As always, since you can’t embed the HD versions automatically from youtube anymore – make sure you click the hd button. Better yet, click the link below the player to view it on youtube directly so you can put it into widescreen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJsbL2p4FNo

I can’t believe I actually managed to type that without laughing.

Fact is, if enough people complained that gnomes pink hair was too pink they’d change it.  Is this kind of blatant pandering a good or a bad thing though?  Clearly in this particular case it’s a good thing as the relative common sense of the players seems to have outweighed the creeping stupidity of a certain lead game designer.  However I can think of a fair few hundred more times when it’s been total bullshit, like a lot of the over-nerfing of Deathknight tanks being clearly community / pvp community driven and not really thought through by designers.  Which of course led to a few changes being reverted in 3.2 – and yet still DK tank threat is the lowest in the game while their resource mechanic makes them the hardest tank style to play, but that’s another story.

I haven’t tested this on the PTR yet but I assume the tick values remained unchanged – the reason I bring this up is that no one has mentioned if the total base heal of rejuvenation was also reverted back to it’s 15 second version – but I think we can assume it has.   It didn’t really make sense for them to go forward with the duration nerf at the same time as the GotEM nerf, but I wouldn’t be too sure they wont try and push the rejuv nerf back in in 4.0 or something – hide it with the ‘ooh shiny’ in the start of Cataclysm somehow.  But at least for now we’re safe.

Yeah I know it’s the news every druid blog under the sun is going to go for, but it is an important one, and hey after all I’m not really reporting the fact I’m just offering my opinion on it based on the assumption you already know because you read MMO.

Rebirth: The cooldown on this spell has been lowered from 20 minutes down to 10 minutes. Cannot be used in Arenas.

Obviously a good change, and I’m sure anyone who has done any of the CC heroic modes will agree that waiting ~16 minutes for your combat rez to come back up after a wipe or even a successful kill was starting to get pretty dumb.  I would have preferred they had done something similar to Bloodlust’s debuff mechanic for combat rez.  For example it has a 3 minute timer but places a 10 minute debuff on the druid when he/she casts it that prevents it being cast.  That way if you wipe then it’s always available for the next fight – however reducing the cooldown to 10 mins is a decent compromise.

Item – Druid T10 Restoration Relic (Rejuvenation) – The periodic healing from your Rejuvenation spell grants 32 spell power for 15 sec. Stacks up to 8 times.

Then you have this tier 10 resto druid idol and two things struck me.  Firstly it’s pretty boring how we’ve been pigeon-holed into always having a rejuvenation based idol.  Ok I get it rejuv is awesome but this idol could just have easily only procced from wild growth (and therefore stacked instantly to 8 practically every time you cast wild growth, although they’d probably have to up the spellpower for it to be worth it.  But the main issue here is that there is almost no difference between this idol and the current tier 9 idol.  In fact the new idol will just take longer to ramp up to full spellpower at the start – and gives you hardly any extra.

The current idol procs instantly for 234 spellpower and has 100% uptime if you have at least 2 rejuvs running. The new idol procs 256 spellpower in 32 spellpower segments with 100% proc chance per segment per tick of rejuv.  It just seems to me the difference isn’t very pronounced, sure people will go for the t10 idol but probably not as a ‘first piece must have item’ like the t9 one was, as you’re only gaining 22 spellpower.

Personally I’ve never liked the whole relic procs idea that came in with t9.  It seems very lazy design to simply give classes a major stat boost for something they’re already doing in their rotations / general healing.  How much better would the t10 have been if they upped the spellpower a bit, to say 280, lasts 20 seconds – and made it a flat proc from something other than rejuv – for example swiftmend.  Suddenly you actually have to work a little tiny bit for your idol proc rather than just getting spellpower bonuses for doing what you were going to do anyway.

Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation – Your haste now reduces the time between the periodic healing ticks of your Rejuvenation spell.
Gift of the Earthmother now increases your total spell haste by 2/4/6/8/10%

I’ve put these two together because they are clearly part of the same issue.  If rejuv ticks are to be hasted, then of course the 359 haste softcap has to be moved and the only way to really do this is to nerf GotEM, so that’s what they’re doing.  This nerf only makes sense if the idea of hasted rejuvs is going to go live – which they already mentioned it might not – so I’d fully expect to see this change to GotEM removed if hasting does indeed not go live.

Of course I’m talking about a haste softcap as it exists on live today, but even if GotEM wasn’t nerfed the ’softcap’ would no longer really be a true cap.  As it is right now any and all haste you have past 359 is essentially worthless on *most* fights.  However with Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation haste would suddenly be worth taking past 359 – arguably not worth more than crit currently because of the t9 bonus but then t10 doesn’t have that bonus so we’re going to ignore that for now.  But by nerfing the amount of haste your instant spells gain from GotEM by 10%, if you want to hit a 1.0 sec gcd for instants now you require ~856 haste which is a pretty big increase over the old 359.  Of course due to item inflation in 3.3 the top level gear is going to have insane amounts of haste on it and crit goes back to being a lot less useful once you replace your t9 set for t10.  This change might even force some druids back into 3/3 Celestial Focus in order to reduce the needed haste back down to a more obtainable ~736 (with 3/3). I personally think the GotEM change is a good one, although technically a nerf, at least now when you get your brand spanking new gear you wont be as annoyed to find out it’s covered in haste as you were in 3.2 – since you’re actually going to want to have that haste.

What I really don’t like though is the idea of hasted rejuvenation.  The whole concept seems to be flawed, based around the rather giddy idea that most other blogs have on the subject, that ticks wont be nerfed once hasting comes in.  Of course they will be, if suddenly your rejuv is ticking, say, 15% faster than it used to – do you really think Blizzard will let you just keep that?  They’ve already made it clear that they think rejuv is overpowered so I doubt it will take that long for them to nerf the tick amounts down to compensate for the increased tick speed.  And then what are we left with? A spell that essentially does the same healing it did before but now requires a lot of haste stacking to maintain it, sure it will now scale with haste but all that means is that those of us at the very top of the gear chain will have a slight benefit.  Those in the middle will have no benefit and those at the bottom will have a nerf.

I’m not going as far as to say it’s a completely bad idea, as who knows what fights the future brings who’s mechanics will probably favour the new shiny fast rejuv, I see it as more of an unnecessary change.  Certainly the change to GotEM makes it more attractive, but still an obvious crutch to hold up what in the long run will probably turn out to be a bad mechanic.

This is what resto druids, and druids in general (not feral…) have become.  We are no longer the shape shifters we once were in classic, or even TBC (hey at least resto pvp would use bearform back then), balance and resto druids alike just sit in boomkin or tree for entire fights.  It makes you wonder what the point of having these forms is if you are just supposed to stay in them.  I mean as far as tree is concerned, you could easily just replace the 4 talent points with a passive bonus that gave 15% spirit as spellpower, gave a 6% healing aura to the raid, increased your item-armour to 200% and gave you 4% more healing – then at least we’d get to see our armour graphics.

Ghostcrawler did touch on this, the fact that only feral druids switch forms, which is mainly because they have 2 forms and they’ll want to go to caster form to combat rez, innervate someone or may be heal themselves.  While resto and balance stay in their forms other than the odd cat+dash or travelform scenario, and I don’t really count travelform.  Feral is pretty much balanced in this way, they are rewarded for shifting, while balance and resto are only ever penalized for it.  But so far nothing has been done to address this, and even when Ghostcrawler brought it up he kind of said it in a whiny “waahh why dont they shift, they should shift more” kind of way.  Which I for one object to, the reason we don’t shift Mr. Ghostcrawler is simply because you have not given us anything to shift for.

