If you are wanting to take the plunge into competitive raiding, or you just want to see what the process is like. Please keep reading

Where to Begin

A common question I get asked by druids, is how do you get into competitive raiding?  The first trick to getting started is, look at all the knowledge about your class that you can. Read through theory crafting (even if you don’t understand the numbers behind it, just understand why it works), examine progression orientated raiders and learn from their gearing choices, and hit the forums for some good guides on proper set up for your characters. The bigger insight into your class that you have, the better your chances are of beating out your competition. There are tons of resources on the internet for bettering your game play, and if you are on this page, you are well on your way.

Another good resource that I always find useful, is watching a player stream their raids for you to view. This will give you a heads up look at how other druids play. Examine everything from their UI, down to their cooldown management, and how they take down each specific encounter. I offer a live stream Monday – Thursday 6:30 – 11:00 CST and always will make sure people know if we are not raiding that night, or if I am going to be late/unavailable to our raid (Twitchtv.com/SCShakk). All my announcements will be made via http://twitter.com/SCShakk. There are many other resto druids stream that can be found, and I urge you to tune in and watch at least one, to see how they handle progression raiding.

I’m Good, but I Have No Experience

Most progression orientated guilds, are going to want to see previous raiding experience in the current tier, as well as previous tiers. If you don’t have prior raiding experience, you have to start somewhere. Finding a guild for your given class, can prove to be tedious, however they are out there. Join a guild that has lower progression then what you are hoping for, and really shine. Perform well above the rest of the players, and advance through the ranks of the guilds on your server. Eventually you will have the required experience and knowledge to start the application process with a highly ranked guild.

Dedication of Time

The other problem that raiders generally run into is being able to allot that time to the guild each and every week. What you have to understand is, you are making a commitment to the other 9 or 24 players that will be there during raid times. By joining the guild, you are saying “Hey, I can make your schedule work for me”. Now, life does come up and most guilds allow for this, but it doesn’t hurt to check their attendance policy. If the guild you want to join doesn’t fit the times you need, keep searching.

Loot Rules

Loot rules will be the breaking point for some people. Loot is a means to an end. Gear is looted in a way to advance the guild into more challenging encounters. Open roll loot is going to pretty much disappear at this point. The good news is, you only have roll against balance druids, for now… KUNG PAO (Monk sounds) Having raided in both a loot council, and DKP system I can tell you that they both have their ups and downs, but in the end they are both fair loot systems in most cases.

The Dreaded Application Process

If you have ever browsed the forums of your favorite guilds, you’ve likely took notice to their application process. At first glance, you might shrug off the idea of filling in the information, to raid with a group of people, although you should never ever think of it like that. This is your time to shine in this guilds eye. First impressions are key, and demonstrating your class knowledge is just one more way to prove to the guild, you are ready to undertake the challenges of competitive raiding. Don’t rush through the process, take each question slowly, and really build a well written response. A sloppy or short application, will generally be disregarded. Players that put the time and effort into writing up a grammatically correct, well thought out application will have a upperhand over the other classes that are applying.

I would suggest keeping a high focus on uptimes during your application. Active casting time is HUGE for being a competent resto druid this tier. We have once again fallen from our spam model, and have to micro manage our buffs and hot timers.

What We Look For In Parses

I really rather enjoy analyzing parses. Sometimes I feel that they don’t do justice, but most of the time they will if the person reading them understands the mechanics of the fight. When I examine a resto druid, I check two things first. Harmony uptime, how often are you using a direct heal to make your hots more effective. Harmony is a key component for mastery based druids. (The exception would be of course experimenting with crit, but I don’t like stat weight discussions) The other important component is Lifebloom uptime. Giving that extra little boost to a tank, is a big help to the tank healers. I look for those stats to be above 76% on a standard tank and spank fight.

Then, I will move to effective HPS and overhealing done. If I look at your graph, and you are peaking highly on activity at the start, but slow all the way down towards the end it usually means you aren’t managing correctly and have run yourself oom. Usually, your overheals will be super high right out of the gate. Mana management is a key part on my determination of your competency as a healer.

