It’s hard to believe, I know.  Your friendly neighborhood tree, all Bear-Butted out, tanking Moroes.  So hard to believe, in fact, that it could only be true. 

Anyhow, here is how it happened.  I didn’t have anything going on last night, and I had a good 3-4 hours to kill in game, so I joined the Kara LFG channel.  That usually ends bad, I know, but I need badges for the Gavel of Naaru Blessings and most of the guild was otherwise indisposed. 

I got an invite fairly quickly, as my note advertised me as a Resto Druid with 1923 Healing.  Should be sufficient for Kara.    I did a quick lookup on WoW Heroes of the person who had invited me, and I really liked what I saw.  A strong tank goes a long way.

So we’re trying to fill, trying to fill.  We have tanks, we have healers, we need DPS.  Though I had a hunter I could have brought, I really wanted badges with the Druid, so I stuck to my guns.  After about 20 minutes the RL asked if I would be willing to respec and DPS.  Why not? 

Next thing I know, I’m the OT for the night.  The other warrior in the group turned out to be pure fury, and he didn’t even have a shield if he wanted to OT.  The MT was VERY strong, so I figured what the hey.  I tanked.  Here are pics to prove it:

I felt a little bad for the healers, as I don’t have the most HPs around.  That’s one area I’d have to really improve in my Bear gear.  I have the defense and other stats, but the health is lacking.

Still, we got the job done.  I also got to tank all kinds of other good stuff, along with Romulo.  The MT did most of the heavy lifting, thankfully.

Yeah, that’s right.  Thankfully the tank was very strong, and we did just fine with me as the OT.  We made it all the way to the Shade, but it was 3 am and myself and others were too tired to finish him off.  Oh well.  Still, I had a great time, and managed to snag a couple staves while I was there.  In the interests of summarizing, here is what I got:

• Staff of Infinite Mysteries
• Terestian’s Stranglestaff

Not bad at all!  I’ve been looking to pick of the staff of Illhoof for awhile, and the other staff looks like it might be the start of my Boomkin off-set.  It seems I’m headed towards true druidism, the ability to play any spec.    That’s all for now, thanks for reading!

That was the scene last night.  Some of you have been to ZA, some of you haven’t.  If you haven’t, that’s what it looks like just before the pull of Zul’jin, the last boss in Zul’Aman. 

If you recall, I wrote about ZA a few months back.  If you don’t want to go back and read, basically what that post addressed is the difficulty of ZA in comparison to Karazhan.  When ZA was first announced, a lot of people thought it would be a case of linear progression, you finish Kara a few times, then move on to ZA.

They were wrong.  As it turns out, ZA is just flat-out too difficult for a Kara geared group.  I suppose I should pull back on that a little, as it is POSSIBLE with a Kara geared group, it would just be incredibly frustrating and filled with wipes. 

So what is it that makes ZA so tough in comparison to Kara?  Well, first the trash is a LOT tougher to deal with.  There are a couple parts in the instance where you have to run through a "gauntlet", and it can be very difficult to get through.  There are times you have to deal with wave after wave of mobs, and you can easily get overwhelmed.  In Kara, everything is quite easily controlled.  You position the raid in one spot that is safe, and the tank pulls back to you.  Easy cheesy.  It’s not that easy in ZA.  The one very nice thing about ZA trash is there is a lot less of it overall.

So what about the bosses?  The boss fights in ZA are on par with a lot of what I’ve seen in T5 content.  Some of them last almost as long, too.  Sure, the bear boss is easy enough to deal with, and once you learn a couple of tricks the Eagle boss is pretty straightforward as well.  But then you start getting into bosses like the Dragonhawk or Malacrass, and the whole game changes.  You need strength in your group all around for these fights, and a solid plan of action.  This is not your mother’s tank and spank Prince fight.

So, all that stuff aside, is ZA fun?  You’re darn skippy it is.  When I wrote the above linked article, I was just barely getting out of Kara myself.  ZA still seemed like a waste of time for me, as the times I went I died over and over and over again.  To trash.

Now, things are a little different.  I’ve seen a great deal of T5 and T6, I’ve geared up significantly, and now the challenges of ZA have paled somewhat.  I can pump out a lot more healing, and take at least one or two more hits before I go down.  PTD’s all growed up since he first set foot in ZA, and much of the group I was in was T5+ equipped as well.

Now when I look at the instance, I see the kind of challenge I get in T6 content for a 10 man group.  Kara is a snoozefest nowadays, which is why I do stuff like try to solo heal the place.  Besides the healthy challenge, there are some very nice drops I could use.

