Here are a few great blogs that you may not have visited yet. Some are new, others have been around for a while but I have only recently stumbled upon them.





Druid Heal Raaff from Druid Heal describes himself as a “hardcore casual gamer” – unable to adhere to a hardcore guild’s schedule, he wiles away the hours playing with stats, talents, and gear (to our benefit!) Druid Heal is home to the Resto Mega Guide, which covers everything from talents to idols to gems. Updated 24 March. Also check out his mana regen calculator here (updated for 3.1 as information becomes available). This is the blog I lean on when I don’t understand the numbers (which is always).
Nerf this Druid Nerf this druid is a relatively young blog – it has been around since October last year but has been gathering a lot of momentum in the last couple of months, with some great posts about the upcoming changes in 3.1. Another druid who isn’t afraid of numbers (yay!) – she was kind enough to put a lot of us out of our misery and finally test the Nourish glyph to see if it stacks with 4pc T7 – big brownie points right there.
Passport to Shandris Passport to Shandris has been around since 2007, but I only found it recently Recent posts include a fantastic wrap-up of the 3.1 changes (so far), and an ongoing guide to different facets of druid healing. Check out this guide to the best raid heal to cast.
Restokin Restokin is a brand spankin’ new blog written by Lissanna, a druid who is well-known on the official forums and beta/PTR forums for posting helpful and informative threads. She got a huge plug on WoWInsider today (prompting a few bandwidth hiccups, I’m certain..) with particular emphasis on the guide to 3.1 healing. From the caliber of her forum posts, I know this will definitely be a blog to watch.
Upyursh This is another fairly new blog – another Aussie druid! Check out this great guide for the G9 mouse and G13 gameboard. So far, lots of great druid-centric addon, macro, and peripheral info. Nom. Another blog to watch





Do you know of any other great druid blogs (new or established)? Let me know and I will highlight them in another Community Spotlight post in the future.



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Hurrah!

The Undying/Immortal achievements in Ulduar have been created on a per-boss basis; that is, you don’t have to do the entire instance without anyone dying; you can keep working on the achievement over as many raids as you need to.



The Undying, Part Two has been renamed to “Champion of Ulduar” and now require you to kill each boss without dying, but not necessarily during the same reset Title Reward: Champion of Ulduar.

The Immortal, Part Two has been renamed to “Conqueror of Ulduar” and now require you to kill each boss in Heroic difficulty without dying, but not necessarily during the same reset. Title Reward: Conqueror of Ulduar. (Source).

While I do think this “dumbs down” the achievement a little, I really can’t get away from the hatred I feel towards the current Immortal achievement. There’s just too much random luck involved; too many times that you are put at the mercy of a bad internet connection.

Previously, I would have (sullenly!) sat myself out of a raid rather than risk the title for others. In Ulduar though, it won’t matter – because I won’t be jeopardising an entire week’s work for 24 other people by disconnecting on the final boss; at worst, it would stop them from getting one boss. That’s still not good, of course, but it wouldn’t be the way it is now – slog your way through the entire instance for several hours, allllllllllmost get the achievement, and then have someone disconnect in a void zone, YAY! This time around, if they disconnect and die, it hasn’t ruined the entire week’s effort – it just means that there’s one last boss to finish off for the achievement.

Some quick notes, as summarised on the WoW forums:


-2nd attempts in the same reset will not count, only first try
-Can be done over multiple resets
-Algalon is not apart of this achievement, which is intentional
-The titles are currently placeholders and should change when the patch hits
-Naxxramas Immortal/Undying will not change, this is for Ulduar only



I’m all for tough achievements and skill and whatnot, but the Naxxramas Immortal is horrible, stressful.. I hate it. The fact that Ulduar is per-boss actually makes me WANT to do it, rather than dreading it – I’m actually looking forward to it now!

