Ulduar10: Ignis, Razorscale

My guild initially skipped these two, wanting to instead put our time into the harder bosses. Then a competitive streak filtered in, and we realized that we'd be tied for top 10-man progression on our server if we stopped by and kicked these two over on our warpath through the instance. They're both dead now.

As a side note, the T8 shoulders look pretty cool up-close (even have little pawprint shapes on them, and swirly twigs and moons and stuff!), but when zoomed out they look like you've just got pompoms on your shoulders.

Ignis the Furnace-Master: "Insolent whelps!"
Big guy with a molten codpiece. Usually, a fight like this would be rather frightening for a plant with all the fire and such, but it's probably a place where we shine the most: lots of aoe damage and snap-heals. The strat we used was to cluster the ranged/casters in the center of the room between the two water pools, and have the MT kite-tank the boss in circles around us, always keeping the boss facing away. The OT ran around picking up adds as best he could (a good resto druid is SUCH an aggro magnet) and running them through the fire and water, calling dps as needed to shatter them.

• Keep full stacks of LB on both tanks, if necessary (given strengths of cohealers, etc), once things really get rolling with the adds. It'll eat up your mana, but if your dps is good enough, you'll be able to manage it with an innervate and a mana pot and have the boss dead before you're completely OoM.
• Slag Pot: Ignis will periodically grab someone and hold them in the molten pot chained around his waist. People inside need to pop barkskin, etc to help shield from the damage, and as a healer you should help keep them alive. You cannot attack from within the slagpot, but you can still heal people, and yourself, while you are in the slag pot. If a healer is in the slag pot, they CAN HEAL THEMSELVES and should do so.
  

**If you are looking for tips on how to target the victim of the slag pot, check my post here (CLICK!)**

• Flame Jets: Do not be caught casting a spell when this ability goes off, or you'll be spell-locked for 8 seconds. It also causes a knock-up into the air, and deals raid-wide damage. Yay Wild-Growth and Rejuv.
  
• Scorch: this is the big burning spot he puts on the ground on the tank, and what the tank will be kiting him away from so they don't stand there and crisp themselves. You shouldn't stand in it, either. The OT will have to run through it to debuff the adds, and should call out when he's entering the "scorch" so that you can be alert of when he'll need extra healing, especially if your LB's dropped due to range.

If you get aggro from an add, call it out to have one of the tanks pick it up off of you quickly. Target the add to assist their taunts. The MT can pull it off of you, if necessary, while the OT may be too far away to rescue you.


Razorscale: "Rawr!"
A pretty proto-drake, though sadly, she is the twisted outcome of what "Loken" did to Veranus after he defeated Thorim in the Storm Peaks questline. Akin to Utgarde Pinnacle, you must bring her down using harpoons. As a healer, all you have to worry about is bouncing around avoiding fireballs and keeping those in range of you alive, until the group brings her down and then it's just a tank-and-spank to heal, with some minor kiting to get out of the patches of fire. My guild initially attempted the "v strat" as discussed on wow-wiki, but ultimately decided to just stay out of the circle and split up as two separate parties (closer to the 25-man strat), each party on either side of the circle with a tank, a healer, and mixed dps.

• As a general rule, don't stand in front of the boss when she's on the ground.
• Devouring Flames (P1): this is a large patch of blue fire she spits at whoever is closest to her while she's flying. With our organization of the groups, we assigned a hunter or warlock to act as the "tank" for this, where he was nearly constantly on the move to stay closest to her while trying to shoot the mobs to assist in dps, or sent his pet in to tank it when she went off to a far corner. It worked out really well, and he didn't take much damage, but I did make sure to always keep a rejuv on him and keep an eye on him and his pet when he went out of my range. The "flame tank" doesn't have to be attacking Razorscale while she's flying; he just has to be the closest person to her, or have his pet do so.
  
• Fireball (P1): she spits these at everyone, and they do hurt for a chunk of damage. I have read that you can dodge them, since while she casts them AT a specific person, they do not CHASE that person as they travel. Keeping on the move constantly is one of our strong points as druids, so make use of your strengths. Regardless, these fireballs are why you want to keep everyone topped off. If you'd prefer, you can keep Razorscale targeted so that you can see who she is casting them at.
  
• Adds: these spawn out of tunnelers in various locations, and are what your group is killing while Razorscale is in flight. Make sure you keep your party up, particularly when they grab the "big guy" who spawns in the center ring. Be especially mindful of healing your tanks when Razorscale lands (or rather, gets dragged out of the air with harpoons) and everyone moves to the center behind her, as they will likely be turning their backs on several mobs while doing so.
• Harpoons: there are 2 of these in the ten-man version, and they are used to bring Razorscale out of the sky. Designate a single dps to run over and fire these off when the harpoons are repaired by the NPCs, but have them hold off on firing the second harpoon until most of the current wave of adds are dead. Once Razorscale is down, the dps should all switch to attacking the proto-drake, and get as much damage on her as possible before she breaks the chains. Each time she escapes the chains, she'll do an aoe knockback effect around her. Above 50% life, she will leap back into the air after breaking the chains.
  
• Phase 2: at 50%, she'll stay grounded. DPS should mind their aggro as the 50% mark nears, because she will attack the highest threat first. Keep behind of the boss and sorta off to the side, out of the way, and watch where your tanks might turn her as she's kited. This is a simple phase compared to phase 1, provided she is kited to get the tanks and dps out of the fire patches. There should be two tanks for this phase, and they will need to taunt her back and forth whenever either tank gets a stack of two Fuse Armor debuffs.
  

Off topic: Blogs, Words, and Miscommunication

(Since I'm writing this as a personal reflection, I'm not going to make any attempt to format or organize this post... just read as you will, as you wish.)


One of the hardest parts of blogging (or, indeed, writing any sort of instruction) is covering all bases and making yourself as well-understood as possible. Your mind may be thinking one thing as you type your words out onto the screen, but the meaning behind those words can be lost as a reader skims over them, picks out the important points, and possibly misses other equally important ones.

Communication hiccups have been a problem stumbled upon to varying degrees by anyone who has ever written something for the purpose of instruction or explanation. I myself am relatively new to the blogging community, and already have had to go back and re-word several of my posts to better explain my meaning, or to highlight points that commentators seemed to miss. I'm quite certain that I am not alone in this experience.

My own work is in Distance Learning, and quite a bit of my college degree was focused on the importance of being concise with your data. Technical Writing was one course I took that lead to great insight on how to best arrange your thoughts, but it was only through experience comparing guides or course materials and then writing some myself that I can see just how much the reader's own interpretation can impact their entire understanding of what the author is trying to say. Assumptions in particular are one of the deadliest trip-wires out there.

Much of what we write will be skipped over, skimmed by eyes speeding to find the points the reader cares most about. This happens when we read news articles, books, blog posts, and even trade chat. I can't help but wonder what eyes may miss even this one lone sentence, lost in the midst of a paragraph. We can color words, emphasize them with bold, italics, or underlines, and even set them flashing on a computer screen, but if the reader doesn't interpret it correctly or even choose to read that section of the document, they may misinterpret your entire point.

What does a > sign mean to you, and what does it mean to your reader? Or a = sign, or that you left out something else to compare, or that by "players" you simply meant "friendly targets counted as being in your raid group" but felt that was too much of a mouth-full to continuously type? How extreme will a reader take what you say, how far will they cut it down to black-and-white? Will they later remember your clarification on it, or that there may be factors beyond what simple math can describe? Will anyone even read it?

Who is at fault? Is it the reader's job to take the time to fully read every word, see every letter? How esle wluod it be pbosisle to iretprent tihs stnence? Is it the writer's job to summarize and organize their documents as accurately as possible? I think it is some of both. Most of us know about "TL:DR," Too Long: Didn't Read: a lot of casual readers will have entirely skipped this paragraph by now. Yet if the author doesn't go into explicit detail on their math, comparisons, and reasoning, they can be questioned on that, too. If the author doesn't repeat a point multiple times as a conditional to their statement, it may be missed the one time that they did say it, and get questioned for it, or their whole post may be misrepresented by others, particularly if they are making a bold statement.

