Druids already have a tough time as healers for a lot of reasons. We have difficulty dealing with spike damage, and this can make some of the more difficult 5-man and raid encounters more difficult. We don’t have an Out of Combat Rez, so if your five man wipes, chances are everyone has to hoof it back. (What I wouldn’t do for an OOC rez…but that’s another topic!) What CC we have is very limited and conditions specific. We don’t have a lot of “utility” or buffs to offer. Most of the time we can’t see our fancy gear. Basically, the Resto Druid is a one-trick pony.

But that one trick, boy. Wowza. Our HOTs are the bee’s knees. We can keep multiple targets in full health by the strength of our Lifebloom and Rejuvination spells alone. Because of this strength, the Tree Druid has come to be quite useful in raiding situations. Sure, we can’t really deal with spike damage, but we can alleviate spike damage and kind of smooth it out for the other healers in the raid. Once maligned, the Tree Druid is now a sought after addition to most raiding groups.

Now it seems Blizzard has seen fit to reduce the effectiveness of our primary, Numero Uno healing spell ? Lifebloom. For patch 2.4, currently on the PTR, Lifebloom has taken a hit with the nerf bat. From the numbers I have read, Lifebloom took approximately an 8% hit in effectiveness. I won’t get into math here, there is plenty out there for you to see. In the simplest terms, our most useful, most effective spell is now not as effective.

Why? Was it unbalancing raid encounters? No. It’s not like having a Tree Druid is an “I Win” button for ZA or SSC or anything else. Was it unbalancing 5 man encounters? Most certainly not. We can be quite effective 5 man healers, but in the end groups usually prefer a Priest or Holy Pally. The reason for the nerf, it is assumed, is PvP and, more specifically, 2v2 arenas. Resto Druid teams have been so effective in 2v2, that a great deal of whining about our class has surfaced. For those whiners, I encourage you to roll a druid and see just how “OP” we are.

I’m asking you Blizzard, please don’t nerf us. We have enough limitations as it is, don’t take away our one sharp stick. You can read other thoughts on this change on the following pages/blogs: Moonfire, Resto4Life, Lifebloomer, Leafshine and HealerLFG.

I approve this message. -Pummra

And I mean that in a good way. By now you know I play a Resto Druid on Whisperwind, and I don’t often have a lot of time for any kind of raiding. I have a 1 year old at home and another on the way, and I generally don’t log on until the baby and the wife hit the sack, and even then for not very long. My guild sets up raids during “prime time” hours, and I can almost NEVER make it.

Recently, I found out that one of the guilds in our alliance runs a late night Kara on the weekends. Wahoo! Finally, a run I can at least occasionally participate in. Well, this weekend I scored. And I mean REALLY scored. The random number generator was just plain my friend.

At the beginning of the night, I was sitting at around 1145 healing, the only stat I really care about. (Of course I pay SOME attention to MP5 and Stam, but really it’s all about +heal.) I am a leatherworker, so I had the [Windhawk Hauberk], [Windhawk Belt] and the [Windhawk Bracers]. Aside from that, I had a collection of decent blues like [The Essence Focuser] and such, along with my lone Kara drop from a previous run, [Aran's Soothing Sapphire].

Obviously, there are about a thousand drops in Kara I could use. Also lucky for me, of the three healers I was by FAR the most undergeared. The other two were there for fun and badges. I got nothing from Attumen or Moroes, but they don’t have much I’d want anyhow. When we got to the maiden, I said that I was hoping for the [Shard of the Virtuous]. Maiden falls, and sure enough, there it is. If that was all I got for the night, it would have been a great night for me. That alone bumped me somewhere around 200 +heal after the enchant.

Next came Opera. Once we saw it was the Big Bad Wolf, I again called out what I was looking for: [Red Riding Hood's Cloak]. Sure enough, there it was. Before that I was still wearing an old green cloak. (In retrospect, it’s too bad I didn’t call out that I would have wanted [Earthsoul Leggings] as well!)

At this point, it’s already hugely successful for me. Well, it only kept going from there. We took down Nightbane, Curator and Aran. I got [Nightstaff of the Everliving], [Pauldrons of the Solace-Giver], [Handguards of Malorne] and finally [Boots of the Incorrupt]. Wow. Just wow. By the time we got to Netherspite, other peeps in the group were asking me to call stuff out that they wanted. I called out [Chestguard of the Conniver] for our rogue, and sure enough, it dropped.

My only regret? I had to log after Aran. I feared for my life as it was now 4 am (we got started at midnight) and it was only a matter of time before the wife came out and skinned me alive.

