I’ve been in the beta for awhile now, but the fact is I’ve paid no attention whatsoever to anything resto.

I know, I’ve been a bad Tree.

You see, I just wanted to take a gander at the new CONTENT, not the class changes.  I sure as heckfire wasn’t going to take a look at it all weak and leafy.  I went Boomkin in beta to, well, make the mobs go boom. 

I hadn’t even LOOKED at the resto tree until last night. 

So I logged on around 11 pm last night (with my 48 warrior I’ve been working on) to see how my UI looked and get things set up.  Of course, my UI was a bit on the borked side.  So I went to WoW Interface to download any new and updated Addons I needed.  (WoW Interface had a very low bandwidth addons page set up, good idea!)  I also decided to do a bit of spring cleaning, and cleared out the bulk of my Addons folder.  Just too much junk in there.

So here I am wrestling with a new bar mod and working on getting things set up when I get a tell asking if I wanted to heal Heroic Blood Furnace.

Hmm.  Tempting.  I haven’t even LOGGED into my druid yet, I have no idea what talents I’m going to take, and surely his UI is borked, too.

"Sure," I say. 

So I jump over and spec to this.  My method?  I just go down the frigging tree and go "yes, yes, yes, no, no, yes" until I’ve spent 55 points in resto.  Some good looking stuff in there that I had to at least try.  Living Seed?  Check.  Imp Tree of Life?  Check.  Gift of the Earthmother?  Check.  And, of course, Wild Growth.

I looked everything else over.  I had upgraded Clique already, and Grid worked as is.  I had to change my Clique settings quickly to fit in Wild Growth, but that was about it.  I got my bars in reasonably working order, got the daily, and took the summon.

Whew.  I wasn’t prepared to hit the ground running, that’s for sure.  I thought I was going to just spend a couple hours getting things set up.  Oh well.

On to heroic BF.

It went very, very well.  The group consisted a Warrior, a Boomin, a Lock, an Enhance Shammy, and myself.  I know myself and the Warrior are geared VERY well, though I’m not sure of the others we went with.  Still, we went through BF faster than I’ve ever gone though it before.  I’m not sure if we have new, "overpowered" spells and talents now or what, but we wasted that place.  Blew its doors off.  Took it out to the woodshed.  About the only hiccups were a couple times when the DPS pulled aggro from their OPness.  No biggie.  It was a lot of fun, and I look forward to more heroics to see whether that was just a fluke or what.

Here are my initial reactions to the tree changes.

• I LOVE that I can move just as fast as everyone else now.
• I LOVE that I can fricking rez people now.
• I LOVE that I actually got Soulstoned.  As a matter of fact, the one time I died I sat there with a stupid look on my face for a good 30 seconds before realizing I had the option to rez myself.  I guess I’ll have to get used to that.
• I LOVE Omen of Clarity.  Especially since it’s not a buff like it used to be, but an always on, passive talent.  It seemed to proc constantly, and I tried to use Regrowth or another, bigger heal whenever it did.
• I LOVE Wild Growth

It’s not as overpowered as it once was in the beta, but it is a VERY useful addition to my healing arsenal.   I know, 861 isn’t a huge amount.  And the fact that it takes 7 seconds to HEAL that whole amount isn’t great either.

However, it’s a HUGE boon for 5 mans at the very least.  Under normal circumstances, I often have to totally ignore damage to the DPS in tough situations.  I often have to focus 100% on the tank to keep him up in hairy spots.  With Wild Growth, I can work a group heal in WITHOUT losing focus on the tank.  It’s instant, it has a cool animation, and it works.

I’ll have to see in the future how it function in a raid environment, but because it’s a TARGETED group heal, I think it will work VERY well.  I look forward to taking this baby out into Kara or something in the future.

As far as the other stuff, I have no idea if and when living seed went off.  I wasn’t tracking stats or anything, and I had no kind of DPS meter, so I have no idea how, overall, the healing or DPS was.  I’ll try to look closely in the future.  I wasn’t really prepared for this last night. 

The only meter that mattered though, the fun meter, was very high.  Big patches like this one just always bring out the geek in me.  I love, love, love everything so far.  The graphics tweaks are noticeable, I love the new loading screens, I love the new pet/mount system, I love the achievements.  In short, I love WoW patch 3.02.

I’m a fanboy.  Sue me.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 15th, 2008 at 10:34 am and is filed under Druid. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.