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…)

This is part 2 of my new resto druid mega guide 3.0: Glyphs.  A druid can improve or change their spells through glyphs, enchants for your spells. Glyphs might change the way you use your spells. You will have three Major Glyph and three Minor Glyph spots at level 80. Restoration druids have access to the following major glyphs:

• Glyph of Swiftmend – Your Swiftmend ability no longer consumes a Rejuvenation or Regrowth effect from the target. This means you don’t have to consume a recently casted Regrowth or Rejuvenation on your target and leads to more healing over time and mana efficiency. A druid without this glyph is handicapped, it makes swiftmend a very valuable spell;
• Glyph of Regrowth – Increases the healing of your Regrowth spell by 20% if your Regrowth effect is still active on the target;
• Glyph of Lifebloom – It increases your Lifebloom with one second. In theory you could have a 9 second Lifebloom with the appropriate talent (Nature’s Splendor>) and this glyph;
• Glyph of Rejuvenation – While your rejuvenation targets are below 50% health, you will heal them for an additional 50% health. This glyph is a very good raid healer for encounters with a lot of raid damage like Hodir;
• Glyph of Healing Touch – Your cast time is reduced by 50%, mana cost 25% and healing by 50%. It converts your Healing Touch into a flash type heal like Nourish. In my experience a glyphed Healing Touch has higher heals then Nourish but is also costs more mana. Which one should you use? Do you want a fast panic button (which you already have with Nourish) or do you want to be able to cast 7-10K heals with a non glyphed Healing Touch when nessecary? It is all about preference.
• Glyph of Nourish – It will buff the bonus part of your nourish spell by 6% per HoT on the target. This glyph stacks with the T7 4 set bonus.  The glyph is supposed to replace the T7 4 set bonus after you have replaced your T7 with T8 gear;
• Glyph of Wild Growth – Heal 1 additional target with your Wild Growth, might become handy with the talent Revitalize, 1 more target, 1 more change to proc. Apart from the talent an additional target that get heals is always good especially since the raid has a lot of aoe damage in Ulduar.

Not glyphs for your healing spells but you might like these:

• Glyph of Innervate – With enough spirit on yourself you will not be needing this glyph, but if you cast it on someone else your regeneration of mana will be a 100% for 20 seconds;
• Glyph of Rebirth – Increases the amount of health on a character brought back to life via Rebirth by 100%. Nice but not really needed.

Which Glyph should you use? The plan at first was to provide you with a decision tree but while making it occured to me that some choices are hard to make. Nowadays I easily change my glyph between fights if I feel it is necessary. Some guidlines I use:

1. It depends on your healing style. It would be silly to glyph a spell which you hardly use.
2. What is your role in the raid? Are you raidhealing, tank healing or a bit of both (i.e. normal dungeons or heroics)? Some suggestions (not in this particular order):
   Raidhealing:  Glyph of Rejuvenation, Glyph of Wild Growth;
   Tankhealing: Glyph of Nourish, Glyph of Regrowth, Glyph of Healing Touch.
3. What gear do you have? More importantly which tier set bonuses do you have?

An example: if you have the tier 7 4 set bonus it gives you a 6% bonus to Nourish per HoT you have on the target. You could take  Glyph of Nourish to boost it even more or choose not to glyph Nourish because it heals good enough for your style and choose to glyph Glyph of Wild Growth to boost your raid healing.
Lastly I would like to point out that there are minor glyphs, there’s only one I would recommend:

• Glyph of Unburdened Rebirth – Your Rebirth spell no longer requires a reagent.

Next episode will be about talents!

Here are the changes notable for restoration druids in Patch 3.1 (remember NOT FINAL):

Glyphs

• Glyph of Rebirth – Players resurrected by Rebirth are returned to life with 100% health. (Old: Increases the amount of health on a character brought back to life via Rebirth by 100%.);
• Glyph of Wild Growth  – Wild Growth now affects up to 6 targets;
• Glyph of Nourish  – Your Nourish heals an additional 6% for each of your heal over time effects present on the target;
• Glyph of Barkskin – Reduces the chance you’ll be critically hit by melee attacks by 1 to 0% while Barkskin is active.

Skills

• Abolish Poison now ticks every 3 secs for 12 secs. (Previously ticked every 2 secs for 8 secs).

Talents

• Improved Mark of the Wild (Tier 1) now also increases all of your total attributes by 1/2%.
• Intensity (Tier 3) now allows 17/33/50% of mana regeneration to continue while casting. (Previously 10/20/30%)
• Improved Regrowth (Tier 6) renamed Nature’s Bounty. Increases the critical effect chance of your Regrowth and Nourish spells by 5/10/15/20/25%. (Previously increased just regrowth crit by 10/20/30/40/50%)
• Replenish (Tier 9) renamed Revitalize;
• New Talent* Improved Barkskin, Tier 10, 2 point talent – Increases the damage reduction granted by your Barkskin spell by 5/10%, and increases resistance to Dispel mechanics by 30/60% while under the effect of Barkskin.

The notable changes are the buffs to Nourish! The new Talent Nature’s Bounty Nourish becomes a very good heal although the same talent is nerfed for Regrowth (from 50% crit to 25% crit). But it should mean that nourish will crit for about the same values as regrowth only without the HoT, which gives us a cheaper spell then a full (glyphed) regrowth! So instead of renewing regrowths will most likely cast Nourish when Regrowth is up. Another buff is the Glyph of Nourish: +6% for every HoT present, which is Imba with the T7 4 set bonus + 5% per HoT, effectively making +11% per HoT! Which could mean a max of +44% to Nourish (Regrowth, Lifebloom, Rejuvenation and Wild Growth). More crit and more healing to Nourish, 3.1 is the Nourish Patch for us Druids…

The other changes were already known (revitalize, intensity) or aren’t notable (sorry people, this is a PvE blog). I will update this post when there’s more to tell!

Want to compare stats of your old gear with the gear in patch 3.1? Or do you want to know how the changes to mana regen will affect your druid? See my mana regen calculator / gear compare calculator!

Update: I have Raaff on the PTR (Raaffie on Brill test realm), and the calculators seems correct with my values of Spirit/Intellect and MP5!.

A short message: I have updated the Resto Mega Guide with more Glyphs and Enchants!

In the guide I try to help you with your choosing of talents. I have listed gear, glyphs and enchants to help you out. Let me know what you think of the guide, feedback is greatly appreciated.

Cheers and good luck in Azeroth,

Raaff

P.S. Could someone cast a cure disease? *Sniff Sneeze*