So how did we do last night?  Well, we got to Zul’jin, but didn’t take him down.  Myself and the other 2 healers were fairly new to the place, so overall we did well.  We only took two shots at ZJ since we were already past the raid time when we got to him.  That Eagle phase of his is nasty, I’ll say that much.

As far as the timer thing, we only managed the first.  We wiped on the trash leading to the Eagle boss as we didn’t have a Pally tank.  Our Pally healer had to try to deal with all the birdies, and he went down.  On the second attempt at that gauntlet the same pally healer died again, but towards the end and we made it through.  Then he had to release and run back, and he got lost on the way.  So no second timer for us. 

Oh well.  At least the first timer netted me the Life-step Belt.  And with that I said my final goodbyes to the Windhawk set.  The belt was the last piece I was still wearing.  Into the bank it goes, where if I ever decide to try out a Moonkin spec I will regem it for that.  I also managed to pick up that froggy pet.

Still, we did make our way all the way to Zul’jin, which is pretty good considering all the healers were basically new.  That Malacrass is one bad mutha.  If you haven’t seen the fight, just think of a Moroes fight on steroids. 

One other note is that I managed to crest 4 million in overall healing.  That’s a lot of HOTs, man!  I don’t know if I’ve hit 4 million before, but here’s a screeny to prove it. (My recount is in the lower right)

In all, it was a very fun night.  I like a good challenge, and ZA provided that, with some good rewards.  While I don’t see a Bear mount in my future, I can see myself running this quite a few more times before Wrath hits.  There are still some very nice items I’d like to see, and at my gear level it’s a little more fun than Kara.  If anything, I think I’ve perhaps proven my previous post to be true:  ZA is basically a 10-man for bored T5 and T6 raiding guilds.  I just wish Blizzard had told us that in the first place.

Oh, sorry…that’s supposed to be Shade of Akama.  Well, anyway, we hit BT again this Saturday, and started with this guy.  We waxed him like a level 25 in STV on a PvP server.  It was nasty.  Ok, maybe it wasn’t THAT bad, because it did in fact take two attempts.  Anyhow, this is how it went down.

We used three tanks.  One on each door to handle adds, and one Bear in the middle of the room to handle those other whatchamacallit guys.  My job was to roll HOTs on both the Druid tank and the Tank on one wall.  There is an easy place to stand where this wasn’t a problem. 

So we start the fight up, and the healing is surprisingly pretty easy, especially compared to the Supremus fight before that.  As it turns out, wires of communication got crossed in some way, and the tank on the other side wasn’t getting enough healing and he went down.  So the RL called a wipe and we all gathered by the Bear tank to corpse up. 

If you are ever in a wipe situation on that fight, it takes a LONG time.  The fight revolves around the real Akama trying to kill the Shade of Akama.  Akama is one bad mofo, as it took a good 2 minutes for all the mobs to beat him down after we were all dead.  I sent him a guild invite afterwards, but he turned me down.  I’d like to have him as a tank.

Anyhow, we figured out the whole in our strategy and rejiggered it a little.  It turned into one of those situations where I was surprised that things were going so well.  I kept listening to the reports from the DPSers on the progress against the channelers that hold the Shade in place.  (If you’ve seen the Leo fight in SSC, it’s basically like that.  The boss, in this case the Shade of Akama, is being banished or held by a group of casters.) 

Before I knew it, all the channelers were dead and the Shade was on his way to engage with Akama.  The whole point is that Akama is there to take down the Shade and restore some sense of balance to his people.  Or something. 

Once the Shade is free and engages Akama, everything is out the window.  No threat to worry about, and not a lot of damage to heal.  So I pulled out my trump card, my Ace in the hole, my golden ticket…mad Resto Druid DPESSSSSSS.  You’ve seen it before.  Here it is again.

Oh yeah, baby.  You see those numbers.  All Wrath, All the Time.  In this case, I was actually expected to contribute, as you have to get the Marshmallow down REALLY fast or he does something bad.  I don’t know what it is, but I’m sure it involves a massive wipe of the raid.  

With my 1k Wrath hits flowing, the Marshmallow met his end.  I must say, I’d rank him as probably the easiest boss I’ve seen since Attumen.  And it’s nice that he drops T6 loot.  I thought the Void Reaver was the loot Pinata, I’ve gotta nominate the Shade of Akama for that title.  Anyhow, once he goes down, there is a nifty little cut-scene wherein Akama does some magic HooHa and turns all the red mobs that were in his area green.  It certainly helped later when we were wiping on Gorefiend.

