Too much to do on WoW...

Last night I logged onto WoW, I looked at my toons, let out an "Ugh...." and logged off. I think for the first time ever I'm burned out by WoW. Sure I quit back at the end of BC, but that's because real life called and not answering is not a good idea.
This time, it's more "Even if I log on, I can't finish all the valor point collecting on 2 toons, so why bother logging on at all?" People said that Cata was awful because people'd log on and there's nothing to do. I liked that, nothing to do, but still means I can choose to solo old raids or farm the remaining rep for Insane in the Membrane, and if I don't feel like doing anything, then log off, sleep or do real life things without a shred of guilt.
I'm probably one of those rare species of player that is casual (play <3hours a day, except on weekends) but raid in a relatively top end progression raid. I truly like raiding with my RL friends. My friends tailored the raids on weekends just for my schedule and it's the only reason I haven't quit playing. And therefore, in order to not drag the raid down, maxing out valor to upgrade gear is mandatory, not an "option," (so is research the fights beforehand, but they usually send me links to read). Hence, actually not logging on to max valor creates guilt, but logging on and not finishing, what's the point....
All in all, I'm tired out and hoping for a break. Don't want to bother my friends about it and don't want to get flamed on forums. So venting on my happy little blog.

No progress due to Thanksgiving

This week's gone by, our raid made no progress. Well, since we are a weekend raiding guild, this Thanksgiving pretty much meant only 6 of our core 12 people wasn't out of town. So... no progress = no new strats to type out. But we all had a great thanksgiving. :D so thankful for that.

Mistweaver vs Resto druid

I'd want to update this a tiny bit with patch 5.1. In 5.1 monks got a huge nerf and ever since I would say for the moment, I cannot switch to mistweaver, since my druid gear is just so much better. In fact, if you want to only compare healing output, I heard that monks aren't that much greater than druids anymore, so what I said about never picking druid over mistweaver is no longer valid.

So I got to playing mistweaver in lfr a few weeks now. My gear is still pretty bad, greens with blues and 2 heroic pieces (1 of which is a dps neck... but I was ilvl padding to get into lfr), but I can now finally get top 1 or 2 healer consistently every boss. Anyway, all in all, if I was to compare the two class, I would say resto druid is gimper numbers wise. I can consistently put out equal hps fistweaving on mistweaver (as long as I don't oom, which I do since I only have 5k spirit atm) and on top of that I can put out 20k dps without breaking too much of a sweat (and on fights like Garalon or Stone Guards, the dps and hps is even more impressive). Yea yea, lfr has less mechanics to dodge, but there's not that much to dodge for melees anyway this patch. So basically, only looking at numbers and given a choice, I would never bring a restore druid in place of a mistweaver. Though they are gimping renewing mist/uplift next patch, so we'll see how that goes.
On the other hand, fistweaving for me creates an issue where I have trouble single targeting heals. So if a single person was to take a huge drop, switching target to spam surging mists on them is a little difficult for me. I would blame my key/mouse binds for that and mana management, since usually 1/2 through the fight I'd be drinking mana teas just to keep renewing mists up, so obviously will not have mana to pour out surging mists.
Druids are much more controlled, brings raid utility like extra tranq/deterrence/ice block, and raid healing numbers aren't that bad, but I would say it's by far the weakest healer this expansion. Monks do have the option of just doing ranged healing, but then I feel like monk becomes lesser druids, since it's less mana efficient and without fistweaving, chi generation becomes a bit more problematic, no chi = no uplift (unless gylphed) and less mana tea, etc.
I don't thinking playing either class is harder or easier, in fact, being counted as melee and staying in melee range is actually advantageous on most fights, except Will of Emperor, since dodging devastating combos = not outputting dps to fistweave, but you do get an extra big attack on the boss afterwards. But since Blizzard did give the option not to fistweave, it's not that bad for monks.

Thanksgiving past again....

Another year's gone by. Last year was full of extreme joy and extreme horror. If one were to total it all, I wonder if we'd come out ahead or behind. Well, in the end, I believe and hope that all will balance out, so that when we do leave the world behind, the balance would be zero. We arrived with zero and leave with zero, that would seem the most quaint.

Here's hoping for a great next year.

