Week In Review: Raiding With A New Guild

I was planning on having this out on Tuesday during the maintenance but this last week has been kinda weird at home and I've been doing my weird 12 hour sleeping schedule again only to wake up to raid then go back to sleep. I decided to do a weekly kind of mini-blog of about the random things that I do during my WoW time. It will hopefully be posted on Tuesdays during the maintenance.

This week I joined a new raiding guild after the fallout with my first one. <SRS> is a really good guild and is very different from anything that I have ever experienced on US-Garona. Our leaders, Bromby and Docz are the kind of get on your ass type. He knows how to weed out those who are soft by just being brutely honest. If you mess up he calls you out on it in front of everyone. And if you can't handle that then you won't be around very long. I've been around for about 2 days and already 5 other Trials have either left or been kicked out.

Tuesday - Raid Day #1: We downed a lot of bosses on just the first day. Halfus Wyrmbreaker was downed in about three attempts. We were having a difficult time meeting the hard enrage timer. And after four or five attempts we killed Valiona and Theralion. Video of it shows me getting creaned by a meteorite and watching the rest of the raid kill the boss without me. Then it was off to Blackwings Decent as we one-shotted Magmaw, Omnotron Defense System, Maloriak and Chimeron. I forgot to record Chimeron because it was my first kill and I was nervous.

Wednesday - Raid Day #2: I was not initially invited to the raid. I was actually pretty alright with it. Uusually I get a little hurt inside and obsess over what I did the previous night to not get a reinvite. But today I was just like that's cool and started to run some heroics for some more of my BiS gear. Docz, our Holy Priest and Officer, asked me to build a boomkin offspec since Resto Druids are on the lower end of the healing spectrum right now. So I get a random invite about an hour and a half before the raid is supposed to end. As I get invited a newer Retribution Paladin gets kicked out of the guild. Apparently, he went to sleep during the 10 minute break. And I get summoned onto the Conclave of Wind and get these simple instructions. "Stay on this platform and heal the tank." And they pulled. I had no buffs, no food buffs, no flask and no idea what I was doing. We one shotted it none the less. They had downed Atremedes earlier in the night.

Thursday - Raid Day #3: We spent three and a half hours working on the Ascendent Council in Bastion of Twilight. The beginning of the raid was started with a 10 minute lecture about how coming into a raid with greens and not correctly gemmed and enchanted gear means we don't care about the guild. And if we aren't full 346 and 20 enchants/rare gems we're getting kicked. I'm safe since I'm full 246 with full lvl 20 enchanted and rare gems.

<SRS> doesn't raid again until Sundar so we have three days to basically do whatever we want. And I am going to spend my time working on my gear. I have full 346 with all the correct gems and enchants. But some of them are not my first best in slots, some are maybe third or fourth on the best in slot list. So I put together a comprehensive list of BiS Boomkin and Restoration gear. 10 of 16 on the gear list are the exact same for both specs. Right now I have 10/16 current BiS pieces for Restoration and 10/16 current BiS pieces for Balance. I currently need 12 pieces across both specs, 6 for both.

I also took the time to do some more fun things. I like to level alts. When I get tired of my druid from time to time  I like the ability to jump on something different. I've been spending all of my time on my druid so far since I transfered so all of my new Horde alts are still level 1 apart from my level 12 Disc Priest. I have 10 toons, one of every class except a rogue and instead have two priests.

Sheîldra - Discipline and Shadow Priest
Ressura - Holy and Shadow Priest
Hollie - Holy and Protection Paladin
Surga - Restoration and Elemental Shaman
Furra - Fury and Protection Warrior
Shottzz - Survival and Beast Mastery Hunter
Eraîna - Unholy Death Knight
Arcanna - Fire Mage
Shadowz - Affliction and Demonology Warlock


My current goal is to get all of them to level 15 so in my downtime I can jump on any of them I want and run dungeons.

Sunday - Raid Night #04: Not a good night. 10 minutes before raid is supposed to start and a max of 18 people logged on. So Bromby, Docz and Sedatives raged. Not in a screaming rage but in a frustrated leader rage. He said he's doing to start rage kicking people come Tuesday and their going to be doing 10 mans until they can get people to sign up. So they chose to do 10 mans and I was not invited. So 8 people couldn't raid because 7 people didn't log on. But I just got on my alts and stayed on vent to cheer them on as they went for more boss kills. They downed Ascendent Council in two attempts and Cho'gall met his demise in about 10.