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This is the third installment in my “Grid vs Healbot” series. I had planned this to be a multi-part experiment and feature the other raid frame heavyweights such as Pitbull, XPerl, and so on, but really it’s such a massive job to look at them carefully that I don’t think I can commit to doing another one – not for a while at least.

But the most important challenge, I think, is definitely Grid vs Healbot. So many people ask, on a weekly basis, “Which is better, Grid or Healbot?” The answers given are often incorrect (due to people not understanding the capabilities of the other mod) or simply, “Try them both and see which one you like best” which is actually probably an excellent answer, but not what a lot of people want to hear.

So, without further ado, here is my attempt at giving those people are more definitive answer. This entry will be about Healbot’s features; then I will follow with another to compare the two mods directly (I need to separate the two posts because of their length, I don’t want to overwhelm people too much).


Legend

Once again, here are the symbols that I will be using to show what each mod requires to get them working to my satisfaction (legible, useful, and attractive, etc).




Note that the green check marks come in two flavours: ready to go, and ready to go (but you can adjust the display).

Some features are ready to go by default, but are usually set up in a way that isn’t very attractive or just isn’t quite what I want. For example, poisons will show up, by default, as an icon in the center of the frame, and a corner square also. I don’t like that – I prefer my frame to turn green to indicate poisons. I could certainly get by using the icons, but I prefer to use different display options. So, technically I could install Grid and have poisons showing just fine – but the options are there if I want to make things a little more attractive or to suit my tastes better.

A plain check mark, on the other hand, means that the feature is ready to go and presents in a way that is nice and easy to read, and doesn’t need tweaking to be attractive, and can be left as-is.

Remember – the final goal will be to be able to assess whether I could disable Grid and be satisfied to use Healbot instead. That, as a druid, Healbot can show me all the things I need to see in a raid, in a way that is both easy to interpret, and aesthetically pleasing.


Healbot


healbot -noun 1. a bar-style raid frame addon displaying target health, buffs, debuffs and other information. 2. Informal. a healer who follows his/her target around and acts as their personal healer: Keeva is my healbot for PvP. -verb 3. Informal. to act as a personal healer: Keeva healbots me in PvP.



Old Healbot
Healbot has been around since vanilla WoW; unfortunately, while being very useful, it gained a bit of a negative reputation because it would actually choose the “correct” rank of spell according to how much health your target was missing. This was obviously quite handy, but it did give the mod a bit of a bad name for “playing the game for you” – which is why I never used it. I don’t like mods that make decisions (such as spell ranks) for me. Your opinion on this may vary.

Healbot: Simple, beautiful
But, that nasty business aside, Healbot is well-known for being simple to use “out of the box”, meaning that as soon as you load it up, you can pretty much run with it. This makes it perfect for people who want a solid raid UI but perhaps don’t know much about customising UIs – with Healbot you can just install and run, with minimal tweaking.




Healbot does have some pretty nifty bells and whistles, but its biggest sell point, I believe, is this simplicity – that you can use it immediately with almost no knowledge of addons or UI customisation. If you want to load a raid UI mod and run, Healbot is definitely a great choice.


Alright, let’s get started on the nitty gritty.

1. Aesthetics

So, how is Healbot when you first fire it up? Pretty darn… well, pretty. The bars are a fairly good size, text is good.. and it has a really cool tooltip that shows you what your buttons are bound to, and what your heals should land for (how cool is that – especially if you’re like me and don’t run with any spell buttons on your UI).




Healbot when first loaded – showing tooltip


So if you wanted to walk into a raid right that second, your frames would be a decent size, legible, and attractive, even without tweaking them or personalising them to taste.

Let’s rate things in the same way that I assessed Grid.




There’s really not much to fault here. In terms of basic aesthetics, Healbot is excellent, and it is excellent with very little initial tweaking.

Despite its simplicity, Healbot does have a lot of options for changing its appearance. For example, some people prefer the green bars (that change colour gradually according to health deficit). I personally prefer my bars to be coloured by class, so at a glance I can see the class of person taking damage, and make split-second decisions – ie, triage.

