Goodbye Idols, and good riddance!

I interrupt this dead time in Lissanna postings while she is traveling with news from MMO-Champion concerning the latest Beta Build (this post is written by Post written by Lavata/Malchome).

As the title indicates Idols are now removed from the game, they have been merged with Relics, Totems and Librams of the Death Knight, Shaman and Paladin classes under a general heading of Relics.   They now have normal itemization and fill the role of stat stick like Wands for the caster classes and ranged weapons for melee or the normal weapons slots for hunters.

I have to say this convergence is long over due.  I remember running the first boss of Shadow Labs over 70-80 times for Lissanna trying to get a stupid Idol that never did drop…..  I hate random loot sometimes, well most of the time but that is what my blog is for and not a topic for here.

Please return to your normal weekend blog reading activities.  Had this been a true emergency I would have used more inflammatory language and most likely bold text and colors.

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Spoilers: Learning from Cataclysm Quests

Warning: This post is somewhat spoiler-filled, due to describing quests in Cataclysm.

One of the things that happens when people start raiding is that they have to learn situational awareness (being able to move at the right time & pay attention to your surroundings).

One of the Deepholm quests helps teach situational awareness. During this quest, you fight a dragon called “Aeosera”. This is one of those things where paying attention is going to matter. Instead of just allowing you to stand & nuke at the dragon, you have to jump out of the way so that the dragon’s fire breath doesn’t kill you.

So, to engage the fight, you jump up onto some rocks, and go higher up in the air. During the fight, you jump from rock to rock while trying your best to DPS along the way. It’s pretty challenging, but it seems to be doing something that quests haven’t been doing much of before – requiring you to pay attention to what is going on, and not just mindlessly slay mobs as you go along. So, getting exposed to mechanics requiring us to pay attention is something we can learn out on our own soloing around. To complete the quest, you have to actually use some situational awareness skills, OR you can get roasted as you fall to your death. Sounds like fun!

(You can click on the pictures to see them in more detail).

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Cata: Seeing the forest for the trees

Resto druids on the forums seem to be having problems looking at the bigger picture of how restoration healing will work in Cataclysm. Most of that is because resto druids have such HUGE changes coming that it is hard to really put together what the bigger picture will be for resto druids in Cataclysm, and this is something I’m still struggling with.

So, lets take a moment to step back and look at the bigger picture of resto PvE healing in Cataclysm. It is still early in Beta, but I can still talk about how things are shaping up now (based on the data we have as of build 12694). However, a lot depends on what happens over the next several months, so it’s too early to let our weaknesses get us down.

What are PvE Resto druids in Cataclysm?

Some druids are worried about losing our HOTs, but Blizzard still has their focus set on them. Here is the description you see when choosing talent trees:

Uses heal-over-time Nature spells to keep allies alive, taking on the form of a tree when the need is most urgent.

So, our focus is still on our HOTs. However, rejuvenation & lifebloom won’t be the only buttons we push in Cataclysm. So, lets look at the tools we have:

Tank Healing as a druid in Cataclysm PvE:

The tank healing role has the most clear set of tools and comes together really well for druids.

  • We have Lifebloom, which we will keep rolling on a single tank, since LB can only be on one target now.
  • Rejuvenation will go on all tanks, since putting HOTs on multiple tanks is part of what druids do.
  • Regrowth will be the fast flash-heal on tanks, in addition to being a HOT we should keep up on multiple tanks. Regrowth will be used when we need a fast heal and as a HOT. In this way, it serves a dual purpose role in our tank healing toolset.
  • Nourish is a long cast, mana efficient heal. This is going to be our go-to spell to make sure we don’t run out of mana. It will also refresh the duration of lifebloom, so that you won’t have to cast lifebloom as often (though you will still have to refresh it directly some, since Nourish’s cast time is so long).
  • Healing Touch has made it back into our healing toolset, since sometimes we will need a healing spell that hits harder than Nourish. HT is going to be a long cast, mana expensive tool, where we will need it when we need to heal up a big chunk of our tank’s health pool.
  • Swiftmend is our instant-cast, short cooldown spell that requires a regrowth or rejuv to be on a tank (which is why our HOTs should be on all tanks at all times when tank healing).

