My shaman, Lissiel on Elune, finally hit 80! My goal over Thanksgiving break was to hit 80 on my shaman, and I met that goal!
I have an enhancement spec & a resto spec. I’m working on getting them geared up, and such. I’ll be doing some more shaman research soon and I’ll probably do a shaman-related post or two over the next few weeks as I work on gearing up that character some more on non-raid days.
Okay, so I’ve gotten a good start on compiling responses from the healing survey. I’m planning to collect data through Monday (when people come back from their holiday).
As a preview (and to get some feeback from all of you), I wanted to post the possible talent specs first. I kept two of my original builds as my “no CF” builds, and then added what I think works out to be the best “with CF” build. I’m sure that people will disagree with my talent choices, since I figure there are 2 or 3 “flex” talent choices in the “with CF” build that are going to get shifted around to fit what people want out of their build the most.
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4. Recommended talent specs
There is some degree of flexibility in what specs people think are “best.” These are updated with the changes to resto druids in mind.
The 3.3 talent change to Gift of the Earth Mother changes the amount of haste we need. While we used to be able to gear for about 400 haste or so, the amount of haste we need to hit the “soft cap” has more than doubled. Information about the 3.3 changes can be found here.
If you are near the 850 haste soft-cap (with access to Wrath of Air & moonkin/swift ret auras), you can go with one of two builds, with either 14 or 11 points in the balance tree:
14/0/57: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#0VG0uZZf0fuduxiuVGsVo
Has 2 points in replenish. Has Nature’s Grace, but not Celestial focus. Nature’s Grace is useful if you cast Nourish or regrowth a lot and/or use the new glyph of rapid rejuvenation.
11/0/60: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#0VG0zZZf0IuruxiuVIsVo
Drops Nature’s Grace in favor of maxing out revitalize & putting more points in Tranquil Spirit. May be better for people who don’t benefit as much from Nature’s Grace procs.
If you are at or below 735 haste (or don’t have access to one of the raid buffs), you should consider picking up Celestial Focus. You will end up with something like:
18/0/53: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#0VGzu0hZZf0IubuxiuVzsVo
Drops Living seed in favor of Celestial focus. You may need to shift around a couple points in some of the resto talents to get something that really works well for you. I’d be happy to hear what your 18/0/53 build looks like, since this was relatively uncommon before patch 3.3.
UPDATE: here are two more 18/0/53 specs. Thank you @Vivitec for sending me spec links on twitter!
The current two most popular 18/0/53 specs are skipping empowered touch in favor of either full Living Seed or revitalize.
Hey everyone! I’m going to work on my 3.3 healing guide. However, before I do that – I want to get some input from all of you! I’m looking for people who are already level 80 who heal in PvE (either 5-mans or raids).
So, I created a short healer survey designed so that I can compile a little bit of data before I finalize my decisions about what my new healing guide will look like.
I want to keep all the survey responses in one place, so to take my survey, please visit the druid forum post by clicking here!
What I’m looking for is to see how much variability there is in the forum & blog readers likely to read my leveling guide – as well as figuring out what healing styles I should focus on when I write the new guide (ie. if no one answers “tank heal” in my survey, then I should shorten my section on tank healing and focus more on other playstyles).
I’m going to collect info over the next couple days, and then I’ll compile it all and use it to help me revamp my healing guide. I’m not expecting the 3.3 patch to hit before December 8th (though I’ll have something prepared for the 1st if they decide to release it early).
So, go fill out my druid healing forum survey!
Note: I forgot that EU players can’t post on the US forums. If you don’t have access to the US forums, you can post your responses here, that’s ok.
I hope you all have a great Turkeykin day! I finished the meta-achievement for Pilgrim’s Bounty on my druid. I’m close to having it done on my shaman. I also got my shaman’s cooking skill up from 50 to over 300.
Turning rogues into turkeys was a difficult part of the achievement, so some volunteers on my server made low level rogues (daynight & turkeymebaby among others) and put them in Dalaran so that we’d put the costume on them instead of harassing the other rogues.
Happy Thanksgiving!
OH – and because the Control Alt Delete comic is just so perfect for today:
From cad-comic.com
Okay, so one of the most common complaints by druids who are leveling feral is how bad it is to level from 10 to 20. These are usually druids who get bear form and try to plod away by mauling things to death for 10 levels. It’s pretty painful.
