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Feb
28
2010

Moonkin basics for the new level 80 Raider

So, you just hit 80 and want to be a moonkin raider? Great! Lets get started.

First, you have to be aware of how many great resources there are for new moonkin players, such as the Balance 101 guide on WoW.com. Murmur’s guide covers a lot more than what I’m going to talk about here, and he covers it in greater detail. I am also including lots of links in this post to places where other people explained things, so if you are a new moonkin, I expect you to read all those other links, too! The more resources you read, the better you will understand the moonkin mechanics.

This guide will also assume (in places) that you haven’t raided before on another character. Murmur’s guide is very specific to things unique to moonkin, but a lot of the time, people who are very new to WOW raiding will miss over other important basics (like why you need addons, or how to learn the boss fights in advance). This is also going to be more of a resource list of things you need to know, and where to go find out about them.

The most important thing you need to remember is that it is your job to NOT be a faildruid:

From CAD-Sillies by Tim Buckley

How should you spec?

Talents are a very, very important thing. Having the right talent build can take you from being a failkin to being a boomkin. When you hit level 80, you need to choose a good talent spec for raiding. There is a little bit of flexibility, but not that much. Instead of explaining all the talents, I’m just going to give you 2 “template” specs that you can use:

For more discussion on talents, see Graylo’s talent guide, and Hamlet’s moonkin basics for more advanced raiders.

Get to know your spells.

Priority/rotation basics:

  • In a raid, always attack what your raid leaders/tanks tell you to attack. If they put a Skull symbol over something’s head, it means you should attack that. At the very least, follow directions about what kill targets you are supposed to be on. For example, there are often adds that spawn that you will need to single-target kill in boss fights. The raid leaders will ask you to kill those adds FAST and then go back on the boss.
  • For 3 or more mobs that are standing near each other (usually on the “trash” packs before bosses), you can AOE instead of doing single-target damage (ie. hurricane & starfall). If you have enough space to not aggro a bunch of other crap, then you can use starfall when it’s off cooldown. If you aren’t sure how big your AOE radius is on starfall, then skip it and stick to just using hurricane.
  • For your single-target rotation, you will basically be refreshing DOTs, using your cooldowns, and switching back and forth between wrath and starfire based on having a solar (orange = switch to casting wrath) or lunar Eclipse (blue = switch to casting starfire) proc. For how this all works, See Graylo’s “spells and rotations” guide. Graylo has great advice about being able to master the art of doing good damage as a moonkin druid, and should be considered “required” homework for you.

Addons/Interface.

  • You have to WATCH your Eclipse buffs and your DOTs closely so what you should do is to install an addon called Squawk and Awe. (Advanced moonkin can find other options, such as Quartz, power auras, etc).

Here are some other addon things I find helpful. In general, try to keep your interface CLEAN and SIMPLE. Make sure you can see the world around you so that you can pay attention and your screen isn’t covered in windows, spam and crap. If you are a new player without other high level characters, here is a couple really basic addons that are helpful for raiding:

Gear for Success

  • Gem & enchant all your gear, and use the right kinds of gems & enchants. The worst mistake that you can do is to apply to a serious raiding guild without any enchants or gems in your gear. Even running PUGs, they will likely not accept you if you do poor damage and you look like you don’t care about your gear at all.
  • Run Random Heroics to get your triumph badges for the Tier 9 set pieces (which you will eventually replace with Tier 10 from frost badges) & make sure that you get a good idol, trinkets, and pick up enough stuff to replace all your blues with dungeon epics. Running 5-man dungeons will also be a good way to practice your rotations before you try to start raiding. Graylo has good loot lists to help you evaluate raid-level gear.
  • Make sure you have enough hit rating that your spells don’t miss (263 without a draenei, or 236 with a draenei in your group). You want to hit these marks, but not have a ton of extra, since you get zero benefit from hit after these points.
  • Try to have between 400 & 500 haste rating, and then focus more on crit after that point as you are gearing up.
  • Don’t forget your glyphs! What the “best” glyphs are will change in patch 3.3.3, but before the next patch, you would want moonfire, starfire, & insect swarm glyphs. You will likely trade out your insect swarm glyph for a starfall glyph when the next patch day hits, however this is subject to change.
  • Use flasks (Flask of the Frost Wyrm), and food buffs (usually fish feasts, but make sure you have your own spell power-increasing food if you need it).
  • Since you need to run 5-mans before you start running 10-mans or 25-mans, you may also want to read this wow.com rookie guide for advice on preparing to run 5-man dungeons at level 80.