As bloggers for a widely-popular video game, it seems we must cater to all kinds of readers, and that makes the job incredibly difficult. Many blogs are looked to as sources of experience and answers to how exactly someone must play or to make themselves better, or what to do in the delicate social situations that the game--and life--sometimes leaves us in. It is an incredible responsibility, one that brings me to admire various bloggers for their shouldering of the burden and scrutiny. We have to figure out how precise we have to be with our words, and remember that not all of our readers will hold the same assumptions that we do. We know that we all make mistakes, or that someone who does read our words may misinterpret them in some way. We also know that inevitably, there will be someone who disagrees, be they right or wrong.

It is a tight line to walk, but one that we all must be aware of, be it as writers and readers alike.


(As a point to reflect on, this post has been edited 5 times since publishing.)

Ulduar10: Ignis, Razorscale

So, my guild initially skipped these two, wanting to instead put our time into the harder bosses. Then a competitive streak filtered in, and we realized that we'd be tied for top 10-man progression on our server if we stopped by and kicked these two over on our warpath through the instance. They're both dead now.


Ignis the Furnace-Master: "Insolent whelps!"

Big guy with a molten codpiece. Usually, a fight like this would be rather frightening for a plant with all the fire and such, but this battle is probably a place where we shine the most: lots of aoe damage and snap-heals. The strat my raid uses is to cluster the ranged/casters in the center of the room between the two water pools, and have the MT kite-tank the boss in circles around us, always keeping the boss facing away. The OT ran around picking up adds as best he could (a good resto druid is SUCH an aggro magnet) and running them through the fire and water, calling dps as needed to shatter them (a single ranged player was in charge of shattering the adds on the OT's call, and if he was in the slag pot, then he designated someone else to get it until he was free).

• Heals: Keep full stacks of LB on both tanks, if necessary (given strengths of cohealers, etc), once things really get rolling with the adds. It'll eat up your mana, but if your dps is good enough, you'll be able to manage it with an innervate and a mana pot and have the boss dead before you're completely OoM. Aside that, WG the raid as needed, keep a helping of rejuvs ticking around to offset the raid-wide damage and provide for Swiftmends, and don't get caught casting nourish or regrowth (or a non-NS'd HT) when the flame jets go off.
  
• Slag Pot: Ignis will periodically grab someone and hold them in the molten pot chained around his waist. People inside need to pop barkskin, shields, etc to help shield from the damage, and as a healer you should help keep them alive. You cannot attack from within the slagpot, but you can still heal people, and yourself, while you are in the slag pot. If a healer is in the slag pot, they CAN HEAL THEMSELVES and should do so. For tips on quickly finding the victim of this ability, refer to this post.
  
• Flame Jets: Do not be caught casting a spell when this ability goes off, or you'll be spell-locked for 8 seconds. It also causes a knock-up into the air (resistable), and deals raid-wide damage. Yay Wild-Growth and Rejuv.
  
• Scorch: this is the big burning spot he puts on the ground on the tank, and what the tank will be kiting him away from so the tank doesn't stand there and crisp themselves. You shouldn't stand in it, either. The OT will have to run through it to debuff the adds, and should call out when he's entering the "scorch" so that you can be alert of when he'll need extra healing, especially if your LB's dropped due to range.

This fight has no phases, aside a continuous stream of adds. If you get aggro on one, alert the tanks immediately, because it can kill you. The MT can pick it up off of you temporarily if the OT is too far away. Target the add to assist their taunting it off of you.


Razorscale: "Rawr!"

A pretty proto-drake, though it is sad to see what has become of her after Loken captured her with Thorim outside in the Storm Peaks (Sons of Hodir questline). Akin to the protodrake in Utgarde Pinnacle, you must bring her down using harpoons. As a healer, all you have to worry about is bouncing around avoiding fireballs and keeping those in range of you alive until the group brings her down, and then it's just a tank-and-spank, with some minor kiting to get out of the patches of fire. My guild initially attempted the "v strat" as discussed on wow-wiki, but ultimately decided to just stay out of the big red circle (for the most part) and split up as two separate parties (closer to the 25-man strat), each party on either side of the circle with a tank, a healer, and mixed ranged/melee dps.

• As a general rule, don't stand in front of the boss when she's on the ground.
• Devouring Flames (P1): this is a large patch of blue fire she spits at whoever is closest to her while she's flying. With our organization of the groups, we assign a hunter or warlock to act as the "tank" for this, where he was nearly constantly on the move to stay closest to her while trying to shoot the mobs to assist in dps, or sent his pet in to tank it when she went off to a far corner. This ranged tank doesn't have to be attacking Razorscale while she's flying, he just has to be the closest person to her, or else have his pet be the closest. It worked out really well, and he didn't take much damage, but I did make sure to always keep a rejuv on him and keep an eye on him and his pet when he went out of my range.
  
• Fireball (P1): she spits these at everyone, and they do hurt for a chunk of damage. I have read that you can dodge them, since while she casts them AT a specific person, they do not CHASE that person as they travel. Keeping on the move constantly is one of our strong points as druids, so make use of your strengths. Regardless, these fireballs are why you want to keep everyone topped off, particularly the "squishies" such as mages. If you'd prefer, you can keep Razorscale targeted so that you can see who she is casting them at.
  
• Adds: these spawn out of tunneler vehicles in various locations, and are what your group is killing while Razorscale is in flight. Make sure you keep your party up, particularly when they grab the "big guy" who spawns in the center ring. Be especially mindful of healing your tanks when Razorscale lands (or rather, gets dragged out of the air with harpoons) and everyone moves behind her in the center circle, as the tanks will likely be turning their backs on several mobs while doing so.
• Harpoons: designate one or two players to fire off the harpoons as they become ready. Once 2 have been fired (in the 10-man version), Razorscale will be dragged down to the ground where the raid can commence beating on her. When this happens, all dps on adds should be stopped in favor of damaging the proto-drake, so I recommend holding off on the second harpoon until there are few adds remaining, and before the next wave spawns. Razorscale herself will do an aoe knockback when she gets loose from the harpoons' chains after a dazed period.
  
• Phase 2: at 50% health, she'll stay grounded. Keep behind the proto-drake and sorta off to the side, out of the way, and watch where your tanks might turn her as she's kited. This is a simple phase compared to phase 1, provided she is kited to get the tanks and dps out of the fire patches. Do not stand in front of her unless you are a tank. You may get bored as a healer in this phase and start pew-pewing, but make sure to keep rolling hots on the active tank amidst the wraths and moonfires. Tanks themselves will need to swap who is currently tanking to keep from getting more than 2 stacks of the Fused Armor debuff, which slows their movement.
  

Jousting in WoW

Patch: 3.1.1

First things first: lag is your worst enemy.

You will need to adapt your jousting strategy to account for lag, or just plain wait until it's as lagless as possible before you try to joust anything remotely difficult (commanders in front of the citadel in particular). Seriously. I updated my computer last weekend, and suddenly, jousting is FUN.

Problems lag causes:

• "Too close" to charge the guy who's clear across the screen.
• "Too far away" to melee the guy standing in front of you.
  
• You get charged/shield broken while the enemy is standing in front of you.
• The enemy runs away... and keeps running... and running... and running... and then BAM you're dismounted.
• You pressed the charge button. You think. Did you? Hmm... OH! Look, we're running into a tent wall.
  

So, with lag in mind, try to joust when your lag will be as little as possible. It makes a HUGE difference in your survivability, success, and enjoyment of the mounted-combat dailies.