Here we are celebrating over his corpse.

There was loot, including a decent pair of cloth healing shoulders. I would have considered them, but there were a couple priests above me on the SK list. No biggie, real healers wear leather.

That was the fun part.

Correction, that was the end of the fun part.

After that we headed on to Teron Gorefiend.  Before we really get into this, let’s see some pretty pictures, shall we? 

Now, I was prepared.  I had heard many times that Gorefiend is the first real "idiot" check in BT.  The reason is that EVERY raider must be prepared to handle the whole weird constructs thing.  I won’t get into details, but basically you get a debuff that kills you in 1 minute or something.  When you die, you spawn as a banshee/ghost thing and are surrounded by these construct mobs.  You have to kill them with special abilities you only get when a ghost.  Nobody can kill these constructs EXCEPT ghosts. 

They, however, can certainly kill the other members of the raid.

Anyhow, it’s like a mini-game, you against them, and if you can’t take them down, they get into the raid and start tearing people apart. 

It’s bad.

Hell, someone even came up with a FLASH game so you can practice killing your constructs.  If you need out of game training, it must be tough. 

And it is.  Basically 2 people get this debuff every, I don’t know, 30 seconds or so.  They have to go die in a specific location that makes it easier for them to try to hold off their constructs.  In our 5 or 6 attempts, some people were able to do it, some weren’t.  I never got a real chance to try, as every time I got the debuff we were already pretty much stewed.

However, from a positive prospective we did notice we got him down to about 40% without successfully holding off a single wave of constructs!  By my math that means we only need to hold off 2 or maybe 3 waves to kill him and take his T6 tokens.  (Ooooohhh….T6 armor….can you hear me salivating?)

So, we didn’t get it done, but I think we can.  A lot of people got a look at the whole construct thing, and that should help us next time we go in.  I think there’s a good chance that the Wednesday night crew will start taking down the first 3 bosses, and then we’ll start every Saturday at Teron.  We’ll see.

So PTD’s adventures in the Black Temple continue.  So far, so good.  I’ve seen a lot of wipes, but I’ve also been there for 2 of our "first kills," Supremus and the Shade of Akama.  In two weeks time (since ’tis MH this week) hopefully I’ll have another one or two "first kills" under my belt.  Until next time!

One of the first posts that really put me on the blogging map was Resto Druid:  5 Things You Should Know.  It was the first post I wrote that got a real reaction from the community.  Phaelia did me a huge favor by posting her reaction to my post on her blog.  It expanded my readership significantly, and it also taught me something:  people did read my blog.  I wrote the initial post in all of about fifteen minutes, just trying to "get something up" for the day, and didn’t give it a whole lot of thought.

That was a mistake.  A big one.

Phaelia’s reaction wasn’t exactly positive, and other bloggers like Runycat had adverse reactions to the post as well.  Honestly, I can’t blame them.  In a lot of ways I showed my early weaknesses as a blogger.  I was too harsh on the class I love, and in a lot of ways I was ill-informed as well.

Since then, I’ve grown a lot both as a druid in game and as a blogger in real life.  For a long time I’ve wanted to do an update to the post with some of my new key thoughts on the druid class, and that time is now.  So without further hesitation, let’s get it started.  Here are five ways to get the most out of a Resto Druid.

Use Your Versatility

The Resto Druid is very versatile.  IMO, they are second only to Priests in terms of versatility.  The Druid goes about things differently, but is also very capable of filling multiple roles. 

Druids, of course, make excellent tank healers.  Rolling LB, Rejuv and Regrowth on the tanks can make all the difference in tough fights.  If I only have to roll my array of HOTs on one tank, I can very easily handle a good deal of raid healing at the same time.  I have successfully ran as the only healer in Kara.  It wasn’t a spotless run, but I got the job done with minimal wipes. 

In a multi tank situation, I can fairly easily roll triple lifeblooms and rejuv on two separate tanks, and if necessary I can roll lifebloom on as many as five tanks at a time.  That’s some pure healing power. 

In a raid healing situation, Druids can do pretty well too.  They can’t compete with a Resto Shammy or a CoH Priest, but they can certainly hold their own.  While our single group heal is largely situational, we can throw multiple instant HOTs quickly, and help out with Regrowth as well. 

Druids can fill any healing role, and don’t let anyone tell you different.  I have led the healing meters while healing the MT, and I have led the meters while raid healing.

Use Your Mods

I’ll preface this by saying you can effectively heal using no mods at all.  You can use standard targeting methods and standard casting methods and be successful.  I don’t think I could live without my healing mods, though.  Here are a few you might want to think about.

