I haven’t really posted in a while and for the most part it is because things have been fairly quiet. We have long since discussed all of the major changes to resto druids and in general they feel fairly straight forward. I do want to go over a few things and post my thoughts as we get into 5.4.
Day One
As soon as I was able to get home from work my first goal was to get the legendary cloak as I’m sure all of you are or will be shortly. I found using TomTom I could get all of the 5000 coins needed in a matter of mere minutes through the mandatory quests and chests readily available. I’d clock this in at under 20 minutes tops. After that we had a guild group go through and level all four of the celestial bosses quickly. They aren’t really all that bad though if you are doing it with pugs expect people to do the following:
-Not stand in the helpful circle on Chi’ji
-Yu’lon will kill some poor souls with the green tidal wave
-There will be some caught by Niuzao’s charging hellfire attacks
Once I obtained the cloak a quick trip over to Ordos was in order. This is also a rather uninteresting fight and it is predominantly an AoE heal fest. Make short work of him and try to coin something if you must. I personally opted not to as many of the warforged loot items available are spirit/crit and not-conducive to maintaining my 13,163 haste rating with decent mastery.
After we finished up Ordos I had a chance to go over and take a peak at the pet trainer options near the celestial court. Lil’Oondasta, while he hits like a truck, is easily dispatched with three mechanical pets who have strong finishers. I opted for pets with big attacks such as Self Destruct, Decoy, and Ion Cannon. Once he was defeated I healed and hopped into the Celestial Tournament. I got most of the way through, getting extremely lucky with enemy misses on some matches, and flailed about on Chichi before giving up. I will be revisiting this later.
SIEGE OF ORGRIMMAR
Healing
I suppose this is what is really important isn’t it? First lets talk about healing with the changes as that is why people come here i’d imagine. Though my witty antics are surely very exciting!
First off, world of logs is currently a bit messed up and didn’t track our progress from last night in any organized fashion. I will post an all night log here however (includes unimportant things like trash, and there is a lot of it): http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-mrcwv6vv8wtiqyw4/sum/healingDone/ While I’m not one to EVER rely on logs to tell me that I am good or bad, clearly my throughput was at an acceptable level last night. I think that as gear and familiarity go up throughout the tier, you can expect some classes to step up significantly. I think this mainly applies to absorb classes knowing exactly when to do their thing to maximize protection.
MVP’s:
Effloressence – the change to wild mushroom producing a permanent effloressence field is massive. You could argue this borders on ‘not fun’ because it is much the same meter padding smart heal shenanigans that we used to get more angry with other people about. This did anywhere between 15 and 21% of my total healing done on any fight where I could keep 4 people in it that took any modest amount of damage. My concern is how much of a hit this will take without the two piece Tier 15 set bonus. Since it is moveable you will be picking it up and moving it very often and I found that flexibility to be a godsend on high mobility fights (Dark Shaman being a good example).
Glyph of the Sprouting Mushroom – I honestly can’t see playing without this glyph. There is never a time where I want to rely on another players position to place an effloressence field. Having the reticle available showing exactly how far your field will reach allow you to maximize your coverage on the fly. Critical and useful a perfect combination.
Ysera’s Gift – mindlessly does 3-6% of your healing done on a fight. Boring as all heck but it gets the job done. Yawn.
Wild Mushroom – while I did less healing than usual with wild mushroom I think part of it was my addiction to effloressence and because I don’t have any really good way to track its charge. Since it is not a buff on you (which I think it should be) but a buff on the mushroom no WA or Mod can currently track your stored overheal when you replace a current mushroom. That being said it still worked perfectly and I was able to always make it work. This ranged anywhere between 8 and 25% of my healing done on a fight depending on whether it synced up with boss abilities well enough.
Nature’s Vigil – This talent was an absolute beast last night. While I could have had 1/3 uptime, and in some cases I did simply use it aggressively, if it was timed up with intense boss damage your throughput shoots up dramatically. It’s even more awesome if you get other procs lining up with it. Numerically I’m leaning towards this as an automatic go to for level 90 talents.