In my mind there are some easy things that could be done to make shifting attractive to resto druids in pve.  And so in no particular order:

1. Bring back fights with mana leech mechanics.  In BC we had a few of these, someone would get a debuff in the raid which drained their mana or there was a pulsing mana leech going on which could be predicted (or had a cast bar).  This would see all the resto/balance druids instantly shifting into bear to avoid the leech.  Simple and affective.
2. Look at why Feral works so well with shifting, other than having 2 primary forms, and emulate this with all specs.  Put simply, ferals can still heal reasonably well and have 2 major abilities for helping others (combat rez and innervate) which they have to shift in order to use.  We could easily copy this idea across to resto by having, say, a resto specced cat actually do something useful for either the druid or the raid.  A simple idea which is by no means finalized could be something along the lines of a talent in deep resto that causes the rake debuff given by a resto specced cat to regen mana/hp/energy/rage to anyone who hits the boss.  Then simply design some of the upcoming encounters to benefit from this mechanic in certain phases/situations and hey presto u got resto druids shifting into cat to apply rake once in a while.
3. Give us specific reasons to move out of tree form.  Give resto some reason to want to put some kind of debuff on the boss, which is only good if you are deep resto  but you have to be in caster form to cast it.  An example of this I liked, while not a debuff of sorts, was to rework the useless tranquillity to be a much shorter cooldown and do something different such as increase the damage of the targeted party within your raid by 10% for 10 seconds while channelled.  And of course make it so you can’t cast it while in tree.

You get the idea, I’m not suggesting any of the above proposals should be implemented I’m just trying to get the ball rolling on fixes to an issue which quite frankly has only got worse as the game as gone on.

Of course I’ve mentioned mainly buffs as a way to persuade people to shift, but the same could easily be done with nerfs.  You could make innervate a balance only talent (and buff it) thus promoting boomkins in raids while also slightly nerfing resto.  But then to counteract not having innervate as resto, make resto have an ability they can use in a feral form to regen mana (similar to enhancement shaman’s mana regen cooldown mechanic) but it requires them to melee the boss in cat/bear.  Hell a simple one would be to create a resto talent which causes frenzied regen to regenerate mana, which would force a resto to go into bear, do some melee damage to get 100 rage and then pop frenzied regen to act like an innervate.

Either by carrot or stick, something needs to be done to get druids shifting again – and I doubt that I’m the only resto druid who thinks so.

Druid T10 Restoration 2P Bonus – The healing granted by your Wild Growth spell reduces 0% less over time.
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.

Wild growth no longer reducing healing per tick? That sounds like it might be too good to be true, since for most of WotLK resto 2 set bonuses have been pretty lacklustre.  Perhaps they decided that the rejuvenation crit bonus of tier 9 was going to be a tough one to beat with just another 4 piece bonus and so they’d need the combination of both bonuses being pretty nice in order to persuade people that the tier 10 perks were better.  At least it’s not going the way of t8->t9 conversion where clearly someone in the design team just said ‘”oh shit, tier 8 4p bonus is way better and scales much higher than tier 9 4p – we’re going to have to nerf  it by 50% just to get people to upgrade…”.

So yeah, I like the t10 2p, but I’m uneasy about the wording for the t10 4p.  As some of you might have noticed the word “jump” is a bit of a problematic one here.  ”Jump” signifies that there is a 2% chance when rejuv ticks that it will remove itself from the current target and randomly jump to a new target.  I’m sure I’m not the only one that would see this as problematic, in fact I’d go as far as to say if this went live in that fashion that no decent druid would be using t10 4 set and would probably stick with just 2 or 3 pieces for as long as they could get away with.  The only way this 4 set will work is if it isn’t a “jump” but more of a “copy” or “spread”, ie: 2% chance for the rejuv to apply another rejuv to a random person in range while the parent rejuv remains on the designated target.

To be fair to Blizzard this is probably how it will (or even does, since we can’t test it yet) work, since there really is no way that the wording taken at face value would ever be considered an actual buff to rejuvenation.  Can you imagine? You rejuv a guy on 50% hp and after 1 tick it just goes to some other random guy leaving the original target without a hot?  Yeah, I don’t think so, but that is how it’s worded right now.

“Yeah don’t fix shamans pvp, just add additional totem models for each race.”