Lazy Resto Druid BIS List Updated 11/21/2012

Now that all 16 bosses are out in heroic, time to make my BIS list and of course these are all heroic versions. This is all my personal opinion, just going by stats and ilvl!  So my old list from icy-veins is obsolete, guess it's getting deleted or something.
I'm color coding the location of drops.... Orange = ToES, Red = HoF, Green = MGV


Hat - Tier 14 piece - Terrace of Endless Springs Boss 4 or for the unfortunate Hood of Cursed Dreams - MGV Feng 

Neck - Zian's Choker of Coalesced Shadow (502 mastery) - MGV Spirit Kings vs Korven's Amber-Sealed Beetle (crit 509) HoF Boss 4 I would pick mastery probably... though higher ilvl.... :-/

Shoulders - Tier 14 piece - Terrace of Endless Springs Boss 3 or for the unfortunate Spaulders of the Divided Mind MGV Garajal

Back - Drape of Gathering Clouds - HoF Boss 2 (woohoo, my first bis)

Chest - Tier 14 piece - HoF Grand Empress or for the unfortunate Robes of Eighty Lights HoF Boss 3

Wrists - Bracers of Dark Thoughts - MGV Spirit Kings   seriously???? no mastery or haste bracers out there???

Hands - Tier 14 piece - HoF Boss 4 or for the unfortunate 496 crafted or the 509 Gauntlets of Undesired Gifts - HoF Boss 1

Waist - Stonecinch Belt (502)- MGV stone guards vs Weaver's Cord of Eternal Autumn (509)-Terrace of Endless Springs Boss 2   well, I would say stonecinch unless you can make the 6652 haste bp w/o it.

Legs - Magnetized Leggings - MGV Will or Tier 14 piece is bad imo

Feet -  Asani's Uncleansed Sandals (516 heroic elite) - Terrace of Endless Springs Boss 1
Ring 1 - Watersoul Signet (516 heroic elite) - Terrace of Endless Springs Boss 1 

Ring 2 - Seal of the Profane - HoF Boss 5

Trinket 1 - Spirits of the Sun - Terrace of Endless Springs Boss 2

Trinket 2 - Valor Trinket w/ +int and chance to proc + spirit.

Main Hand - Kri'tak, Imperial Scepter of the Swarm HoF Boss 6

Off-hand - Fan of Fiery Winds - MGV Feng

Terrace of the Endless Springs

This instance on normal is so easy, that none of the bosses took more than 3 attempts. I am looking very forward to the heroic versions. I feel like most of the mechanisms would make heroic quite challenging (except the first boss maybe...).
Since everything's trivial to heal, don't feel like just retyping what other people have already mentioned/streamed.

Now my personal opinion, I like Terrace, it's all outdoors and nice and bright. Pretty on the eyes, doesn't make me squirm with insects.

Resto druid 10m Heroic Will of the Emperor strategy

Um, this fight is strange. It's another execution type fight. It feels easier than spirit kings in that sense. Healing this is pretty easy if you have the proper soakers.

Symbosis: Hunter (Deterrence)
Talent: Doesn't really matter, I used HotW and Force of Nature.

Difference from normal: So there's no more titan gas phase, there's just a constant raid wide damage, which is very easy to heal through as a druid.
The Rages and Strengths create Titan Sparks after dying, which needs to be soaked without letting the Sparks reach the raid or the sparks will 1 shot non-damage reduction people within 8 yard range. Since the sparks spawn after rages die, be sure to typhoon and ursol's vortex the Rages so they're as far from raid as possible when they die.

Soaking: Hunter is OP for this, they can spec into 1minute deterrence, which means their deterrence will be up every other Titan Spark. Then fill in the gaps with priest dispersion, rogue shadow cloak, etc.

Strategy:
2 Healers, as little melee as possible, we brought 2, paladin to tank the Strength and rogue to soak rogue Titan Sparks left by Strengths with feign, etc.
Best to split healers into tank healing and raid healing, that way less running around for both healers, but do have tank healer call out if they need to move out of tank range to kite or avoid and the other healer will move in to help. Druids obviously prefer raid heal. Neither tank nor raid takes that much damage if they tank properly and soak properly.

Encounter is repeating between rage/strength spawns then break (in normal mode this is the titan gas phase, but in heroic, it's a nice calming period to regen and for dps to derp the bosses) I used the calm break period to HotW and dps too.

Rages strat
Some groups do CC first batch of Rages and AoE them down, our raid comp isn't very AoE friendly, so we chose to down the Rages asap and soak, until before the 2nd Courage spawn, then we CC, kill Courage then Rages. Works pretty well for us, but if your raid comp is different, you can try the other strat.

For healers, this is not hard at all, just stay in the middleish with the raid, tanks will tank to the sides, back up in a straight line through middle as needed, that way don't get hit by bosses. Since damage is constant, it's nice to throw Force of Nature in the center on cooldown and just let them do their thing while you run away or move accordingly.  Since there's no huge burst damage, Tranquility is use on see fit. Don't really need to plan it out with other healer. I used mine once when the Rages were kinda getting out of control during the 2nd Courage spawn due to CCs breaking early.

