The healing mushroom change is good…

By Lissanna | Published: June 15, 2013

The Wild Mushrom healing spell change is good … and you should feel good!

Why did wild mushrooms need a change?

The original intent when asking for healing shrooms was that restorations couldn’t keep up with the burst healing of other classes. However, healing mushroom’s initial implementation left a lot to be desired. The current Wild mushroom spell allows you to plant up to 3 healing shrooms on the ground. While the original intent was to allow for spreading them out, most of the time you just clump them up in one place. Many people have found the current mushroom design to feel awkward. It takes a lot of setup time, and even when they are buffed to do a substantial portion of healing, they still don’t feel right in the current 5.3 version. While we now have a high risk/high reward spell, it just ends up being really frustrating when an encounter doesn’t give you that high reward in return.

Original Healing Shroom problems from my 2012 post:

Targeting circle was originally too small: Previously solved by making the targeting reticule bigger. CHECK
Shrooms needed to interact better with our other healing spells: Previously solved by changing shrooms detonate to activate harmony. Also, the overall interactions with other spells were increased by allowing rejuvenation overhealing to increase the amount of healing done by shrooms. CHECK
Small 6 yard radius was too small: Previously solved by increased radius to 10 yards. CHECK
We needed some sort of HOT component on application when dropping the shrooms: Addressed in the upcoming patch (see below). CHECK
Three shrooms felt like too many: Addressed in upcoming patch (see below). CHECK
Have to target the ground: Many people didn’t like using the reticule to place shrooms on the ground. Addressed in upcoming patch (see below). CHECK

The big 5.4 changes solve the biggest quality of life problems.

Currently in the PTR patch files for the next patch, wild mushroom will now just be one shroom that you place on the ground. No more having to place three shrooms! While the moonkin version may still drop 3 (I haven’t been able to test it directly on the PTR), the resto version of healing shrooms only drops one.

Grow a magical mushroom with 5 health at the target ally’s location. After 6 sec, the mushroom will become invisible. The mushroom grows larger as it accumulates healing power from 100% of overhealing done by your Rejuvenation, up to a maximum of 200% of your health in bonus healing. Recasting Wild Mushroom will move the Mushroom without losing this accumulated healing. Wild Mushroom: Bloom can consume your Mushroom to heal nearby allies. Only 1 mushroom can be placed at a time. Can be cast in Tree of Life Form, Moonkin Form. Druid – Restoration Spec. 40 yd range. Instant.

The THREE underlined sentences are really the important changes. Most of the other changes are just adjustments to balance the amount of healing it does. However, there are two other important change in the above text:

If you move your shroom, it doesn’t reset your rejuv overheal stacks. So, if everyone moves, you can replant the shroom with all the overhealing it absorbed and bloom it right away! No longer do you have to be psychic and know in advance exactly where your raid will end up in times of heavy damage!
UPDATE: As many people pointed out the text now says “at the target ally’s location”. So, apparently your friends will be growing shrooms out of their backs. It appears to still sit on the ground and require a detonate, but it looks like you will target an ally to drop the shroom at their feet. No more reticule. If you have no one targeted, it drops at your feet. Mouse over macros are still behaving poorly on the PTR, but we may be able to work out some sort of macro to use for people by the time it goes live.

Also, they are allowing you to have the option to glyph for healing Shrooms such that your efflorescence is tied to your shrooms instead of swiftmend:

The Efflorescence effect is now caused by your Wild Mushroom instead of by Swiftmend, and lasts as long as the Wild Mushroom is active. Additionally, increases the healing done by Swiftmend by 20%.

This would allow Swiftmend to be a single-target direct heal only, and your Shrooms would carry the HOT component of efflorescence if you choose the glyph. This was something that members of the community recommended early on when druids were unhappy with shrooms mechanics, so it’s neat to see it get implemented. In true Blizzard form, the changes we ask for a year previously seem to magically make their way into the game.

So, in conclusion, if these changes go live, this will solve most of the quality of life problems related to healing shrooms. With all the other great changes they are making for resto druids, this last tier almost makes me wish I didn’t reroll mage. At least my guild’s resident resto druid, Juvenate, will be having fun!

Becoming a WOW blogger and growing the community

By Lissanna | Published: June 2, 2013

The World of Warcraft community has overall had one of the largest and most active out-of-game communities. This community involves blogging, podcasting, forum posting, theorycrafting, and more! I started posting on the official WOW forums shortly after the game’s initial release. By the release of the Burning Crusade expansion, I had joined the ranks of guide writing. My druid leveling guide, that I took over at the start of Burning Crusade (Summer of 2006, I believe), is my longest-running WOW guide. I didn’t actually start blogging until much more recently, in comparison (early 2009, when Blizzard threatened to shut down the class forums and I needed somewhere to host my guides if that became a reality). While many of you come here to read my guides, I really enjoy reading other people’s blog posts. I can’t do my guide writing without a healthy theorycrafting and blogging community to be part of. So, today I’m going to give some advice to new potential bloggers, to encourage other WOW players to make the leap and start writing!