As anyone who has ever worked in any kind of job ever before knows, there are different departments that do different things.  Even if you’re some jobs worth retard working in a McJob™ you at least understand that it’s not the-guy-on-the-till’s fault if someone in the kitchen has burnt someone’s fillet-o-fish.  Thereby the designers utter failure to do anything constructive with pvp balance (other than pissing pvers the fuck off with their blatant pvp-orientated pve-hurting nerfs) has nothing to do with the art department producing a new shiny dwarf totem, and it is shiny.

But as many of you might have already seen resto druids got a pretty big nerfbat.

Rejuvenation now heals 1352 over 12 sec. (Down from 1690 over 15 sec).

Yeah, where did that come from? It’s just typical Blizzard goalpost moving – yeah I was looking forward to 3k rejuv ticks coming soon (fully raid buffed I’m at around 2790 ticks right now).  But this doesn’t affect those of us at the top end that much anyway – sure rejuv will heal for less in total now but a few upgrades later and you’ve made up for it just with more spellpower stacking.  The duration nerf is a pretty harsh one, in fact as many might not know this was apparently a bug.  A bug? Really? A bug that has been in the game for over a year? Yeah, that’s the flimsiest excuse to try and make a blatant nerf look like a bug fix I’ve seen.

Yeah okay, I am biased in this particular discussion, after all no one likes to see their class nerfed right?  But this really caught me off guard – most other resto nerfs have been predictable.  A lot of us saw the lifebloom nerf incoming, even though it was again a pve-nerf and pvp-buff situation which the current design team seem to favour, but a rejuv nerf really wasn’t on the cards.  All we can do right now is hope that it doesn’t make it to live – so get on those forums and complain like mad since that appears to be the most effective way of getting something nerfed, buffed, or a nerf overturned.

Of course this is also a nerf to Swiftmend, as you’ll only be able to SM once per rejuv, nice.

I recommend using the modded version of GridStatusRaidIcons which can be found here, this version was modified to increase visibility of raid markings when used in the center icon position in grid – the normal version has rather translucent icons which can be hard to see on top of certain class colours.

You end up with something like this in grid when the raid gets penetrating cold, along with the rather pleasing whisper from whoever is running the addon

I’m not sure how useful this is for any of Anub’s versions other than 25man hardmode, as with the other 3 versions you can pretty much just have a normal raid healing strat of ‘heal ppl when they go low’ and just win. But since the idea behind 25man hardmode is to keep the whole raid hovering on as low hp as possible – the healer assignment needs to be refined so that the 5 penetrating cold targets get a 6k+ heal (or bubble) each, in under 2 seconds. We tend to run 4 healers – either 2 druids and 2 priests or 3 priests and 1 druid.  In the latter example each priest is assigned 1 raid marker to heal and keep alive, and the resto druid (in this case me) takes 2 due to max hasted, glyphed and specced healing touch being a super-fucking-fast 7-10k heal. The priests also have the secondary task of throwing a bubble at the druid’s 2nd target just to help with the first tick as that can sometimes come faster than 2 seconds and thus cause a death.

This certainly is a very nice addon, every now and then you notice it fails to put a marker on someone but this is not often and usually not a problem as the person who’s marker failed to appear just heals the unmarked guy who should have had it.

Just to confirm, only 1 person in the raid needs to have the Penetrator addon installed and activated. And this person must have assistant so they can mark – it should also ideally be the person with the least latency in the raid as this can make the difference between having marks placed instantly or after a delay.  All the penetrating cold healers should then have Grid StatusRaidIcons installed to allow them to see the markers in grid. It should also be noted that the addon only uses the markers you see in the screenshot – namely: moon, triangle, circle, star and diamond.  The only downside to this addon that we noticed when using it to kill anub last night was that it seems to wipe all other markers off whenever it sets new ones. By this I mean that even markers that it doesn’t use (cross, skull) appear to be removed from whatever they are assigned to as soon as a new batch of dots have their markers applied. This means you cannot use markers to identify between burrower adds for interruption and have to use positional based targeting instead – although this didn’t seem to be much of a problem for us.

The phase 3 healing in this fight is still very stressful, but this addon at least takes a small part of that away.