Oh, another thing is there seems to be a bug, where the bosses will magnetic pull healers when they first spawn. Not sure how to avoid it, but as long as you're not getting pulled back and forth between the bosses (happens sometimes) just hang out with the tank for 10 seconds after getting pulled, otherwise it'll just keep pulling you back.



Don't just tunnel on your grid though, watch where the rages are and where the sparks will spawn so you can run out of the way or kite accordingly.

That's pretty much it if your dps meets the dps check.

Once again I'll mention we are Recruiting....

Resto Druid 10m Heroic Blade Lord Ta'yak strat

Um, this boss is relatively easy... only thing new in this phase is boss does an extra ability that sucks players to him while he whirlwinds. It's not that bad, just makes it so that you have to keep healing while running. And of course, all of his abilities do more damage.

We ran 2.5 healers and as a note, disc priest is godly for this fight. Disc priest spends the whole fight doing 2 things, shielding everyone and smite atonement...

2 Phases, exactly like on normal.

Symbosis: Shaman (spiritwalker + tranq = OP during phase 2), Mage (ice block for Wind Step in Phase 1/getting out of tornadoes in phase 2)

Talents: HotW, I ran Tree form, but next time I'd want to try Force of Nature instead (well :-/.... most of my healing needed is during Phase 2 when tree form instant regrowth lifeblooms are great.... but... feels like less hps during phase 1.)
So I did try out Force of Nature, I like it more, just because during Phase 2, I'm going spiritwalker tranq anyway, so the tree form lifeblooms and regrowths aren't as useful after all. And since the trees aren't blown by the wind, could consider leaving them midway up to the boss to let them heal stragglers, or just blow them at the start of phase 2 to help heal everyone to full faster before run.
Without spiritwalker, tree form is pretty necessary, since other than monks, druids are probably the best running healers.

Phase 1:
Boss does abilities in the same order each time. As long as tanks don't mess up, tank healing is minimal and the rest is a dps check.
Ability 1: Tempest Blade, throws a tornado at a ranged person. The tornado never goes away and knocks back a little bit. Make sure you assign a column for all the ranged, so they can move south in their column gradually as the fight progresses without getting in 8 yard range w/ each other or let the tornado into melee area.

Ability 2: Wind Step. This one ticks 150k per 3 second now instead of 80k on normal, so you can't have 2 in raid at once or else it's pretty OMG for the healers. So every ranged needs to be >8yards apart. So the boss casts this whenever the previous one expires (25seconds or so?), so can never have >1 Wind Step in raid unless dpses were <8 yards and all got Wind Stepped. If mage ice blocks it off, that's basically 25 seconds for healers to relax.  O yeah, never ever let person with Wind Step dip below 40% hp if you can help it especially before ability 4.  To heal the Wind Step, shift lifebloom onto the person + rejuv + regrowth if omen procs + swiftmend + nourish/healing touches. It's pretty painful for druid solo, so probably need other healer to also heal wind steps with you.

Ability 3: Unseen Blade. Everyone except the person with Wind Step needs to stack together and take a huge hit in the face. If the person targeted for Unseen Blade is the person with Wind Step, have a Paladin BoP or priest pain suppression or Ironbark, 'cause otherwise high chance of death from Wind Step ticks after the blade. The stacking must be done well, stand in front of the boss's blade, otherwise if <5 people takes the hit... they'll all probably die.

Repeat Ability 1 and 2 then

Ability 4: I forgot the name, whatever that stupid Whirlwind attack is. Basically, he sucks you in, you run out and keep running until it ends. Stampeding roar is nice, but not necessary. During this time, all healers throw all instant casts on the person with Wind Step. Rejuv, Lifebloom, Nature Swift if necessary.

This cycle of abilities will continue until the boss hits 25% and starts Phase 2, pushing people to one side of the room and making you run tornadoes.

Phase 2:
As soon as this phase starts, don't start running yet, top off raid to nearly full, then start running. When people are getting <50%, Spiritwalker Tranquility! If you get caught in a tornado and fall behind, you might just have to cat form and sprint your way back up and hope other healers didn't mess up and can heal before you get there. O!!!! tree form actually gets cancelled by stampeding roar!! I did stampeding roar in tree form and it turned me into a bear!!! anyway, just something to watch out for.

When boss hits 12%, everyone, except for 1 tank + maybe a dps who can survive without healing for  a while, needs to ride the winds on the side back to the other side of the room while the left behind tank/dps brings the boss to 10% hp and he flies to the other side where the rest of the raid is already waiting. Then dps the boss down and hope it's before berserk.