After enchants the next day, I was up to 1440 +heal along with a healthy bump to spirit, health, mana and MP5. It was truly one of the best nights of WoW I can remember, but I’m sure it will all even out over my next 15 runs or so!

This is actually one of the earliest posts I wrote for my blog.  I found it interesting because while I was once utterly devoted to the Druid class, I now find myself playing my Warrior almost exclusively.  It’s interesting that I actually rated the Warrior LOWEST at the time.  My, how things change!

Ok, maybe my title is misleading. I’m not going to blog about whether casuals have any class. I thought I would take a completely biased, totally subjective look at what I thought the "best" classes were for a casual, solo player. Casual players, by definition, don’t have the time to devote to the game that others do. Given that, it helps if we can focus on one character more heavily. We’ll divide these rankings into three tiers, starting from the bottom. There will certainly be multiple complaints and an abundance of hurt feelings – just don’t take it personally.

Tier 3

Warrior. If there was a tier 4, the warrior would be in it. So what’s the problem? Groups always need tanks, right? They do. The problem with the warrior is their extreme level of gear dependence. The one-trick-pony rogues and mages can at least get by with sub-par gear in many end-game five mans, heroics and Kara. The warrior, on the other hand, must be tricked out in great gear to attempt many of the same instances. Casuals often have the most difficulty "keeping up with the Joneses" gear-wise. Also, have you ever seen a warrior’s repair bill? Ugh!

Aside from the gear problem, there is also the issue that as the tank you are often tasked with leading the run. You are often responsible for marking kill targets, assigning CC, pulling and more. It can get to be a bit much.

Rogue. The mind-numbing, explosive DPS can make casual play sessions seem VERY worthwhile. The ability to stealth is also a boon for a casual player, as it can help make gathering skills a little easier, and allow a player to see more of the game solo than they could with any other class.

The problem with the rogue is that it’s a one trick pony. You are a pure melee DPS class, plain and simple. Although there are big differences with spec choices, it only affects how you deal your melee damage.

The problem doesn’t come with leveling, it comes when you reach the later stages of the game and instancing becomes more of a concern. Asking a group if they have room and hearing "full on rogues" makes a casual’s heart heavy.

Mage. The mage is another pure DPS class, only this time from range. Again, this can make the leveling fun, as a casual player loves to kill stuff FAST to maximize playtime. Then, of course, you find yourself on your fanny drinking after every other fight or so. Casuals no likey downtime. Give the mage class bonus points for the teleportation and portal spells to make travel quicker and easier.

As with the rogue, no matter the spec, a mage is still a mage. Ranged DPS. Period.

Mages do provide a touch more to group situations with their slightly more useful CC and their AOE abilities. Also, who doesn’t like Ritual of Refreshment? You do find yourself fighting with a handful of other classes for DPS spots, however.

Tier 2

Paladin. You’ll quickly notice a theme with Tier 2. Healers. Healers, like tanks, are always needed. Unlike warriors, you can often get away with lesser gear. Paladins make great healers with the safety of plate to help out a bit if you happen to pull aggro.

Paladins are also VERY hard to kill. One thing that can help a casual player is to NOT DIE so much. Paladins are great in this respect. The tradeoff is that they can take a LOOONG time to kill stuff. Paladins are the kind of class where you can engage a mob, go make a sandwich, and not really miss anything or fear dying. Heck, the mob could still be up when you return.

Paladins also have a good deal of versatility when it comes to spec. They are now one of only two classes that can fill any role in a group depending on spec. (I’ll get to the other class later.) You can be a tankadin, a healadin, or a retadin. I’m not familiar with how much DPS a retadin can supply, but it is at least an option. Pallys do lose a few points because they have a certain degree of gear dependence, especially if you plan on tanking.

Priest. You won’t have any problems finding groups with a priest, most likely. They are probably the class that receives the most random group invites. They make great healers, and are not especially gear dependent. (The caveat is that gear ALWAYS helps, some classes can just get away with lesser gear.)

Priests also have a good deal of flexibility with spec. You can spec to be a face-melting DPS class with some utility (shadow), or take the more traditional healer/utility route with Holy/Disc. From what I understand, leveling as a shadow priest is not to be missed. I’ve often watched in awe the way a shadow priest can burn down a mob with impunity.

I’m taking away a point or two due to the fact that before 40 as shadow, or the whole way as disc/holy, leveling a priest can be a somewhat frustrating experience. (Hence the reason my priest still sits at a dusty 31.) Unless, of course, you have patience and/or a good group to roll with often.