How to Joust NPCs and take Minimal Damage:

1. Accessorize. This is a game, and this is one aspect of the game where the stats on your gear don't matter one bit. You can ride buck-naked and still put a beat-down from horseback, as long as you have a lance equipped. While I wouldn't recommend this for *real world* jousting, in WoW, it's perfectly acceptable to ride into combat wearing a pink dress, bunny ears, and dragging a little kid along behind you stumbling beneath the crushing weight of an over-packed backpack and 3-pennant flag. If you'd like to strike fear, don your old pumpkin hat from Hallow's End and make them think they're facing down the Headless Horseman. Wear what you want because a) it will make you feel better, and b) it *might* just demoralize your foes that you can beat them in a bikini, or at the least, it might distract them. Do it for giggles.


2. Keybind your 3 main abilities: thrust, shield-breaker, and charge. You want these as comfortably close your movement keys as possible: I chose q, mouse button 3, and e respectively. I keybound them on my Bartender action bars, since it allows for stance and vehicle-bar-swapping support.
   


3. Shields up, Captain! When you mount up, with lance equipped and properly accessorized, put your shields to a full 3-stack. This is not cheating: the Boneguard Commanders do it, and the Champions in the ring do it. It is simply smart play to keep your defenses up.


4. Pick your prey. If you're a Valiant, you can go to either of the two Valiants' rings to pick a fight with an NPC (horde and alliance doesn't matter), and if you're a Champion, you have the whole Champion ring to choose from. Both ranks can pick a fight with the Boneguard Lieutenants and Commanders, if you wish to fight for justice rather than sport. For the commanders, I recommend pulling them up the stairs towards the citadel so that you don't aggro tons of things (especially those pesky gargoyle scouts!).
   


5. Charge them! For ring fights, wait for you enemy to get in the center ring, and charge them from the sidelines. This is your heaviest damage-dealing attack, and you want to close with them before they charge you back.


6. Wheel around with the mouse and movement keys while spamming your shield-breaker (this is why I bound the ability to a mouse-button). This is a maneuver most old-school hunters learned while working on their epic bow quest-line, and is a handy skill for most any player to know: jumping while moving one way, then spinning with the mouse in mid-air to turn and face your opponent again to that you can shoot a ranged ability at them. Since the charge effect gives you a speed boost, tightly circle them while trying to face them (strafe a bit if you have to) and try to stay behind them or to their side, and it should prevent them from getting a charge back at you while you wait for the speed boost to wear off.


7. Stab them in melee. If you're feeling plucky, you might run away and wheel-about midair to throw another shield-breaker before they can react, and close back into melee before they can do the same to you. The more you do this, the less armor they have.
   


8. Keep shields at full. Reapply your shields whenever you loose one, and also reapply them before the whole stack simply wears off after a minute's duration. If you loose multiple shield charges, getting them back up around the cooldown should be your top priority.
   


9. When they run, charge after them. How nice of them to provide their backs to you. If your charge isn't up, use shield-breaker and close with them fast before they turn and charge you.
   


10. Rinse, repeat step 6-9.

This strategy has served me well in the Champions' Ring (I've been able to take out all 4 without needing to heal between fights, if I'm careful), as well as in being able to solo the commanders at the citadel. Just don't get *too* cocky, or you'll end up dismounted amidst the dozens of foot soldiers and get squished... >.>

I have not dueled anyone yet, not since a very failed duel on the first day. I'm an odd druid who avoids duels like a plague. I'd like to know, though, if this tactic will work in duels, or if the unpredictability of a live opponent will make it far more difficult, requiring more reliance on remembering their charge cooldowns, and wheeling mid-air for quick breaks or charges.


~ Note: for a full Argent Tournament Questing Guide, check out Orbitz' guide at Beware Splinters! ~

Macro: Lip Balm

Wanted to share this rather handy macro to make your daily quest, A Blade Fit for a Champion, a little less time-consuming.

/use Warts-B-Gone Lip Balm /kiss

To use: click on a lake frog to target it, check that the GCD on the lip balm is up, and press the macro. It will simultaneously apply the balm and blow a kiss at the frog. Target the next, check cooldown, and press again when ready.

Benefit: no more typing /kiss. I do not recommend adding a /target Lake Frog to the macro, as it will probably target one you've already kissed.

The Noble: Hints and Tips

I have a strange fascination with exploring to uncover things. It has lead me to wanderlust at times, bringing my boots to the trail, or even just to the sidewalk... and in-game, it has brought me much joy and delight in hunting things such as Everfrost Chips. Thus, this easter egg hunt got me very, very excited.

I was out there in Mulgore at 1am, running circles around the tents finding eggs. I didn't get to sleep until very, very late... and then was up again at 10am to start it all up on my feral druid, too! By 4pm (with breaks for gardening, housework, shower, and dailies), I had gotten the Noble title on my main, and need only to complete the Shake Your Bunny-Maker ear-ing of people on my feral druid.

I understand that the frustration of fighting for spawns of little eggs hidden around out-of-the-way towns is not for everyone, so I will share some suggestions on how to handle this achievement.

The Egg Hunt

• To begin, head out to one of the "starting villages" for your faction (does not have to be your specific race). These are the towns a lowbie first reaches that have a mailbox. For horde, I found the lowest density of people in Mulgore and Brill; for Alliance, I found the least in Kharanos and Dolanaar. If you're feeling adventurous, you *can* go to the starter towns of your opposing faction to loot eggs, but you won't get the starter quests there.
  


• Speak first to the quest-givers outside of the inn. They'll give you a starting goal and a click-use basket offhand that gives you a 60% speed boost buff. I recommend keybinding this somewhere where you can comfortably spam it. This does work while in cheetah/ghost wolf form, but does not stack: you will either be 40% speed from cheetah (etc), or 60% from the basket.
  


• Scout the whole town, picking up eggs (which are painted in some variation of blue/purple/green) as you find them. Make note of the locations that others are camping as spawn points.
• Within bushes
• Under wagons
• Under windowsills
• Wedged into corners of buildings
• On grills, tables, or racks
• In fountains
• Under benches and tables
• In boxes
• Under ramps
• Up against Mailboxes
• Between baskets and crates
• Etc.


• The "Tiny" eggs are not lootable. They are laid by players who were turned into bunnies and sat too long in one spot.
  

• If at all possible, attempt to egg hunt during a low(er)-pop realm time: while most are sleeping, are at work, or at school. Lunchtime will probably see a heavy burst around noon to 2pm server.

Now, at this point, you can gauge how much competition you have. Is nearly everyone camping a single spot? Are there many people making circuits of the area? How heavy is your server population, and is it one of those heavy-load times of day?

Hunting Style

There are two egg-hunting methods you can choose from, or switch between: the Camper, and the Hunter.

• Camping: choose the best location you can, preferably with no one else camping that clump of bushes or corner. Some spots are better than others as they may have 3-5 egg spawns within click range, some may only have 1. Your initial scouting should help with selection. Cons: this is incredibly dull, and you often feel territorial about your chosen spot. This leads to further frustration with the event, and may lead to harsh words with others who want their fluffy bunny as much as you do (I saw people cussing each other out in Goldshire). Above all, the camping method requires patience, as you wait for them to spawn in under your mouse. Sylly at Rolling Hots has written up her camping method here.
  


• Hunting: choose a circuit that includes as many non-camped egg spawns as possible, and run it. You need a good eye for this, and keep rotating your camera with mouse-look as much as possible so you can notice the eggs better. The quicker eggs are looted, the quicker they'll respawn around the town. Keep an eye on the comings and goings of the campers, as they may alter your route. If you aren't finding many spawns on your chosen route, change it up. Usually, the best route is to circle the largest building in the town, or a couple of the buildings. Don't ignore nearby trees, as they likely hide an egg or two of their own on the far side. Cons: if there are lots of campers, you won't find much.
  