Why start your own blog?

To pass along advice and helpful information to people newer to the game than you. To have a place where you can express your own opinions about the game on a space that you control.
As a new player, it may be helpful to chronicle your own learning and journey so that other people in a similar situation will be encouraged.
Writing is something required in most professions these days, so getting in the habit of writing and reading WOW blog posts provides skills transferable outside of WOW.
To become part of the WOW community outside the game and open up new adventures outside of Azeroth.
In the end, the point is NOT to get “famous” from your writing. The majority of blogs have only a small number of readers, and only a small number of blogs manage to reach the point where they get thousands of views per day. So, the important point that everyone says is that (especially at the beginning), it is important to write for yourself and not for fans. However, if you take an active role in the community at large, you are doing your part in making the game more fun for all.
As some of the more established bloggers in the WOW community stop posting (e.g., Graylo and others), it is important for new people to come in and take over. So, it really is important to the WOW community as a whole that new people join the blogging community.

How do you get started?

Phaelia of Resto 4 Life wrote a great introduction to making a WOW blog back in 2008. While some of the links won’t necessarily work anymore, it is a great place to start. There are some things that Phaelia covers that I won’t duplicate here, but there are a few main overlapping topics where I want to share some more specific advice:
Importantly, you have to pick a theme (though keep it broad enough that you can have some flexibility in your topics). While it is important that your first 10 posts or so really fit into the narrow theme, you really can post whatever you want in your little “home”. However, some consistency in what to expect will increase the probability of people staying on your blog for longer to read similar posts and want to return for more. For example, most of the early Restokin posts were specifically related to resto and moonkin druids. However, over time I have covered lots of different WOW-related topics (some of my non-druid posts have been more popular than my druid posts!).
You have to pick a title for your blog. It should be something “unique” (so, google search the name you want to choose and see what comes up that could draw traffic away from you – it’s embarrassing to find out that you picked a name that is being used by someone else!). You would want to avoid choosing something too similar to a larger WOW fan site, or related too closely to non-WOW websites. I tried out about 10 different blog names before “restokin” stuck. In my case, the blog name and the domain name is the same, so finding the right domain name that wasn’t taken already was also important for me (and I would recommend buying your own domain name so that other people are less likely to come along after you and steal your preferred name). However, now that I’m playing a mage and not my resto/moonkin druid, the theme and my title don’t actually match what I play in-game anymore (awkward!). However, I noticed that no one actually cares if I write about mage related topics on Restokin sometimes, as long as I still spend time following druid mechanic updates and posting druid-related topics.
Overall, I would recommend hosting your blog with WordPress. Blogging software has gotten a lot easier and simpler. In general, if you understand enough about computer programming, you can host your own blog using WordPress software (downloaded from WordPress.org). If you aren’t really as familiar with how to do that, you can either learn how – or you can have it hosted by WordPress.com. The main difference between the two is that hosting your own allows for being able to modify anything (fully customizable theme, a broader range of plugins allowing you to have things like mouse-over wowhead or wowdb tooltips for game spells and items). Having it hosted for you means that a lot of the technical back-end things get done for you, instead of having to worry about it yourself, and it may cost you less to have it hosted by someone else, since hosting it yourself requires more money. We pay a lot of money each year for the space that we use to host my blog, my husband’s blog, my guild forums, and other small sites. At the peak of Restokin’s popularity, we had to be able to survive heavy patch-day hit numbers, which has it’s own problems. My husband does all the technical stuff for Restokin, so I just point and complain when stuff is broken.

Once you have your blog, start writing!