So, tank healing will still be: keep HOTs on tanks, cast direct heals between HOT refreshes. I think this toolset will work great, and that we will be using a large variety of spells as tank healers in Cataclysm, and this will be a lot of fun.

Raid/AOE healing confusion:

While we have a very clear tank healing toolset, our way of being able to deal with raid damage done to targets has not really changed in Cataclysm.

  • Wild Growth is a mana expensive, 10 second cooldown spell, that we won’t be able to use every 10 seconds due to mana costs.
  • Rejuv will still be one of our primary AOE healing spells, although it’s a single-target spell. We’ll still have to use it proactively to have HOTs on targets to be able to swiftmend, and it will have an instant heal component when we put it on someone already taking damage
  • Regrowth is going to be a raid healing tool, where we will gain an AOE HOT from an Effloresence proc when regrowth crits. We have a talent that increases the crit chance for regrowth on targets at low health, so Regrowth will be our go-to spell as a reactive HOT on people who are close to dieing.
  • Swiftmend will be what we use after a rejuv or regrowth if we need more healing on the target
  • Due to mana concerns, we’ll still have to sometimes cast Nourish, but hopefully we’d only cast nourish on tanks when we’re having mana issues and need to take a break from raid healing
  • The best thing happening is that Tranquility is being changed, so that it will be more viable in Cataclysm. However, tranquility is still an 8 minute cooldown, meaning that we won’t get to use it very often.

The only change for druids in terms of raid healing is that we get to introduce Regrowth into the Rejuv/WG spam. So, now we have Rejuv/Regrowth/WG spam. This is the area of healing where we still fall short. Since our current style of Pre-HOT for raid healing isn’t supposed to be what we do in Cataclysm, I’m still not sure how this is going to come together, so raid healing is where I have gone on a crusade to save druids.

So, in conclusion, we have a great tank healing toolset, but we don’t have a good raid healing toolset. We have a ton of choice, flexibility, and fun in our single-target healing toolset, and we really don’t have a good multi-target healing toolset. We’ll have to see how this shapes up, but I could easily see druids going back to WG/Rejuv pre-HOTs around the raid just for lack of a better thing to do in Cataclysm, and that would make me sad.

But what about tree form?!?

Tree form is going to be a cooldown in Cataclysm. What the tree form cooldown needs is:

  • The slow needs to be changed to be about 20%, rather than 50%.  We’re supposed to use tree form when the healing gets tough, but the healing is always the toughest during times where we need to be moving.
  • Instant-cast regrowths becomes incompatible with a 50% slow that requires us to stand still, and thus tree form’s limitation prevents us from being able to benefit from the things designed to allow us to cast on the run.
  • In addition, the limitation of lifebloom to one target (and nourish refreshing it) prevents the lifebloom bonus (applies 2 LB’s on a target instead of 1) from being useful, based on how it is worded. If it allowed us to keep LB on 2 targets instead of one, that would be more helpful for PvP, but that seems to be unlikely how the wording is intended.
  • Maybe tree form could help us not run out of mana. A mana cost reduction would allow us to spam regrowth & wild growth (the only worthwhile healing spell boosts we get from the talent). Right now, tree form seems to be designed to make us run OOM faster.
  • My focus right now is on making the tree form cooldown better, rather than fighting it’s becoming a cooldown. Right now, the cooldown isn’t quite right, but it’s close. My hope is that by the time Cataclysm comes out, they’ll have a nice tree form that we’ll want to use, rather than the currently somewhat confused tree form design.

Seeing the forest through the trees:

  • Druids have a great interaction between HOTs and direct heals in Cataclysm for tank healing.
  • Druids don’t have a good AOE healing toolset, and this is a particularly troublesome area of weakness that needs work.
  • Tree form as a cooldown may be great when Cata comes out, but we aren’t there yet, and there is still a lot of work to do.
  • The Beta is being patched every week, and so it’s too early to freak out or abandon the class. Instead, we need to focus on how to fix the things that are coming up short.
  • We still do have a strength in HOT healing, and it’s a strength that Blizzard wants us to have. We’re going to be good healers in Cataclysm, but we still have a long way to go.
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What happens when I take a day off

So, I attend most of my guild’s raids, both our 10-man and our 25-man raids. I hate taking nights off of raids, and I even raided on my birthday just to be able to not miss a raid.