The Achievements

I recommend aiming first for the Chocoholic achievement, or work towards purchasing a pet bunny (or the mage book as applicable) with 100 chocolates once you complete the initial quest. This gives you lots of egg-hunting time to collect various pieces of garb and possibly even have the pet bunny drop. Everything off of the vendors except for the click-use egg (purchased for 5 chocolate) can be collected from the eggs themselves. You will need in total:

• 100 chocolates consumed
  
• Spring Rabbit pet (drop or 100 choc)
  
• Spring Robes (drop or 50 choc)
• Spring Flowers (drop or 50 choc)
• Blossoming Branch (quest, drop, or 10 choc)
• White Tuxedo Shirt (drop, 25 choc, or gift from a buddy)
• Black Tuxedo Pants (drop, 25 choc, or gift from a buddy)
• 1 NobleGarden Egg (5 choc)
  

You will get an extra achievement for looting the tux shirt and pants from eggs, as well as for looting an elegant dress; these are not required for the overall title and eventual proto-drake-mount achievement, however. If you're as happy about hats as I am, you may want to pick up the Spring Circlet perma-rabbit-ears-hat for your collection, though it can also drop from the eggs themselves and is not required for any achievement.

Once you have these necessary things completed and gathered, you can leave the egg hunting behind and focus your efforts on completing the achievements:

• Spring-Fling: begin working on this the moment you have your bunny pet, to cut down on travel. When your Spring Rabbit comes near someone elses' Spring Rabbit, they will... get hearts over their head and make baby bunnies using some sort of floral sorcery. You'll need to let your little sailor of a rabbit have such a fling in each of the four starting towns of your faction.
  
• Shake Your Bunny-Maker: the flowers have a 5-minute cooldown, so take care of this as you go about your dailies and travels. Dalaran is one of the best places to find each race. The hardest to track down will usually be female dwarves, orcs, and trolls. IMPORTANT: check if the person has the 2-minute carrot-icon ears buff on them before you use your flowers on them, or you won't get credit, but you'll still be sitting there with a cooldown on your flowers.
  
• Noble Garden: sometime in your travels you will likely end up in Stormwind or Silvermoon City, and at that time you'll want to have an egg on hand from the vendors that you yourself can hide. Either leave this for a friend or random passerby, or you can loot it yourself after dropping it!
  
• Blushing Bride: don your tux shirt and pants, find someone wearing the peachy-pink Elegant Dress, and send them a kiss. Easy to do, just don't wait til late in the week to take care of this, or there may be fewer dress-wearers lurking about the cities.
• Desert Rose: don your Spring Robes and port out from Dalaran to the Caverns of Time (Tanaris). Once out in the desert, click-use on the robes to plant a flower. Ride up past Gadgetzan into Thousand Needles/Shimmering Flats, and repeat; then head back to the flightpath at Gadgetzan to fly to Ungoro. In Ungoro, take care of your Hard-Boiled achievement (see below), then ride up to Silithus to plant your next flower. Fly from Silithus to Desolace for your fourth planting, and then hearth/travel across the world to Badlands for your final flower.
• Hard Boiled: while stopping by Un'Goro, have a friend with you, or find a pug-type who also has the Blossoming Branch. Head to the hot springs on the western side of the crater and bunnify each other, then wait quietly in the water until you lay an egg.

Try to get all of this done before Children's Week begins, so that you have less pressure to do both at the same time! Good luck, and have fun :)


(Oh, and if all those Chocolate Eggs give your character a tummy ache, I recommend some Goldthorn Tea.)

Happy Arbor Day!

A celebration of trees everywhere: in forests, in backyards, and even in Ulduar raids!



I decided for Arbor Day to refresh myself with some real woodlore: identification of many of the deciduous trees of North America, by leaf shape.

Can you tell one tree from another?

Which of the leaves belong to which tree?
Birch, Black Walnut, Chestnut, Dogwood, Elm, Hickory, Holly, Locust, Maple, Red Oak, Sassafras, Sweetgum (or Redgum), Tulip, White Oak, Willow.



KEY (Highlight):

1 - Sweetgum 2 - Chestnut 3 - Red Oak 4 - Maple 5 - Tulip 6 - White Oak 7 - Black Walnut 8 - Birch 9 - Sassafras 10 - Hickory 11 - Willow 12 - Dogwood 13 - Locust 14 - Elm 15 - Holly

What kind of tree are we most closely related?

Well, our golden leaves have 5 pointed lobes: a star shape like a sweetgum, though ours is a bit "wilty" in that all of the points/lobes brush upwards towards the tip of the leaf. Each of the lobes looks to connect at the base of the leaf, as though each vein is anchored to the actual stem of the leaf at its base.

Some of our spellcasts (such as Nourish) bring about leaves with far more points (7ish) which more closely resemble oak leaves. The barely-visible veins connect to a central vein, like the branches of a stream.

So, at my best guess, we seem to be a sort of gum/oak hybrid.





So what's the real story behind Arbor Day?

There were these druids in Ashenvale, you see, and... well, okay, it was really Nebraska :) His name was Julius Sterling Morton, and he served for a time as President Cleveland's Secretary of Agriculture. He felt that both the landscape and the economy would see benefit from wide-scale planting of trees, and so created Arbor Day over the course of his career to increase awareness of the importance of trees.

The very first annual, legal Arbor Day was set as April 22nd, to coincide with Morton's birthday. Since then, the dates have fluctuated, and still vary per state. This variation is due to local climates and weather. In my state, the official day is the second Friday in April... which was technically the 10th (ironically, it was snowing here, then). Nationally, President Nixon set the date to be the last Friday in April, which is April 24th, this year.

Over the last century, the holiday has spread to other countries, including Japan, Australia, India, Iceland, Azeroth, and more!


...as a random FYI, large holly trees are one of the easiest climbing trees available, as they get really knobby with age, and the branches are so spread out that you're unlikely to get hit by the stickers... just make sure to wear shoes when walking up to the tree! Yeah, I climbed a lot of trees as a kid :)

Ulduar 10: Assembly, Freya, Hodir

3 new bosses down, so 3 new resto-druid walk-throughs :)

Assembly of Iron: "Decipher THIS!"
This one gave us the most trouble that night, due to tanks getting insta-gibbed for various reasons (fusion punch + power rune, overload + power rune, fusion not being dispelled quick enough, etc). You may need 3 healers for this, and have the 3rd healer bounce between the two tanks to where they're needed most (and take over when you need a mana break!). The kill-order can vary; we did Steelbreaker -> Runemaster -> Stormcaller, which is reportedly the easiest. This is an endurance fight where survival should come first, and your mana will be stretched to the limit, particularly if the dispellers and interruptors don't do their jobs.

• Healing assignments will be necessary, as it is best to spread the tanks to either end of the room to minimize splash damage. As a resto druid, you should probably be with whatever tank has the current kill target so that you can reach the dps with WG (depending on your playing style, etc). There should be an interrupter with whoever is tanking Stormcaller, to interrupt his chain lightening and whirls and stuff.
  
• Steelbreaker: watch the incoming fusion punchs, as they cause a debuff that if not purged immediately, can deal maaassive damage to the tank. Time a nourish/regrowth cast to land right as the fusion punch does, and start spamming, dropping in swiftmend as necessary. When the tank's health isn't dropping in frightening numbers, you're probably in the clear until the next fusion punch. A paladin or priest must be in range of the Steelbreaker tank to cleanse the magic debuff from the tank. There's a small amount of kiting as well, as Steelbreaker must be moved off of the runes of power that the runemaster casts under him. You will probably be close to OoM by the time he dies (or even go OoM before), in Naxx gear. Use your innervate and keep on truckin'.
  
