Posts Tagged Resto
Give more Fluff and forget the nerfs
Surprisingly I’m not actually against fluff at all. I like fluff. Everyone likes Fluff. Also to be fair enough it always annoys me slightly when you get people saying things along the lines of
“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.
Healing addons for Anub’Arak 25 heroic
Posted by Cows in General, Resto Druid on September 29, 2009
On our original kill we didn’t use any special addons for this fight. However this week someone has created a very useful addon appropriately called ‘Penetrator‘ which marks everyone in the raid who gets penetrating cold with a raid marker. Combine this with GridStatusRaidIcons, which allows you to show raid markers in grid, and you have a rather powerful method of defining which penetrating cold target a given healer should heal.
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.
Druids without mana issues
Posted by Cows in Resto Druid on September 24, 2009
Don’t exist. Fact.
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:
- 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.
- 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.
Daily Heroics, soon a thing of the past
I was going to write a post about how we killed Anub’arak on 25man hardmode last night, but since we didn’t – that will have to wait 
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.
Latest WoW news- Zalazane's Fall and Operation Gnomeregan now on live servers September 7, 2010
- Vortex Pinnacle Video, Companion Pets, Blue Posts, September 7, 2010
- Cataclysm Dungeon Loot, Blue Posts, Comics September 6, 2010
- Stormwind Improvements, Blue Posts September 5, 2010
Armory for Cows
Armory for Beefie
Recent Comments