Legendary Cloak – I don’t think you need me to tell you that a legendary healing cloak is awesome because it is. My only recommendation is that you create a weak aura to inform you that it is active, similar to what you probably do for Lucidity.
UNDECIDED
Genesis – while it is incredibly potent and I did find myself using it fairly often during Siege (to heal and to charge mushrooms) I don’t think I got the most out of it. Understanding every fight, its mechanics, and its timing is a big part of milking this spell for everything it is worth. Since we were one shotting most of the Siege bosses and flailing through their mechanics brute force style I never got the most out of this spell. It’s definitely not bad, I just can’t say how it will play out in heroic encounters just yet.
Throughput Tier – Soul of the Forest is great and I pretty much rocked it for most of the fight. It is clunky, as it always has been, however without being penalized for dropping Efflo in a bad location you can aggressively use Swiftmend and WG when there is a damage spike. Tree of Life was not as impressive to me but I think a big part of it was not knowing the boss damage patterns. I expect that once I get the 4 piece Tier 16 set bonus and learn all of the encounters I might consider Incarnation.
HAS ISSUES
Living Seed – still bad after all these years. This will never account for a meaningful amount of healing and is really just a bone being tossed randomly here and there. Grumpy tree is not impressed.
Encounters
I’m not comfortable enough to really go into a fight by fight breakdown of Siege of Orgrimmar just yet. We only cleared 9 of the 14 bosses and a few of the kills were one shots where I am not one hundred percent convinced we adhered to the tactics as intended. Here’s the cliff notes version for now:
Immerseus – irritating spread out encounter. Damage is fairly minimal during the fight and for the most part you’ll be rolling rejuvenations on any raid member within reach and keeping effloressence under anyone nearby if you can hopefully catch two people with it. Even tranquility will only be able to reach a small percentage of the raid. He is clearly an entry level boss on normal.
Protectors – another really straight forward fight. Since you are working with a much smaller space all of your spells will be working as intended. Effloressence will always be able to move with whatever the current mark/target is making sure the melee get some free smart healing. Other than add control and DPS following instructions on who to burn and when, this isn’t a fight that has much healing intensity or mechanics to worry about.
Norushen – irritating encounter but our toolkit works well. I was tasked with going down early (which I didn’t love) to get purified. You simply click on a ball, hop down, heal the three NPC’s and cleanse debuffs as needed. After a period of time you’ll pop back up top with the Sha boss. For the most part your job in this fight is to keep effloressence on the melee and then on the raid when you group up later in the fight. Avoid or take the balls as dictated by the raid leader, avoid the adds before aggro is established on them, and displacer beast through cutter beams as needed to avoid ever being hit. While this fight is damage intensive you’ll find that efflo+mushrooms+rejuv blanketing pretty much do the job.
Sha of Pride – this fight was actually kind of boring. Your raid will stack up behind the boss and only really move to avoid the adds or break people out of the prisons. As the fight progresses there are of course other mechanics to address such as people moving to their void zones, raid members fleeing the group with the debuff that needs dispelling, and mind control though hopefully not! Stack up fights work very well for Efflo and mushrooms so you’ll do pretty darn good here. I believe I outhealed everyone by a decent margin however I have a feeling part of that was me phasing out to heal the NPC’s.
Galakras – there’s not much to tell for the fight. As someone who wasn’t on tower duty I kind of just hung out in the middle and healed some people. I hung out with Sylvanas some because she seemed nice. Keep efflo moving with the melee for each add phase and rock your standard spammy rotation.
Iron Juggernaut – this is one of those fights where if things are done properly it probably isn’t so bad at all. We one shot this I believe but holy crap were a lot of people dead at the end. For the bomb phase there is a lot of damage going out, more should some blow up, but for the most part it isn’t anything unusual. Keep the melee (or ranged depending) over an efflo field and keep your eyes peeled for ground based death traps. Literally. Your healing rotation isn’t anything unique here. Once the other phase starts with AoE damage and punting make sure that at any time you are a.) between the boss and a wall to prevent being thrown too far and b.) positioned such that if a tracking fire beam heads towards you, you will avoid igniting too many tar patches (or non at all, that would be preferred).