However if you ever read any resto druid related forum posts, either official or mmo-champ, you’ll find vast numbers of them.  The usual situation is some new druid asking about meta choice or  something.  Someone comes along and explains the guys choices with the theme that spellpower is king but regen is also needed, and throwing away cheap regen (like the mana restore meta IED) is a bad thing etc.

And we know what happens next, some compete fuckwit comes and posts along the lines of:

“LOL NOOBS I NEVER RUN OUT OF MANA EVER EVER EVER NOOBS LOL JOHN MADDEN LOL”.

I’m paraphrasing of course, but you get the idea.  If a resto druid ever tells you he/she never has any mana problems then there are only two options to consider:

1. They are actually retarded, perhaps playing wow is something their doctor suggested to help them cope after losing 1/2 their brain in an unfortunate schmelting accident.
2. They exclusively play content which is beneath their gear level, and somehow can’t comprehend that this might be the reason that they find it so easy and not that they’re just so awesome.

So yeah you could gem exclusively spellpower, take no regen gear at all, take the spellpower meta and still not run out of mana.  This is providing you’re in something like full tier8 running Nexus.

The problem is that even if these people somehow break every rule that I know of pertaining to resto druids and WoW, and actually are never running out of mana on content which is at their gear level – then why don’t they ask why?  Invariably this will only be because they’ve gemmed massively for regen, int, spirit instead of spellpower and measure their performance solely on how much mp5 they have while casting.  Why would you do that?  Any mana you are left with at the end of a fight is essentially wasted, the ideal situation is to balance your regen with spellpower to the extent that  you maximize your throughput while maintaining some kind of buffer with with mana, but not so you are regening so much that you end a fight on 1/3 or more mana.

Edit:  By the way looks like the Wild Growth target out of range bug has been stealth-fixed in 3.2.2.  Still seems to bug when the target is dead though – but this isn’t as big of a problem as the OOR was.

External link in case you want to watch it in a larger window / fullscreen:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DkfSRd04pA

So when 3.2 first hit I was running 3 different level 80 characters through the daily heroic minefield.  When it first started it wasn’t so bad because I actually hadn’t done any heroics for a very very long time and so, while they weren’t exactly new content, I had forgotten bits and bobs so it wasn’t totally mind numbing.  However that quickly changed, mainly due to the almighty random number generator’s persistence in choosing the same fucking dungeons over and over on consecutive days as if encouraged by some kind of malevolent force.  Not that anyone really minds when it picks Azjol’Nerub 5 times in a row though, rogues and hunters sure are popular dps on the days when it does!  But when you’ve just completed your 3rd gundrak in almost as many days, it starts to grate.

I pretty much can’t be fucked to do the daily heroic on most of my characters now and this is for other reasons than just that the content is boring as hell.  Mainly that the end is already in sight – triumph badge wise – for both Cows and Deathcow, that and I don’t really give a shit about Bullshot.  Cows is currently getting 61 badges a week just from raids alone, while Deathcow is getting around 49 (no hardmode 25).  I only now need another 70 badges in order to have enough to upgrade my last piece of 232 t9 to 245, once I win a trophy.  Trophies are coming thick and fast since we now get 4x between 10 guys on 10 man hardmode, and then another 9x between 25 guys on both 25mans (soon to be 10x hopefully).  In fact as I mentioned a while back we’re getting even more trophies due to splitting up the mains into 2x 25 man groups and filling the rest of those groups with alts, and giving trophies to mains.  As a result, the motivation to actually run through many more heroics is rapidly evaporating.

I wouldn’t give it much more than 2 weeks before you stop seeing any Apex mains doing the daily heroic any more, and so I guess no more 3am crew for me either which definitely isn’t a bad thing

Just to add, I recently had an argument on some forum somewhere (I would link it but I totally forgot which of the many forums I frequent it was on) about which meta is best for resto druids.  Of course as most druids know this is the Insightful Earthsiege Diamond, which is always better unless you massively out-gear the content you are running. I found a great post here which explains why in more detail.