Furry Feathers and Flora: Dawn of a New Age

Cataclysm's been out for around a week now, and I'm sure most people are still getting themselves raid-ready, either by getting to 85, or getting the mix of 333-346 items. I'm personally in the latter area at the moment, and I'll share my experiences so far.

I'll start off with a quick paragraph or two about levelling to 85 in the first place. Even though I'm Resto to the bone, I have to say that I levelled as a Boomer, and did as many instances I could get away with as one... Which to say the least wasn't many in the end. The questing experience however has improved massively, and I do mean massively! A lot of it I had already played on alpha/beta, so I ended up just taking the quest and going to wherever the arrow pointed me to. But now that quest drops have been improved to near-100% drop rates, and other quests have exciting mechanics that don't always mean vehicles. Though I do like vehicles, I'm sure I'm part of a minority there.

My favourite zone has to be Uldum, Twilight Highlands was interesting, but you just can't beat the Indiana-Harrison Jones quests and easter eggs literally littering the whole zone, as well as all the cutscenes. You can tell Blizzard put a lot of effort into the zone. Hyjal and Vashj'ir are rather nice places to start in, however this is from the perspective of a 6k GS Druid. From what I hear about new people entering the zones, the first few quests can be a little challenging with Northrend quest rewards, but as soon as you start getting Cataclysm rewards, it starts paying off and you're in the same boat as many others.

As for levelling in the dungeons however... Don't. Each instance takes around 30-90mins, and they fill up maybe about 7 or 8 bars at most, if you're handing in quests after. Otherwise they're just areas where there's some loot that will be replaced by Uldum and Twilight Highlands quests in any case. Blackrock Caverns and Throne of the Tides normal modes are surprisingly rather easy to heal. It's only once you start hitting Vortex Pinnacle and above that you start to feel strain on healing.

At level 85 though, it all changes. I'd suggest completing as many quests as you can first to get the gear to comfortably pug 85 normals, then start getting 333-359 gear from a mix of normals and reputation vendors. Keep two stacks of water on you at all times, if there's the slightest bit of AoE that needs to be healed, you will most likely have downtime for mana. It doesn't help that we're now contending for the weakest class for AoE, from being one of the (if not the) most powerful AoE healing classes.

But here's a few tips that I've managed to pick up over the past week:

Don't Waste Mana

This may seem obvious, but as a Druid we're often hit hard by this bat. Firstly, don't overheal - even if you're gawking at me now about how we CAN overheal in this environment, it can happen. I haven't reactivated Recount since having the expansion, but we're not targetting for something like 60% overheal any more. I'd like to throw a number out there and say that 10% is good, but I really don't know. Aim for 0%! That'll do. Our healing over time effects are where this hits us hard. We can't control when other people heal our target, but try not to waste mana by sticking something like a Rejuvenation on someone with more than 80% health, other than the tank.

Secondly is HOT-"clipping". Now Blizzard largely removed a lot of clipping with DOTs and HOTs, in the sense that the first spell will complete its next damage or heal tick, before taking the new one into account. This means that you can cast Rejuvenation when you have 1 second before the end of the first one, the first Rejuv tick will go off, then 3 seconds later the new Rejuv will start its healing.

However, you can still clip your HOTs by casting Rejuv (or whatever HOT) before the second to last tick has gone off. You're essentially stealing yourself from a 3-6k heal. So always try to refresh HOTs between the penultimate and ultimate ticks, unless necessary in the case of Lifebloom, which I'll go through below.

Lifebloom, Lifebloom, Lifebloom... Lifebloom!

Seriously, I can't stress enough how much Lifebloom helps now. You want it to have 100% uptime in the best scenario, failing that at most a single GCD to get it back after a bloom. It's not that the bloom is necessarily a bad thing - its 18-35k heal is nothing to be sneezed at when the tank's taking a lot of damage, it's just that it helps a lot with mana regeneration while it is up that you'd have less mana than a Warrior if you didn't use it.

It procs Replenishment. It procs Revitalize. It makes Omen of Clarity proc more from Malfurion's Gift. The only thing it doesn't proc to do with mana return is Innervate (although it would be very nice if that did happen, Blizz, just sayin'). So in order to keep it up all the time, you have three options:

1. Lifebloom. The easiest, cheapest, and quickest way to maintaining LB would be to stick another LB on the target. This is the way to go if the LB target isn't currently taking much damage.
2. Nourish. This will (if specced into Empowered Touch) refresh Lifebloom stacks, and do a slow, cheap, medium-strength heal on the target.
3. Healing Touch. Also if specced into Empowered Touch, this will cast a slow, expensive, powerful heal on the target, and refresh LB. This is also the go-to spell if you manage to synergise Omen of Clarity with LB nearly coming off, for the chance of Living Seed.

As you can see from above, Empowered Touch is fairly necessary in your build, which we'll get onto later. You can always let the LB bloom if you don't have the time or mana for a powerful heal, as a 3 stack bloom heals around the same as Healing Touch will, but do be wary of the loss of healing throughput having to restack LB back up again. You also don't have to worry about heal clipping either, Blizzard put in measures to avoid that kind of thing.

Casting with a Clear Mind

I touched on it briefly in the previous tip, but we now actually have to think about our Omen of Clarity/Clearcasting procs. As said, it procs from Lifebloom the most out of any other spells - although it still has the chance to proc from anything, Malfurion's Gift gives it more of an opportunity to proc.

Clearcasting can be shown using the Blizzard Power Auras with this symbol around your character:

It also has a fairly distinctive sound that goes with it, but with combat sounds already drowning things out alongside TS, you might miss the note from time to time. It might be worth setting up a Power Aura for it as well from the player-created addon, with a louder or more distinct sound.

