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.

My raiding team got into P2 madness this week on 10 man normal, in spite of the fact that most of my top raiders are away, and I had to grab guys from the other team (which is also having attendance issues), alts, basically whatever I could find to get a group together. It’s not a kill, but progression is progression, and this was a pretty big deal for us.

Our success came down to a few things. Naturally, the team worked together well, but I’d like to think I pushed everything I could out of my Druid. Arielle and Reesi talk a lot about Bearcatting. Here is why it’s the most OP crap in Wow right now.

That’s me, tanking tentacles when my Pally tank gets an impale, but otherwise staying in cat as much as possible. My gear is optimised for cat, with reforges into stats that are good for both (Mastery, then Crit), with Mastery and Agi enchants, DPS leg enchant, and Assassin’s Step on boots, because I just can’t live without the speed increase in Bear. Oh, and the DPS meta.

Then, I have a spec that’s as pure cat as I can get it, with the vital Bear talents thrown in : Thick Hide, Natural Reaction, and Pulverize. When I shift bear, everyting works as intended. I had to make sure I took Stampede for Kitty 4pc, and Blood in the Water for 2pc. With 4pc, the kitty rotation is a joke. About to drop Rip? Either 1+CP Bite at under 60%, or pop Tiger’s Fury, get a free Ravage and 2 Shreds with the energy you just got, and you’re good to go for a 5CP Rip. If your target is over 80% health, Ravage is basically a Guaranteed 2CP.

Speaking of tier bonuses, I make sure I’m in bear when we’re on the 4th platform (we do Blue last, so we eat the shard on the last platform), which means my FR 4pc is up as the raid takes the mental burst. 15% health + 30% healing taken (make sure to have the FR major glyph). I also stay in bear when we’re killing the shard, since I don’t want to strain my healers any more than they already are.

So basically, rather than sitting around being useless when I’m not needed as a tank, I push DPS as good as the next guy, which helps to get over the fairly rough DPS check on later platforms, where you start losing haste, dmg done, while having to deal with adds that are increasingly hard to kill, especially once Alexstrasza decides to take a nap.

In spite of the emphasis on cat dps, remember there are times that a bear can push nice AOE. When bloods are about to spawn, I shift bear, autoattack the limb to get some rage, then as they move in range, I pop enrage (15% dmg anyone?), and Swipe-Thrash-Swipe. With the Spellweaver splash damage, plus the Vengeance that you quickly get, this is some intense burst AOE.

Oh, one final tip. Since cats really suffer on target switches, ask your raid leader really nicely if you can stay on limbs, and not have to switch to take down Blistering Tentacles. It makes your life a lot easier, and you push way more DPS, which in the end is good for the raid. Alternatively, just don’t switch, and see if anyone notices Being a raid leader myself, I get away with murder sometimes…

Druids are the only class in game with 2 specs in one. Enjoy it while it lasts.

The new 5.0 talent focus on bringing role-shifting and form-shifting back to druids would be great if it worked in the first place. However, we spent years fighting against being the “jack of all trades, master of none” because being the “master of none” in PvE totally sucked. So, instead, we became the “Master of One at a Time”. Moonkin focus on DPS (and spend most of their time in moonkin form). Healers focus their energy on healing. Feral druids are really the most hybrid of the specs, since they have a greater opportunity to swap between DPS & Tanking.

“Master of None” becomes “Master of One at a Time”

So, let me tell you a story. Back when I first started the game in Vanilla, I leveled up as restoration. I enjoyed leveling, but I mostly leveled by healing in instances. This is because my soloing experiences looked like this:

• In Hinterlands, pull a non-elite mob. Root mob. Cast moonfire. Cast starfire/wrath a couple times until roots breaks and I’m low on mana. Go cat form to regen mana. Get Omen of Clarity Proc. Shift out. Heal. Root Mob. Rinse & repeat until Mob finally dies 1 to 2 minutes after I pulled it.
• While doing this “rotation” on my mobs in Hinterlands, in the same amount of time it took me to kill one non-elite mob, a mage (around my same level) ran by, aggro’d 5 of the same mobs, AOE’d them down in like 10 to 20 seconds, and managed to pull everything else in the camp I was at while I worked killing my one troll. I have a very strong & clear memory of this event.

Was this a fun play style back then? Well, not really. If you wanted to raid, you had to go restoration because being a cool hybrid that could shift between forms wasn’t wanted by your raid at all. They just wanted you to spam Rank 4 Healing Touch so that you could innervate a real healer and maybe battle-res someone. You were primarily there as support utility and that was it. A lot of things have changed since then, but the fact remains that the “jack of all trades, master of none” model sucks. It’s also true that you can’t be the “master of all trades” (because then why would you bring anything else?).

• So, druids started become more specialized in PvE because that’s what we need to do to be viable and wanted. No one wanted someone who was 2/3rds DPS and 1/3rds healer. So, we ran around in raids as healers (the one thing we could do well enough and we bribed people with innervate to keep our spots), and patch 1.8 started to bring us some abilities to make tanking or DPS more viable. However, that specialization came with costs (including balance druids not being able to heal in moonkin form).