The best way to grow your blog is to write. Choose a set time each week for your post releases at first – consistency really helps to build momentum. When I started here, I was actually putting up one blog post a day. However, even 1 to 2 posts per week is often enough (and now I’ve hit the point where I miss some weeks!). You don’t have to always keep a set schedule, but if your blog has no content, then no one is likely to stick around reading it. So, building momentum in your writing is very important!
Pay attention to spelling and format! You want to proof-read your posts before you send your writing out into the world.
Pictures say a thousand words. Thus, it is important to include images on your posts to draw readers’ attention. They can be used to break up text (along with careful use of bolding, bullet points, colored text, and other important formatting tools). However, be careful about copyright problems with some images you find google searching. It is usually better to put in citations to external picture sources (don’t plagiarize other people’s work!), or when in doubt – just stick to using your own in-game screenshots.
Be honest and avoid plagiarism. You can write about topics that other people write about. However, make sure that you link back to the original source where your topic idea came from (for example, earlier in this post, I linked to Resto 4 Life who wrote a similar topic a number of years ago, and I still send people to read her post from time to time!). However, if you copy and paste huge chunks of text from another site and put your name on it, then all you will do is make enemies. Also, make sure you are truthful and honest (and yourself!) when you are posting (it’s okay to post under your WOW character name, but importantly, don’t misrepresent yourself, like this person, or it will come back to haunt you). You want to be part of a community, so make sure that your work on your site is your own original writing, and make sure you are positive member of your new community!
Spread the word! Once you have around 5 posts, you can start telling other bloggers about yourself. I’m usually happy to add new druid (and mage!) blogs to my blogroll. However, I’ll often overlook someone who doesn’t have any content other than their introduction post, as I don’t know how relevant the blog is if it has zero content.At around 5 posts, I get a sense of how frequent the blogger is posting and the type of content they are likely to keep writing. Before 5 posts, you can still start sharing your blog with your friends and starting to builds some momentum. You can make a twitter or facebook account to go along with your blog, and start using social media to meet new people who may have similar interests and start driving traffic to your blog. Comment on other bloggers’ posts that have related content. If you join the community, it is much easier for the community to support your blog in return.

You can also join sites like Blog Azeroth to get more blogging help and advice! Also, after you start your blog, you can introduce yourself on Blog Azeroth. Happy blogging! If you have questions, feel free to post them in the comments!

Happy 5.3 patch day!

By Lissanna | Published: May 21, 2013

The new 5.3 patch is going live today. This has fairly big changes for resto druids, especially those in 25-man raiding.

Druid 5.3 changes

I have a post up describing the major 5.3 changes for resto & balance druids. These changes should be implemented today.

This means that I have also updated my resto druid healing guide:

I also made some minor edits to the blog’s leveling guide, but nothing substantial.

Mage 5.3 changes

Mages had a buff to Living Bomb that now theoretically makes it better for single target boss fights than Nether Tempest. Nether Tempest is still better for multi-target cleaving boss fights (e.g., Horridon).
Mages also had buffs to our AOE spells, though I’m not sure how these changes impact our overall AOE rotations yet, especially if you are going to be running around with Living Bomb for most of the raid and not consistently switching back to nether tempest for trash packs. I may need to spend some time in LFR tonight to figure out what buttons I should be mashing.

Other changes

You can upgrade gear again with valor points, so don’t forget to hit the upgrade vendor and cash in any saved VP.
Grab some friends and hit up Heroic Scenarios to help with your VP farming fun.
And of course, make sure you read one of the patch day summaries at MMO-champion, or WOWhead, or WOWinsider.

druid 5.3 changes on PTR

By Lissanna | Published: May 11, 2013

With 5.3 likely to come out in the next few weeks, I thought it might be helpful to write a recap of the 5.3 changes for resto & moonkin druids. Since this is still on the PTR, it is, of course, subject to change. The full PTR notes are available here.

We still don’t have an official release date, but I thought it would help to cover some of the changes in more detail.

Talent change

Both resto & moonkin benefit from general druid changes. First, Force of Nature is undergoing some changes in 5.3. It is now going to be one big tree (without a pet bar) that is a little bit smarter, and should chain-cast spells (instead of pausing so much). For moonkin, the casting of roots in PvE is still likely problematic. However, the resto druid version (that now casts swiftmend in addition to healing touch) is likely a more viable option than it was previously. As a “fire and forget” spell, now off the global cooldown, it may be worth trying out, especially for new players .

Balance 5.3 changes

The main balance changes for 5.3 are really about PvP, with some solar beam changes.
In addition, the glyph of Omens seems like it could be used to fish for eclipse procs in PvP situations. However, most of the utility spells that generate Eclipse energy with this glyph aren’t often used in PvE.

