Thoughts on the Druid Class Q&A

Reading material: Class Q&A Series: Druid

So a few hours ago Blizzard posted the druid Q&A on the official forums so I headed on over to check it out. It was interesting to hear what they had to say about the current state of the druid and what they mean to the game. I like how they’re directing their focus on the aspect of shifting forms and how it rarely happens. Im kinda getting bored in tree form for 3 hours while i raid, i dont get to check out my fruit on the T8 shoulders or see my dazzling emblem cloak swishing around, but have to look at a so-so looking tree stumbling around fancy ulduar. Because of this, I usually end up getting my fix healing heroics in caster form and i get to pew pew a few wraths off while I’m at it which is fun, but not all that often.

Another way to go would be to make Tree of Life form a cooldown, more like Metamorphosis. You shift into tree when you need a healing boost, but you don’t stay in it all the time.

This is an interesting idea, but something I don’t see working stated as how it is here. I Still love how druids can shift, and how I am a tree for healing, but I wish it was only some of the time. My problem with this cooldown aspect of it. Like I do with all my cooldowns (even swiftmend to a degree despite its 15sec cooldown) like natures swiftness and tranquillity, I save it until I need it the most because when that moment comes I want it there, I could go hours without using NS, but I could’ve used it 20 times in that period and it’d still be up for that time I need it, but I don’t. if TOL got a cooldown, say 40 sec uptime every 3 mins for increased healing, I wouldn’t use it unless i knew i had to, not popping it on the 3min timer every time. I want to be in tree form more often than once every odd boss fight for a small amount of time. I think it needs to be something you toggle on and off just like it is now, but give you bonuses and penalties for being in it. There are many areas of healing that they could apply it to: Movement speed, Mana regen, HoTs, Single-target heals, Healing range, Healing power or Healing speed are just a few. Balance might be too tough for something like this though. If it was movement speed for bonus healing, then druids would be overpowered on stationary fights, no shifting would occur and the opposite would happen for high movement fights. If it was a toss-up between group healing in tree form and single target healing in caster form, and a druid was assigned to raid heals, then there wouldn’t be a choice, nor would there be much shifting. Either way druids end up overpowered or lacklustre compared to other healers.

The only other restoration question was on healing touch and tranquillity, and their usefulness. Im glad the dev team has looked at how many talents are focused on healing touch, and GC said its pretty much for sue with NS and lower levels, which is cool. He also touched on the talent that reduces the cooldown on tranquillity, saying that its not very useful because its a situational spell, not a use often one. Like i said before, i never use tranquillity unless i have to, i go whole raids without ever using it, 6 mins off the cooldown means nothing. Patch 3.2 will bring the Empowered Touch talent into light (from my being dark and untalented in my current Resto build) with 20% more nourishing goodness, and I like nourish, so its win win there with power for both HT and Nourish.

That about sums it up from me on the Druid Q&A

-Rosarra

Project Shaman: Phase 1

We interrupt your regular hunter/druid blog for the following announcement. We be rollin’ shamans!

Both of us have caught alt-itis at the same time & funnily enough, both wanted to roll shaman. Ros has decided to go enhancement, while I have decided to level as elemental with resto as the eventual goal. All we have in terms of heirlooms are the pvp shoulders (I spent most of my emblems on a pally alt that I have abandoned), though they are proving very nice in speeding up the levelling process. We’ve also decided to only play them when we can play together so that we can level at the same rate. I was unsure about this at first, but we’re already 30 after days & things seem to being going fine.

Don’t worry about things getting too shammy ’round here though, we’re still dedicated to our mains. Still, stay tuned as we update our progress.

-Vanha

Jurassic Squee

Oh man, with the chance of raptor mobs to drop these babies, they’re gonna go extinct all over again. DO WANT!

-Vanha

Spirit much?

As a Resto Druid i love stacking spirit. I try hard to make sure some of my gems have spirit and i avoid pieces of gear with only stamina and intellect on them. I feel like it differentiates the healers, with priests and druids having spirit, compared to paladins and shamans having mp5.

