Filed under: (Druid) Shifting Perspectives

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. Welcome to our DPS edition, brought to you by Chase Hasbrouck, aka Alaron of The Fluid Druid blog. This week, we spend our Valor Points at the corner store.

Patch 5.3 is here, the item upgrade vendors have returned, and it's time to talk about everybody's favorite things; gear. What are the pixels I can pick to push my kitty to the top of the heap? Let's take a look.

Weapons and trinkets first

As a feral, getting a good weapon is your highest priority. It's the jelly to your peanut butter, the ketchup to your french fries...okay, I may be hungry, but you get the point, it's a necessary complement to ensuring you can be an effective damage dealer. You have four choices for weapons; three drops from Throne of Thunder (Shan-Dun, Breaker of Hope, Jalak's Maelstrom Staff, or the Darkwood Spiritstaff) and the weapon with a legendary socket from 5.0, Gao-Rei. The differences in the ToT weapons are fairly minor, so just get the best you can, and upgrade it ASAP. If you can't get into ToT yet, the +500 agility from the legendary gem on Gao-Rei makes it a worthwhile fill-in. Oh, and if you've completed Chapter II of the legendary quest and received an Eye of the Black Prince, don't forget to buy another one when you get a weapon upgrade.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. Welcome to our DPS edition, brought to you by Chase Hasbrouck, aka Alaron of The Fluid Druid blog. This week, we forge ahead. No, literally. Go reforge.

Welcome back to Shifting Perspectives! I've been dealing with some serious family issues, so I haven't written for a while. Happily, things are settling down, I'm raiding successfully, and it's time to get back to the keyboard. I've got quite a backlog of topics to cover, so let's get right to it by talking about the most commonly requested topic: what, exactly, am I supposed to do with all this new stuff I've been getting? The addition of Rune of Re-Origination and the Capacitive Diamond have changed gearing priorities significantly, so if you've been sticking with the pure mastery build, you may be missing out.

Mastery or haste, a question of RPPM

Ever since it was introduced, mastery has generally been our most favored secondary stat. (Yes, even over hit and expertise, from a simulation's point of view. That said, hit/expertise capping is the best idea for most folks, because we can't instantly recognize that an ability has missed and change strategy like the simulators can.) The rationale is simple. Most of our damage comes from bleeds; mastery increases our bleed damage ... obvious strategy is obvious. Well, the changes in 5.2 have adjusted that calculus a little bit.

Story time!

I first got a lesson on how to read healing meters while raiding Serpentshrine Cavern. One of our healers, an otherwise very competent holy priest, consistently ran OOM early on Morogrim Tidewalker and was next to useless during the final phase of the fight. The head of the heal team took an hour to look over the logs, and decided to give me a lesson on how to read them while doing so. It quickly became apparent that the priest was unwittingly covering for a resto shaman, who not only wasn't pulling his weight, but also seemed to take an unusual amount of damage.

"Why aren't you doing anything during the add phases?" asked the head, a paladin.

"Because our off-tank can't hold aggro for s$#t and I'm tired of dying to murlocs."

This was actually true. Our head healer pondered for a moment. "Can't you just Chain Heal after he's already gotten all the murlocs?"

"No, I die that way too. And we have to save BoP for the clothies who have to AOE the murlocs." Also true.

Every week (sort of), WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, the bookmarks folder gets the root cellar treatment.

I've been away from the game since the holidays due to what I will politely refer to as technical difficulties. (I have a variety of impolite terms for it too, but this is a family blog.) During that time, I've watched the game from the sidelines and have grown bored enough to do some maintenance on stuff that usually gets ignored until I'm rooting through it in a hurry. Add-ons were updated, dead blog links were sent to their folder, interesting ones were added, and then I turned to my collection of bookmarks in order to prune there as well.

I have a pretty sizable cache of druid or druid-related links that's grown over the years, and a lot of them are still pretty interesting. In the absence of the ability to talk about what's actually happening in the game with any fluency, I thought it might make a decent stopgap Shifting. This is a selection that's kept me absorbed for many an hour on a snowy weekend, and it ranges from comparisons between druid and warrior tanks in the classic game to where you fall on a healer's priority list when you're a jackass.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. Welcome to our DPS edition, brought to you by Chase Hasbrouck, aka Alaron of The Fluid Druid blog. This week, we discuss the future.

Happy New Year!

Hmm. I guess I'm a little late for that. Anyway, my no-notice household move is mostly complete, and I've finally had a chance to start breaking down the new changes for druids in 5.2. With the exception of Feral PvP, things look pretty positive across the board, so let's dive in!