When we cleared it, we had 2 dead dps when boss was 10% and so we hit berserk timer :). And everyone except our tank died, but he survived just long enough to shave off the final 0.4% hp. Epic epic.

Once again I'll mention we are Recruiting.... 

Resto druid 10m Heroic Four Kings strategy

Four Kings are down this week. Thanks to more gear and blizzard berserk timer increase.

Four Kings, ordering needs to be Subetai 2nd in order to have highest success rate. So lots of resets :( Better reset than wipe :).  *Update* well, apparently blizzard finally saved players the trouble and stopped randomizing the ordering (and mind you, they now set the 4 kings in the easiest order, so this boss is pretty easy now, but eh, doesn't really change the guide, since I didn't mention how Maddening shout during the orb kiting can wipe the raid anyway, but this won't happen anymore, so whatever.

Healer Number: 2 healers.
This whole fight is execution. Only difference from normal version for healers is once the boss hits 30%, 2nd boss will come alive. So need to heal 2nd tank. The Qiang and Zian also get shields that need to be mass dispelled (Qiang's can't be purged, purging counts as an attack, we think it's a bug... *update* they might have fixed this bug, since tranq shot is working fine now) because of huge raid damage if people attack with shield up.

Anyway, for this fight, I like Heart of the Wild and Force of Nature. There's not a specific moment to use tree form, but Force of Nature is nice in my opinion because it frees up healing so can help dps the bosses during transitions. And can use them during flankings or maddening shouts or just whenever you can use some free healing to rest your mana or running and don't want people to drop from lack of heals, the cooldown is so short that it really doesn't matter usually, except when you want to use HotW.

Symbosis mage is nice, ice blocking pinning arrows and other gonna die moments is nice.


Phase 1 Qiang:
Plant mushrooms on the raid that's stacked. Follow tank around and don't get hit by flanking order/annilihation.

Phase 2 Subetai:
Raid needs to stack until Qiang dies, so dps really needs to burn Qiang hard but don't forget to watch the shield. Here, force of nature, heart of the wild and help. If Qiang doesn't die before pinning arrow, then it's pretty wipe for the raid.  As a druid, we don't have anything that takes us out of pinning, so symbosis mage, a 2nd tranq is not very necessary. Depends on your raid comp I guess, but we only used 2 healing cooldowns + s.priest vamp.

Phase 3/4: Depending on Meng or Zian, burn healing cooldowns on Meng's Maddening shouts. Zian is not special for healers, just kite orbs. O yeah, I forget if it's Meng or Zian, but one of them causes spell reflection DoT, so you have to yell at dps to stop dpsing until topped off if their HP drops below 40%.

When left with only boss 4, help dps or keep raid alive depending on if it's zian or meng, but careful you don't explode raid if it's zian.


This fight is easy for healers. The rest of the job is really hoping for no silliess (can't dodge volley, flanking, annilihations, attacking Qiang & Zian's shield)/over kills during maddening shout/people not stopping dps with the DoT that reflects spells back at them (i forgot if that's from meng or zian) and hoping your dps knows how to interrupt/stun, etc.

I need a new anime to watch...

Um... so I finished un-go, that was surprisingly better than I thought it would be. Usually any mystery show that goes supernatural loses my interest, because well... magic made the closed room, so kinda stupid. But this show sticks to only one premise and that is the detective can extract one honest answer from a person at a time, deeming the mystery still sorta mind boggling and interesting to figure out.

Restarting on One Piece, but honestly, the mermaid island arc is stupid.... villains aren't interesting, I hate the low IQ princess and her crybaby mom. I was so happy when Otohime died, though that's unintended by oda-sensei i'm sure. Anyway, hopefully this arc will wind down, I heard good things about the next arc.

Really want a new anime to watch, one that isn't going to be ongoing into oblivion like Detective Conan, one that doesn't always end with the girl getting together with no one because the manga is ongoing or game has her picking from 8 guys. Meh..... headache.... I wonder sometimes do most animes feel generic to me now because I've watched so many? or has the industry really stopped churning out unique fun animes. Or maybe I'm just spoiled, thinking that the year Death Note, Code Geass, Ouran High, Melancholy of Haruhi dominated the top 4 (imo any one of those could've stood at the top if they were released separately in any of the later years) would be the norm when that year is the true outlier. Granted last year had Mahou Shoujo Madoka, steins gate, but really.... they pale in comparison.