Personal Raid Week #01

Baradin Hold (1 of 1)

Argaloth - Defeated

Bastion of Twilight (2 of 4)

Halfus Wyrmbreaker - Defeated

Valiona and Theralion - Defeated

The Ascedant Council - Undefeated

Cho'gall - Undefeated

Throne of the Four Wings (1 of 2)

Conclave of Wing - Defeated

Al'Akir - Undefeated

Blackwing's Decent (4 of 6)

Omnotron Defense System - Defeated

Magmaw - Defeated

Chimeron - Defeated

Maloriak - Defeated

Atremedes - Undefeated

Nefarion - Undefeated

Efflorescense: Is It Useful?

Today I am going to be talking about a little Druid Talent called Efflorescence. I do not currently have this talent into my build for multiple reasons I will be explaining below. I personally do not find it as a life saver or a useful place to add 6 talent points to. I have had people tell me that I could not be an top efficient raid healer without it. This is what I personally think on the subject.

Efflorescence: When you heal with your Swiftmend Spell you also lay a bed of flora underneath the target, healing all nearby friendly targets within 8 yards of 30% of the amount healed by your Swiftmend over 7 seconds. Healing effectiveness diminishes for each player beyond 6 within the area.

So let's break this down piece by piece.

Lay a bed of Flora underneath the target - This means that I have control over where I lay it. However I find myself most of the using it on tanks on 5 mans and 25-Mans recently since they are usually the ones that I have to heal quickly. And generally the tank is alone or only with his Off-tank within 8 yards. So that means once every 15 seconds or so only 2 people are being healed by the Efflorescence anyway. But if I want to lay the bed down for future raid healing, then I have to potentially waste a very valuable cooldown on someone who may not even need healing just for that one spell.

Healing All Nearby Friendly Targets Within 8 Yards - I know of very few fights where a lot of people are grouped up within 8 yards of each other. Theralion and Valiona is one but that is only for a moment because directly after Blackout takes place all raid members need to be more than 10 yards apart to not be clustered for Theralion's Twilight Bolts. So Efflorescence gets about a 2 or 3 second usage before it becomes completely run out of.

For 30% of the amount healed by your Swiftmend over 7 seconds -  I actually did math for this so listen up. Currently in full raid buffs (I actually ran around and got all different classes to buff me), Severed Sagefish Head Well Fed buff and Flask of the Draconic mind buff my Swiftmends were doing on average (I did Swiftmend enough times to where I had 10 non crit numbers and 10 crit numbers, add them in each column then divided by 10) 16,319 for non-critical heals and 31,762 for critical heals. 30% of each of those numbers is 4,895 and 9,528 respectively. Which means over 7 seconds each tick is healing for 699 Hit Points and 1,361 Hit Points respectively. And if the group is spreading out within two or three seconds that's 1,398 Hit Points Healed per Player and 2,722 Hit Points Healed per player. This does not count the fact that since 8 players, not including Bloodworms and Hunter/Warlock/Mage/Hunter/Death Knight pets, are standing in the healing circle hence dropping down the amount of HP healed drastically.

Healing Effectiveness Diminishes for Each Player Beyond 6 Within The Area - So in this specific encounter all 10 members of the raid are stacking onto each other, dropping down the total amount healed by 4. Pets, including Death Knight Tanks Bloodworms, are included in this calculation so if you have a Unholy Death Knight, a Hunter and a Warlock in your group who has both his regular pet and his extra Demon summoned thats six extra things being healed and taking away from your raid healing. 

One Last Thing, Full Efflorescence Takes Up 6 Talents - Yeah, that's right, six. So that means to get this extra 9,000 max healing across a maximum or 2 or 3 players per 15 seconds I need to remove 6 other talents from my current build. All of my current talents are put into mostly buffing my current spells instead of adding new ones and I honestly have looked through and could not find a single talent that was not useful to me.

So is 6 talents and 9,000 healing really worth it for a talent that will only be useful ever once in a Blue Moon. I say no. What are your thoughts on Efflorescence and its usefulness?

Patch Notes for 4.0.6 and How They Affect You (EDITED: 01/12/2011)

Patch 4.0.6 is now being tested on the Player Test Realms and they bring a lot of changes to pretty much everyone in the game. I am going to cover the General Changes and the Druid Specific ones and what they mean to us. This article may be updated in the future if more Notes are added so check the header to see if it has been update since 01/08/2011.

P.v.P

• Bloodlust, Heroism, Time Warp and Ancient Hysteria can no longer be cast while in Arenas.

I'm pretty sure that this is a bug that they just now realized and are going to reverse but why wait until a Patch to implement it? It will probably be another week or two (or more...) until they actually make the Patch go live and now that they have it in Public Patch Notes anyone who reads them will exploit it if they didn't know about it already? Although, this doesn't impact Druids specifically it may make you change who you are Arena-ing with if you only chose them for the Heroism/Bloodlust/Time Warp/Ancient Hysteria.