• Runemaster: At "Phase 2," Runemaster starts casting a giant green Rune o' Death. Anyone inside it must vacate immediately. Watch for people fleeing from it, they will need extra heals. This involves far more kiting as the death runes are HUGE, but you can probably place yourself in the center of the room and often then be in range to heal both tanks at the same time. The raid should still stay clear of Stormcaller's Overload, and interruptors must now watch to interrupt Stormcaller's Lightening Whirl. Try to get your hunters/shammies to put out nature resist totems/auras to help mitigate the massive damage the lightening whirls do, since thy have an immense range and deal massive damage to their random victims. This is the phase that you'll want to be letting your mana regen as much as possible.
  
• Stormcaller: At "Phase 3" he has all of his previous abilities (which still must be interrupted, keep after your interrupters!), plus he now has a flight phase, where he becomes a lightening storm himself and chases people around the room. Melee will have to run away quickly, but are likely to still catch some, particularly if they're being chased first, so drop a WG on the lot of them as they begin to scatter. Stay clear of Stormcaller yourself, and give yourself plenty of room to run if he decides at any moment to start chasing you. Your HoTs and swiftmends will serve you well in this part.

Freya: "Forgive me."
Kill the 3 mini-bosses unless you want to activate hard mode ala Sartharian + Drakes. Each of the mini-bosses requires some amount of kiting to escape the boss being healed (Brightleaf), or destroying your tank (Stonebark). Ironbranch may one-shot a few players with the roots damage or the giant impale thorn (which is not removable, like Najentus' was). When you engage Freya herself, she will spawn a wave of adds once every minute, to a total of 6 spawns. It comes down to a matter of killing the adds and surviving these 6 minutes, rather than doing any damage to Freya herself during this time.

• "The EVIL trio": a snaplasher, water elemental, and a storm lasher. The tanks will need to monitor debuffs on the snaplasher and tell dps where to go, as the snaplasher gets more powerful with every hit, and can destroy your tank. The Snaplasher's damage buff resets after 4 seconds. The elementals have a knockback: if you get hit by it, just run back to the group.
• "BOMBS": aggroless little buggers. Everyone (you included) needs to run in on Freya to gather them up. Let the HoTs fly around the raid, and don't let your raid become overzealous while killing them: each one explodes when it dies, and with everyone clustered up, that's some massive raid-wide damage. Call out when you need DPS to stop so you can catch up on healing... or have an appropriate raid leader call it out.
• "Shrooms!": a giant tree-man for the DPS to play with, and a blanket-effect silence that is only dispelled while sheltering by one of the many mushrooms he spawns in the area. Run to one immediately so you can continue healing. The mushrooms slowly grow to maximum size, then will wither away quickly. Any size of the spawned mushrooms will protect you, but be mindful of its growth and be ready to move to a new one. The tree also casts a lightening bomb "Nature's Fury" on a random player which will damage anyone around them; they must move away from nearby players. This may result in some rearrangement of players among their mushroom shelters.
• Phase 2: tank n' spank with some kiting away from the giant green pools of boss-healing. Easy stuff if you killed the giant tree minibosses beforehand. If you reach this phase, you've pretty much won.

Hodir: "Winds of the North, consume you!"
I find this fight a lot of fun, as a resto druid. Lightly plant yourself on one side of the boss, within range to heal the melee/tank; have your co-healer plant themselves opposite so they can reach any ranged dps on the other side. Keep moving: taking slow, jolting steps to break the stacking frost aura debuff, since each single movement you do will only remove one of the debuffs, and you'll have to stop and move again to remove any others that have stacked.

• Turn on Projected Textures in your video settings tab. Have everyone in your raid turn this on, it is very important. It will enable you to see the runes on the floor that show where the next set of ice shards will be falling from the ceiling.
• Ice Shards/Icicles: move out of the runes cast on the floor. Just pay attention to what's under your feet/roots.
• Biting Cold: press w to not die. This is the stacking debuff aura I mentioned above.
• Flash Freeze: when he begins casting this, two larger icicles runes will appear somewhere in the room: move over to them, but don't get on them until the ice has landed and created a snowdrift. Get as close to the center of the snowdrift as possible before he casts the freeze, as it may lag or bug and you'll still get ice blocked. You can heal any players who are trapped in ice blocks, but they'll need to be rescued by your dps.
• Freeze: a frost-nova type ability that traps your feet. As a druid, you can either wait for someone to dispel you (priests need to be mass-dispelling this, pallies can help with hand of freedom, and there's an NPC that somewhat assists), or shift out briefly to break it. I usually opt for the shifting-out.
• Frozen Blows: this is the one thing that can possibly wipe your raid, and the reason why you want the healers spread out to either side. Raid-wide damage ticking rather quickly, particularly if dispels are not being handled properly. Hand of Freedom (from pallies) should be kept on the tank during this time, else they'll be taking MASSIVE damage. Let WG take care of the melee, and keep an eye on all of the ranged players, and don't let yourself get distracted from the ever-spawning ice shards.

Have fun :D

Resto Webstats report 3.1 - first look

The following stats are taken from my guild's very first raid night downing the "real" (non-vehicle) bosses in Ulduar. It was a ten-man raid, and the tanks were a prot pally and a prot warrior. A holy priest was healing with me, though the enhancement shaman certainly made a showing with his heals off of Spirit Hunt and Healing Stream Totem.

First, a look at the spells I used:

LIFEBLOOM:
I used lifebloom far more than I had expected to. I'm uncertain of how much this will remain as we grow more comfortable with the instance, and how much may be on group makeup (who I'm healing with). The breakdown on my lifebloom targets is such:

Percent breakdown of my Lifebloom Targets
Tanks:	85% (61% and 24%)
Myself:	4%
Others:	11%

As I did 50% of each of the tanks' total healing received myself, lifebloom obviously still is a superior tank healing spell from raw healing done. Among the tanks in the raid, one in particular received 61% of all of my lifebloom healing, as I did try to limit myself to one tank with a rolling stack of lifeblooms.

Now, one change I did notice is that the blooms' healing was being properly credited to me, where it used to be counted as the person's own heal (much like Leader of the Pack). Of course, this resulted in my lifebloom overheal reaching over 30%, mostly due to the large blooms being wasted as combat wore off, etc.


REVITALIZE:
With Wild Growth and Rejuvenation making up 41% of my total healing done, Revitalize had plenty of chances to proc. I cast Rejuvenation approx 635 times (the feral druid cast it at least once). WWS does not show how many times I cast Wild Growth, and the number of targets hit was too varied to make a good estimate on how often I had cast it. Unfortunately, the log file only says who gained WG, rather than making note of me casting it. I could probably go through the log and manually count based off of the cooldown on Wild Growth... but I'm not THAT insane.

The following numbers were quoted for revitalize (the raid was 4 hours long):

Player	Role	Total Regen	# Ticks	Avg Amnt	Max Amnt
Alyae	Tank	15,649	236	66	80
Rambridge	Tank	452	113	4	4
Kaelynn	Healer	15,894	83	191	198
Kuchki	Healer	9,745	51	191	198
Kitarha	DPS	1,072	67	16	16
Celeritas	DPS	979	67	14	79
Razhakal	DPS	8,964	49	182	201
Tuku	DPS	7,895	59	133	136
Keltsett	DPS	6,891	54	127	129
Grommsol	DPS	6,053	46	131	133
Spirit Wolf	DPS	24	6	4	4
ArmyOTDead	DPS	32	4	8	8
DK Ghoul	DPS	80	10	8	8

Over 15k mana was returned to myself and to the prot pally, and 452 rage to the prot warrior: the three I targeted most often for my rejuvenation spells. The 3 melee dps: DK, feral druid, and enhancement shaman saw my next-most-often use of rejuvenation (40+ rejuvs applied each), and then the ranged and pets. Hunter pets did not get earmarked by WWS to have received any procs of revitalize, though the shaman and DK pets did.

The average and max tick amounts on the feral druid are not reliable. Celeritas' numbers are twisted by the fact that they weren't all energy: he was sometimes in bear, and sometimes in caster form when revitalize procced, so these numbers are not reliable for him. The amount gained in cat form would be 8 energy per tick... which was his form for the majority of the raid.