Know the boss fights.

Additional Moonkin Resources:

Conclusions:

  • Moonkin CAN do respectable damage, but often don’t live up to their potential.
  • The biggest places where moonkin lose out is by having a bad spec, not gearing correctly, not understanding the “rotation” well enough to maximize damage output, not using good raiding addons, not knowing enough about the fights (so you lose more damage time by moving too much or too little), and not using the resources available to learn how to do it right.
  • Try to run other raids (like Naxramas, Ulduar, ToC, VoA, etc) before jumping into Icecrown Citadel if you haven’t really raided much before. You can usually tag along with PUGs running 10-mans for the weekly raid quests.
  • Learn to maximize your potential – so that you can be a contributing raid member and to help your team to succeed.
  • Also, don’t forget that this is supposed to be fun!

Posted in Leveling, Moonkin Balance DPS | 12 Comments »

Feb
10
2010

It’s Recruit a Friend, NOT recruit a Stranger

So, Druidmain showed me a very disturbing thing that is happening on the “WoW getting started” forum. She has been spending a lot of time in the Getting Started forum, which is designed for experienced players help new players get acquainted in the game. The forum has a lot of guides for new players, and allows players to ask basic questions about the game mechanics that tended to get lost in other forums.

Unfortunately, experienced players have started a really bad trend of spamming this forum for their own purposes. In an attempt to abuse the Recruit a Friend feature, there are people trying to bribe new players into leveling with them, with promises of gold, mounts, etc. Yes, instead of trying to use the RAF feature to recruit their RL friends, they are trying to trick inexperienced new players into becoming their Recruit a Stranger.

I can’t conceive of how Blizzard allows people to spam the Getting Started forum with subject lines such as: “RAF!!! I Give You Free Stuff LOOK!” This is just really inappropriate behavior, which (According to Druidmain) Blizzard hasn’t cracked down on at all. The most troublesome thing is that these spammers are likely trying to recruit people for their own personal gains, rather than for the benefit of the new players. These spam posts often have poor grammar & spelling, and read more like a gold-selling add than people trying to help others out of the kindness of their hearts. According to Druidmain, people spamming the RAF forum with these posts are not getting bans, as the same people keep posting there day after day (to the point where the “regular” helpful posters recognize the names of the RAF spammers).

WARNING – If you are a new player to WoW: Please do not respond to these people spamming the “getting started” forum. In general, you should never send e-mails to people you don’t know/trust, and you shouldn’t ever click on links posted on the forum if they come from sources you don’t know/trust. Even if there happen to be trustworthy people who will help you as you are leveling, they are not likely to be the people who are posting on the “getting started” forums. I personally spend a lot of time trying to help new players, BUT I don’t do it for personal gain, and I don’t spam forums looking to recruit new players to help them.

The people on that forum posting RAF threads are (9 times out of 10) likely only there because they want you to grant them free levels and get them a free mount reward that comes from recruiting a player – and it’s unlikely that they actually have YOUR best interest at heart. In this case, any players who abuse their RAF partner are a risk that could turn off new players from the game more than help them, and is likely an unacceptably high risk, especially since all the recruiters post e-mail addresses which they expect you to reply to.

If you want to do the RAF system, you should be doing it with someone you know and trust – not with some stranger.

In addition, the posts on that forum are something that Blizzard should NOT be continuing to allow to happen. I feel that posting RAF want-adds on the getting started forum is something that Blizzard’s Forum Mod Squad should be deleting – just like they delete other spam adds in other forums. The RAF spam distracts from what the “getting started” forum is supposed to be all about, and shouldn’t be allowed to continue week after week.

Posted in Leveling | 12 Comments »

Jan
02
2010

My new alt: Shadow Priest

So, I consider myself more of a specialist. My focus of everything that I do is my druid. However, while I was rewarded in Vanilla and Burning Crusade for being a specialist, Wrath instead rewards generalists.