Contrary to popular belief, Healbot doesn’t have to be green bars and only green bars – you can set it up to be coloured by class (like Grid), if you want to, although I think many Healbot users will call me a heathen for doing this




Healbot and Grid, both set to display frames by class colour. Please don’t hurt me.



You can also change the size of the bars, number of columns (something you can’t do in Grid), font type and size, border, background, group headers (and customise those as well). When it comes to displaying buffs and debuffs, you can choose between border and frame colours as well as the standard icons. Not as many options as Grid, but whether this matters to you will depend on the number of things you need to display on your frames at any given time. And.. I think we should pay attention to Mr Confucius’ wisdom above – keeping things simple isn’t a bad thing.

Healbot can show you 5, 10, 25 and 40 man groups. It shows pets, although I am disappointed that you can’t force it to show pets coloured by owner type. I like to see hunter pets as green, warlock pets as purple, for example, so that I can prioritise healing. That is not a huge problem, only a slight niggle.

Another small problem is that there is no background to the individual frames (perhaps this is something I missed). Grid allows you to set a customised background colour (eg red or black) to make health deficits easier to see. If you use the green bars on Healbot this is not a problem, because the bar will change to red as the person loses health; but if you are like me and prefer class coloured frames, this isn’t the case. I like to have a colour behind the bar to show me more easily how much health is missing. But – this is more a personal preference than anything.


2. HoTs and HoT tracking




HoT counters are now built into Healbot. They are shown as numbers on top of HoT icons on the target’s bar. Very attractive and simple. My main gripe here is that the counter doesn’t show up until the time remaining has dropped under double digits (ie, 9 seconds or less). This annoys me because I prefer to see exactly how much time is remaining, so that I know how many other things I can do before I need to refresh my Regrowth, for example.

I also found that the counters are quite cluttered on the icons; in order to make the counters legible, I had to increase the size of the icon and text, and this obscures the person’s frame, meaning that if they have a health deficit, it can be difficult to see. This would not be an issue for someone who chooses to display the HoTs off to one side (not on the frame itself) but as I prefer to have my HoT counters inside the frame, it is a problem for me. I found that having several HoTs on a target made things very cluttered.



Left: Healbot, set up to my preferred frame size, and showing all four HoTs. Disclaimer: different frame configurations will make your HoTs easier to see; this is merely to demonstrate that on my chosen frame layout, the HoTs are quite cluttered.


I don’t like that there isn’t a set position for each HoT; they are just put up in order of casting.

The Lifebloom counter also doesn’t count down with a decimal place; it only counts in whole seconds. If this is what you are used to, you will probably be quite efficient, regardless; but having fractions of a second display can make your Lifebloom rotations much cleaner and tighter.

As a druid, I think that the HoT display is possibly the most important thing on our UI, and as such, this is what I really focused on when I was looking at Healbot. I will go into this more in my comparison of the two mods.


3. Buffs and debuffs




Healbot shows missing buffs, rather than showing everyone who has a buff. You can choose a colour to display when someone is missing a buff, for example, red for someone who is missing Thorns. You can tell it who to check for these buffs – by class, by type such as ‘healers’ or ‘ranged’, and of course, the tanks. This is brilliant. Basically, you set it up to tell you when the tanks are missing thorns, and if they are, it turns them red. When they get their buff, they go back to normal.

And on top of that, you can have Healbot play a warning sound as well – in case you missed them changing colours.

I definitely give Healbot an 11/10 for “missing buffs display”.

However if you want to display who has particular buffs, then it falls down a little. Again, this is personal preference – some people like to be able to see if there is a renew on the tank, or weakened soul, etc – not necessarily their own pre-combat buffs. A minor issue for most, but probably something that some people don’t want to do without.