Most of the revitalization on the ranged dps came from procs off of wild growth.


NOURISH vs REGROWTH:
With about the same crit percent, I cast Regrowth half as often as Nourish, yet they did about the same amount of my total healing because of the HoT portion of the regrowth. I am certain that nourish will pull away by 5% or more once I get it glyphed, and when I remove the regrowth glyph. I was using regrowth as a heal+hot, and nourish as a "flash heal."

Overall, both of these spells made up significantly more of my healing than they did in Naxx. I had to help heal the tanks far more, and the raid wasn't safe with just HoTs. People needed direct heals WITH their hots, so nourish and regrowth suddenly took a larger role in my healing than previously.


LIVING SEED:
Did 3% of my total healing done, with only a 17% overheal, which is less than the overheal that I got off of lifebloom or nourish, and roughly the same amount of overheal as I got with regrowth. It averaged 3.2k per seed (resulting from regrowths and nourishes), and one seed was as much as 10k (from a large HT crit)! EDIT: recent parses have increased the average to almost 4k... yay. Purely passive bonus healing off of my crit-happy regrowths and nourishes? Yes please, talent points well spent.

Consider in comparison how important Swiftmend and NS+HT are, and their relative % of my healing done. I have to actually cast those, and I think people would die if I didn't. Living Seed is passive, and nourish is critting all over the place now. The seeds can be wasted on dps as they aren't hit near as often as the tank, but meh, their place on the tanks feels plenty important enough.

Living Seed still won't be useful for druids who do not cast nourish, swiftmend, or regrowth (or HT) very often, since it is crit-dependant... nor for druids who do not usually heal the tanks, since it only blooms when the person is next hit. It will be extremely useful for druids who fancy themselves as MT healers. Since I heal both (raid and tanks), I'm loving it for the tank-side of my healing.


CRITS:
These numbers got big, and some were far larger than I'm used to.

Heal	Max Crit
Lifebloom	26,406
Nourish	15,029
Regrowth	10,317
Swiftmend	20,459
NS+HT	19,605

Yum. Lifebloom bloom crit for massively huge numbers (probably a 3-stack). I wonder how much of that was overheal? Ha. I do know that that particular listed NS+HT crit was pure overheal... the tank used Lay on Hands right as I cast it ><


THORNS:
Heh heh heh 200+ damage. The main tank got up to a maximum of 321 damage off of a thorns hit, which was probably charged by the shaman's stormstrikes. Good times. Take that, Anubisath Defenders!! Totally making sure this is always on the tanks from now on.

Thorns did 3% of the prot pally's damage for the night... though only 1% of the prot warrior's.


Summary:

Ulduar and 3.1 have forced a change in my healing, one that I will continue to adapt to fit the situation. Revitalize and Living Seed have seen an increase in usefulness, and Nourish is certainly an important flash-heal now. Thorns is now superior to ret aura's damage, particularly around enhancement shammies.

The blooms from lifebloom are something I still need to learn to work with, but I can see they fall into 3 major Bloom categories:

• 3-stacked blooms for the raw heal on a tank, which crit up past 26k
• 1-stack bloom for mana refund after it applied its healing, be it a tank or otherwise
  
• Wasted overheal from letting stacks drop after combat is over.
  

Ulduar 10: XT, Kolo, Auri

The server instability killed 2 out of our 3 scheduled raiding days, so Sunday night was the first chance we had to get really into the instance and play with bosses that were NOT just a zip-around-in-vehicles funfest. We entered enthusiastic and held up to the wipes with good humor; we ended the night with XT-002, Kologarn, and Auriaya dead.

Kill pics are posted on the guild's own front page, for those interested.

• I picked up the Traveler's Tundra Mammoth. My little rogue is a wonderful farmer, and I finally sold enough saronite and scraped my pennies together to purchase the extra-large mammoth and hire on a couple vendors. As the only one in the guild, it was a very pleasant surprise for the raid to have easy access to repairs, reagents, and arrows :) Once we got into the indoor portions of the instance, I'd just run back from wipes quickly and park myself by the teleporter, letting people repair as they ran past.
  


• I did NOT pick up my new glyphs. I could not justify spending 500g on a nourish and a wild growth glyph. Curse you, market abusers! I may pick them up off the Alliance AH and transfer them over to my poor little moocow.


• General trash strat: spread out, and stick one healer on either side of the hallway to minimize the chances that both will be running around waving their hands in the air in a panic at the same time. If you see a Molotov Cocktail thrown at you, move out of the glowing red symbol that forms on the floor under it, or you will blow up.
  

Ulduar Bosses: a View from the Trees

~Note: Ulduar does not have a necessarily linear progression path from one boss to another, so you may not fight the following bosses in this order. This is simply the order in which my guild has killed them, and notes on the parts that I found important as a druid healer.


Flame Leviathan: "Activating anti-personnel countermeasures."

BEEP BEEEEP! No healing here. Have fun driving or shooting or launching your guildies through the air... or all three :) Just don't mistake your flailing guildie as a target to shoot as they soar through the air, and if you're driving a demolisher or chopper, don't forget to pick up said flying guildie after they eject from the boss' roof.

Yes, you can drive in shapeshift forms. Moonkin bikers currently have a bugged animation where they stand on their bike "mining" it.



XT-002 Deconstructor: "New toys? For me? I promise I won't break them this time!"

Firstly, this guy is hilarious. His voice is so high-pitched and squeaky, he's like a giant kid in a robot suit. Also, he does calisthenics while wandering around his room!

• LoS: we chose to tank the boss on the top of the stairs, where it we could better control the incoming adds from the 4 corner junkpiles. Small stairwell = LoS issues. I stood on the top stair to the far left, and the other healer to the far right. You can stand on the railing, but you can also fall off of it, so be careful there if you decide to tank the boss on the stairs.
  
• Range: the dps has to run around in this fight, getting away from each other with their bombs. We also need to be able to help the other healer when they get the light bomb, so try to be in range of them, too. If DPS spreads out too far, then your WG can have problems.
  
• Light Bomb: this is the bomb the boss puts on a single player that causes some serious damage to them and everyone around them. There's also a gravity bomb that pulls people around you all on top of you, but that's not as big a deal (though we got an achievement for not having anyone die to a gravity bomb...). When someone gets the lightbomb, they're gonna need heals! Run out of the group/away from people if you can, or tell others to get away from you.
  
• Tantrum: this is the most-dreaded part of the fight, and the place where people are most likely to die. Raid-wide steady AoE damage, and heavy! Be especially watchful of players who have a light bomb on them when Tantrum starts.
  

For a more detailed strat that explains how to do XT-002 Hardmode, click here!



Kologarn: "Only a flesh wound!"

Ahhh Monty Python jokes, good times. Tis only a flesh wound! Anyway, this fight may require 3 healers. With a resto druid and a holy priest, we found we needed to have the shadow priest dual-spec over to disc to assist with this boss due to the heavy damage the tanks were taking.

• Eye Beams: pay attention, and run away when you get focused with eye beams. Don't run them over someone else, either. Stay relatively spread out from other players, and always be aware of your escape route. We chose to have our ranged players arrange themselves in a rough horseshoe shape, with the back opening into the corridor, so that those with eyebeams could just run out of the door through the center without running the beams over other players. Running outside the room does NOT reset the boss.
  
• Hand Grip: SQUISH... a very technical term. The hand on your own left when facing the boss will grab a player and start squeezing them to death; obviously, you should heal them. If your dps is slow, it may take a while to get the person out... or even too late.
• Shock Wave: nature damage, so have your hunters/shammies figure out who's going to put up some resist for you. This is an AoE that deals some pretty heavy raid-wide damage. DBM has a cooldown timer for it, which can help you in making sure everyone in the raid has high enough HP to be able to survive the next shock. Watch this timer around players getting eyebeamed or gripped.
  