Grid

Grid is a raid frame mod along the lines of Pitbull.  People have varying preferences when it comes to raid frames modifications.  Some people love Pitbull, some love Xperl, some love Grid.  Me?  I’ll take Grid.  The reason I am so fond of Grid is it’s compactness.  It gives me ALL the info I need in a relatively small area, especially when it comes to 25 man raids.  One of the keys to good healing is being able to heal the proper targets as quickly as possible.  Preferably by anticipating their damage.  With Grid, I can switch healing targets in a flash, and it doesn’t take up too much precious screen real estate.  In this screenshot you can see how I have Grid set up, it’s on the upper left side of my UI. 

Grid and other raid frame mods usually take a bit of time to set up to your liking, but they are well worth it.  I can track literally everything I need to track in that tiny package, and it works VERY well with my next mod…

Clique

Clique is a casting mod that allows you to cast your spells on a specific target by clicking on their raid frame or portrait or whatever.  What happens is if I want to cast lifebloom on the tank, I just left click on the tank.  I have all the spells that I really need bound to different combinations.  Here is how I have Clique set up.

• Left Click:  Lifebloom
• Right Click:  Rejuvenation
• Ctr+Left Click:  Regrowth
• Ctr+Right Click:  Swiftmend
• Alt+Left Click:  Nature’s Swiftness
• Alt+Right Click:  Healing Touch (I hold down alt and left click then right click for a VERY fast, big heal)
• Shift+Left Click:  Abolish Poison
• Shift+Right Click:  Innervate
• Ctr+Alt+Left Click: Remove Curse
• Ctr+Alt+Right Click:  Rebirth (The best way there is to Battle Rez)

This makes my healing fast, very fast.  I spend a good deal of time hovering over the raid frame of my next target awaiting the GCD.  It might look intimidating at first, but it’s now second nature to me.

HOTCandy

Just about any HOT timer will work, but as a Resto Druid you want to make sure that your LB stacks keep on rolling.  A good timer works great in that regard.  You can see my timer in that above screenshot just under the Grid interface.

Now, there are many more useful mods, but those are the most important, IMO.  I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 or more mods, and at least 20 of those are there to make my job as a healer easier.

Use Your Healing Tools

All of them.  I was guilty of being limited early on, and I didn’t use all my tools.  There was a time, and I hate to admit it, that I NEVER used Swiftmend.  I didn’t quite understand how the spell worked, or how effective it could be.  In my defense, this was early on in my career as a healer.  Now, I couldn’t live without Swiftmend.  It’s one of our most powerful tools for delivering a lot of healing quickly.  It’s cooldown is a mere 15 seconds, so use it early and use it often.  I’ve come across a few druids that NEVER use it, and I make a point to suggest they start.

Another big tool to make sure you use is Nature’s Swiftness.  Coupled with Healing Touch, this is our biggest possible instant heal.  The cooldown is 5 minutes, so don’t bother always trying to "save" it for the biggest, near wipe situations.  Maybe if you had used it earlier you wouldn’t be in that situation!  Almost without fail, the times I most often hear "good healing" from a group member or tank is when I just blew my NS+HT combo to give them a blast of 5k plus health instantly, usually when they were sure they were about to die.  Don’t ignore it.

Another spell you shouldn’t be afraid to use is Rebirth.  Yeah, I know, 20 minute cooldown.  It’s a bummer.  Just remember that the earlier you use it, the earlier it will be available again.  You don’t have to reserve this for the final boss all the time.  I’ve saved a raid in more than one situation by my ability to quickly battle rez a key player.

There is one last healing tool that I want to be sure to call out — mobility.  Nobody can heal on the move like a druid, regardless of the run speed debuff of tree form.  You can still cast your most important heals while running around.  Take advantage of it.  Don’t be afraid to roam a little and get a different view of the situation.  It can also help identify when someone is in trouble.  You aren’t nailed to one spot, get moving!  Priests, Pallys and Shammys are all stuck, you are not!

Don’t Pass on Off-Spec Pickups

This is less important, but if something you could potentially use is going to be sharded, don’t be afraid to speak up!  You never know, maybe some day you’ll want to go Boomkin to shake things up.  Maybe you’ll want to try to OT Kara some day.  Who knows.  You can use a lot of different gear types, don’t let them end up as shards.  Heck, I tanked my first Heroic this past weekend (I’ll post about it in detail later) just by using the assorted tanking pieces I’ve picked up along the way.  I also found that my Cat gear is REALLY, REALLY good.  I’m almost up to par for T5 content in my off-spec kitty gear!