Shaman. Yeah, I know, another healer. As a casual player, it just helps to have a lot of group viability. Healers seldom complain for lack of groups. Shammys with their totems and chain heals can be quite the powerful, versatile healing and utility class.

The shaman trumps the versatility of the priest, but doesn’t quite reach that of the paladin. You can spec to be a pure healer, or spec to be either a ranged or melee DPSer. That kind of versatility is golden.

Leveling a shaman, with the right spec choices, can also be a great experience. An enhance shammy, once they get windfury, can be quite the fierce solo DPS machine. I’ve also heard that it can be hard to beat a well-geared elemental shammy for pure DPS. Add to that the ability to heal yourself and totems, and you have a leveling winner. If my main weren’t a druid, there’s a good chance it would be a shaman.

Tier 1

Hunter. Now here we are, to the meat and potatoes. Why the hunter? Because it is one of the best leveling/grinding/solo classes there is. A well-played BM hunter can be a DPS machine, and they can also get away with lesser gear and still get spots in heroics and beyond.

It’s hard to beat a BM hunter in a leveling competition, as they can pump out huge DPS numbers with little or no downtime. They can also farm anything you need with reckless abandon.

They don’t have the kind of versatility as some other classes, so why do I rate them so high? Because I am assigning more value to pure soloability and ease of leveling than versatility. It is nice to be able to respec to fulfill other roles, but that practice can be expensive, and also necessitate multiple gear sets. With a hunter, you can focus and just pump out mad DPS with a great deal of survivability and little downtime.

Warlock. I would be hard-pressed to decide which class is better for the casual, the Warlock or Hunter. They have a good deal of similarity. Both are great solo classes that are easy to level and can really pump out the DPS. They can also both get away with subpar gear for longer.

Who doesn’t want a class that you can roll your face on the keyboard and have success? That’s the warlock. Easy to play, easy to level, and a great farmer. (Although I will add that though it’s easy to play a warlock, it’s tough to be a GREAT warlock.) Again, there isn’t much in the way of versatility, as you are a pure DPS class. What casual wouldn’t want to be the class largely considered "OP?"

Druid. I told you this would be biased! For me, the druid is hands down the best class for the casual player. They are the only class other than the paladin that can fill ANY role based on spec. The advantage with druid is that you can cover both melee DPS and tanking with the feral spec, and you can even fill the role of ranged DPS as a Boomkin as a balance druid.

The druid can be like three characters in one. I have gear for feral DPS, feral tanking and resto healing. If a group is ever short DPS, I can easily respec and hit the bank to join in the fun.

It can be tough through the first 20 levels, but the druid blossoms at 20. Once cat form hits, they level with fiendish speed. They can’t quite compete with a lock or hunter, but they can get close. A feral spec druid is, IMO, the best leveler in the game. The reason for this is that you can solo wonderfully and also almost always find a spot in a group as a tank. This is all out the window if you want to try leveling as a resto, but I know Phaelia at Resto4Life did just that.

In addition to all that goodness, you get to fly before any other class, without having to pay out 900g. You can’t beat that!

So there you have it. I told you it was biased, didn’t I? I do honestly believe that the Druid is the best class for a casual player. Their combination of versatility and soloability is unmatched in the World of Warcraft. The first 19 levels can be a bit of a pain, but from 20 on it’s like every day is Christmas. Thanks for reading!

The topic of creating a “Casual Raiding Guild” has come up recently both at the World of Matticus and Of Teeth and Claws. Their approaches to the problem of the “Casual Raiding Guild” (the newest oxymoron in the WoW lexicon) are a little different from my perspective, so I thought I’d chime in.

There are two kinds of players in World of Warcraft. The casuals and the raiders. And like the Montagues and the Capulets, they have been at war for quite some time. It didn’t start in WoW, and it won’t end here. It’s just the way things are. Some players have all the time in the world to devote to gaming, and others have mere scraps here and there. As you all know, I have always been in the latter category.

I am in what you would call a casual guild. It’s always been more about friends and fun then about progression. After awhile, that cute little gnome mage in Arc isn’t so funny any more, downing Murmur doesn’t give you the same thrill and even Kara loses its luster. You need more. Other people in the guild need more, and you start thinking, “will we ever see SSC to the end, much less ever see Illidan?” When you get to this point, you either start hemorrhaging members, or you evolve.

