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.

(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!

This is part 3 of my rewritten Resto Druid Guide. This episode is about talents. Play styles can make you decide whether not to take a talent or to take a talent. Remember that there a more roads that lead to Rome and that a talent might work for you. I have not commented to all talents because its not needed because it speaks for itself or you just must have it!

Talents from the restoration tree, the first tier:

- Improved Mark of the Wild (2/2), must have.
- Nature’s Focus (3/3), must have.

You have no use with Furor as a restoration druid. Next up tier 2:

- Subtlety (3/3) : lower your threat, in most builds you see a maximum of two points in this talent (they are needed to get to 10 points). Threat is not much of a problem for a restoration druid (mainly raiding druids).
- Naturalist (5/5) : This talent will lower your Healing Touch spellcast from 3 to 2,5 seconds. If you do not intend to use the glyphed healing touch, don’t use this talent. Spent your points in the shapeshifters talents.
- Natural Shapeshifter (3/3) : the goodies come from the next talent : Master Shapshifter.

Tier 3:
- Master Shapshifter (2/2) : get 4% extra healing while in tree form!
- Intensity (3/3) : Must have period, a druid without a decent amount of mana regen while casting can’t do his job properly!
- Omen of Clarity (1/1) : gives you a mana free spell every once in a while.

Tier 4:
- Improved Rejuvenation (3/3), must have.
- Tranquil Spirit (5/5): If you are going to use Healing Touch (a must for the glyphed Healing Touch users) and Nourish a lot this talent is a good one since it will lower your mana cost of the spells by 10%.  If you have no mana problems, you might consider spending some points in other talents.

Tier 5:
- Nature’s Swiftness (1/1) : If you have glyphed your Healing Touch chances are you won’t be using this spell much. If you don’t glyph you healing touch, get it. In combination with a Healing Touch it is a very powerful tool.
- Gift of Nature (5/5) : Must have, period.

Tier 6:
- Empowered Touch (2/2): Since this talent buffs Healing Touch and Nourish this talent is a must have. If you don’t use these spells a lot, skip it.
- Nature’s Bounty (5/5): improves your crit and thus higher heals, with mana regen in mind higher heals (25% crit is a lot!) are welcome.

Tier 7:
- Swiftmend (1/1), must have.
- Living Spirit (3/3): must have period! (Spirit also buffs your Spellpower in Tree form!)
- Natural Perfection: A few % extra crit for the people that need it. If you look at Nourish it seems to benefit a lot from crit, this talent is worth spending points on when you got some to spare.

Tier 8:
- Empowered Rejuvenation (5/5), must have;
- Living Seed: This is mainly a Main Tank heal, opinions differ about it. I have raided with and without it and I can’t say I missed it.

Tier 9:
- Tree of Life (1/1);
- Improved Tree of Life (3/3);
- Revitalize (3/3) : With patch 3.1 it procs from Wild Growth too making a chance for a proc higher.

Tier 10:
- Gift of the Earthmother (5/5): It will lower your Global Cooldown with 20% for your instant healing spells, which means you can cast more of these spells in the same time;
- Improved Barkskin: this is a pvp talent, not needed for pve.

Tier 11:
- Wild Growth (1/1), needed for raids.

Talents from the balance tree:

- Genesis (5/5): It buffs your healing over time and damage over time spells with 5%;
- Moonglow (3/3): It will reduce the manacost of Moonfire, Starfire, Starfall, Wrath, Healing Touch, Regrowth, Nourish and Rejuvenation spells by 9%. Less mana, more heals;
- Nature’s Majesty (2/2): You need to take this talent to get Nature’s Splendor, crit is not as important on lower levels of raid content but crit is becoming more important as we progress to t9/t10 level content.
- Nature’s Splendor (1/1): This is the real talent you want from the balance tree, an 8 second Lifebloom, 15 second Rejuvenation, 27 second Regrowth. Need I say more? This would mean more rolls on your raid/party and the time to cast other spells like Abolish Poison or Remove Curse.
- Nature’s Grace (3/3): It will grant you with 20% off your cast time and is worth thinking about a lower cast time could mean life or death.

The most common raiding build is  14/0/57 see wowwiki for more builds.

Next episode will be about attributes.