Custom debuffs, another important part of my UI, are also handled fine with Healbot. You can enter your own debuffs, such as Frost Blast, and have it display in a special colour (and again, a warning sound if you like!). The colour can be set to the border, icon or frame colour (but not to corners as with Grid). The only minor problem is that you can only choose one colour for all custom debuffs; if you want two different debuffs to display as different colours, you can’t do that.


4. Other




Most of these things are built in and turned on by default (or require a quick check mark or slider bar adjustment). I can’t find the low mana alert (if there is one) or feign death warning. Death is shown as an empty bar (zero health), but I prefer DEAD to show on the frame.


Overall

I’ll go into better detail when I write the final installment comparing the two mods, but for now, my super brief summary would be that Healbot:

- is really attractive out of the box, has plenty of great features and requires little tweaking

- has pretty good HoT display options built-in (no need for extra modules)

- has quite a lot of options for changing the appearance of the mod – and would probably surprise a lot of die-hard Grid fans. Still not as flexible and customisable as Grid, but it honestly has all the main stuff that most people would need.

- would be good for UI newbies and seasoned healers alike

Overall, Healbot shows you a lot of buff, debuff, HoT and healing information as soon as you load it. If you want to spend a little more time on it, you can pretty it up even more, but if you don’t have that time, you’ll still have just about everything you need as soon as you start.

Stay tuned for the final installment – Healbot & Grid side by side (dun dun dunnn).



Do you know of a great How-To guide for Healbot? There are a few out there for Grid but I had problems finding an up to date guide for Healbot. If you know of one, please let me know so that I can list them here to help out Healbot users.



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Look what Matticus and Pike pointed out, if you missed it – Blizzard have given Phae her own Ulduar epic, from Iron Council (25man):




Phaelia’s Vestments of the Sprouting Seed



Isn’t that wonderful?

I remember when Breanni got his in-game tribute, very cool. I think it goes without saying that you have to make a massive contribution to register on Blizzard’s radar and have them place something in the game as a tribute – that’s a pretty big deal, wouldn’t you say?

Grats Phae!

PS – This item was already in the game as Vestments of the Sprouting Seed, but has been changed to be a tribute to Phae. Now I think it begs the question – did they choose this item for her because of its name and the fact that she is expecting?

I didn’t know whether to laugh or groan when that dawned on me. Maybe it’s just a coincidence…




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A recent quote from GC regarding PvP as trees:



One change we are (probably) going to make that will help Resto PvP a little is this:

The Tree of Life talent currently grants bonus healing to group members and reduces the cost of your hots in tree form. We would like to change the talent to say “Reduces the mana cost of all your hots and also lets you go into tree form, which grants bonus healing.”

In other words, you would not need to be ToL to get the cheaper hots (in PvE or PvP) so long as you had the ToL talent. In PvP, you could still use tree form when you wanted to be more tanky but your efficiency would not be so bad when in caster form.

So, basically, if you are specced into ToL, you would ALWAYS have cheap HoTs and good efficiency, even if you’re not in tree form. The benefit of tree would then be the bonus armor, ToL aura, and extra healing from ToL and Master Shapeshifter.

This has been made as a change for PvP, but I can see benefits for PvE – there are times in fights when I need to do a little DPS, but I feel like I have to keep shifting into tree because I’m drying up, fast. With the changes to Lifebloom (and, to a lesser extent, OOFSR regen), this would be handy. Not a huge deal for PvE, but handy.

I wouldn’t be running around often out of tree form – but it would be good to not have to have to worry so much about wasting mana if I do happen to be out of form and casting a heal or two.



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I can’t make it to Phae’s farewell tomorrow on Scarlet Crusade because I am working at my second job. The different hemispheres and whatnot make it so that it falls in the middle of the afternoon for me. Bah. Gotta get me a laptop..

BUT – let’s just say that while I can’t be there, my character will. In spirit.




… thanks to a level 2 boar. *grin*





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Another quickie for you – the 10 and 25 man Tier 8 item stats have been released, thanks MMO as usual. Click for larger versions of these images.