Cyclone a-no-no

Cyclone is the crowd-control effect that everyone loves to hate. Unlike the vast majority of other CC effects in the game, Cyclone does not share a diminishing return category with other effects, meaning you could couple it with another CC from a teammate to lock down an enemy target for a long period of time. By itself, this wasn't the end of the world. While a "clone" was powerful, it had a short range and a cast time, making it difficult to land in the first place.

The beginning of an expansion is usually a bad time to write deep, meaningful, and typically pompous posts on the "state of the class" and whither the druid and all that crap. For that matter, the beginning of Mists of Pandaria struck me as an especially bad time, because so much of what we were used to in WoW got changed and sent everyone scrambling. Toss in a brand-new hybrid class (the monk), and you've got the perfect storm of elements that make evaluating healer performance a dicey proposition at best. I poured myself a nice cocoa, kept an eye on World of Logs and Raidbots, and watched as the numbers rolled in and a legion of holy priests tore their garments and cried out in despair.

Given that patch 5.1's now live, it seems an appropriate time to swirl that cocoa, take a look at how healers did in tier 14, and ask what's likely to change. As of now, it seems apparent that:

• Holy priests were actually right.
• Monks kicked your dog, seduced your mom, stole your XBox, and drove off in your car.
• Paladins are still topping the charts on certain encounters, but they're no longer dominating all of them.
• Shaman have improved a lot from their lackluster performance in Dragon Soul.
• Resto druids are back in same boat we were in at the beginning of Cataclysm, and it's not a very nice boat.

Just for fun, here's a Shifting I wrote almost a year ago on healer balance in Dragon Soul, if you'd like to see how classes fared in the last tier of raid content.

The following is a partial transcript of questions I have received ingame or via email since the launch of Mists of Pandaria, accompanied by their answers:

• What's the hit cap for bear tanks now? Versus a level 93 raid boss, it's 2,550, or 7.5%. If you're only running heroics, it's 2,040, or 6%. Thanks, Arielle!
• What the hell is going on with resto in raids? I don't know, but I suspect it's a version of the problem that plagued resto in the early days of Cataclysm. More on this next week when I've looked at more World of Logs parses. In the meantime, don't forget that other healers' (cough, monks) being overpowered renders us underpowered only by comparison.
• Do I need to worry about the "hard" expertise cap? Eh. It should be fairly easy to reach the soft cap (or get close to it) once you're sitting on heroic-level gear. After that, whatever expertise you get up to the hard cap is gravy, because if your rage income is enough to keep Savage Defense at maximum uptime, additional expertise won't really have a serious impact on your survivability.
• How do you get blood out of a shirt? Hydrogen peroxide.
• (From my raid leader) When will our scrub-ass warlock get to 90 so we can raid? I don't know, sir.

And the last:

How should I reforge my bear tank?

(Fidgets.) Uh, well ...

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. Welcome to our DPS edition, brought to you by Chase Hasbrouck, aka Alaron of The Fluid Druid blog. This week, we automate (legally!)

So, you might have seen references to macros, macro-ing, or other mac-type things (the non-cheesy variety) in my latest column, and wanted to know just what I'm on about. I've combed through my personal setup, the macro discussion threads over at Fluid Druid, and the excellent tips at Macro WoW to lay down some (automated) beats.

Before we begin, though, a quick introduction/refresher. Macros are an in-game method of grouping up commands or actions so they can be used in a more efficient way. To create a macro, you open the macro UI pane (/macro), type or cut-and-paste the macro text into the field. pick an icon if necessary, and save it. This saves the macro text to an icon that can be dragged to an actionbar, just like one of your regular spells. Macros have two main limitations; they can only be 255 characters or less, and they can only execute one ability on the global cooldown per click. Other than that, go wild! (Just don't miss the litter box.)

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. Welcome to our DPS edition, brought to you by Chase Hasbrouck, aka Alaron of The Fluid Druid blog. This week, we grind.


Okay, I know this column is a little behind the Mists of Pandaria power curve. That said, if you happened to fall in love with another class (coughMonkcough) for leveling this time around, and you've just now leveling to 90...here's some tips. And yes, that's a moonkin on a mechanostrider by a fish. Why? Isn't it obvious?