The last section that I look at for parses is spell selection and cool down management. Is your lifebloom count high enough? Are you properly offering fillers into your rotation when damage is low? Did you use your tranq during a period of low damage? You can learn a lot from players by looking at their logs. I encourage you to compare your logs to other resto druids and see how you guys line up on particular fights.

It Doesn’t Hurt to Ask

I can’t speak for every guild in the game, but if you have questions about joining it never hurts to ask. Speak to a member about what it takes to join, what kind of experience they are looking for, and what classes they currently need. Your journey to the next level of gameplay is a just a little research away. Stay up to date on resto druids, and if competitive raiding sounds like it’s for you, best of luck on the start of your journey.

I switch between my moonkin spec and my healing spec frequently enough that I end up having to maintain gear for both. This requires me to juggle two things: My moonkin hit rating cap of 17%, and my Restoration haste rating breakpoint (2005). In an ideal world, I would have two completely different sets of gear. In the actual world, I tend to see half of my gear pieces shared between the two specs. I have eight pieces shared between my moonkin and healing sets right now, with the other half being different between the two specs (though I get to spend several hours this weekend re-working my healing set so I can use the new healing mace that dropped from LFR last night). So, how do you survive the frustration of having to deal with shared gear pieces for your caster hybrid? Here are some considerations and hints to keep in mind when trying to fill in for moonkin and healing on the same character.

Pick one main spec and one off-spec for gearing purposes, and stick with it! This main gear set for me ends up being my Moonkin set because I found it very hard to keep up with the required DPS if I was doing DPS in primary resto gear, whereas I could keep up healing even if I favored my DPS gear. This gives me access to DPS trinkets and accessories in raids, and means that I pick up my moonkin set pieces first. I use Graylo’s moonkin loot list as a general guide for thinking about what items I want to use for my moonkin set. If you primarily heal (with occasional DPS), you may want your main spec to still be healing.

You will still need to pick up some off-set pieces (either through points, LFR, or picking up off-set things from your normal raiding) to keep some pieces that are not shared between the two sets. This may mean that you have a couple lower ilevel pieces for one set, but try not to let your off-set fall too far behind your main set. You should read both moonkin & healing guides to know what your gearing priorities are, but you can’t just rely on some reforging addon to make both sets work out. Instead, you have to be very careful about how your gearing for one set impacts your pieces of gear that are shared between the two specs and know how much non-shared loot you need to keep everything in balance.

Resto Gearing Stat Considerations:

• Restoration druids use the same stats as moonkin, so most pieces can be shared between the two specs. Intellect is the gearing priority shared for both specs, where sometimes higher ilevel moonkin set pieces can end up being better than lower ilevel off-set pieces for restoration druids. The one stat that isn’t shared is HIT rating which may be found on weapons and accessories.
• Restoration druids want to be above 2005 haste rating. Most haste above this break-point will be a wasted stat, but you generally never want to fall below 2005 haste rating. This is the first thing I check on my resto set when I’m upgrading gear & reforging.
• After 2005 haste rating, the other stat priorities are to get as much mastery and spirit as possible. You may want to pick up some Spirit/Mastery pieces that are not shared with your moonkin set, as moonkin will have a cap on how much spirit is useful to them, and they still value haste over mastery past the 2005 resto-specific break point. Crit is the least desirable stat for both specs. I will end up with higher spirit and mastery in my resto set compared to my moonkin set.
• If you can’t get access to the Tier 13 set pieces for your resto set right away, then your two piece T12 set bonus is very important for you to keep as you gear up (and is easily attainable from the Justice Point vendors if necessary).