However, one of my friends recently graduated with her PhD from grad school, and was moving with her husband out of town. Due to the craziness that is packing & moving, the Sunday “lunch” we were supposed to have turned into dinner, and started late enough that I had to miss a raid last night. However, I made sure that the group could continue without me, and filled the spot, and then I came home to see my guild celebrating, because while I was gone…

my guild killed the Lich King on 10-man (normal) for the first time! Congrats Conspiracy, I’m sorry I couldn’t make it for the kill! I had someone send me a screenshot, so I could still document their boss kill.

Congrats guys!

If that’s what happens when I take a day off, maybe I need to take a day off our 25-man some time so we can get that boss kill, too… Right? Oh, maybe that’s not really how it works.

The bummer is that I can’t make it to next week’s 10-man run, either, since I’m out of town next weekend. However, by the time I come back, I’m sure they’ll have downed many heroic bosses & such. I guess I can get my kill when I’m able to run 10′s again later this month. By then, they’ll be LK slaying experts, lol.

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Cata: Reforging caster armor

So, I got to play with reforging some yesterday on the Beta server. There are a couple things I want to point out.

First, it takes 40% of stat A, and turns it into an equal amount of stat B. So, if I had 92 hit rating on an item, it turned into 56 HIT & 36 haste (56+32=92).

So, reforging is not going to be good for healers to turn Hit gear into healing gear, because you would still waste an incredible amount on Hit.

Also, when reforging, you can’t turn a bad stat into a stat that is already on the item:

So, lets take my Frozen Bonespike here. It had 59 spirit & 59 crit strike rating that I could reforge. However, in the list of stats to reforge, I could not choose either spirit or crit. If the item didn’t have spirit or crit on it, however, I could still reforge into those stats. This basically prevents people from being able to over-stack in one stat.

I could, however, drop my hit rating pretty significantly by knocking down every item with hit or spirit on it. Being able to avoid having so many spirit & hit pieces, however, would be so much easier.

So, at a 40% conversion rate, Blizzard is still going to need to make some leather caster gear without spirit on it, so that moonkin druids are not constantly way over the hit cap, or they don’t have to reforge every item (since almost every item I was wearing had either hit or spirit, including a lot of my set pieces that now having hit rating instead of spirit).

Here’s what the reforging UI looked like when I chose to turn spirit into haste rating:

After you choose “reforge”, it would show up with the new stats in your inventory. My stat character sheet was a little bit buggy still, so they do still have some kinks to work out of the system.

While reforging is nice for minor tweaks, it will NOT be able to make up for a lack of well designed gear for each class & spec.

Posted in Cataclysm, Moonkin Balance DPS, Restoration Healing Trees | Comments closed

Cata: Suggestions for a better resto raid healing toolset

With my last post, I outlined some mana cost & class balance problems associated with our raid healing toolset.

However, with how sensitive a lot of resto druids are about their ability to heal in Cataclysm, I wanted to have a slightly more positive suggestion post to spend a little more time talking about ways to possibly fix our AOE healing toolset.

At this point, I’m not focusing on the tank single-target healing toolset, because we actually have a good tank healing toolset, where we can use our 3 direct heals (regrowth, nourish, & healing touch), where regrowth gives us an additional HOT. We can put up a 3 stack of lifebloom on a single tank, and then put Rejuv & Regrowth HOTs on all the tanks as needed, which will allow our heals to tick on more than one tank in a raid situation, while we cast Nourish, HT, & regrowth’s direct heals as needed on a tank. The mana cost of our heals for direct healing are well within the range of the costs of other healers’ tools, and all of our HOT & direct heals for tank healing are going to come together and work similarly to how they do in WotLK, with the exception of Healing Touch being added to our arsenal (and you’d want to refresh Regrowth & rejuv reactively, rather than proactively, since both have direct heal components). They went to a lot of trouble to make tank healing work well enough where we will want to do more than spam more than 1 or 2 buttons on a tank.

The AOE healing problem (short version): Blizzard made Wild Growth & Rejuv more expensive to make us less likely to want to spam them around the raid for AOE healing purposes. However, they did not give us an alternative that was any more mana efficient to fill the raid healer role, as Regrowth’s Effloresence was presented to us as the alternative, at a higher mana cost than a rejuv, meaning that all 3 of our raid healing tools are now mana expensive.