Races

• The night elf racial trait Shadowmeld can now be used while shapeshifted.

This really shouldn't impact a lot of Resto Druids since we are almost never in form while Healing however it is going to be very useful in world PvP when you're in Flight Form and someone decides they feel like ganking you.

• The tauren racial trait War Stomp can now be used while shapeshifted.

This is HUGE for Tauren because it is something people have been asking for for a LONG time. Before if you wanted to use War Stomp it would break you out of Bear, Cat and Boomkin. This would make a tank loose all of his rage and most of his threat, a cat loose all of it's Energy and a Boomkin would loose valuable DPS time because he would need to stop casting, hit the spell, go back into form and wait for GCD period on his spells to wear off to start casting again. This affect will probably be used a lot by Bears because it is another AoE in the arsenal or for pretty much any druid that is trying to make a quick get away from a mob.

• The worgen racial trait Darkflight now has a 2-minute cooldown, down from 3, and is no longer on the global cooldown. In addition, the movement speed bonus now stacks with existing bonuses, but cannot be activated while Sprint or Dash is active (and they cannot be activated while Darkflight is active).

This is pretty much a Feral Druids PvP wet dream (or Rogue). This means that Dash is no longer on the same cooldown as Darkflight. So you can pop Dash and then Darkflight immediately after Dash's duration ends AND they lessoned the cooldowns. I can already hear the bitching on the forums for this.

Druids

• Barkskin is no longer dispellable.

Um, thank you!? I honestly had no idea that Barkskin was dispellable and even though it's pretty much a PvP only change it's still awesome to know that it's getting fixed.

• Healing Touch is now trained at level 78, up from level 3.

Um... I honestly don't get this change. 78 is PRETTY high up there to give us our Holy Light/Heal/Healing Wave equivalent... As an 85 this won't matter but still.

• Mount Up: This guild perk now applies to Flight Form and Swift Flight Form as well
• Yay! This bug was bothering me for a long time because I honestly don't use my flying mounts at all on my Druid because I have an instant cast form that I can pick herbs in!
  
• Nourish is now trained at level 8, down from level 78.

Nourish is pretty much replacing Healing Touch while leveling. At a low level it won't matter very much but as you get up there I'm sure a lot of druids are going to be asking where is my BIG healing spell when the tank is low.

• Omen of Clarity can no longer trigger from helpful spells (aka heals), unless the Restoration talent Malfurion's Gift is chosen.

If you didn't have Malfurion's Gift as a talent before now, you might as well get it. Now your Clearcasting (Which allows your next cast to cost no mana) will not proc from healing spells at all. But this also means that the only thing that it can proc on now is Lifebloom which is going to force Druids to start using it. 3 Stacks of Lifebloom for ALL tanks now! But also Omen of Clarity says attacks. Which means our melee swings are going to have the ability to proc Omen as well. We're going the way of the Paladin my friends and get ready to see a lot of Druid Healers asking to be in melee range.

• Rejuvenation is now trained at level 3, down from level 8. In addition, its mana cost has been reduced from 26% to 16%.

If you're a level capped Druid the first part won't matter much but the second part is HUGE! 10% reduction in mana cost for our Rejuvenation.  My Rejuvenation right now is 4,554 mana. 10% of that is 455.4. Which means Rejuvenation after 4.0.6 will only cost 4,098 mana. This is HUGE since personally Rejuvenation is the spell I go to for raid healing.

Talent Specializations


Restoration

• Empowered Touch now also affects Regrowth.

Empowered Touch: Increases Healing done by your Nourish and Healing Touch Spells by 10%., and refreshes the duration of your Lifebloom on the target. This talent will now include Regrowth as well which means a 10% healing increase. I tend to not use Regrowth that much anymore since the mana cost has sky rocketed and if you spam it you go OOM pretty quick. It was pretty much only spammed if the tank was getting really low and Swiftmend was on Cooldown and I didn't have Clearcasting active. This 10% healing increase will hopefully help with me not having to cast it so many times so I can save mana when the tank is dipping dangerously low.

• Nature's Bounty no longer affects Swiftmend, but now has a new effect. When the druid has Rejuvenation on 3 or more targets, the cast time of Nourish is reduced by 10/20/30%.