Moonkin Gearing Stat Considerations:

• Like restoration druids, INT, spirit, haste and mastery are important for moonkin.
• Unlike restoration druids, moonkin can benefit from Hit rating on gear (though I prefer picking up spirit instead when possible, since Spirit gives your moonkin hit rating). They don’t make leather with hit rating, as they expect you to use Spirit instead. However, moonkin have a cap of 17% hit (1742 hit rating) where you stop benefiting from spirit/hit. So, you want to be as close to 17% as possible. You never want to fall below 17%, and you don’t ever want to be above ~17.5% hit. This is the most important number I watch when gearing my moonkin set. In my healing set, my spirit ends up giving me way more hit rating than that, even with some of the shared pieces between the two sets having spirit reforged into haste or mastery.
• Moonkin value haste rating past the 2005 breakpoint. I will pick up a few pieces with more haste rating on them for my moonkin set. For moonkin, Haste is more valuable than mastery and mastery is more valuable than crit, so that I can try to sit a couple hundred haste rating higher for my moonkin set and have slightly lower mastery and spirit as a result.
• The moonkin 4-piece Tier 12 set is very powerful. Your moonkin set should hold onto the 4-piece T12 (if possible) until you can get the 2-piece T13 normal-mode or heroic-mode (don’t use the LFR set pieces if you have access to the T12 4-piece bonus for either moonkin or resto). With the 4-piece buff for moonkin T13 on the PTR, you will eventually want to upgrade everything to get the 4-piece normal or heroic T13 by the time the next patch hits if possible (after the patch, it may be possible for the moonkin T13 LFR pieces to be worthwhile, and you’ll want to pick up T13 LFR if you don’t have access to the T12 4-piece).

Additional Points for sharing pieces between moonkin & resto:

• Moonkin and resto druids can share the exact same gems and enchants, keeping the above stat points in mind, though I will sometimes end up with less desirable gemming in some situations. For example, moonkin and resto specs can share a helm if you use the Burning Shadowspirit Diamond (as of the changes in 4.3, the burning shadowspirit diamond impacts both healing & DPS crits). Otherwise, gems tend to be: Int red gems, Int/Haste orange, and Int/Spirit purple.
• The best trinkets available will usually NOT be shared between the two specs. Make sure you read trinket descriptions to make sure that Equip or Use effects are not being wasted by wearing a damage ability trinket in your healing spec (or vice versa). I almost never share trinkets between my two specs.
•  With Dragonsoul, weapons with healing or damage-spell based casting procs, you won’t want to share those particular weapons between your gear sets, either. If you get something with pure stats on them, they can be shared between your sets.
• Set pieces will often provide a lot of stat differentiation between your two sets. So, getting set pieces for both sets will help a lot with balancing your slightly different stat priorities between the two sets.
• You will have to reforge gear for both sets every time you get a new upgrade that will be shared between the two sets. This can get pretty expensive, as I usually have to resort to trial-and-error for figuring out how to make the two sets work out right.
• You want a different talent spec for healing and DPS (with different glyphs), since healing in moonkin spec or DPS in a healing spec sucks a lot. There is no such thing as a restokin talent spec, unlike feral right now that share a DPS and tanking spec.

The very most important thing to remember is to save your two gear sets in the equipment manager (either the base Blizzard UI feature or with the help of another addon), and make sure that you swap your gear at the same time as you swap your specs. Healing or DPS’ing in the wrong spec will hurt your output numbers, as I have proven over and over again.After 4.3, I transmog some of the gear pieces into different looking sets as much as I can to hopefully tell them apart visually.

Resto Spec

• What type of content do you focus on? – PvE
• If PvE, what type of PvE? regular-mode raids
• What are your biggest quality-of-life issues? Honestly, I think the tree form design is working fine (I like it better as a Cooldown). So, for me, the lifebloom restriction on one person (without a way to force-bloom or get faster stacks on target-swaps) is probably the biggest quality-of-life issue. The ramp-up time for switching Lifebloom to a new tank on a fight like Ragnaros is too high, and the tank is most often likely to die while I’m trying to get LB on the new tank target. I waste a lot of GCD’s trying to move LB from one person to another when there are frequent tank-swaps in 10-mans. In 25-mans, it’s less of a problem since we can usually just assign one LB to each of the tanks and just keep it on our targets.
• What makes playing your class more fun? Resto druids are more fun when HOTs matter for keeping people alive, and when we have enough tools to do the job. I actually enjoy using more of my spells and tools in Cataclysm compared to previous expansions.
• What makes playing your class less fun? I actually liked the idea of “slower” healing, but it isn’t working out that way in Cataclysm. Instead, we had like a few bosses where your slower heals could actually work in T11, but really not in T12. At this point, if I cast Nourish much at all in Firelands, people die – because it just takes too much time to heal them. On more and more bosses, I’m starting to rely on only using instant-cast or FAST heals over slower-casting heals, which ends up making me hit mana problems pretty hard. Being GCD-capped on a lot of fights and still not feeling like I’m healing fast enough can be really frustrating.
  