Potential AOE healing Solutions:

  • As I said last thread, the easiest solution would be to bring down Wild Growth’s mana cost (probably to the 30 to 35% of base mana cost range). Rejuv & Regrowth have much more balanced mana costs when compared to the mana cost of tools that other healers have, so it would be possible to weave regrowth & rejuv between WG casts if WG was more reasonably priced (30 to 35% of base mana is still going to be a lot of mana at 85).
  • The most fun solution, however, would be to make a talent in the restoration tree that allowed our new Wild Mushroom spells to heal the people standing in that 10 yard radius when the Mushrooms are Detonated.

How Wild Mushrooms work now:

Wild mushrooms are targeted on the ground. In a raid dungeon, this is going to be under bosses or other enemies. When the mushrooms are killed or we use our detonate button, the wild mushrooms explode and do some damage. This seems to be a more PvP-oriented spell, which we can’t actually test yet, since we can’t hit the level 85 requirement needed to learn them.

Moonkin get a talent that allows mushrooms to slow the enemies that the explosion hits.

Mushroom Healing Talent Suggestion:

I am pretty sure that I’ve identified a weakness in the restoration druid’s toolset that will prevent us from being effective raid healers in Cataclysm, where combined with a strong tank healing toolset, resto druids need some sort of OOMPH for our raid/AOE healing toolset to be able to have the choice & flexibility needed to be able to fill either role, without having to resort to 2-button spamming.

The “detonate” portion of the mushroom ability allows us to trigger mushrooms when we want them to go off. So, we could line up mushrooms under friendly targets (if we want to) and then detonate them as needed. They could adjust the number of shrooms that can be active at a time, as it wouldn’t really hurt moonkin to only be able to put out 2 or 3 at a time if 5 was too much.

The detonate is a really neat functionality of the spell, which would work great as a new healing spell, different from anything else that the other healers have – but definitely in line with the tools that other people have available (ie. chain heal is only 17% of base mana, so with shrooms at 11% to set, and 11% to detonate, up to 22% of base mana is definitely in line with other heals – with more shrooms up at  time being more mana efficient to detonate).

If the healing cost was kept low, then it could be balanced into our toolset (where we choose between healing a small amount now, or picking a more mana expensive tool to tick over time). In addition, having to place it before triggering means that if people move, you still risk losing that heal, so you have to add skill & choice into your AOE healing playstyle.

Where to add it into the talent tree:

  • Good candidate talents would be: Empowered Rejuvenation, OR Fury of the Stormrage.
  • Empowered rejuv would work because the Healing Mushroom talent could be in place of one of the boring/passive HOT increasing talents, or tacked onto the HOT increase portion to have a mix or passive & active talent – especially since you would want a secondary effect on the talent that could be used while leveling up prior to 85.
  • Fury of the Stormrage is a good candidate talent for a healing shroom because it was the talent designed to mix our DPS & healing spells, and right now FotSR is actually not that good of a talent (to the point where most people are likely to skip it for basically any situation).

Conclusions:

To be effective raid healers, where we don’t just spam rejuv, wildgrowth, & Regrowth proactively around a raid group (which will be a bad healing style in Cataclysm), we need a new tool that allows for more reactive AOE healing. With tranquility on an 8 minute cooldown, we get to use it once a boss fight, or every other boss fight, depending on length of the fights & amount of trash.

The best candidate for a reactive healing spell that would work as an AOE heal would be the new Wild Mushrooms spell. I think Healing Shrooms would go a long way to restoring our AOE healing ability to a point where we could choose between tank healing & raid healing (or have a better ability to mix up spells when assigned to raid/AOE healing). The point of Cataclysm is about having to make hard choices, and Healing Shrooms would allow for choice to be put back into restoration druids’ group & raid AOE healing toolset.

TLDR: Make a resto talent that allows Wild Mushrooms to heal, and resto druids will be able to be either tank or raid healers, as opposed to only being good at tank healing in the current Cataclysm design.

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Cataclysm feedback: AOE healing class balance

While it is still a little early to talk about overall class balance, I would like to take some time to talk about mana costs of AOE (multi-target) healing spells for the various classes.