We interrupt this post to bring you a message from Alamo (Nov 2005)

Why the Original Melee Moonkin Experiment Failed

Let me tell you another story about Burning Crusade and the Melee-Moonkin model. Moonkin didn’t come into the game until patch 1.8 (shortly before the Alpha/beta testing phase of Burning Crusade). Back then, moonkin had to melee things with our staff to get mana regen (even in raids), since both moonkin form’s mana regen and Omen of Clarity required you to hit things for them to proc. I spent all of Burning Crusade beta fighting against the melee-moonkin design (and kept fighting during Live TBC).

The real problem with melee moonkin wasn’t just that casting & hitting things with our staff was incompatible, but also that ranged DPS don’t want to be in melee range in PvE, except for very specific stack-up fights where the fight mechanics require us to come in close. In fact, Hunters are having their entire melee weapon removed in 5.0 because Blizzard has found over time that they don’t WANT to use it. With moonkin, the ability to mix melee DPS into our caster DPS is totally and utterly just unnecessary, and we spent so much time fighting to let moonkin stay at range and focus on being a great Ranged DPS class.

Why the 5.0 cat-bear-healer-moonkin PVE experiment will fail for moonkin

What other caster DPS wants to run up into melee range and wack things with melee abilities in PVE raid encounters? Answer: None.

Some of the melee classes have gotten ranged DPS spells and benfit from those (I remember when paladin tanks didn’t have a ranged pull – it sucked), and self-healing is something every class can use. So, feral druids CAN use things that give them more spell power because more spell power equals more survivability through being able to cast bigger self-heals when needed. So, feral druids definitely benefit from the vast majority of the new “hybrid shapeshifting” talents in 5.0.

However, there is no world conceivable where a moonkin is going to need to go DPS in cat form during PvE raid encounters (without having mangle or shred or any of the other feral specialization abilities). In situations where moonkin might need to tank a boss, it may actually make more sense to just stay in moonkin form and self-heal or pray to Elune for protection than to invest in a talent that increases our attack power. It would make more sense to pray on the spirit beasts to increase our moonkin form’s defense than it would be to shift into bear form and try to hold threat without any of the Guardian specialization threat increases.

Restoration druids won’t benefit from attack power either, since (unlike monks), doing melee attacks is unlikely to do a lot of healing to make up for the loss of main-spec effectiveness (unless they plan on making druids monks).

Ranged DPS/Healer hybrid models work better than mixing ranged DPS & melee for casters

They should focus “hybrid” talents around the type of hybrid models we know works. Back in TBC, we had Restokin Specs that were hybrid ranged DPS & moonkin specs. While mostly for PvP, moonkins sometimes stepping up to save their raid with healing spells is a model for druids that makes sense (I use tranquility as a moonkin quite frequently in raids even in Cataclysm). However, I’ve never EVER wanted to hang out in cat or bear form as a moonkin in raids. Being close to the boss inspires fear and likelihood of death.

If healers need to do damage, it’s much easier to cast a few wraths (though DPS talents in the healing tree have been hugely unpopular for raiding druids in Cataclysm), and going cat to put yourself at risk of getting hit by melee-unfriendly boss mechanics in raids is just totally mind-boggling as to why healers would want to shift into cat & bear form (where they don’t have access to heals) to do some sort of utility or DPS.

For tanks & feral cats, they have always worked fine as a spec that swapped between melee DPS & tanking. They can also really benefit from access to more healing spells. So, when thinking about making hybrid talents, it makes more sense to give healer & caster things to cats & bears than to be giving dozens of cat & bear things to casters. What would make sense is to make the talents give casters the ability to do feral-type things without having to go in cat or bear form, and then take purely feral abilities (like Bear Hug) and make them specialization abilities.

It would be more interesting for Tireless Pursuit to let dash be used in moonkin & caster form (maybe also with the ability to cast while moving), rather than giving us a second dash that requires us to be in cat form (what caster PvE druid needs two dashes in cat form that prevent us from casting spells of any type while moving in cat form?). Why can’t we get rid of Tireless Pursuit and put Wild Charge down in it’s place? Why not just make Demoralizing Roar useable in all forms? Why not nuke some of the feral-form specific talents and replace them with things that give all druids access to more healing (something every spec could agree is useful?).

I’ll probably post part 2 over the weekend.

More wisdom from Alamo (12/2006)

I wanted to post a recap last night, but I was too exhausted to form coherent sentences by the time I got back to my hotel last night. This post, instead, is delayed in time but much more coherent & complete than what last night’s 1 sentence post would have read: “OMG healing shrooms & arcane hurricane”.