• Tank Swaps: Kologarn puts an armor debuff on the tanks that, beyond a stack of 2, can pretty much mean an insta-gib of your tank. Pay attention to them swapping. The debuff can wear off before stacking past 2, so swaps may not be common.
  
• Elementals o' death: when an arm is destroyed, adds will spawn. They can and will kill the healers quickly with Rubble Rumble and melee attacks if an offtank doesn't pick them up. Scream and yell if you must! They are not cuddly friendly pets.
  

For a more detailed strat that explains how to do With Open Arms, click here!


Auriaya: "Some things are better left alone!"

The kitties are so cute! The strat for this lady is pretty simple for healers: heal people, and stand with the MT (or behind the MT) hugging a tremor totem.

• Stay out of LoS of the boss during the pull so you don't get kitty aggro. We look like giant scratching posts to her pets.... /pouncy!
  
• If you get feared out of position, run back to your position.
  
• There is an aoe, a cone Sonic Scream attack that acts like a cleave but is spread out among those who took the hit, so you want as many people taking that damage as possible. If you're the only one standing there with the tank, you're gonna die.... if only a few people are there, they're going to take very heavy damage.
  
• Keep everyone topped off, and be mindful of LoS on the offtank/adds people.
• Try to stack healers and tanks in the party that has Tremor totem, if available.
  

Don't blame yourself if the pull goes wonky and the kitty adds double-pounce on some poor hapless hunter or even a tank, instantly slaughtering them... it happens, wipe it, run back, and hope the pull goes better next time. If everything gets picked up anyway and stabilizes after the double-pounce, just battle-res the mauled player and move on! (Edit: they've been nerfed to not be instant-death on a double pounce anymore, at least ;) ).

Trinkets: SoH vs MDF

I picked up the Spark of Hope and the Cover of the Keepers last night. The instance was good to me.

Spark of Hope vs Majestic Dragon Figurine

MDF: 180 Spirit (when fully stacked).
SoH: 100 spirit, plus 42 mana saved off of every spellcast.

SoH Pros:

• Constant 100 spirit. Don't have to build up to it, which is good when buffing or on short trash pulls, or when damage starts heavy.
  
• 42 mana saved off of every spell cast. If chain-casting insta-cast spells (back-to-back on a 1.2 second GCD), this results in roughly 175mp5 saved from being used (give or take GotEM's reductions). The true mp5 saved by this will vary based on how often you are casting and which spells you cast, as well as procs and use of Nature's Grace.
• This mana reduction will not add to your mana regen... it will only save you mana.
• To put the mana savings into perspective, consider that BoW is 91 mp5. Casting 2 spells in 5 seconds with SoH equipped will almost match the mp5 returned from BoW. Imp BoW is 109.2 mp5, or 2.6 spells cast within 5 seconds with the SoH equipped. I am very, very likely to be casting 3 or more spells within 5 seconds, so this proc will save me more mana than impBoW is giving back to me when it matters.
  

MDF Pros:

• Built to 180 spirit.
• Easy to keep stacked in a long fight.
  
• 80 more spirit over the SoH gives it extra healing and regen (when stacked 6+). Accounting for the Living Spirit talent, this is 92 spirit (13.8 healing) lost if I swap to the SoH.
• 92 spirit roughly equates to 27.6 mp5 while casting with full points in Intensity (92 spirit = 92 mp5 out of combat pre-3.1, x 0.3 from intensity pre 3.1 = 27.6 regen while casting. Blizzard has stated that the changes to oo5sr regen and intensity should not have changed the while-casting regeneration rate... much... so I feel this estimation of 27.6 mp5 while casting is still safe in spite of the changes to spirit, to which I cannot find the exact new equations).
  

Personally, I think that the SoH is gonna give me far better returns than the MDF's transient 80 spirit. That 13.8 healing from the MDF is, of course, as transient as the spirit it is derived from, requiring a full 10 stack of the MDF's spirit buff proc for the full 13.8 healing bonus over the spirit given by the SoH. Also, I doubt that the lost amount of spirit-based mana regen from the MDF (estimated at 27.5 mp5) is anywhere close to the raw mana savings on each spell cast from the SoH (roughly 125 to 175 mp5), so I will gladly give up the transient 13.8 healing in trade for the superior mana savings.

SoH wins out, for me. (My other trinket that I am pairing it with is the Illustration of the Dragon Soul.)


What about DMC: Blue Dragon?

I will point back to Averna's post at Nerf this Druid, where she found that the DMC:BD equated roughly to 77 mp5, on average, depending on gear and luck with procs, post-3.1. SoH still wins out!

3.1 Tournament, Crashes, and Minipets

/hugs to all my fellow Hokies out there.

---

Instance Crashes and Stuck Characters

Raiding this week has been quite a frustration, as the instance servers keep crashing around our ears. Kaelynn is still floating around in limbo from Vault of Archavon last night (Wed).

Quoting Blizzard's official announcement on the matter,

If you are stuck in-game, please submit an in-game petition with the following information: Always use the ‘Character Stuck’ button when you submit this kind of petition. Include the name and realm of the stuck character. Include where your character was before they got stuck Mention whether you are stuck at the loading screen, are unable to remain in-game, are trapped on terrain, are unable to find your body, or fell ‘through the world’ If you are unable to log in to your character at all, please submit the petition from another character. If you are attempting to raid Ulduar or another raid instance and 'realm first' accomplishments are not a priority, your experience is likely to be smoother if you wait until conditions stabilize prior to raiding actively.

Major content patches always seem to do something like this, with WoW. Kitarha (my husband) said to me last night, "If we rolled out a system at work and it did this, we'd be fired." I suppose that is the difference between people paying for the exact content vs paying for general content/framework: the rush to get it out and keep customers out of interest, vs loosing customers from it not working.


Minipets and the Tournament:

Some fun stuff up at the new tournament grounds in Icecrown, though it irks me how the limited faction dailies of 5 tokens/day are holding players back and drawing it all out. I understand Blizzard's reasoning of not letting content slip away so quickly, but at 40 tokens per minipet and we can't even collect THOSE tokens yet, it saddens me as a pet collector. It certainly doesn't help that the quest-givers in the faction inns can be kited outside and slaughtered by the opposing faction, without it even flagging the killers on a PvE server. /sigh.

• Tip for those of you just starting the jousting stuff: read what the NPCs say when they're teaching you how to fight the dummy targets. The melee one can kill your mount.

• Tip for those who haven't been up there yet: go FIRST to the big pavilion on the far western end of the tournament grounds, and the NPC there will then send you to your appropriate horde/alliance pavilion on the far eastern side.


• The tournament grounds are in the far north-eastern corner of Icecrown, up past Sindragosa's Fall.

Anyway, I do need to get my feral druid to 77 so she can fly up there and participate in the quests; I may ride her up there before leveling her, though, and hope they let me quest as a 76. We'll see.


Sprite Darter Egg:

I did farm up one of these yesterday on my moocow. It took something like 10 minutes to do, just waddling up and down outside the evil moocow village in Feralas and dropping Insect Swarm on each of the quickly repopping sprite darters in the area, letting the DoT tick them down as I moved to the next. In comparison to the hours spent on the chain to hatch the egg on Alliance side (a quest chain few Alliance even seem to know about!), getting the little faerie dragon for a horde right now is insanely easy. I'll be getting one on my rogue tonight, likely. If you have a horde character, I recommend going out and farming one yourself before they decide to nerf the droprate.