Disclaimer: When reading this post, DO NOT use it as an excuse to cry about the sky falling, as the sky is definitely not falling. Please keep comments & feedback based on this post constructive, since problems examined in this post CAN (and likely will) be addressed before Cataclysm goes live. Please do not go EMO on me, as the point of this thread is to get things examined before Cataclysm actually goes live. Thanks!

Druid multi-target heal base mana costs:

  • Wild Growth: 55% base mana, 10 second cooldown, heals 5 people, HOT.
  • Tranquility: 32% of base mana, 8 minute cooldown, heals 5 people, Channeled HOT.

Priest multi-target base mana costs:

  • Circle of Healing: 21% of base mana, 10 second cooldown, heals 5 people, instant cast, direct heal
  • Devine Hymn: 41% of base mana, 8 minute cooldown, heals 3 people, channeled spell, HOT.
  • Prayer of mending: 18% of base mana, 10 second cooldown, jumps to heal up to 5 people.
  • Holy nova: instant cast, 15% of base mana, heals people within 10 yards of caster.
  • Prayer of healing: 3 second cast, 36% of base mana, heals a 5-man group, direct heal.

Shaman multi-target base mana costs:

  • Healing Rain: 46% of base mana, 10 second cooldown, heals 5 people, HOT.
  • Chain heal: 17% of base mana, 2.5 second cast, heals 3 targets, direct heal

Paladin multi-target base mana costs:

  • Healing Hands: 40% of base mana, 1 min cooldown, HOT that heals all people within 10 yards,
  • Light of the dawn: 21% of base mana, 30 second cooldown, direct heal to all people within 30 yards.
  • Paladins also have Beacon of Light to get 50% of their healing done also done to a secondary target with Beacon on them. However, their other AOE-style heals seem to be on long cooldowns.

Druid level 80 mana costs:

  • Level 80 mana costs (no mana cost reduction talents): Wild Growth is 1922 mana, Tranquility is 1006 mana.
  • Single-target heals that could be used for raid healing: Regrowth is 1223 mana, Rejuv is 874 mana, Nourish is 219 mana.

Tier 2 in the balance tree (which druids can’t get if we pick up Heart of the Wild from feral), only our single-target spells (nourish, HT, regrowth, & rejuv) are reduced by up to 9%.

Priest level 80 mana costs:

  • Circle of healing is 811 mana, Devine Hymn is 1545 mana, Holy Nova is 579 mana, Prayer of Mending is 695 mana, Prayer of healing is 1390 mana.
  • Single-target heal costs: Renew is 811 mana, Heal is 231, Flash heal is 1081, Power word: Shield costs 733 mana.

From Tier 2 in the holy tree, priests get a mana reduction of 15% on their heal, greater heal, renew, divine hymn, and Tier 1 discipline gives them another 12% mana reduction on any of their instant cast spells (which would include renew, circle of healing, Holy nova, prayer of mending, etc).

Shaman Level 80 mana costs:

  • Chain heal: 747 mana before talents, Healing Rain is 2022 mana (1922 mana after talents),
  • Riptide is 412 mana, Lesser healing wave is 1186.

Tier 1 resto for shaman has a 9% mana cost reduction on all of their healing spells.

Analysis of what it all means: I don’t have a level 80 paladin to get mana costs for their heal spells. However, with paladins’ current roles being focused on tank healing, the strength of their AOE healing tools is less of a concern than for druids, who typically put HOTs on the tank and then raid heal in the current WotLK design.

With mana problems being something likely to occur in Cataclysm, the class balance of raid healing tools is going to matter, where the people less likely to run OOM while raid healing will be the ones most likely assigned to raid healing.

Looking at the mana cost & tools available, shaman and holy priests are going to make much better raid healers than druids, because the tools available to them allow for fairly mana efficient raid healing, by mixing lower mana cost spells with higher mana cost spells.

Unfortunately, all druids have to raid heal with are either very expensive AOE heals, or very expensive single-target heals. There isn’t anything besides Nourish (a single target heal that other classes are unlikely to raid heal with) that has a reasonable mana cost out of druids’ tool set. We get no additional benefit at all if we cast nourish on non-tanks, as the Lifebloom refresh is likely to only happen if we cast nourish on the tank.

