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!

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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…..

With the nerf to Gift of the Earthmother in patch 3.3 the haste landscape has changed a bit. This post covers the changes to haste needed to achieve your much loved 1.0 second global cooldown again!

How does haste scale with your cast time?

Haste increases the speed you cast your spells (lowers the casttime) with and lowers your global cooldown (gcd). The global cooldown cannot be lowered under 1 second. However the lowering of your casttime is not limited. There is no such thing and a haste cap, you can have infinite haste untill your spell is instant, which is unreachable. Your haste stat can influenced by gear (including gems and enchants), talents or aura’s (buffs, elixirs, totems etc). The only talent that can lower your gcd or spellcast time through haste is Gift of the Earthmother and Celestial Focus. Another talent that lowers you casttime is Naturalist, but it only affects Healing Touch and not through haste.
Is haste a stat a druid should look at? Yes, but only when you feel you have other stats like Spellpower, Spirit, Intellect and MP5 are sorted.

Formula of haste

Haste_needed = Casttime/ (1+Casttime_wanted/100)

- haste_needed is the x% of cast speed increase
- casttime is the casttime of the spell
- 1% increased spell cast = 32,79 haste rating
- global cooldown is 1,5 seconds, which can be lowered to a minimum of 1 second.

Global Cooldown

The Global Cooldown (or gcd) is the time you have to wait in between spellcasts before you can cast another spell. Lowering the gcd would give you the ability to cast more spells in the same amount of time and thus more healing. If you use the formula above to calculate how much haste you need to lower the gcd to 1,0 second, you will need 50% increased speed or 1640 haste. It might be reachable, but at a huge cost of other attributes which are more important.

You can get the gcd of your instant healing spells down to 1 second. How? Through Gift of the Earthmother, Celestial Focus, possible raid buffs such as Moonkin Aura/Swift Retribution Aura (3% haste) and Wrath of Air Totem (5% haste) and haste from gear. How much haste does a druid need with or without these talents and buffs? These haste numbers will give you a gcd of 1 second on Rejuvenation and Wild Growth:

As you might have noticed Gift of the Earthmother treats Lifebloom differently. For Lifebloom it gets 10% from total haste and 10% extra haste (so 20% total). This means you need less haste to get a gcd of 1 second for Lifebloom.

Haste and casttime

Haste increases the speed of your spellcast. A nice stack of haste gives your druid more spells to cast in the same amount of time. Which means more healing output. If you look at the formula you will see that the longer the casttime the easier it is to lower your casttime. This is because haste is based on a percentage and not on a absolute value. As you can imagine 5% of a 3 second Healing Touch cast is higher the 5% of the 1,5 second Nourish cast. This also means you need more haste to get the same absolute amount of your spellcast (0,1 sec of healing touch 3 sec cast means 114 haste, on the 1,5 nourish cast it means 234 haste).

Now tell me, you voted yes or no for Celestial Focus in the last poll, still sticking with your choice? I am curious!

Attributes

Your druid will want to have a lot of the following attributes on gear:

1. Spellpower: it will strengthen your healing spells. How much it will strengthen your healing spells differs from spell to spell;
2. Spirit: Spirit increases your mana regeneration and your health regen, plus gives your +15% of your spirit to healing in Tree of Life form;
3. Intellect: Intellect increases your mana pool (15 manapoints per 1 intellect), mana regeneration and spell critical hit;
4. MP5: Mana regeneration is the mana you regenerate in 5 seconds while not casting or while casting;
5. Stamina: Stamina increases your health points.

Other stats that are interesting to Trees are:
- haste : reducing your global cooldown (1,5 seconds before you can cast another spell it is an inverse spell cast time, you will only notice it on instant spells) or spellcast duration
- spell crit :  it gives you a chance on a ± 50% higher heal.
Which stat should you go for? Choose one until it is satisfactory for you, then focus on the other.  But it will be very hard to profit from both.

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(update 15th april 2010) See my Cataclysm Compendium for more about Cataclysm!

The cat is out of the bag, we have a new expansion coming. You can read all over the internet what the changes are going to be. I’ll just sum up some things that are going to change for a restoration druid and I think are interesting:

• Spirit is going to be all about mana regen (as it does now), MP5 will not return as an attribute!
• Intellect will give you mana and spellpower. No more spellpower on gear.
• Your spells will now scale with your level, you will only learn new spells at the trainer no new ranks of your already learned spells.
• A new secondary profession: Archeaology
• You will be able to learn new abilities through the Path of the Titans. You will choose a path (like once with leatherworking: Tribal/Elemental) and get to learn Glyphs of the Ancients which will give you new abilities. Archaeology will have a big part.
• We’ll get two new races with the Druid class: Troll (Horde) and Worgen (Alliance).
• We might get new Tree form!
• Things look like getting “less mathy” so that everybody understands what a stat really does. Too bad, the mathy part is a part of the game I actually like….

I’d like to know what your opinion is, leave a comment!