My boyfriend wins out in WotLK because he has 10 alts. The dungeon system rewards having multiple characters, since you can benefit from the gear rewards better by splitting loot across multiple characters (some of whom actually need the blues & greens from heroic dungeons), rather than just picking up badges on a raid-decked-out main.

So, I got bored after 3.3 came out because I only have one character that I focus on. So, I spent some more time focusing on my shaman – I got a set of healing gear, a set of enhancement melee gear, and I even did the holiday achievements. However, this still isn’t enough – especially since my druid hasn’t been able to raid more than once a week over the holidays. So, the last couple weeks, I’ve been rather bored on my druid, since I ran out of interesting non-raiding things to do, besides my one random heroic that gives me frost badges.

So, to cure this Christmas Break boredom, I started a new character. I know I said a couple posts ago that I wasn’t going to start a new non-druid character, but I ran out of other things to do. I decided to start a priest because I wanted to try to learn more about another healing class, and first hand experience is the best way to do it.

My priest is Annalis on Elune, and is a Draenei priest, so that I could play in the newer starting zone.

When I hit level 6, I ran to Azure Watch and picked up all my pets & heirloom items (cloth chest & shoulders, PvP staff, spell power trinket). At level 15, I started running the “random classic” dungeons. At level 15 and 16, the random dungeon is always Ragefire Chasm. My shadow spec’d priest can still heal that dungeon, since no one takes that much damage. I’m currently level 16.

One thing that leveling a priest does is that it allows me to talk to low level druids from my battle group when I’m in the random dungeons, so I can see what low level characters are actually doing. This ends up being good research for my leveling guide, since it helps me see what things tend to confuse low level characters that I’m playing with in the dungeon. I’m not sure how long I’ll keep playing this priest, but the cloth heirlooms will transfer okay to another character if I decide to stop leveling it. If I keep going, I’ll probably post more about my alt’s leveling experiences – between raiding guides, so that I don’t come across as disconnected from the leveling advice that I give people.

It’s actually more fun than I thought it was going to be, since the random dungeon feature is actually really nice at lower levels.

Posted in Leveling, Priest | 13 Comments »

Dec
16
2009

Practice Makes Perfect – Lissiel the Fail Shaman

So, I’m one of those specialists who spend hours and hours and hours focusing on one character. This means that I know druids really, really well – but I know much less about other classes. Lissanna feels more like an extension of myself than a character that I play in the video game.

I do, however, have a shaman (Lissiel) that I played for a while during Burning Crusade. I had a couple months where I just didn’t like rolling lifeblooms and being at the bottom of healing meters, so I rerolled the king of all BC healing: The shaman!

I healed raids several months as a resto shaman in Burning Crusade, and my druid became my non-raiding character for a while. I did really good as a chain-healing shaman in my raiding group, and I was much happier. A number of months later, due to the improvements that resto druids underwent for WotLK, I faithfully returned to my druid, and left my shaman mostly abandoned as I raced into Northrend’s frozen lands.

So, over this year’s Thanksgiving break, my shaman finally hit level 80 – mostly out of boredom waiting for patch 3.3 to hit. However, I had leveled up as Enhancement most of the way from 70 to 80, so I hit 80 with mostly level 70 gear left over from BC raiding (and only some quest blues as healing upgrades).

The new instance mechanics have made it really easy to gear up my shaman alt. I melee’d my way through a handful of heroics, and came out with pieces of my melee and healing sets. Nothing spectacular, but good enough.

This week, I was called on to use my healing spec (which I had set up when I hit 80). I had my new spec, the glyphs I had bought off the AH, and thought that I was all ready to go. However, what we were going to run was the “normal” versions of the brand new Icecrown instances. Not really the best place to be trying out your healing spells for the first time in a year.It was difficult for me to figure out how all my abilities and talents actually worked together. It was an all guild run, so I didn’t have to worry about embarrassing myself in front of PUGs (otherwise, I would have just healed on my druid).

I died a lot as I learned how to heal with my new healing style, while also being pretty under-geared at the start of the night (I was equipping any caster item that dropped over the night, and had a couple good upgrades by the end).

My biggest fail was that I hadn’t put the minor glyphs into my resto set that were in my Enhancement set, so I didn’t have the Ankh’s that I needed to self-res. So, when I died, I couldn’t self-res because I didn’t have it glyphed in that spec, and I hadn’t needed reagents for it because my Enh set glyphed it a long time back. Eventually, I had to take a quick Reagent run during our night of dungeon crawling.