Just off the top of my head from some napkin math i did a while ago about the value of spirit compared to mp5 done with rare gem values (16 spirit vs. 7 mp5) mp5 comes out on top by a bit, slightly less when you factor in the spellpower from spirit, but even then still on top for a regen stat.

Despite that I still stack spirit because blizzard wants it that way, shown by talents in the resto tree and gear itemization(well most of it anyway) so for a long time i didn’t mind, even after the spirit change where we got much less ooc regen but the same in combat regen.

But then this happened:

Mana Regeneration: All items that provide “X mana per five seconds” have had the amount of mana they regenerate increased by approximately 25%.

My napkin math worked off gem values, and I’m unsure whether this +25% will affect them, but as it affects all gear I’m worried for my non-leather peices. All the new caster leather has spirit on it, so i dont have much choice, but for any gems, enchants and gear like rings, cloaks, weapons and such that have a wider range of itemization, will it be more prevalent and beneficial to pick up pieces with this new higher amount of mp5 rather than spirit? Some of these pieces have a lot of mp5 on them compared to the equivalent gear with spirit in the place of mp5 for pure regen. With this buff those pieces are going to look even better for regen.

As far as I’m aware this change was to go with the replenishment change to make the mp5 itemization on paladin healing gear more attractive because before paladins were stacking huge amounts of intellect to get huge returns on replenishment and the mp5 on the plate was wasted itemisation to them. I don’t play a paladin but that seems like a reasonable change to make, and it will indeed make the mp5 on plate gear more useful and paladins will be less dependant on replenishment, but instead of fixing this issue so it wouldn’t affect other classes they changed mp5 as well instead of working on replenishment more. I am glad for the replenishment change because  it played such a huge part in the 10man raids I run, without it I had to watch my casting and mana pool, timing innervates and working with the other healers so we got through the fight. With it it just becomes a spamfest of healing, never thinking about running oom. For me raidbuffed it brings in about 250mp5, which is about 30% increase in mana regeneration. with it having less of an effect I’m fine with that. By buffing mp5 on not just paladin gear, but all gear it pushes mp5 more into the limelight for druids, and pushes spirit for regen further off the table as a prime regen stat. I love my spirit but it keeps getting more and more inferior to mp5 in terms of regen, and I think this change messes up the supposed focus on spirit as the regen stat for priests and druids even more.

I think a better way to have dealt with it would have been more along the lines of a talent change within the paladin class, seeing as it was that class that needed to be fixed in the first place. If the 25% more mp5 from armour was incorporated into a core healing talent, we wouldn’t see this disturbance of the already patchy spirit vs. mp5 battle of gearing choices for supposedly spirit using classes like me.

Hopefully Blizzard will modify this in some way before the patch goes live because I think it makes mp5 too powerful a stat compared to the regen priests and druids get from spirit.

-Rosarra

LOLZ, y u play girlz?!

If you are one of the many male players out there playing a female character the title of this post may be quite familiar, if on the nicer end of the spectrum. It’s a question that we all have had to ask ourselves & I suspect many have their own answers. For some it’s the usual refrain, ‘If I’m gonna spend 15 hours a week staring at my toon’s butt, I’d rather it be nice looking’. For others it may simply be an extension of the escapism playing a game like WoW provides, recreating yourself as someone else in a fantasy world. After all, if you’re playing an entirely different species, what’s the big deal in being a different gender as well?

For me, both these answers factored into my decision. I am currently studying art & design with the hopes of becoming an illustrator/animator/concept artist. I have always been a prolific sketcher & imaginer, since I was old enough to hold a pencil I’ve been drawing dinosaurs, dragons, aliens & monsters. I love creating worlds in my head, then trying my best to translate them into imagery. This may seem like a wild tangent, but this aspect of me is the main reason I decided to roll a female. I treat character creation just like drawing, a way of presenting my vision of an individual. In an MMO like WoW, this is all the more important because, until recently, the decisions you made at that character creation screen were permanent. So I agonised over that screen for hours, I would spend so long switching races, faces, colours that the game would log me out for inactivity. I made my first character playing the WoW trial after getting the disks from a friend. BC had just come out a couple of months back & I wanted to play a draenei. Unfortunately the trial only allowed you to play the vanilla races. As I was starting the trial with Ros & another mate we decided to all roll Night Elves, since they were the only race we could all agree on. I made a female hunter called Vanha.