Before your arrival in Pandaria

Well, that depends on what level your gear is at. If you didn't play significantly at endgame in Cataclysm, you'll find that the enemies get a lot stronger as soon as you hit ground in Jade Forest. You'll get pieces of 378 green gear as you proceed through the early quests, but if you're still rocking Mount Hyjal greens like some of my alts, you may want to look at picking up some Misthide crafted leather items from the auction house. If none are available, you can also ride to Dawn's Blossom and visit the gear vendor there for some starter pieces. You can skip this if you choose, but in that case expect the initial quests to be fairly difficult, and you won't have the item level to queue for dungeons right away.

I knew this was going to happen. I tweeted about it back in August, suggesting that Heart of the Wild was far too powerful for both balance and feral druids; when combined with a weapon swap, the damage potential was significant. Several others warned about it on release, but to no avail, Bosses fell, DPS meters were topped, and all the non-druids complained bitterly. The cry of "Nerf druids!" was heard throughout the land, though most of us were too busy playing PandaFarm to notice.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, masochists eager to heal a pack of early dungeon-runners sort through gear options.

This picture's already a bit dated -- my main's been 90 for about a week now -- but you'll probably find yourself in Mogu'shan Palace for several runs trying to get some useful gear to drop. As an aside, the rush of leveling monks continues apace, and more and more of them will start appearing in your level 85+ groups. Get gear now, people!

As NocturNamos pointed out in last week's article on how to gear a guardian druid for Mists of Pandaria heroics, the ilevel requirement for heroics (or more accurately, queuing for heroics through the dungeon finder) has been lowered to ilevel 435. As such, I've included some ilevel 437 quest rewards in this guide that I didn't think were usable last week.

Again, most of this guide's advice can be condensed to the following points:

• Quest through the Townlong Steppes and the Dread Wastes.
• Be prepared to spend some justice points.
• Farm normal Mogu'shan Palace.
• If you have a good option available from professions (whether primary or secondary), don't ignore it.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, the four normal dungeons are a fat lot of help.

The subject of today's article is, shall we say, an immediate concern. Due to the demand for tanks and healers in the new 5-mans, my main will hit 90 before she even makes it to the halfway point of questing through the Valley of Four Winds. This is good, because I get to relax and enjoy questing as an extended treat without having to worry about leveling. This is bad, because she's about 20 ilevels off from where she needs to be in order to access Mists of Pandaria heroics.

This guide assumes that you will need an average ilevel of 440 to access heroics, because that was the number Blizzard was using on the beta. (Note: This is only true via the dungeon finder. Nothing prevents you from running out to the new heroics yourself with a group, but either way, 440's a decent number to aim for if you're worried about being sufficiently geared.) There are only four normal MoP dungeons, and only one of them (Mogu'shan Palace) drops gear that will help you clear this threshold.

If I had to condense this guide's advice, it would be:

• Quest through the Townlong Steppes and the Dread Wastes.
• Be prepared to spend some justice points.
• Farm normal Mogu'shan Palace.
• If you have a good option available from professions (whether primary or secondary), don't ignore it.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, death is common to all trees.

I'm not much of a PvP player. I enjoy random battlegrounds, particularly when I'm healbotting someone who cares whether I live or die, but I lack a certain something when it comes to better performance. I think that something is called talent, or perhaps just luck. We might even call it gear. Regardless, I'm not a great PvPer, so I usually sit on the sidelines and observe while the people who are great PvPers argue about arena team composition and rated battleground strategy. These people have not been enthusiastic about restoration druids in Cataclysm.

That's not normal. Resto has been a strong PvP spec since season two of The Burning Crusade (although we need to make an exception for the dismal season five at the beginning of Wrath of the Lich King), so it was a surprise to see such widespread ambivalence among the PvP population. However, there does seem to be a broad consensus about why resto has so many problems in PvP, and people are cautiously optimistic that Mists of Pandaria will be better.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, fortune favors the furry.

There's been an outbreak of worry among druids concerning the new guardian spec. That's not surprising, as the spec is new, its rotation is different, and bear mechanics got a substantial overhaul as well. Resto wasn't changed anywhere near as much -- indeed, its existing mechanics got easier, leaving us plenty of time to engage in Typhoon Wars with DPS we don't like (more on this when I feel like writing something really, really evil) -- but I think two weeks in a sort of clinic for both specs is warranted.

Bottom line: After the many tweaks it's had on the beta, active mitigation tanking is not as scary as it looks. This is not to say that the bear doesn't have its issues: Arielle outlined several here over on the (Guardian) Consolidated Feedback Thread that you should visit if you want to leave feedback for Blizzard on the problems you're having. But before you do that, let's make sure that the problems you're having can't be fixed some other way.

This, my friends, is your new mantra as you navigate the sociopolitical conflicts of Azeroth:

The rage extends life. The rage must flow.