, who, took the name Llanion on the US PTR? Before I started the character I made absolutely certain there was no active Lv10+ character in the game with that name… but I digress.)

When Lanion landed, his Lifebloom spell did this:

128, 127, 128… 1173

160, 160, 160…

Then I switched back over to the Live realms, on Arathor, and had Llanion throw himself off a tower.

I got this: 172, 172, 172… 1269.

In both cases, I was doing this with no neckpiece on (that’s the one piece of my gear that’s changed since I made the PTR clone).

So I thought to myself: “Self? This isn’t going to make sense for a lot of people. Can you break it down at all?”

Edit: This experiment will be re-conducted this evening when I have a moment on the Live realms.

I started pulling pieces of gear off, on the Live side, to see what it would take to reduce my Lifebloom to the proposed 2.4 levels.

First I took off [my weapon]. Then [one ring]. Then [the other ring].

That’s right. In order to get 127/128 lifebloom ticks, the level I will have fully geared after 2.4 hits, I am required to entirely remove Light’s Justice, which is the best pre-25-man one-handed healer mace in the game, the Revered-level Violet Signet and the Keeper’s Ring of Piety.

 

Ladies, gentlemen, please go post on the Test Realm forum. Please. I am not kidding when I say that this is going to make taking a Restoration druid on your raids far, far and away less fruitful than another paladin for an extra blessing, or another shaman for totems, or another priest for, heck, Prayer of Mending or a second Renew stack or something funky.

These changes, if they go through, essentially set me back to the level my Lifebloom was at several weeks and epics ago. before I started Karazhan. It will mean my staple healing spell is at the level of instance blues, and I don’t mean heroics, despite the fact that I am now outfitted in 90% epics with a T5-equivalent helmet. Blizzard seems to think this will ‘fix’ the 2v2 prevalence of Druids. It won’t. In Arenas, I am reliably informed, Druids don’t rely on the ticks from Lifebloom, they rely on the final Bloom (which is actually stronger in 2.4 than Live). This change really only affects PVE.

Test Realm forums. Protest. Represent. Something. Anything.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is absolute and utter bullshit. Sorry for the language, but it’s true, and it has me tasting bile.

Edit to add: No, it is not as skull-crushingly hideous as I thought. Is it still bad? Yes. At early raiding gear and in early raiding situations, you’ll be losing ~20 hp/sec/stack/tank. Translated, 120 HP over two tanks assuming a full stack on each.

I was working my way towards my next upgrade- an upgraded mace, since the bosses we’re downing are generous with all the healing gear except weaponry- in Eye of the Storm recently, when I came to an interesting conclusion.

It works sort of like this:

No, really. I started to notice that the people I was healing were, well, actually sticking with me. I even got a couple comments in /s: “Nice heals!”
“good healing”
“you worthless [profane statement regarding gender, romantic preference, and/or hereditary legitimacy]ers, I’m not going to cap the flag unless you get three towers”

I let that last guy die.

My by-now-decently-sized group moved, at my whim, towards the less-heavily-defended of the Alliance towers. They did not fight to control the center, they did not ‘attack, die/win, run away regardless’. We fought until the tower went down, and since I didn’t move, we stayed until it was solidly Horde-aligned.

Then we started making captures, moving two at a time, me paired with some swifter-moving DPSery type.

I guess the point of this post is to explain that healers really do seem to have a good amount of deciding power in determining the flow of a battleground. I haven’t noticed the effect so much in AV, possibly because it’s so spread out, but I think the phenomenon is worth researching.

And if I get to punt gnomes in the name of research, well, it’s a good day to be me.

What do you think? Are we destined to see a wave of Healers-Generale, or am I just a deluded cow in a tuxedo?

(Got 49 on Monday, the last one Tuesday- Tux’d the whole way. No other gear but a riding crop and a Frostwolf Howler.)

For those of you who want an abbreviated summary of today’s post: Don’t use Lifebloom, Lifebloom, Lifebloom as your initial casting sequence and then react to events as they happen.
Instead, use Lifebloom, Rejuvenation, Lifebloom, Lifebloom.

Buckle up and hang on, this one’s a doozy.

I have often played a healing character in games. In Guild Wars I had a rather accomplished Monk (partly due to frustration over players not wanting to take quote-unquote ‘underpowered’ Mesmers).

In Warcraft my first character was a Shaman. Then there was the usual flurry of different characters looking for one I really liked. There was a druid next, and a warlock. A hunter, who I held on to all the way to level 30. Then I rerolled a priest.

At 47, fed up with and frustrated by PVP against Rogues, I re-rolled to a Druid because I wanted more survival ability.

Once I hit Cat Form, I neither slowed down nor looked back. Then, late fifties or early sixties I guess, I decided I wanted to heal. I started slowly and painstakingly collecting healing gear. By the time I hit 70, I was an accomplished healer, and I’d done enough number-crunching that I thought I knew it all.

No.

I am still learning about healing. Here are a few tips.
(more…)

No really.

I get that we downed Horseman in fifteen minutes including trash.

I get that we burned Moroes after one abortive attempt (trap broke early).

I get that Maiden chain-fired us and we came back for a second try and pasted her against the wall.

I get that while this was happening we got two epics off trash. I get all that.