I decided on a female largely because the male Night Elves look terrible in my opinion. To me, my character isn’t simply me in a fantasy space, it’s a chance to create an entirely new persona from which to experience the game world. MMOs are strange in how they blur the line between the real & the virtual. The game & its world are all crafted purely from imagination, but the social interactions between players are deeply rooted in the real world. But when I’m at the character creation screen, I don’t think of this real world social aspect, all I want to do is create a unique & engaging character to play. I think of a story & a personality, I create a look that appeals to me & my idea of the character. In the case of Vanha the Night Elf, the ugliness of the male option made female the obvious choice. I didn’t worry about what other players would think of me in the real world for playing a female character as to me it seemed as much of a choice as class or race.

It would be many months later that I would purchase the game proper. At first I joined my friends Horde-side as a Forsaken warlock. Again I played a female, however this time the choice wasn’t as clear cut as it was between the Night Elves. I didn’t find either gender more visually pleasing than the other, but still I chose female. This was because I was still playing the same character in my head, Vanha. The race & class had changed, but the persona was still the same. About 2 weeks after buying the game my Horde friends stopped playing, allowing me to finally play the character I’d been wanting to since I installed the trial, Vanha the female Draenei hunter.

It was only much later in the game that the apparent strangeness of a male playing a female character ingame was made apparent to me. It seems as though the conflict comes from how people perceive themselves & others ingame. Some people treat their characters as a mere artifice of gameplay, they see other characters as the people behind the screens. To them, a male playing a female is the equivalent of crossdressing, that the player is actively pretending to be the opposite gender. I am not saying that these players are playing their characters ‘wrong’, but that the difference in these views of the role of the character create a misunderstanding. The unfortunate consequence is that this misunderstanding often causes ridicule & derision. I am lucky enough to be in a great guild that doesn’t care about why I play a female, they are willing to accept that people create their characters with different intentions & reasons. I can only hope that any other players, male or female, that face similar discrimination based on a choice made way back at the character creation screen can find others that can accept them for how they choose to play.

-Vanha

Only DPS get Tunnel Vision Right?

That’s what I thought. Healers never get tunnel vision right? We are trained right from the word go (read 5-mans) to be aware of whats going on around us, who’s doing what, whats burning where and who’s standing in said burning. So when we get to raiding were already aware of whats happening around us, compared to some DPS who have come fresh out of 5-mans with a knack for tunnel vision while they just concentrate on their killing the boss because they have never needed to avoid major things like void zones much, or if they did the damage was unnoticeable and the healer just healed them through it it’ll it went away. I’m usually a raid healer for the raids I run, so I’m constantly looking at all the members health and where they are all standing, and I’m the first person to notice a DPS standing in the sludge dying. It turns out though that I do get tunnel vision when MT healing though. It was in a 10-man VOA and we were killing Emalon so there wasn’t any void zones or such, but the Shammy healer that was healing the MT with chain heal and he kept dying, 3 wipes later after he wouldn’t change what spell he was using we stuck him on raid heals and I took up the post of healing the MT. After 20 seconds of my eyes being glued to the MT’s health bar i realised i had the biggest tunnel vision ever. I couldn’t even tell how much health the boss had left because all i was doing was keeping that one health bar from going grey. So now I’m freaking out if i have to MT heal in a proper raid because i didn’t know how to take it a bit easier on the tanks health bar and make sure I’m not the one standing in the fire. Ill have to learn. Raid healing is much easier because I’m forced to look around and peoples health bars don’t jump up and down like a 4 year-old swinging a yo-yo.
What kind of healing do you other healers prefer? Do you get tunnel vision from single-target healing?

-Rosarra

Ooh, pretty colours!