Restoration 5.3 changes

Ironbark cooldown will be 1 minute instead of 2 minutes (the PvP set bonus change means that this won’t really impact PvP). This gives you the ability to sometimes cast this on non-tanks to save raid members from harm, rather than feeling forced to always save it for tanks. You can, alternatively, cast it more on the tank if that works best for the fight. The important part is that this should just generally be used more often to reduce the damage members of your raid are taking.
For 25-man raids, Tranquility will hit 12 people. In 10-man, it will continue to hit 5 people. Several other AOE heals of other classes (such as the priest divine hymn) were changed to also have a different target number for 10 & 25-mans. This will help druids scale better for 25-man raiding, where a weakness of druids was that our tools were really limited in the number of people we could heal at a time in 25′s.
Our “smart” heals will be smarter. One of the problems with smart heals was that they frequently targeted pets over players, leading to what looked like a lot of healing done, but was really wasted healing. So, now, these “smart” heals will now more consistently choose wounded raid members over their wounded pets. In addition, since pets should take a little less damage in raids, they won’t really be at risk of dieing. Note that if players are at full health, it will still do healing on the pets.
The radius of Swiftmend‘s Efflorescence AOE effect has been increased to 10 yards. With how spread out people tend to be, this still will be used more often in melee on 10-mans. However, you now have a higher probability of hitting both your tank and melee for bosses with smaller hit-boxes. In addition, for ranged spread-out times, there is now an increased chance of having more people hit by Efflo (and given the 3 person limit, anyway, that’s not so bad).
Wild Mushroom: Bloom was given two buffs. First, it has the same increase in radius to 10 yards that Swiftmend’s AOE got. Second, the baseline healing (and scaling with rejuv overhealing) was also increased. However, this doesn’t change the fundamental flaws that makes the ability feel more situational. That said, it will be worth using more often in times where you are likely to stack on one spot for AOE healing.
It is also important to note that some of the problems druids are having is with how HOTs don’t play well with discipline and paladin absorbs. The paladin absorb mastery is targeted for a minor nerf for 5.3, which may indirectly help out druids to look better on meters.

Now with more fire!

By Lissanna | Published: May 2, 2013

Old screenshot from the Fireland raiding days.

So, druids should all be familiar with the infamous Fire Kitty staff from Firelands.

We recently had confirmation that the effect from the fire kitty staff is now available without the staff. You can get seeds (5 at a time, each seed lasting 1 hour) from Firelands. Since the Burning Seeds are bind on account, you won’t be able to pick them up from the auction house. Instead, you have to actually go to the Firelands instance to get them.

So, now you can get the temporary fire kitty buff without having to keep an outdated staff equipped (I for one know how embarrassing it can be to get caught in the wrong outfit half way through a raid). We all know how much druids enjoy being on fire. Or at least, that’s what we try to tell Juvenate. More details available on WoWhead.

A quick note

By Lissanna | Published: April 22, 2013

Hi all,

My guild is recruiting: Undying Resolution currently has some open spots for Ranged DPS classes for our 25-man raiding. We are hoping to get in 1 to 2 more ranged DPS players in the next week or two to help keep our roster full for going into the summer vacation months. We are 11/12 TOT. We are raiding three nights a week, since we recently added a third night of 25-man raiding to our schedule. So, we are now raiding 8 to 11 EST on Wed, Thurs, & Sun (US – Elune – Alliance). Adding the extra raid day was really beneficial to us, so we’re gaining faster progress speed than we’ve ever had before! We are looking for people with some MOP-level raid experience. Check us out!

A quick update about me: I have been traveling the last week for work. I attended a work-related conference for the Society for Research in Child Development this last week in Seattle, Washington. At the conference, I presented some preliminary results from the Autism face processing study that was included as part of the research I described in my crowdfunding campaign last fall. The data I presented was some of the functional MRI brain data from the baseline (before the intervention) time point of the intervention study, since we are still working on completing the follow-up assessments from the intervention this month, with lots of other exciting research things happening this Summer/Fall. However, this means I may be a little slow in posting blog content until the semester ends in a few weeks. Sorry for falling behind in my blog posting! I will try to get a post up actually related to druids “soon”.

Hearthstone! One of the more interesting things to happen at Blizzard in recent months was the announcement that they will be releasing an electronic card game related to WOW, called Hearthstone. While this is somewhat old news, I wanted to highlight how much fun I think it will be. You can expect to see some Hearthstone related content here on Restokin when that game is in beta & release.

Looking for guest bloggers! Are you a druid that enjoys writing about WOW? Well, I’m opening back up my “voices from the community” series to guest bloggers this summer. If you have an idea for a World of Warcraft Druid-related post that you would like to write and have posted on Restokin, feel free to send me an e-mail: lissanna70 at gmail.com. Please tell me about yourself (info such as how long you have been playing, an armory link, links to any previous blogs/youtube/etc if you have them), and what druid-related post ideas you are interested in possibly writing.

Resto Roundtable at the Team Waffle Podcast: The Team Waffle Podcast recently had a resto druid roundtable. The lineup included Jarre, Hamlet, Sodah, Jasyla, and of course Arielle as the host/moderator.

BONUS: Resto druid buffs in newest 5.3 patch notes. It looks like they finally put in some more resto druid buffs in the 5.3 patch notes. Importantly, this includes a larger player cap on Tranquility for healing in 25-man raids (will hit 12 instead of 5 in 25-mans), a range increase for our other AOE healing (mushrooms & Swiftmend’s Efflorescence – 10 yards, up from 8), and a reduced cooldown on Ironbark. Healing Shrooms should also do more healing, and thus may actually be useful “soon”. These should be nice quality of life fixes for 25-man raiders in particular, who have been struggling this tier with feeling useful.