Over the course of the night, I was able to re-learn how to heal on my shaman again. However, the best way to get better at playing a character is just to jump head-in (hopefully with a supportive group of guildmates), and just start healing!

One of the nice parts of the random dungeon system is that it won’t let you into an instance if your gear isn’t up to par for doing that content. So, you can try to queue up for things at your level (you may want to start with normal dungeons before heroics). I had to do more than just chain heal, and I learned that I could riptide the tank to boost my chain heal, and then cast 2 lesser healing waves that crit more, and then I could probably cast another chain heal or riptide again after that, and so on.

There is some general advice for making the transition, which transcends what class you are playing. These points became really obvious to me as I picked up a new character that I didn’t already know really well.

When you are leveling up and want to start healing at 80 is, what you do need to do is:

A) Get healing gear as you level up, and don’t try to heal in melee gear or something silly like that. You can also run some instances as DPS and pick up spare healing upgrades until you know the content and have the gear to succeed.

B) Make sure you have the talent spec, reagents, and glyphs necessary to do your job right.

C) Set up your UI so that it’s possible to do what you want to do.

D) It helps if you dual-spec into healing from earlier, and get practice as you level up. This is why I added a dual-spec healing guide for 40 to 79.

E) Practice, because practice makes perfect! As much as you can try to prepare by reading guides and such, only really getting in and playing with your spells will allow you to develop your healing style. Start with easier dungeons and work your way to harder ones.

Posted in Leveling, Shaman | 4 Comments »

Nov
25
2009

Need more abilities: 10 to 30 feral

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:

  • Demoralizing roar (10) – debuff
  • Growl (10) – taunt
  • Maul (10) – does damage
  • Enrage (12) – buff that generates rage
  • Bash (14) – is a stun
  • Swipe (16) – AOE damage
  • Faerie Fire (18) – range ability that lets you pull things from far away

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 know that Maul & other “on next swing” mechanic damage abilities are probably changing soon. For bears, they won’t be able to just take it out, since it’s our ONLY damage ability for a LONG time in bear form. They’ll have to change it to something else that’s a direct damage ability that is spam-able (not on a cooldown).
  • New ability, usable in bear form, available at 12 or 14 – a weaker version of Mangle that does a fair amount of damage on a cooldown (no bleed debuff, less damage than mangle). Replaced by Mangle at level 50 through talents, since it would share the same cooldown with Mangle – and mangle would do more damage along with applying the debuff.
  • New ability name suggestions: Darting bite or battering claws.

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 get shred at level 22, which requires us to be behind the target. The only time we are behind the target is when we are in stealth mode at the beginning of a pull. Unless you are leveling with a partner, feral druids have to treat this as an opener instead of a real damage ability.
  • Our first opener is at level 32. This is ravage.
  • We don’t get pounce until level 38.

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 at level 20.
  • Ferocious bite at 32.
  • Maim at 62.
  • savage roar at 75.

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:

  • A new bear ability to use from 10 thru 50 (can be replaced by mangle if Blizzard doesn’t want another tanking ability.
  • Need a better opener/finisher set at lower levels. Make ferocious bite trainable before level 30. Make either ravage or pounce trainable before level 30.

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.

Posted in Cataclysm, Druid - General, Leveling | 17 Comments »

Nov
21
2009

Coming soon to a restokin blog near you!

Okay, so I started working on a couple big blog post projects. Some of these are going to take a long time to work out, so I wanted to give you an early weekend preview while I spend more time working on them. Here are my short-term blog writing goals over the next couple of weeks:

  • What spells moonkin need for level 85 PvP and PvE. I started collecting feedback on this problem a while back, and now I’m finally (almost) ready to present my final analysis of what new spells moonkin need, why, and how to make both PvP and PvE playstyles better (more different!). My feedback posts usually neglect PvP, so I’m making a big emphasis here in my pre-cataclysm feedback project.
  • Improving feral leveling from 1 to 30. Since I spend a lot of time listening to low level druids cry about how bad 10 to 20 is. We also know that they finally care about the leveling process of the classes, and that they may be willing in Cataclysm to tweak the early levels to be better. So, I’m working on coming up with ideas of a couple of changes to the timing of when we get our feral abilities, so that we can have more buttons to push between 10 and 30. I spent a couple hours working on it already, but it’s not done yet!
  • Leveling guide revamp for 3.3! I need to be prepared by the end of Thanksgiving break for patch 3.3 to hit. It takes a couple hours (per guide!) to go back through everything and keep things up to date. I’ll be reviewing the talent recommendations, PvP recommendations, and other things – to make sure that it’s all up to date. I didn’t do a full revamp for 3.2 because of my schedule, so I know a handful of things are already out of date here.
  • Resto healing guide revamp for 3.3! With the changes to resto druids in 3.3 (along with gradual shifts in people’s playstyles over time), I’m going to need to spend a couple hours working over all the talent specs, spell rotations, gear descriptions, and all the fun stuff that changes every patch. I think I can do most of the work before the patch hits.
  • I have to make blog-friendly AND forum-friendly versions of BOTH guides, which is actually a really huge undertaking, so that’s what I get to spend my week-long Thanksgiving break doing. I won’t release the new guide versions until 3.3 hits (yay for patch day guide updating!). However, I could post previews for feedback as things develop.

In addition to all these planned things, I may also find other stuff to write about. I’ll probably be working on things like leveling my shaman (level 77 now) & getting the pilgrim bounty achievements for my druid.

Posted in Leveling, Moonkin Balance DPS, Patch 3.3 WotLK, Restoration Healing Trees | 4 Comments »

Nov
16
2009

Leveling healing: Guest post by Verdantazia of Silverhand

This post was received in my mail from Verdantazia. I thought it was a really interesting perspective, so I got permission to post it as a guest post. Enjoy!  I’m doing my oral comps defense today (Monday), so I thought today would be a great day to have a guest poster! – Lissanna

Hi. I’m a fellow WoW player who, in the last five months, has devoted a large amount of time to leveling a healing druid. Verdantazia, NE druid 75 on Silverhand.

Whilst doing so, I naturally scouted around online to learn and read about my class, how to heal, how to gear, what to expect and so forth. However, as wonderful and useful as all the blogs and postings and guides have been, there was a large deficit of practical understanding for how to heal BEFORE you’re 80 and have Nourish and uber, epic gear. I was hoping to share some things that you might want to share with people who are in the relative same position that I am in. I’ve compiled a list of things things that one has to have/do in order to heal successfully in regular 5mans AND the reasons why they are necessary.

Let me begin by saying that I leveled Verdantazia entirely as healing spec, solo, until reaching 50 where I decided to dual spec to Moonkin. As such, I *thought I knew what I was doing in 5 man heals. I did Zul Furrak just fine in tree form, laying down Rejuvs and the occasional regrowth, and all was well. I ended up partnering with a friend and did just fine in groups in Outlands, until I reached 70 and decided to try healing for Uttgard Keep. To say that it was a disaster was a mild understatement. We wiped, oh, easily 9 times and only managed to finish by recruiting an 80.

From this trial-by-fire, I learned several things, and I wanted to share them, because currently almost all guides are written by, and for, people whose toons are 80 and for playing raids. Virtually no one gives advice on what to do before then. So here is the list for ~60-79 Resto Druids:

  • 1. Whatever else you may have, glyph-wise before 80, you MUST have the Healing Touch glyph.

I know that might seem obvious to people who have already reached 80 and switched over to the Nourish glyph/skill, but coming from the background of a healing Priest it is not, and it needs explanation. As a Priest, who traditionally heals with lump-sum heals, the idea of nerfing my one good big heal seemed unthinkable. And it still is. Half healing amount to the one big heal I have? What if I need it? BUT there can be no doubt that Blizzard has created the Northrend (and Outland) instances around the idea that you do, in fact, have a flash heal, and we don’t, until 80. So a healing druid really has no choice but to glyph HT into one – the spike damage in 60-70 instances is way too much to function without it.

  • 2. To be successful in Outlands/Northrend instances you must OVERHEAL, OVERHEAL, OVERHEAL.