Nature's Bounty: Increases Regrowth's critical strike chance by 60%, and you have a 100% chance when you critically hit with Healing Touch or Nourish to shorten the remaining cooldown of your Swiftmend by 0.5 seconds. So the talent will take away the 0.5 second reduction of the remaining cooldown of Swiftmend. I honestly never saw a HUGE difference but I never paid much attention to it much. But I really like the second addition to this talent. If you're raiding this means a free 30% reduction speed in your Nourish since you should have at least 3 Rejuvenations rolling on at least someone. My Nourish runs at a 2.22 second cast time. With a 10%/20%/30% decrease this shortens my Nourish to 2.00/1.77/1.55 second cast time. This is HUGE because I usually am spamming Nourish on tanks like a Flash Heal in randoms when they are taking consistent damage. Being able to do them more quickly is going to be really helpful.

Glyphs

• Glyph of Regrowth now causes the heal-over-time effect to refresh itself on targets at or below 50% health, up from 25%.

Eh, I really don't see this as being a super big help. It will keep refreshing itself if the target is below 50% health but Regrowths HoT is very dismal. It's a 6 second HoT that does not heal for very much.  This is not going to make me want to switch to this Glyph and will stick with Glyph of Rejuvenation, Glyph of Swiftmend and Glyph of Lifebloom.


Bug fixes

• Many bugs... handled them!

I love it when they use jokes from that guy. Never stops being funny.


January 12th, 2011 Changes


Restoration

• Symbiosis (Mastery) benefit from mastery has been increased by approximately 16%.

Blizzard has been struggling with Mastery for classes for a long time. They had a good idea and it works for some of the classes but for Boomkins and Resto Druids I know it's not very useful. For Boomkins Mastery only affects damage when you're in an Eclipse state. And since you're not in an Eclipse state half of the time you're DPSing people would rather stack stats that help their DPS out 100% of the time. And for Resto Druids Mastery is the stat we never want to choose right behind Critical Strike rating. So a buff to Mastery for Resto druids is a welcome change. I feel bad reforging all the mastery I have on armor since Blizzard seems to put it on everything and want us to use it.

• Tree of Life no longer grants immunity from Polymorph. In addition, its duration has been reduced to 25 seconds, down from 30 seconds.

I'm fine with this change. I don't PvP much (even though I'm trying to get into it with my new server being World PvP) so I never really noticed not being polymorphed. Although in every other form I am unpolymorhpable why not this one... And the 5 second decrease in duration seems about good. I have noticed a lot in 25 mans that I pop Tree Form when a lot of damage is being dolled out. Once I pop my Tranquility and spam insta-Regrowth/Lifebloom as many people as possible I find myself standing there for a little while until I am popped back out. 30 seconds is kind of long because I can heal up the raid to full with the help of 4 to 6 other healers in less time during the pop all cooldowns phase.

• Wild Growth healing has been increased by 30% , and the cooldown has been decreased to 8 seconds, down from 10 seconds.

Oh my god, yes! I personally spam Wild Growth every time it's up. It's a pretty moderately mana efficient spell (4,729 so about as much as one of my Rejuvenations) that coats 6 members with a small HoT. This is really useful for slight raid damage that doesn't warrant 6 people getting their own Rejuvenations to get them back up to full. But it doesn't pack a ton of punch. To see that it is getting not only a buff in healing, but that the time I can use it down to 1 second after it finishes down from 3 seconds is absolutely amazing. Really happy to hear it.

My Youtube: Http://www.youtube.com/Eraina80 


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Be updated immediately when I post new blog posts or youtube videos. I promise there will be no "I'm eating lunch and itz gewd lawlz" tweets.

For the Horde!

Yes, as you can see by the new Header Image, I'm a Hordie again!

For the last couple nights I've been debating on whether or not I should stay on Garona, a server that had been my home for over a year. Every time I looked at the Realm Transfer screen on the World of Warcraft website I would always tell myself "Just give it one more week, maybe it will get better" and it just never did. There is nothing wrong with US-Garona and I loved a lot of people there but I just felt very limited when it came to opportunities. Garona only has one guild that ever Progresses at a quick rate. So you have one guild that is doing really well and if you're not in that guild you aren't experiencing the best.

So I decided to Realm Transfer to US-Illidan, the top server in the United States, and Faction Change back to Horde, which is what I was originally. I'm hoping at Illidan I will see more opportunities that I did not get to see in Garona. At the moment I am guildless and have applied to several different guilds. I want to get into the raiding scene as quickly as possible and hope to hear from one of them soon! And then I can post awesome kill videos and have more to write about. Things have been kind of slow because I didn't raid this week since I've been having weird sleeping spells where I would fall asleep at 6 pm and wake up up 8am for 4 consecutive nights. Really odd for me. Anyway the new name is Ilaena and hope to hear from you as I start a new adventure.

New Realm. New Faction. New Name. New Me.