Westfall Chicken:

Another pet for Horde to go get now. This is another one of those little-known Alliance pet quests, and even on Alliance side, when you described the quest to someone, 90% of the time they thought you were pulling their leg. Horde were able to get the pet prior to the feed vendor in Brill, but only if an Alliance did the quest for them, since the egg reward is sat upon the ground, lootable by anyone. The quest is as such:

1. Purchase Special Chicken Feed from the farm in Westfall or from the new horde feed vendor, William Saldean in Brill.
2. Locate a chicken critter.
3. Spam the /chicken emote at the chicken. Macros work well for this. Just keep spamming it at the chicken... it does need to be alive, so don't kill the chicken!
4. Eventually, the chicken will pop up a quest marker over its head. It wants Special Chicken Feed.
5. Upon turning in the quest feed to the chicken, an egg will appear on the ground.
   
6. Loot the egg, grats on your new pet!

Healing Experience:

Well, as I said, most of the time I've been crashed, or waiting outside the gate for the instance server to open back up, so I've not really had much chance to see what healing is like with the changes. We killed Flame Leviathan on Tuesday night, but as I was piloting a demolisher and launching my rogue buddy through the air (WHEEEEE!), there wasn't any healing going on until we reached the earthquake-stunning PAIN that was the Molten Colossus trash mobs directly following the boss. Then, the server crashed.

On Wednesday, we couldn't even enter Ulduar, as the instance was down. We decided after much waiting to go poke into the new wing of Vault of Archavon, and I finally got to play around with some healing spells as we began to clear trash, all the while tweaking/fixing mods and error messages (had to turn off Grid's aggro alert status). I kept swapping around between different spells, seeing how my mana did, trying to decide if I wanted to try to use only WG or Rejuv for the raid so I could get new numbers on revitalize, so on each trash mob I was doing something different. Jaemon, holy pally, suddenly asked me in vent how I managed to triple healing done in a single trash mob, and I lol'd. "Yeah, uh, I'm messing around with stuff right now, heh..." ...it was the first mob I'd bothered putting the 3-stack of lifeblooms on the tank.

We get to the boss, wipe a couple times because we were so melee-heavy and the adds were on the other side of the room from the boss (so they'd get all charged up and bomb the raid before our dps could get to them and kill them), and we were about to pull a 3rd time when the instance crashes.

I tried for 2 hours to log back in, gave up, and went to watch Ghost Hunters. :) If she's still stuck when I get home from work today, I'll submit a ticket, cuz I have dailies to get done!!

My 3.1 Dual-Spec Choices

With two druids, I'm gonna have all 4 major specs to play with.

Curious, she knelt along the water's edge, feeling the sun-warmed mud and moss squish up between her roots as she leaned her trunk forward to stare at her reflection in the still waters. The face that greeted her mirrored her movements and expressions, but was wholly different in form: a small, hooked beak, curving horns, and feathers of cream and sand replaced the golden bark and autumn leaves she knew herself to have. Calmly, she studied the reflection with a druid's spiritual wisdom, wondering what the lake was showing her of her inner self.


Kaelynn: Resto, Moonkin.
I will be raiding with both, though using the turkey for dailies, too.

• For the turkey, I chose Typhoon over Starfall out of consideration for breakable CC, since it is a cone and I can control it better (and tend to be good about aiming the knockback). If I have aggro problems, I'll rearrange to take Nature's Reach.
• Resto spec choices are not changing from pre-3.1. I love the build, and think it will adapt well. If you want reasons, you can see my rambling about all the talent points here.
  

Kae: Cat, Bear.
She is currently level 76, so the builds are going to be generic for pugging/leveling purposes.
I am less certain of feral builds since I haven't raided with one since November (08), but these are the specs I'm gonna try out. If I find I need to change them as I finish leveling her, so be it :)

• Nurturing Instinct applies to heals from iLotP, so it will be a good passive for soloing or pugging.
  
• I am least certain about the points in bash for bear, and will probably leave those points for my last two levels' worth of decisions.

Nature's Grace, Haste, and Cast Times

EDIT: observations about Nourish, Wrath, and the GCD; May 6 2009
EDIT: GotEM 3.3 link; Oct 14 2009



Nature's Grace reduces your casting time during the proc by 20%. The base cast times (not accounting for gear, buffs OR GotEM) with the proc are such:

• Healing Touch: 3.0 -> 2.4 seconds
• HT w/ Naturalist: 2.5 -> 2.0 seconds
• HT w/ Naturalist + Glyph: 1.0 -> 0.8 seconds
  
• Regrowth: 2.0 -> 1.6 seconds
• Nourish: 1.5 -> 1.2 seconds
• Revive: 10 -> 8 seconds
  
• Rebirth: 2.0 -> 1.6 seconds


• Starfire: 3.5 -> 2.8 seconds
• Starfire w/ SW: 3.0 -> 2.4 seconds
• Wrath: 2.0 -> 1.6 seconds
• Wrath w/ SW: 1.5 -> 1.2 seconds

**For cast times accounting for 3.3 Gift of the EarthMother talent changes rather than NG, please see this post**


Nature's Grace and Spell Haste
Here, I am expanding the cast-time calculations from the list above to account for spell haste. The calculation for hasted spell-casting at level 80 according to WoWwiki is:

HastedCastTime = BaseCastTime /(1 + (% SpellHaste / 100))

With 20% extra from NG, where:
BaseCastTime^NG = BaseCastTime - (BaseCastTime x 0.2) = (BaseCastTime x 0.8)
then,

HastedCastTimeNG = (BaseCastTime x 0.8) /(1 + ( % SpellHaste/100))

• Note: Applying this 20% before or after your own spell haste does not matter, like it did with the old 0.5 second flat reduction (which had to be applied before accounting for haste). I tested applying it both before and after the haste, from haste ratings of 0 to 1650, and they had the exact same results. HastedCastTime^NG = [ (BaseCastTime) /(1 + ( % Spell Haste/100)) ] * 0.8 = (BaseCastTime x 0.8) /(1 + ( % Spell Haste/100))

Using this HastedCastTime^NG formula and converting for Haste Rating at level 80, you can compare your haste rating with various spell/talent/proc combinations to see what the cast time would be:


I shaded the standard GCD as it scales with haste. "NG" is for the spells being cast under the effects of Nature's Grace. The GCD itself will be reduced by Nature's Grace procs; the reduced GCD timer follows the same line in the above graph as the hasted Nourish (until it reaches the 1-second GCD limit), plus some additional buffer time granted by individual latency.

What this means is that Nourish and talented Wrath will not clip your GCD, even under the effects of NG procs.


Proc Duration
Another small change is that the 20% reduction to cast times will now last for 3 seconds, rather than only affecting the very next spell you cast (that is not an insta-cast) within 15 seconds. Because of this, you will likely get two spells off (sans Revive) with this cast time reduction before the proc wears off, assuming you are not casting any insta-casts during the short proc. This is certainly a boon for balance druids.

Resto druids:
The original 15-second duration provided much more leeway to make use of the haste around applying lots of HoTs, and having this cut to 3 seconds may result in a loss of the buff at times without it being used by a spell other than insta-casts. We should consider, however, that since it does reduce the GCD during those 3 seconds, it is allowing us to cast more HoTs in that time as well, barring the 1-second-minimum GCD limit.


Short of the Long
With the Nature's Grace proc now scaling with spells rather than being a flat rate, your longer spell casts will see a much larger reduction, and your short spells a shorter reduction which will prevent some of them clipping the GCD as they once did. Both your normal haste and the NG-procced haste will affect your GCD just as much as they do your normal spellcasts, so your Nourish and talented Wraths will not clip it.

The proc has NO internal cooldown, so it will proc on each and every spell critical (except for channeled crits such as those from hurricane). This can offset the shorter duration by chain-proccing during a series of crits.

I consider this talent to still be essential to any balance druid as well as any resto druid who finds themselves casting regrowth, swiftmend, and/or nourish with any kind of regularity. While WG, lifebloom, and rejuvenation may be our most-used heals, nourish's boosted place as a flash heal for use when swiftmend is on cooldown makes this talent quite useful, and the fact that the proc will reduce your GCD by 20% around any HoTs cast within those few seconds of duration are what makes this talent truly shine among the trees.