(I don’t quite get why this guy actually had these as an upgrade, they seem rather… out of place…)

Anyway. We were in Karazhan today. We burned Attumen with, and I’m going to brag here on other people’s behalf, such accomplished grace we made it look casual.

My nightmares about Moroes from last week? Gone. This week’s group burned down the adds, shackled, trapped, and in general blew a hole in the universe so smoothly that I was actually and honestly surprised at “First down. Second down. Third dropped.” coming through my headset.

Maiden? Well, I’ll be honest, I actually thought we’d down her more easily than we did. But, still being honest, the reason we wiped the first time was because we were too close together on the melee group. Adjusting for one melee more than we had last week was hard, and the tank caught the end of one of her Chain-Holy Wipe-o-Matic Cluster-Killers.

We got her the second time though.

Then there was some discussion. “Well, you know, we could just clear up to Opera. See what it is.” I didn’t mention that it resets and possibly changes after everyone leaves for a half-hour. I wanted to see!

The entire way up, I’m hearing- from the three people who’ve run Opera before- about how nice it would be if we got Red Riding Hood, since that’s both fun and simple.

I also heard how we had a good group for Oz…

…and how we must live in dread of Romulo and Julianne.

“Of course you know,” I said in jest, “Now we’re going to get them.”

Our brave few cast lots to see who would get to strip buff and go out onstage to provoke the curtain.

“Tonight” the stage manager bellowed as Wild shivered in his unmentionables, “we explore a tale of forbidden love!”

My headset lit up. “Crap! It’s Romeo.”
“Can we try it anyway?” I’m not sure who suggested that.

One reasonably-fast explanation later….

“Romulo’s 20, swap to Julianne.”
“Fifteen and six.”
“Keep at it- eight and four.”
“Four and two!”
“Two and one- she’s down, get him!”

“YES!”

I admit to yelling over voice chat. It was amazing. That was two hours ago and only now is the adrenaline draining.

What I don’t get is this.

In two weeks, I have gotten no fewer than five epics.

FIVE.

Gloves of Saintly Blessing. The VERY NEXT DAY, Mitts of the Tree-Mender. This week? Both dropped again (naturally I didn’t need them this time) plus Earthsoul Leggings and Bands of Indwelling.

I don’t get it! Please, give the tanks some love!

No. Really. Wild, you’re my witness here. If the Forest Wind Shoulderpads drop tomorrow off Curator- (because you just know that punk’s going down) I will cry. I mean it. I will actually cry. The Wrynn Dynasty Greaves or a T4 glove need to drop instead. The tanks need some love.

For those interested in knowing:

27/0/34 is not really viable; Moonglow doesn’t really cut down the mana costs enough to make up for the fact that there’s no Dreamstate pouring mana back in.  Which is too bad, as it’s a rather tasty build, just… short on mana longevity in a big way if you’re used to trees.

I’m speccing 18/0/43 for Kara tomorrow. More experiments in a couple months when my respec cost subsides again. 

And this is where it all goes kind of sour, you know?

I want- I desperately want- to try a new build. It’s part of the fun of the game for me.

Besides, A: Tree was supposed to be temporary.
B: I hate not being able to see my armor.
C: I want nicer solo viability so I can do some quests without asking people for help or taking nine years/drinking a lake.

So this is what it all comes down to, calculations and so on taken care of:

34/-/27 for the MP5 bonuses and Moonkin when I’m soloing?
27/-/34 for the Swiftmend and Imp. Regrowth?
Or stay as Tree?

Maybe I should just flip a coin.

Of course, we’re just starting Karazhan and perhaps I should wait until we know it bet…. nah.

This, however, is not it.

This is about Karazhan.

I had never been before last week. Oh, sure, I understood that there was sweet gear (Mother of murlocs, there’s EPICS in there!) but I’m in a very laid back, very casual guild.

Well, five of us found ourselves together running an instance.

It went well.

We ran another. It went very well.

We ended up doing the entire Karazhan keying chain. With no wipes. In two days.

We’ve since run several more instances in this five-man, and it’s fun every time. Karazhan, despite our keys, seemed an unattainable goal.

We said to our allied guild “hey, we have some people with Kara keys. If you do, too, you want to poke around in there sometime, wipe a few times, have some fun?”

I figured we’d have a chance to gear up a bit more first.

Then that lunatic Wildhermit got involved and started prodding. We ended up going that very week (four of us and six of them).

We dropped Attumen in one try. We dropped Shadikith in the basement with the same amount of trouble.

We went back the next day and turned Maiden of Virtue into Toasted Woman on Floor, one try. Moroes was a little trickier, but we got him on the fourth attempt.

Karazhan, as it turns out, is fun. Really, really fun. I am looking forward to next week and getting more epics.

I highly recommend Karazhan if you have a chance to go in a low-stress environment. If you can drop Attumen, you’re geared okay. If you can drop Moroes, you’re coordinated enough.

This week we’re going to try for Opera.

P.S. Mitts of the Tree-Mender!

Later, I have to write a nice numbery post about comparative damage in the Balance tree, because I promised my guildmaster I would. Tonight, though, I have a different topic in mind.

Innervate. It’s an awesome spell. (more…)