Regular 5 mans are a series of sprints, not marathons like Raids are. As such you MUST THROW MANA EFFICIENCY out-the-window and overheal like crazy. Druids are pro-active healers, due to the fact that HoT’s take time to heal, and do best stacked. Therefore you must pretend that everyone’s taking damage all the time, even if they aren’t. You have to have the HoTs already doing when the spike damage hits everyone. Ignore raider 80’s who talk about over-healing, and heal as much as you can. Don’t worry about using up all your mana after each pull, that’s what water (and innervate) is for! If I’m drinking, I know everyone’s alive. If I’m not, I know everyone’s dead, and we’ve had wipe. This leads to:

  • 3. Keep Wild Growth up every second it comes up for refresh, and spec up to it as soon as you can.

To heal a tank and four other people (including yourself), you need as many HOTs going as possible. This means using Wild Growth as the HoT you already have going on everyone when the spike damage comes, which it always does. It becomes the platform upon which you lay down Rejuvs and Lifeblooms upon once everyone’s health has suddenly dropped by half or more. I can’t emphasize this enough – keep WG up at all times.

  • 4. Put the 2 points into improved Tranquility and USE IT.

I have used Tranquility at least once in every single 5 man I have participated in, in the last month, and each time it has saved the group. Why? Because with the talent points it garners zero threat, and it can heal everyone (including me) at least three times over. I find, because of Global Cooldown, I can’t realistically smother all five of us in Rejuvs fast enough to deal with massive AOE damage, and although Wild Growth is absolutly wonderful, it is by itself, rather a small. So, do yourself a favor and put those two points into Tranquilty, and hot-key it, love it, and use it. Feel free to respec out of it later on for Raiding, but until then, it’s a must-have tool.

  • 5. Do everything you can to avoid aggro.

Again, this may seem obvious, but from someone who played a Priest since the day WoW began, I had been pretty used to laying down a bubble or a Renew (depending on class) on a tank before they rushed into fight, and essentially getting a free heal without any threat. To my deathly suprise, druid HoT’s seem to attract an aweful lot of unwanted attention from instance mobs. So . . . DO NOT DROP HoT’s on the tank before he/she rushes in. I find letting the tank get enough damage to equal the lump-sum heal amount afforded by Regrowth to be just right for making sure he/she has all the threat, and then laying down a Regrowth followed by all my other HoTs.

  • 6. Ignore the 80 Raider’s belief that you should stack spirit for instances.

This may be true for Raiding and post 80 content, but it is NOT true for regular instances. Instead, have a goodly mount of Stamina and Int, just as if you a DPS caster. Why? Because invariably you DO get some threat, and if you’re all spirit you will die in one hit. I know, It happened to me. Several times. I learned the lesson the hard way. And as I said earlier, regular 5 mans are sprints. You should be drinking after each pull anyways. It isn’t about having to have mana regen over the course of 30 mins. It’s about surviving the next 3 mins. At 75, now, in blue gear, I’m approaching 10k in health, and now, on the odd occasion the tank loses threat, I can at least survive through several hits, and not die immeditely.

  • 7. Use Lifebloom (when you get it at 64)

Since in 5 mans you’re both a group and a tank healer, you need to use all your HoTs. And Lifebloom is essential. Use one just one application at-a-time, as part of your HoT stack on the Tank, and refresh after it blooms. This is extremely easy to do thanks to its little whoosing chimey noise. Also use it with Rejuv when your’e spot healing for AOE damage. 80 Raiders all seem to be down on it, because in their world it’s no longer the most effiecient way to heal. In regular 5 mans, efficiency is surviving, and surviving is overhealing, so lay that Lifebloom down!

And finally:

  • 8. Best possible rotation in Northrend instances (before level 80) seems to be -

Regrowth on the tank (because it fills the hitpoints lost while you’re waiting for him/her to get all the aggro), followed by Rejuv, usually followed by a Healing Touch flash heal to those who need it, followed by ONE Lifebloom application to the tank (which I listen for and reapply after it blooms), and then finally Wildgrowth on the tank, which you then keep applying to the tank the instant it comes up for renewal. Lay down Rejuvs and a lifebloom for spot healing, and multiple flash heals as necessary, followed by that lovely Tranqillity for those moments when the you-know-what hits the fan,

Result – Success!

Posted in Leveling, Restoration Healing Trees | 22 Comments »

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