Kor’kron Dark Shaman – I have no words for this fight. It is an absolute cluster-f*ck and while we made short work of them I never had a dang clue what was happening. Dodge elemental walls, dodge poison walls, don’t stand in the million bits of bad that exist, stay clear of meteors and use barkskin when possible to reduce the damage. Until I know more than I do now, my advice is to flail around, don’t die, and heal whatever you can reach.
General Naz’grim – while I was sad to kill him I found the fight to be painfully easy. We handily made short work of him with little real attention to details other than avoid the horrible spinning axes of doom. Sadly Gamon didn’t pay attention to raiding 101 and fell over dead. The boss got moved periodically because we were concerned with him getting a tick of the healing tide totem but on the whole you’ll efflo the melee and spread heal. I don’t think I actually detonated my mushrooms much on this fight at all.
Malkorok (forever called Maloriak 2.0) – is basically a heroic Tortos 2.0 encounter. The main gimmick is that there is a gas in the room that makes all healing produce an absorb effect on the player that caps out at 100% of their health. To ensure everyone isn’t topped off shield wise forever without healing the gas also ticks for damage periodically.
The boss will do two attacks during the non-cleave phase that matter. He will place void zones down on the ground that MUST be soaked by at least one person each. If soaked the soaker’s absorb shield should cover it, if it isn’t soaked it hits the whole raid and weakens your absorb or it might kill someone who just soaked. The other is a series of three cone area slams that are done at staggered times. Officers or raid assist folk will mark the locations of the slams. Later on in the fight he will re-slam those areas without marking them so it helps to have a visual indicator as to where they are. Rejuvenation blanketing and Genesis can be your friend here piling on the absorbs.
Outside of those mechanics there’s a brief period where the raid groups up to share some cleave damage and people will be running in and out after getting debuffs. This is prime time for your heavy AoE tool kit so keep Efflo, WG, Tranq, NV, and rejuv blanketting at the ready.
ROUND-UP
So far Siege hasn’t proven to be outlandishly difficult and our healing toolkit feels very strong. I do know, as it always does, that increased familiarity and gearing will decrease our throughput with respect to other classes but that is ok. This is the nature of HoT based healing. Should heroic encounters continue to be healing intensive in a manner that is not conducive to heavy absorbs then we will continue to be very valuable. I am hoping this is the case.
Celestial Tournament
So as I mentioned I gave the celestial tournament a shot and didn’t do as good as I’d like. I flailed about on ChiChi and my attempts to get back to him failed miserably last night. I just don’t think I have the best pets for the job. You can see my current menagerie here http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/eredar/Jarre/pet#status=is-collected
I’m NO master trainer and I don’t really have a knack for figuring out the needed combos to handle trainers and bosses (hence why I need guides) but here is my current wish list to help me overcome the tournament with my available pets:
Things to do (some require hunting)
Son of Animus – Level up
Clock’em – Do Brawler Guild and level up (have admission ticket)
Enchanted Lantern – Level up
Emerald Whelp – Level up
De-Weaponized Mechanical Companion – Make upgrade and Level up
Azure Whelping – Level up
Gregarious Grell – Level up
Tranquill Mechanical Yeti – Level up
Magical Crawded – Level up (from 10)
Get an Unborn Val’kyr and level
Optional undead:
Blighted Squirel – Silverpine get and level up
Infected Fawn – Eastern Plaguelands get and level up
Infested Bear Cub – Hillsbrad Foothills
Last Words
Well, that’s all for now folks. I know its rambly and the product of a tired brain…did I mention my wedding is coming up?…but here it is. Let me know if you have any thoughts on what I’ve discussed and I would certainly accept criticism in case I missed something or if I’m too tired to remember it properly.