• How do you feel about your “rotation”? Honestly, I think that resto druids are more fun this expansion than they were in previous expansions. I really enjoy being able to weave in direct heals & HOTs pretty seamlessly. The new mastery is wonderful for helping us do what we’re good at. Lifebloom is probably the biggest “thorn” in our sides. Having a way to either force the bloom to happen (on a cooldown), or stack it faster (possibly also on a cooldown) would be a huge improvement for us. We probably couldn’t have both (a fast-stacking spell with a controlled bloom would be super OP),  but having some way to speed up the swapping process (or let LB bloom when you swap it to the other person to top off the other tank) would be something that would really help in a world where almost every raid dungeon has multiple tank-swap fights.
• What’s on your wish list for your class? For resto druids, a way to either bloom LB on demand (on cooldown) to benefit from having to swap targets so much, OR a way to fast-stack it (on cooldown), so that you have an easier time helping tanks survive emergency situations.   Without any way to mitigate the amount of damage a tank is receiving, more Lifebloom control would be a huge help (though I suppose a way to mitigate the amount of damage a tank is receiving would also be pretty high on my wish-list). We still need some talent-refinement in the next expansion, for sure, since we still have a lot of “trap” talents in our tree that look attractive but don’t actually do anything particularly useful.
• What spells do you use the least? Unlike other expansions, I actually use a lot of different healing spells in cataclysm. Nourish is probably my least-used healing spell in raids currently, since the risk of deaths is too high for how little it heals, but it was a spell I used more in T11. I use regrowth more now than I did in T11, but still not that much. I don’t use Nature’s Swiftness as much as I should, but it’s better than it was at the start of Cata.

So, what does a packrats’ bags look like with Adibags? Well, here’s my “after” picture for what my bank & bags look like with the addon:

So, I still have just as much stuff – but now it’s all organized by category! I can see what jewelcrafting supplies I have (in the trade good’s category). I can see what junk I have (some of which is vendor trash that makes it easy to identify).  I know where all the consumables are. The only problem is that with having so much gear, it all gets jumbled together.

Fortunately, Adibags has a search function. Want to know what Stormrider set pieces you have? Well, then just type “stormrider” into the search box, and watch those pieces get highlighted while the other pieces get greyed out (if both your backpack & bank is open, it will search in both places for the items). When you get new items, they’ll also sparkle for a while (and show up under the “new” category) so that you can find that new thing you just picked up without having to search all over the place in your bags. You can also see in the bottom right-hand corner a spot where it says how many empty bag spaces you have. You can drag things from the bank and drop them into the free space slot on the backpack (and vice versa – move stuff from your backpack to the bank).

Do you want to see what’s actually in each bag? Well, you can change it back to the normal view, while still keeping all the neat search functions (just without the other type of filtering into categories). Being able to retain this functionality means that you don’t lose your old bag system, you just gain a new one to be able to search by categories.

So, overall I have found that it’s a very useful addon. The setup wasn’t very time consuming, it’s pretty intuitive to use, and it organizes things for you without having to really put in much time/effort. So, I’d highly recommend picking up a bag addon such as AdiBags (though there are several others that have a similar functionality) if you are a packrat like me! This will help you in preparing for 4.3′s transmogrification,  since I’m sure a lot of people are working on farming up old set pieces and need to easily be able to keep track of what they’re missing for each set!