Level 83 druid mana costs: While level 80 mana costs don’t look that out of hand, if you actually take the level 83 mana costs, you can see why the mana costs might start to get out of hand for druids:

  • My total mana pool at level 83 is: 34,912. My in-combat regen is 377.
  • Druid spell amounts: Wild growth is 5,248 mana. Tranquility is 2,747.
  • Single-target heals that could be used for raid healing filler (no moonglow): Regrowth is 3,339. Rejuv is 2,385 mana. Nourish is 600 mana.

In combat, at level 83: I can last for about 20 seconds worth of healing if I cast nothing but wild growth & regrowth (no buffs, with talents, no innervate). I last 25 to 30 seconds casting rejuv & wild growth (no buffs, with talents, no innervate). In 5 minute fights, we just won’t have the mana resources in raids to work as raid healers because Wild Growth will drain our mana pool too fast.

Wild growth with rejuv & regrowth weaved between them is not going to work for AOE healing for druids, because all 3 are really mana intensive heals. While my mana pool is also larger, the smaller base mana costs for other healers’ spells (besides shaman’s healing rain) makes druid healers at a mana cost disadvantage in Cataclysm.

Conclusions & suggestions for improving:

While I’m not usually one to freak out over the current state of Beta, I would like to highlight the fact that druid AOE/raid healing tools need a second look.

The best thing to do would be to make Wild Growth cost A LOT less mana, so that we can use it every time it’s off cooldown. If Wild Growth is going to stay prohibitively high, then druids need another multi-target heal in our toolset (like chain heal that shaman have, which costs less mana than druids’ regrowth, rejuv, & wild growth). Spamming mana-expensive single-target heals between refreshing a super expensive AOE heal is not going to work as a healing style. Thus, druids are not currently a good choice for raid healing in the current class design, due to not having a lower mana cost raid heal that we can weave between our more expensive raid healing tools. Instead, all of our raid healing (AOE and single-target HOT) tools are prohibitively expensive for us to work as raid healers in the current Beta design.

Instead, we have pretty strong tank healing tools, so we’d be assigned only to tank healing, where we will save Wild Growth for Omen of Clarity procs, because by level 85, the mana cost is going to be prohibitive to cast it without an OOC proc.  Even tree form’s cooldown encourages us to spam our mana-expensive flash heal (regrowth) without a mana cost reduction on it, with tree form not having an effect for Nourish.

If we could proc effloresence from Nourish, then Nourish could possibly be used as a raid healing tool – however, effloresence is highly unreliable, and when it does proc, people could always accidently move out of it without knowing. We can’t use lifebloom as a raid heal, since lifebloom can only be on one person at a time, so our mana efficient heals don’t work as raid healing tools right now.

Another fix for resto druids could be giving us more mana reduction talents in the resto tree somewhere accessible, so that we will be able to be a competitive raid healer. Moonglow could also be moved to Tier 1 Balance, so that it’s more accessible to restoration druids (with Nature’s Grace moved to Tier 2 balance instead). Reducing rejuvenation’s mana cost could also work for helping to keep resto druids raid-heal viable – However, it would encourage druids to use the same rejuv/WG-spam that we do now (though there is not much breaking this trend in Cataclysm, anyway, since Wild Growth costs too much for us to spam regrowth between refreshing WG).

Now, they want us to have to make choices about how to not run out of mana. However, I don’t feel like we have a choice – because I don’t think Nourish will work as a raid healing tool, so at this point I feel like we have to focus mostly on tank healing, without AOE healing for druids being something very viable compared to shaman or priest AOE healing (with druids probably still being ahead of paladins on AOE healing, due to paladins having such high cooldowns on their new AOE healing tools). There is plenty of time for Blizzard to work on mana costs, and GC may be mad at me for looking at class balance this early. However, I think that looking at JUST mana costs of AOE spells is a focused enough feedback report that it was worth doing. I’m also not sure how base mana will scale for shaman & priests from 80 to 83, since I don’t have a level 83 priest or shaman. I also don’t know what class balance will actually look like at 85, and I don’t know what plans Blizzard has in store for future talent builds.

Posted in Cataclysm, Paladin, Priest, Restoration Healing Trees, Shaman, Uncategorized | Comments closed