As for the actual casting of spells while under the Clearcasting effect, there's a few conditionals. But it all boils down to using your most expensive single target heals (WG, LB, Nourish and Tranquility are unaffected by Clearcasting) - so we'll be using either Regrowth or Healing Touch. Basically it boils down to how quickly you need to heal a target.

On a tank, you'll pretty much always be using Healing Touch. It refreshes Lifebloom, gives a nice chunk of free health and if it crits, you're looking at a 10k free heal when the tank next gets hit.

If the tank looks safe for a few seconds, then focus on a non-tank: if their health is low and they're in danger of dying, use Regrowth followed by a Master-boosted HT or Nourish. If their health is low and they're not in danger of dying, HT. If their health is high, use a quick Regrowth and go back to what you were doing before.

You have around 8 seconds to use the proc, so don't hold it off for too long, and make sure that the slower cast HT has time to hit before it falls off (so you're looking at just over 6 seconds before the crunch time). If Clearcasting drops, you're out around 5-6k mana basically. Live (or die) and learn.

Innervate

Do it early. It restores 20% of your mana pool, and chances are that you'll be continuing to cast while it's up. I'd suggest Power Auras again to tell you when you're at 80% mana to give you an indication that you might start thinking of using it. Then another Power Aura to tell you when Innervate's back up. Even if the boss or mobs are beginning to get low on health and it pops up, use it. I've wiped more than once now where I thought I'd be able to manage with low mana and just drink my way after the fight back to full blue. If anything, it'll lower downtime after fights too.

AoE Healing

As I said earlier, we've been gutted from our top spot of AoE healing down to the bottom of the pile. Many healers are also facing this kind of butchery, but from what I've seen and experienced, Druids have been hit the hardest - possibly because of getting out of old habits is harder when you've been playing them a while.

Efflorescence used to be such a nice free AoE heal, but as we're entering 5mans, heroics and facing content that's challenging for us, there are better talents out there to take (Furor and Moonglow for example). The aim of the game is longevity, not throughput when you're not outgearing content. Cataclysm is about predictable and consistent damage - you no longer need to overheal your way through content in case of spike damage. I've dropped Efflorescence for now, as if people do actually stay in it for it's full duration (which they don't) you'll get a massive... 3-5k heal from it.

Wild Growth on the other hand... Also bad. It costs around 5-6k mana off the top of my head, and heals the group for around 10-20% of their total health pools. Rejuvenation is expensive to cast on EVERYONE, unlike before too. I mainly only use Wild Growth to give Tranquility a boost from Symbiosis. Otherwise our AoE healing consists of waiting on Clearcasting procs, or waiting for a gap to heal people.

Treat every fight like Anub'arak phase 3 - keeping people at around 40-60% health apart from the tanks.

Bandages!

It may seem silly to use bandages as a healer - that's what we're there for, to replace the need for bandages! That certainly was the case for TBC and Wrath in any case. But hey, in this expansion we're actually running out of mana and having to conserve it. So level up your First Aid, carry around 2-4 stacks of bandages around, and keybind them just as you would a normal heal. Although don't forget that bandages only heal people who aren't taking damage, so it's best off to hope for OoC procs while bandaging DPS. As with Innervate - do it early so it could be up later in the fight when you really need them again!

In conclusion... The spec itself!

While still entering new content (going into 85 normals for the first time, or heroics, or raids) this is the spec that I'll be using:

8/2/31

Going into the Balance tree primarily for Moonglow, making all of our spells 9% cheaper to cast is a HUGE saving in mana, while the extra haste after casting Regrowth in Nature's Grace and the extra crit is always nice to have along the way. Because of this, we can only really afford two points into Furor to give us 10% extra mana. I might have a play around to see if have 6% cheaper spells and 15% extra mana, but as Druid guides seem to say at the moment, 2/3 Furor is the way to go.

As for the Resto tree, you can see that I've opted out for Efflorescence completely. To me, it just seems too expensive to put 3 points into it where they could be spent better elsewhere. Everything else in the tree is pretty much a given, Nature's Bounty is a filler talent that can be put anywhere really. Nature's Ward is in there as I'm the most likely target to get hit after the tank, so that free Rejuv helps out a lot, saving around 4-5k mana and a GCD, and will stay on your for as long as you get hit under 50%.

With glyphs, we haven't really got much options for a fair few of them, in similarity with many other classes.

• Lifebloom, Regrowth, Rejuvenation and Swiftmend are our options for Prime, and I decided on dropping Regrowth as it's far too situational, and if people are dropping that low, I'll be casting HT on them anyway.
• For the Majors, we have a slightly less limited choice than with Primes, with all of Barkskin, Healing Touch, Innervate, Rebirth, Thorns and Wild Growth. I've opted for Innervate for raiding purposes mainly, I'll be sending another healing around 16k mana with the pool that I have at the moment, while getting 8k as well for myself - which is around 24k mana's worth of healing! Healing Touch is also one that I've picked, as we're starved for time as well as mana now, so the sooner we get NS back off cooldown, the better, and we're using HT a lot more now compared to before, so it all balances out. The third slot goes to Rebirth for me. If someone dies I don't want to spend time both BRing them as well as healing them back up again - again it's too much time and mana that could be spent elsewhere. Wild Growth is also a powerful contender, especially in a raid, however at the moment I feel I can do without.
• Finally, the Minors. The only one I find "mandatory" is Unburdened Rebirth, as it saves a bit of cash and bagspace. The rest are entirely your call, the only of no use are Challenging Roar and Typhoon. I've gone for MotW for cheaper costs when people die and are BR'd, and Treant so people don't lose focus when they see me pop grandpa-broccoli form and start laughing and wiping... It has happened.