Tier 8 (10 man):


Tier 8.5 (25 man):



There’s also mention of Tier 8 idols, with the resto one being:

Druid T8 Restoration Relic — Increases the spell power of your Nourish by 187.



I wish they would reverse the sets – I think the brown 10man set looks the best. But – I like both sets, so that’s okay I suppose. I used to lament the amount of brown in our gear, but the Tier 8 set looks really nice. Perhaps because it’s more brown and gold rather than just dull brown.



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Still piecing together my healbot writeup, but it’s been a super busy week (in real life and in guild-land), so it’s not ready yet. In the meantime I thought i would share a fun guild even that I am running (again) on Saturday. I did this back in October when we were 70 but had just got all of our new talents and abilities, and it was great fun.

It’s just a guild event this time around (although friends are welcome to come along!), but I am considering some server-wide activities for later





It’s a fairly straightforward competition – people form up teams, we all assemble at the front of Kara, and when I say go, they all rush in and destroy the place as fast as possible. Here are the best boss kill times from last year:

44s Attumen
55s Moroes
29s Maiden
27s Opera
2m27s Nightbane
48s Curator
36s Illhoof
48s Aran
48s Netherspite
1m12s Prince

The bosses themselves only take about 10 minutes; the bulk of the time is actually spent travelling through the instance, and I suspect this time it will be much faster because at level 80 it will be easier to bypass a lot of trash. Plus, the trash that can’t be bypassed will probably be nuked down in a few seconds, so I’m kinda picturing this long winding train of players and mobs weaving through the halls of Karazhan….

Here are the basic rules, if you’re interested:

A WWS/WMO must be provided after the event to verify that you killed everything.
I’m not pointing fingers, but some people like to be “creative” and.. skip things. Every boss in Kara must die – except the silly animal boss.

Your team, your classes, your specs, your choice. Stack 7 shamans if you feel like it. WHEE!
Can you tell I copy/pasted this from my October entry? Oops.

All teams zone in at the same time.
There shouldn’t be anyone else at Kara opening the gate, so the best way to do it is to have both teams standing back while I stand at the gate, yell GO! and open it for them.

You can skip pulls where necessary if you would like to. I really don’t care how much trash you kill or don’t kill.
It’s all about the bosses. Skip as much as you can.. then just pray you get BBW for Opera

Prince must be the final boss. Other than that, you choose the boss kill order.

Teams must share a vent channel! This is for added fun and laughs.
This is a social event to help ease up some pre-3.1 tension. We’re raiders and we’re bored. A little friendly competition, perhaps a couple of small wagers under the table.. and being forced to share the same vent space. It’s hilarious to listen to all the bluffing that people do to try to fool the other teams.

MOST IMPORTANTLY: When Prince dies, official confirmation MUST be given in the form of a screenshot clearly showing server time on the map. NO SCREENSHOT, NO WIN. NO EXCEPTIONS.
I ask for a WWS and a screenshot just to be sure. It used to be easier back at 70 when some people hadn’t finished kara (?) so someone would get the Karazhan achievement as soon as Prince died – easy to spot the winners there. But now.. not so easy, unless you have a rerolled character in your group.

Plus, the WWS lets people see the crazy dps numbers and the insanely short fights.

And the booty:



WINNERS
For this challenge I will be donating 1000g prize money (of my own), meaning that the winning 10 people will take home 100g each. Additionally people might like to place their own bets on the side, I’m certain. Definitely encouraged!

LOSERS
The losers will each receive absolutely squat.

AMG BONUS PRIZE!!!!!111
500g bonus prize (50g each to each team member) for the fastest Maiden kill. MUST BE VERIFIED WITH A BOSS MODS SCREENSHOT – eg the message that says “Maiden down after X minutes Y seconds”. No screenshot, no win.


The guild time to beat on Maiden is 29 seconds. Looking forward to seeing what happens this time.