Back in Vanilla, I worked really, really hard to get all the gear. When Burning Crusade came out, I didn’t really WANT to get rid of all that gear. So, I put it in the bank. My bank has basically been a repository where I just shove all the gear I can fit. When I have too much gear, I go through and get rid of some old gear so that I can fit new gear in there. I haven’t been very organized in my gear-hoarding, so I have random bits & pieces of various sets and off-sets. At this point, I’m pretty sure that everything in my bank is soulbound gear, and I still have a ton of other gear that I carry around on a regular basis in my bags that is more current.

It’s perfect for seasonal outfits, items you think look really cool, etc. It’s the place to put the gear you just don’t want to delete, but don’t regularly use either. If we just gave you 80 more bank slots — which is a monumental technical task as I said earlier — we’d have to consider nominating you for “Hoarders: World of Warcraft Edition.”

Well, lets look at my bank & bags on Lissanna today:

I’m pretty sure I should be one of the first characters nominated for Hoarders: WC edition. What do I have in my bank & my bags? Well, most of it is soulbound gear & assorted vanity items (holiday stuff that’s soulbound, trading card stuff, trinkets that were obsolete 5 years ago that I still held onto). There are a couple of crafting things & raid consumables that I carry with me in the bags & use every day. The rest of the stuff in my bank and in my bags is all gear. You know what giving me 80 slots of gear “void storage” does? It allows me to empty some (but not all!) of this stuff out into the void storage so I can… hold even more gear! I haven’t been able to use my bank for anything other than holding gear since around the time Burning Crusade came out, so I’m not sure what I’d do with actual bank space. Every 6 months or so, I have to go through my bank and make more space for the new gear that I get. I don’t have my Tier 1 anymore, but I’m pretty sure I have bits & pieces of pretty much every other tier set that’s come out since then (though it’s not well organized, so I may have accidentally gotten rid of some things that I’ll have to re-farm later on).

The only reason I have a partially empty bag is that I need space to be able to actually pick things up when I’m farming and whatnot. I never, ever have more than 1 bag empty at any point in time, and I very often run out of space when running instances and whatnot.

So, Void Storage is an awesome feature for me, since that’s basically what my current bank is – space to store old gear (and I need MORE SPACE!). If the void storage space is 150 slots, I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to fill all of those void storage slots, as long as I have enough gold to be able to do it. Also, Blizzard, when you want to start making Hoarders: WC edition, you should see what my bank will look like after I have 80 more slots to hold more gear! LOL!

Playing Dress-up

So, The other thing that comes in patch 4.3 is the ability to change how your current gear looks. Even though I’m running around as moonkin most of the time (so I suffer the problem of always looking like a moonkin), there are a lot of positive features of the system that I’m really looking forward to.

First, druid tier sets have a long history of looking totally stupid. There are some really great sets that they have made for druids. However, there are some outfits that I’ve had to wear over the years that I really just hated looking at. While we spend a lot of time in forms, I still spend an equally large amount of time running around Stormwind or hanging out waiting for stuff to happen where I’m not in a form.

From Wowpedia.org

So, what sets would I never want to wear again? The druid T1 wasn’t fun to wear when it was current, and it’s actually something I didn’t bother keeping. Druid Tier 10 along with Tier 12 are also not things I really would want to wear. However, there are a handful of really great sets that would be worth re-wearing. The Tier 8 set is one that I really liked, though I don’t think I still have all the pieces. Tier 5 is also really a nice set. The tier 7 (re-skinned T3) is pretty good, as well. There are a lot of options that we have for customizing our gearing. You don’t want to wear pants? Great! Just slap on a dress graphic and you are good to go!

You also get to re-skin your weapon, and I’m pretty sure that you’ll see a ton of druids running around with the Tentacle Staff that I know you all saved from your Karazhan raiding days just waiting for Transfiguration to come to the game, right?

Oh yeah! That’s one sexy moonkin!

So, even as a druid, I think there is a lot for people like me to be excited about when the 4.3 patch hits!