What bear gets from 10 to 20:
Only 2 of those are actually damage abilities that you are going to use on a regular basis (maul & swipe). You basically have 2 or 3 buttons (if you include faerie fire for pulling) that you are going to really use for solo leveling 10 to 20. All you will really use for solo leveling is: Maul, swipe, and faerie fire.
Maul is really the only damage ability for single-target damage. Faerie Fire is basically just a debuff that doesn’t do much damage at all at low levels. Swipe is better for fighting groups of things than fighting things by themselves. This actually limited number of solo damage leveling abilities is really what makes bear form so painful for leveling 10 to 20.
We don’t have many good damage abilities in bear from from 20 to level 50 when we get mangle. This kinda sucks, but it’s the most problematic until you get to level 20. I have heard dozens or hundreds of complains about how bad feral leveling is from 10 thru 20 – and then we just go cat from level 20 on unless we’re tanking.
What bears need for the 10 to 20 grind:
We get cat at level 20 - but it’s not all good then, either
Cat is still pretty bad at the lower levels. The improvements to cat that came along were all put in at level 40 or above, which leaves 20 to 40 as not fun. Here’s the problem. We don’t get the right openers & finishers early enough.
Cat openers (require stealth):
We should get either pounce or ravage at either level 20 or 22. We need our opener ability earlier. It doesn’t matter which ability, but going 12 levels with stealth without anything that requires us to be stealthed is just really, really silly. It also hurts cat’s early leveling playstyle to not get an early opener move. It’s okay to pick up one of them in the 30s – but one needs to come early.
Cat finishers (require combo points):
Rip is a bad finisher move at lower levels. You shouldn’t be fighting things long enough for a finisher bleed from level 20 to 32. That’s just too slow of a leveling process if you can bleed things to death like that. Ferocious Bite needs to come earlier. I mean, rogues get eviscerate at level 1. Having to wait until level 32 to get our eviscerate is really just not fun. I’d recommend level 24 for ferocious bite (so we go a couple levels with just rip before we get FB).
In conclusion, this is what feral needs to make leveling more fun:
Just one new ability and changing the timing of when we get 2 other abilities will have a huge impact on improving early feral druid leveling. With Cataclysm working on revamping low level zones, I really think that some classes (like druids) need the timing of early abilities re-examined so that new druids don’t have to suffer through the same problems we’ve had since the game first came out. Fixes (like Ferocious bite & mangle) were given to us at higher levels, which made the higher levels less painful, but it doesn’t address the early struggles.
Okay, so the shared topic on Blog Azeroth is asking about what we think are the best changes that have happened to WoW in the last 5 years. Since I’ve been playing my druid for almost all 5 of those years (except for the couple months when I got frustrated by tree healing in BC), I thought I would make my post totally druid-centric. You can see the posts from other people on the Twisted Nether site, since I’m posting this a little too late…
Sometimes, we get so caught up in what is still wrong with a class, that we forget how far we’ve come. In the spirit of Thanksgiving, and the 5 year anniversary, here is my list of: Thank Elune they fixed that, Druid edition!
This was a huge bonus, but it’s actually not the best thing that happened to druids, so here’s the little things that made a huge difference:
What Blizzard design changes are you thankful for?
Okay, so it’s been a while since I asked for feedback on what spells moonkin need. At this point, I’ve isolated it to two new spells needed. Both need to be arcane school. One needs to be an instant-cast spell (single target) with a short cooldown. One needs to be a short cast time single-target nuke (likely between the cast time of wrath & starfire).
Here’s why & what I’m imagining for the future of moonkin.
Some separated PvP & PvE talents: If we get two new spells, and we end up having separate PvP and PvE tools, then we can have a couple talents designed just for doing interesting PvP things with our PvP tool set, and we can have a set of different talents designed to make us good PvE damage dealers. Having a better spell arsenal variety would help a lot with this, as being so limited in number of spells really hurts us in a lot of ways. PvP talents could add more defensive & offensive PvP-oriented abilities, and PvE talents could be used to boost damage and make moonkin’s damage rotations more interesting for PvE purposes – to make us mix up the use of our two PvE-oriented nuke spells (the 2 sec & 2.5 sec nukes), the instant cast cooldown spell, and our two DOTs.
Why generals & not specifics?
I’m listing out here pretty obvious points, but not saying WHAT the two new spells should look like. This is because I respect Blizzard’s design decisions in terms of what they want our new rotation to look like. However, I want to give some suggestions and continue all of our discussions about this in hopes that moonkin can be a lot better in Cataclysm. I hardly ever fill numbers into my suggestions so that they don’t get turned down just based on the numbers.