I’ve run a few fun guild events in the past and I have a few up my sleeve for later in the year – currently in the planning stages. If you’re interested in running one of your own, check out the Guild Relations forum – players have submitted a bunch of great ideas for fun things to do.

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With the 40% nerf to spirit-based regen, Innervate has taken a big hit. On the PTR it no longer gives you back a full bar of mana, but around 75%.

Now, before they announced the changes to Lifebloom, I really didn’t mind too much – I don’t often use my own Innervate, so it wasn’t the end of the world. But now that mana really will be a lot tighter for us, many druids are calling for Innervate to be added to the spells that were improved to compensate for the nerf. Our while-casting regen talent, Intensity, has been improved so that our regen while casting is around the same (or ever so slightly more), but Innervate got the nerf bat to the face, and the best we’ve heard so far is that Blizzard will consider changing it.. maybe.

Well, never fear, druid friends – Blizzard comes to the rescue today and quells our mana fears in the updated official patch notes:

Innervate: This spell no longer costs mana.

TADA! All fixed! Thank goodness!

…../tongue in cheek

Also, not remotedly druid-related but something that has annoyed me for a long time – in the category of “…finally!!!”:

Badges and Emblems looted off of any dungeon bosses by a member of the party or raid will automatically be given to all eligible party or raid members. Party or raid members must still be inside the instance to receive Badges or Emblems.



Random baby druid update

Drucie is making a comeback!

Drucie is my “baby” druid. I have always liked to have a “main” druid, specced resto for raiding, and that is how they stay. But because I love soloing as feral SO much, and because I enjoy farming on a druid, I have alt feral druids.




When they announced dual specs though, I thought, “what’s the point?” What’s the point of levelling a second druid if Keeva will have access to the best feral gear in the game in Naxx and eventually Ulduar, and she can swap specs at a moment’s notice? So sadly, Drucie has been sitting, unloved, since patch 3.0 (she didn’t even have her talents re-entered).

I eventually changed my mind because I was so bored on Keeva. Once I was locked into raiding for the week, I couldn’t do alt runs with the guild (having no 80 alts). And only raiding for a night or two a week was just NOT meeting my healing “needs”. I have urges, you know. Healing urges.

Once upon a time I used to take off part of my gear to go do heroics. I healed them in my blue overalls, partly for the laughs, but also because it felt like much more of a challenge when you shed 1000 healing. I miss that, and I think I would really enjoy having a second backup druid to heal instances and raids, should the guild need it.

So I thought – Drucie is 64, why not keep levelling her, do some alt Naxx runs, and heal on her in my spare time when I feel like I haven’t had my fill? Not only that, but let’s face it, herbing in flight form is so much better than doing it on my hunter.. so having a druid farmer makes sense.

I’m having a lot of fun. It’s been a long time between Mangles.



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Good old MMO, what would we do without you?

Druid T8 Restoration 2P Bonus (Class: Druid) — Increases the healing done by your Swiftmend spell by 10%.

Druid T8 Restoration 4P Bonus (Class: Druid) — Your Rejuvenation spell also instantly heals your target for its periodic healing amount.


Before you have a heart attack over the 4pc, it’s not an instant heal for the entire amount that RJ heals for; rather, an additional tick as soon as you cast it, rather than the spell having to be on the target for 3 seconds to start ticking.

It’s understandable that you might read it as the entire heal, I think Blizzard’s tooltips often leave a lot to be desired. I blinked at it, at first

Very tasty – having Rejuv start ticking instantly will be great for tank and raid healing alike – particularly raid healing.





But.. I can’t help but worry that people will complain that druids are sniping heals by throwing 2k insta-juvs around the raid to patch up small amounts of damage before anyone else can get to it. Wild Growth + Rejuvs = unhappy Shamans, at the very least. I think rejuv may be headed for a nerf sometime.



Hey – I needed to edit this to say something.

I have two words for you:

Frost. Blast.





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