Numbers Aren’t Everything

Skill can make a huge difference in your performance.  I know, I’m living proof.  Because of my casual, part-time play style, I’m more often then not one of the "least" geared healers in any given run.  That doesn’t stop me from being in the top three for overall healing nearly every time.  Don’t get too hung up with your +heal number as a reflection of your healing ability.  A highly skilled 800 heal Druid can easily out-heal a less-skilled 1200 heal Druid.  I’ve done it.  (Though my days of 800 heal are far behind me.)  This doesn’t mean that numbers mean nothing, just that they don’t mean everything.  You do have to have decent gear to succeed in the end game, but you can make up for gear deficiencies by using all your tools.  High level purples sure do look nice, but they don’t do the healing for you. 

Conclusion

And there you have it.  Undoubtedly I could keep this post going, to 10 or 15 or beyond.  But you don’t have all day now, do you?  I love druids, I love their versatility, and I’m fairly confident that my druid will ALWAYS be my main because of that.  I’m glad I was finally able to re-address my class in a more positive way, and I hope you found this post useful.  Later this week I’ll talk about my first Heroic Tanking experience, as well as our progress in BT over the weekend.  Thanks for reading!

I’ve been strictly resto spec’d for a long time.  The vast majority of my time as a level 70 Druid has been spent as a healer.  I enjoy healing, I consider myself a strong asset in raids, and I will always be a healer first.

Last night, however, I switched sides, at least for a day or so.  Through my days of raiding, when I saw the first 5 bosses in SSC over and over again, and farmed Kara many times for badges, I made a point to pick up any cat or bear gear that would have been sharded otherwise.  I hate to see a purple go to waste.  So over time, I have gathered a fairly respectable, albeit imperfect, set of gear for tanking.  I have the Heavy Clefthoof set, of course, and I also have some very nice epics to fill things out.  Heck, I have the best tanking weapon for a Bear in the game, I may as well put it to use sometime, right?

I do still have some issues.  I obviously haven’t concentrated much on slots, I’ve just picked up stuff that dropped.  I’m presently sporting a DPS helm and shoulders, and a green pair of bracers.  So I have some spots to fill.  Last night, I was half tempted to pick up the nice badge tanking bracers, but luckily remembered the whole point of going feral.

Farming for badges.

It seems, at least on my server, that the hardest class to get a hold of for heroics is a tank.  We seem to have more than enough healers willing to do the job, and of course more than enough DPSers, we just don’t have all that many tanks. 

So, I figure, why not?

I headed to Darn, picked up all my tanking pieces from the bank, and hit the druid trainer.  My cost to respec had bottomed out to 15g, so no big deal.  (I will have to respec again on Saturday for BT, however.)  I carefully chose my talents, and ended up with 0/47/14 or something like that.  I’m pretty sure I hit all the key talents for tanking, and threw in the DPS talents as well.

I put on all my bear gear, and took a look at my stats.

• 11.4k Health (A little low, but should be doable for a lot of easier heroics with a good healer methinks – this is completely unbuffed, though, I didn’t even have Mark up.)
• 20,800 some armor
• 20.33% Dodge
• 417 Defense (Yay!  No crits!  This is one thing I reworked the gems a bit to achieve.)
• 1600ish Attack Power

Not bad.  I spent the next half hour or so setting up a tanking bar, as it had been a LONG time since I tanked. 

By the time I was done, though, I was yawning.  It probably wouldn’t be a good idea to tank a heroic for the first time fairly tired.  I had stayed up later than usual to watch the Bears get beat by the Chiefs, and then to watch the So You Think You Can Dance finale.  Yes, I’m a sports nerd, and a lot of other nerds rolled into one.  My name is PTD, and I am a gaming nerd, blogging nerd, sports nerd (go Cubs and Bears!), reality TV nerd (especially Gordon Ramsay) and a Bowling nerd.  Beat that!  Oh, and if you ever want to get pwned on the lanes, give me a ring.

Anyhow, I elected not to try to get anything going, but logged off in Shatt with the SP daily heroic saved.  I plan to start with either that or Ramparts.  SP has classically been known as the "easiest" heroic, but I think I might prefer to do Ramps first, as I have a more solid understanding of how all the pulls work.  Hopefully tonight I get a shot at my first tanked heroic, and I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes.  Who knows, maybe I’ll love it and finally be everything my class could be.  A Tank, Healer or DPS, whatever you need, for any situation.

Next I’ll have to look at my DPS gear overall.  I know I have a nice epic chest from SSC!