Druid Heal!

With the new expansion coming up the boredom of Icecrown Citadel is hitting hard. I see a lot of people starting a new character (an alt, a twink). When you’ve got your main character decked out, you probably have some emblems lying around. You can buy gems for them or primordial saronite to sell for precious gold, but why not help yourself on your new character with some heirlooms?

A male druid with the Wildheart Raiment

Heirlooms are pieces of gear with stats that scale with your level until level 80. The heirloom is the equivalent of a (very good) blue item at your current level. When you buy heirlooms you get nice buffs useful while leveling like + 10 experience on a kill, completing quests or 2% life/mana restored on a kill. You can get these items in Dalaran (for Emblems of Heroism, you can buy lower level emblems with current emblems) and the Argent Tournament Grounds (for Champions Seals). If you rather level your character in pvp you can also buy pvp heirlooms. The pvp items can be bought in Wintergrasp (for Wintergrasp Mark of Honor). But which items to get? Here is a list of items to get per talent specialization:

Restoration/Balance
Restoration is a healing specialization and is not really good for leveling, unless you plan to use the dungeon system to level.

• Preened Ironfeather Shoulders – 10% experience bonus
• Preened Ironfeather Breastplate- 10% experience bonus
• Dignified Headmaster’s Charge – a weapon to get you going!

For other gear you should look at intellect, stamina, spirit, spell power & crit for restoration and for balance: intellect, stamina, spell power, and critical strike. When you get improved moonkin form, spirit becomes more useful.

Gear fo pvp, only shoulders and a weapon:

• Lasting Feralheart Shoulders
• Grand Staff of Jordan

Other gear: look for stamina, stamina and stamina on lower levels.

Feral

• Stained Shadowcraft Spaulders – 10% experience bonus
• Stained Shadowcraft Tunic – 10% experience bonus
• Repurposed Lava Dredger – a weapon to get you going!

For other gear look for agility, strength, stamina, attack power and crit.

Gear for pvp, only shoulders:

• Exceptional Stormshroud Shoulders

These items give you +20% experience per kill and completing quests!. Imagine the bonus when you level rested! Then there’s the case of the trinkets. These are not really useful for feral druids, but the 2% mana/health restore on a kill is quite useful when questing. Heirloom items do not have durability and thus don’t need repairing.

Trinkets

• Discerning Eye of the Beast
• Swift Hand of Justice
• For pvp: Inherited Insignia of the Horde or Inherited Insignia of the Alliance

There’s also a ring you can earn by wining the Kalu’ak Fishing Derby. The Dead Pirate Ring will give you an extra 5% bonus to experience earned from kills and quests.

Enchants

The gear can be enchanted. But since heirlooms are lvl 1 items, you can only enchant them with low level enchants. I listed the enchants after the break!

Riding Skills, mount up asap!

Remember that you can learn riding skill from level 20 and flying from level 60. Which will speed up your questing by quite a bit! I listed riding skills required levels and cost after the break!

Glyphs
You can utilise glyphs after you reach level 15. I listed the levels at which you get new slots.

• Level 15: 1 Major, 1 Minor
• Level 30: 2 Major, 1 Minor
• Level 50: 2 Major, 2 Minor
• Level 70: 2 Major, 3 Minor
• Level 80: 3 Major, 3 Minor

Talents
I did not list any talents for leveling because the amount of work that would go into it would be high and since Blizzard is changing them quite soon in Cataclysm (and probably a month before with patch 4.0) its no use. But luckily others already have! Remember that you can buy dual talent specialization at level 40 and utilize other builds as well.

• Restokin – Lissana’s leveling guide for Balance and Feral
• Wowwiki- Leveling as a druid
• the Druid Wiki – Feral leveling

Last tips

• Stick to questing, it is the fastest way to level
• Only play when rested, the rested bonus is 100% extra experience, use it!
• Try out the dungeon system, the easiest way to get those pesky dungeon quests out of the way. Re-live the old dungeons (man they were HUGE in vanilla Wow.
• Start your proffesions at higher levels, its much easier.

Have lots of fun leveling your new druid. After the break the promised info!

(more…)

New Tree of Life form is going to be a tad different…. Whats your take? (you can select two options!)

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compendium |kəmˈpendēəm|noun ( pl. -diums or -dia |-dēə|) a collection of concise but detailed information about a particular subject, esp. in a book or other publication.
• a collection of things, esp. one systematically gathered : the program is a compendium of outtakes from our archives.

Sooooo, more Cataclysm! Now the dust has settled over the Druid preview and the loss of our precious Tree form (in its current state) I started looking into stuff. I will collect all the info and put it in my compendium, for all of you to read back! More to come later today/tomorrow!

Cheers,

Raaff.

We heard some stuff about Cataclysm at Blizzcon. Now Blizzard has started to give us some more information about the changes on gear! A short round up for restoration druids:

1. Spellpower and MP5 will be gone. Instead we will need Intellect and Spirit (no real change there, but mana regeneration (management) will matter more in Cataclysm!), we will still see haste and crit on gear.
2. A lot more stamina on gear as part of the make healing more challenging program.
3. Spell ranks are gone and spells will scale with level. This is something we already have right now, only you have to buy the ranks at a certain level. Once learned it will scale!
4. It will be harder to cap stats like haste, hit and crit. This will become harder as you progress further into endgame.
5. You can learn mastery talents by spending a certain amount of points in a talent tree. What the mastery will be is still a blizzard sekrit!
6. Reforging: “In Cataclysm, we are going to give players a way to replace stats on gear as part of the existing profession system. As a general rule of thumb, you’ll be able to convert one stat to 50% of another stat. While some conversions (like converting Stamina to Strength) won’t be permitted, the goal is to let you customize your gear more.“

Thats it for now. I am liking the changes, although I hope there will still be a mathy part…..