For us, it’s time to start taking a crack at SSC and beyond. The problem with our guild is not in numbers. We are not a small guild by any stretch with over 75 members (I would guess) with around 500 characters in the guild. Our problem has always been getting 25 people on at the same time, well geared and ready. Not only that, but as you progress you need to think more and more about specs and raid makeup. We’ve been farming Kara and Gruul while working on ZA, and we are finally getting to the point where SSC and TK could be a possibility. So how are we going to do it?

One thing that we will NOT do is have any kind of raiding requirement. We are still as much a casual guild as a raiding guild. As soon as you bring in hefty requirements, the casual part of the guild could fall to pieces. Because of this, we certainly will not rip through any of the higher end raid content. We will, however, stick to our roots.

We will schedule 2 25-man runs a week to start, in addition to our normal ZA and Kara runs. There will be some very minor guidelines to join the fray, but nothing too strict. We’ll be asking members to focus on one “main” for these runs, and will keep an eye on our numbers through WWS.  If a character is severely underperforming, we will take a look at their gear and help them make improvements.

We will maintain all of our old ways of doing things. Casual players are still welcomed with open arms, and we will still run the “lesser” stuff and help out when needed. We are family first and raiders second. It just so happens a lot of people in our family want to have fun raiding!

Will it work? We will see. When I read the articles from the World of Matticus and Of Teeth and Claws, my thought was that in the end, neither was actually talking about a casual raiding guild. One suggests separating the non-raiders off into a separate guild, and both focused HEAVILY on progression. In my mind, that is NOT a casual raiding guild. It’s merely a raiding guild that was once casual. Once you start requiring attendance, penalizing members for non-attendance, or separating non-raiders from the main guild, you are no longer casual. I think both articles are great frameworks for starting a “not so hardcore” raiding guild, but I wouldn’t call them casual.

I’m just catching up here, but this was another good “shared topic” from Blog Azeroth. What do you enjoy about the class you play the most? This is a great topic, because if you are going to invest as much time in a game as many do in WoW (oh boy, do we ever), you’ve got to play a character you like. (Unless, of course, you have some weird love/hate relationship.) Well, I don’t just like the druid class, I like it like it in that fifth grade infatuatory way. It wasn’t always like that, however.

In the beginning. Booooring. Sling a couple wraths at the mob, burn it down with my staff. Ugh. The first levels for the druid class are sloooow going. Every class is that way to an extent, but the druid particularly so. A noob mage can only cast 2 or 3 spells before going OOM, but boy do they hurt! I’d argue that the druid from 1-20 is the most boring class there is. Sure, it’s great that you get Bear form at 10 – a lot of fun to finally be able to shapeshift – but you STILL take forever to kill stuff. Now it’s just even harder for them to kill you. Getting up to 20 was like pulling teeth, but once you get there…

Cat Form, baby! God does the game change for a druid once you get cat form. You go from low and slow damage to mega burst tear mobs to shreds DPS. Oh how exhilarating after 20 levels of tedium. Now I know how rogues feel from level 1. If it weren’t for Cat Form, I probably wouldn’t be a druid today. And my love of Cat carried me all the way to the outlands with the druid (and I don’t even like cats!). I rarely tanked, almost never healed. I just went out and shredded mob after mob after mob.

Instancing. Cat form got me to the outlands, but versatility and fancy tricks took me all the way home to 70 and the “end game.” I’ll never forget my first time in Ramparts, where all my skills were really starting to come together. I was there for DPS, and to off heal if needed. Well, during the second boss fight, the priest went down. It looked like we were about to wipe, but I popped out of cat, blew my BR and tossed a regrowth on the priest when she was back up. Then in the final fight, the tank went down while fighting the dragon, and I saved the group again by going Bear and finishing him off. A druid, when you really have things going, can be flat out amazing and help the group in so many ways.

Flight Form. This, my friends, sealed the deal. Instant flight, without having to shell out the 900 or so gold, at 68 no less? Sign me up! Instant flight can be so fun, I’m sure you’ve all seen the druid suicide dive. There’s nothing better than flying high HIGH HIGH above Shatt, and dropping all the way down, trying to pop flight form at just the right instant to be impressive….or….the wrong instant and be dead.

I love the Druid class because I feel like there is so much you can do with it. You can excel at any role if you focus. Feral tanks, once maligned, are now accepted and often sought out. Cat DPS can be through the roof, as can the OOMkin (though I have yet to try that spec), and a Resto Tree druid is a fantastic healer for raids or anything else. Though I am a Resto Druid now, I still have my tanking and DPS gear in the bank, and I’m always one respec away from filling a different role if the group needs it.  Are you unsure as to whether you’d like to tank, DPS or heal?  Roll a druid!  Just remember I warned you about those first 20 levels!