You may have noticed we’re trialling a new colouring system to make it more apparent which one of us is doing the posting. To try & keep the colours of the site consistent I’ve made my posts purple to match my draenei’s skin colour in the banner, & I’ve made Rosarra’s posts green to match her hair colour (plus it suits her as a tree). Like I said, it’s just a trial so if you find it too distracting or just plain ugly, just tell us & we’ll try & figure something else out.

-Vanha

Where oh where does the difference lie?

We are in a pretty small guild at the moment, & I kinda like it that way. We’re slowly making our way through Ulduar 10 (8/14 so far) & we usually do it with an almost identical team. There’s only one other hunter in this team, he’s Marks spec’d as well. In fact, we’re almost identical in gear & spec. Just this week I picked up the same polearm off Ignis that he’d got the week before & then Golemheart longbow dropped twice from trash.

But despite all our similarities I regularly pull 500-1000 DPS more than him. After our first night of raiding he asked me what I thought was causing this gulf in DPS. I double-checked his gear & spec, it was still almost identical to mine. So I figured it must be the rotation, he told me his rotation. Again virtually the same, even down to the popping of cooldowns. I asked if he was hit-capped, he told me he was just under. ‘Aha!’ I thought, ‘that must be it’. But his recount showed he’d missed only 1% of his shots. Getting more & more puzzled by this we looked at his pet’s spec. I saw a few talents that I thought were out of place, but still nothing major. I made all the recommendations I could, switching points from Imp. Steady Shot to Focused Aim to reach hit cap, respeccing pet for optimal DPS, but I still couldn’t see how those small tweaks would do it.

Sure enough, tonight’s raid he was still doing a substantial amount less DPS than me, though the difference had shrunk since the previous night. Anyway, I’m still at a loss as to what’s causing the damage discrepancy. So to any more-experienced hunters out there, what’s your advice?

-Vanha

Closest kill ever…

Hi guys, I thought I’d start my posting off with a little story of a Deconstructor kill that went down a few days ago. It turned out to be the closest kill that I’ve ever been present at, and my ears still hurt a bit from the explosion of screaming that happened on vent a split second afterwards. It was just another boss, we were working on Iron Council that week (7/14 now yay, Auriaya got 3-shotted later that night alongside Iron Council). so were just pluggin away like usual, kill these adds, pewpewing that heart, whatever, then at about 15% it started crashing, after the MT dying and a few healers and dps, we were left with a warlock, our offtank and a resto shaman who was almost OoM. By 5% the shaman was completely dry and the MT was using lay on hands etc… just to stay alive. at about 10k hp the tank snuffed it, soon after the lock bit the blade too, and the shaman followed with just over 2k hp left on the boss. By this time we were getting pretty loud on vent lamenting that we lost to a boss with 2k left on the bar, when suddenly the shaman used reincarnation and a combination of a few warlock DoTs left on the target and a flame shock from the now alive shaman was enough to kill the boss. Cue deafness here. It was an awesome saved kill with quick thinking from the shaman, and one of my favourite most extreme kills to date. Pure awesome raiding fun. I wish every boss kill was that exhilarating.

This week our raid will be taking on some of the watchers, so hopefully some vanquisher T8 tokens will drop, I cant wait to start getting my 4-piece set bonus it looks too good to be true, especially as I mostly do raid healing.

- Rosarra

Oh dear, what have we got ourselves into…

Hello there, & welcome to our brand spankin’ new blog. I say ‘our’ because this is a 2 author blog. We figured, to make up for the fact that we are both crap writers, perhaps having 2 crap writers makes 1 semi-decent one.

But to be semi-serious, we are both friends in real life who started playing WoW at about the same time. Recently after having one of our regular conversations about our time in Azeroth we decided come up with a blog together. See, we’re the only ones out of our mates to play WoW, so our non-playing buddies get a little sick of us droning on & on about it. So we hope that through this blog we can connect better with the larger WoW community & make new friends with whom we can discuss this game we love. Expect our posts to run the full gamut of ingame experiences, theorycrafting & general wackiness.

So once again, Welcome to HoTs ‘n’ Shots (hopefully we won’t screw this up).

-Rosarra & Vanha