Day 2 of Blizzcon was actually pretty exciting for druid-related news, as I feel that the druids overall had the best set of questions asked, and the most direct answers out of the Q&A. I wanted to give a big Thank You /HUG to all the developers who answered questions at the Q&A and gave druids such great responses and information. I’m actually incredibly happy and excited by everything they told us yesterday. /HAPPY TREE DANCE

So, what did we learn for druids? Let’s take a look:

Moonkin Eclipse: It is part of the design that moonkin are high on DPS sometimes and low on DPS other times, as is the nature of the Eclipse mechanic. However, they will be giving us an AOE option for Lunar Eclipse. They said they will be giving us an arcane-based hurricane that will benefit from Lunar Eclipse in the future. This would likely mean that we would multi-DOT & Shrooms in Solar and then Hurricane in Lunar. I think switching between 2 different AOE rotations depending on what Eclipse we are in could actually be a lot of fun, and would prevent us from needing to sit in Solar-Cleave mode for AOE-heavy boss fights. Other than that, we haven’t learned too much about what moonkin’s toolset & rotations will look like in Pandaria.

Splitting Cat DPS & Bear tanking: It is intended in 5.0 that cat druids won’t be great for DPS when they switch to cat with the same spec. Since other tank classes don’t have great DPS options, the splitting of druids into 4 specializations will mean a heavy nerf to Bear-tank damage potential when they are outside of bear form. This will be the end of bear/cat hybrid tank/DPS. Instead, you will want to have a dual-spec 1 bear build and 1 cat build. This should be okay, since the new talent design will still allow bears & cats to bring a lot of utility with them to raids (ie. bearfoon), but it will have a large overall impact on how feral druids play in 5.0 (ie. cats won’t have some of the important bear tools, and bears won’t have some of the important cat tools).

Feral cats won’t dual-wield fist weapons. They will share some 2-handers with monks. This is fine, since dual-wielding AND 2-handers available for cat/bear would really be a balancing and design nightmare. They also want the bear T13 set bonus to not work for cat druids, but not be constraining for bears to use it, and they will change the set bonus if it just doesn’t work.

Resto druid AOE healing design: They like how resto AOE HOT-based healing works now, and are worried about push-back from the community if they tried to change it too much, since resto druids didn’t like it when they tried to make us add single-target direct heals back into our rotations. They think a lot of the “spam” feeling is really an encounter-design problem, and that we do still have to make choices about who we Swiftmend and sometimes make decisions about who needs the HOT healing more. I felt their explanation of the current state of resto healing at the Q&A was something I agreed with mostly, and it was nice to hear them talk about their design decisions in more detail. In the Beta testing phase for Cataclysm, we got a lot of talk from them about not liking the way Rejuv/WG spam worked, and the nerfing of WG in 4.3 made me overall nervous about what their design intentions were for resto druids. While their quite lengthy response to my question about druid AOE healing sounded more like a “no” response to my question, there was actually a LOT of great design-level information they gave us in their answer (it is actually pretty rare to get that coherent of an answer from them at a Q&A), and I largely agreed with basically everything they said. I really did appreciate them explaining it all. This part didn’t make it into any of the actual website recaps of Blizzcon so I wanted to emphasize this before I go into the one toolset change they did announce during their answer of that question.

Healing Shrooms! One thing they did announce at the Q&A is that we will get a version of wild mushrooms in 5.0 that will do healing. Wild Mushrooms work by placing targeting reticules on the ground that last there for up to 3 minutes, and explode when you hit a “detonate” button. This is actually a really nice option for resto druids, since you can actually place shrooms before you need them if you know there will be a stack-up point on heavy AOE phases. The mechanic will be just situational enough that it would be unlikely that you would have to “spam” them. Instead, you would use them on places where people would likely be stationary for a while (say on the melee group or something), and you wouldn’t replace rejuv/WG use in raids with the new mechanic. Instead, shrooms would be something supplemental that you had to choose when to use them (and when NOT to use them). They actually solve most of resto druids’ problems right now by allowing for more burst AOE healing, and adding more decision-making and choice into what we do (ie. drop 1 quick shroom to activate your mastery for less over-healing on a lighter AOE phase, or set up 3 shrooms during down-time for an upcoming larger burst AOE ability, or skip casting shrooms because it’s a movement-heavy phase). The way they answered my question suggested that our AOE healing will still largely be similar to what we do now, which is good for the people who like the style of healing druids are using. Healing Shrooms are supplemental tools that will increase the difficulty-level of decision making for resto druids without changing the core mechanics of how resto druids heal.

In thinking about our Pandaria toolset, the talent preview also gives us several other possibilities for things that could supplement our toolset, http://www.wowhead.com/mists-of-pandaria-talent-calculator#d , though all of these are really subject to change between now and when 5.0 is released many months from now. For example, we could potentially pick up things like Cenarion Ward which is the 30-second cooldown ability that applies a HOT on someone after they take damage. The treant ability could give us Healing Treants, and disentanglement self-heal could be really neat if tree form stayed as a cooldown and shifting into tree form would heal yourself for 20% HP when you shifted into it. I am really excited to see how this works in Mists of Pandaria!

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!