Resto druid 10m Grand Empress Shek'zeer strat

Ah, I didn't want to do this boss because I'm a bit burnt out by raiding in general, but I got called in last night anyway, because raid's pug healer was just too stupid.  Since we downed it, might as well write up a strat. So 3 phases.

Phase 1:
Tank and spank with a little nuance.
Mechanics 1: Empress summons randomly in the room 2 yellow swirly areas that has HP. Their HP will drop and when their HP reaches 0, they will explode and do AoE damage to the raid. So having 2 explode at the same time is bad. In order to have their HP dip faster, a person has to be inside or super close to it casting spells (so sitting in ice block inside is not the way to go). The person to go inside should usually be the person debuffed with Cry of Terror (mechanics 2) and once inside cannot be healed. Always have people go inside the lower HP swirly so it'll explode before the other one.
Healing cooldown all the explosions since won't need the cooldowns in phase 2.

Mechanics 2: Cry of Terror, random raid member debuff. With it on, that raid member will do mild raid damage ticks to the raid, it's healable, but if they run inside the swirly thing, only the person with the debuff will take damage. They just need to beware and run out when their HP is low to get healed and don't run into the yellow swirly if the yellow swirly is close to exploding unless they have an invul ready.

Phase 2:
So all these mean adds come running at the raid, 2 big ones, 6 little ones. Tanks need to pick them up and kite them. Therefore, it's best to Stampede Roar for the kiting tank when he needs one.
The little ones will fixate on random raid members and if they catch up, close to 1 shot them (so can take 2 hits). These guys are really slow though, so kiting is pretty trivial.
Meanwhile, the fixates will also spawn resins on the ground, they're little orange/yellowish fizzy areas. People need to pick them up by walking over them and (here i'm a bit don't care...) either touch another player or another player also with resin to form a bubbling orange pool. Then 3 more resins need to be ran into the pool (careful you don't form extra pools and waste resins when running resins), that makes the pool turn into an Amber Trap. Form 2 of these, kill all the little adds (very important, because little adds can break traps) and tanks need to kite the 2 big adds into the trap. After which the big adds will auto die when the trap ends. Both big adds need to get trapped and die, or else it's pretty wipe. Phase 1 will repeat again around this time.

Phase 3:
This starts when boss HP drops below a certain point, should be before a 2nd phase 2 starts. This phase, boss summons purple stuff on the ground, run out of that and stack on boss.
2 raid members will be targeted with "future" fear and explosion. So the targeted people need to run out before they get feared and also explode on the raid, but not too far as to make them undispellable by healers. O yeah, feared player will also take ticking damage. I died during this phase because 2 healers got feared, didn't get dispelled, and fear ran me all the way to the other side of the room and ticking damage killed me :D. The fear lasts very long, greater than 12 seconds :).
Dps burn burn burn, and she'll die.

This whole fight I didn't plant mushrooms :( but next time we kill, maybe I'll be a little more free to experiment.

Comments, suggestions, questions, even debates are welcome.

Resto druid 10m Amber-Shaper Un'sok strat

Um... actually the first 4 bosses is pretty trivial healing wise. So I don't really want to write about it.
Gah... this is my 4th title edit, apparently this boss isn't called Shapeshifter :D.

Amber Shaper is pretty easy to heal too, just beware of the Amber Parasite. I'm lazy and tired today, so just going to type out strat phase wise.
Amber Parasite: this is a DoT that increases DoT damage with healing put into the person. Basically, as little healing on the person as possible (no overheals for sure) and HoTs are actually nicer than big heals because it'll gradually build up ticks, instead of spurt huge ticks.  These ticks are magic damage.

Phase 1: All about the tanks and dps. Amber Parasite is trivial to heal in this phase, especially for druids. If on a player, have no healers heal the player until player is at <50% hp. Then, put a rejuv on the player and wait a few more seconds, and start pouring a few healing touch/nourish on the player.
During this phase, you can also have the dps, bubble, divine, ice block, cloak, or whatever to get the debuff off themselves. However, I recommend saving these cooldowns for phase 2 if phase 2 is going to start soon.
 As a druid, if the debuff falls on me, I'm really happy. I wait for my hp to tick to 50%, pop a barkskin, wait 2 more seconds, rejuv, and then 1 healing touch, done. Don't have to think about it at all.

Phase 2: Now it gets tricky? Not really if your group isn't stupid and everyone knows how to interrupt the big add and their own Amber Explosion. Save healing cooldowns for those Amber Explosions that doesn't get interrupted and hope it's less than 3 or 4 times total during the whole phase. Now, if you use tranquility or any healing cooldowns that heals during this phase, you have to tell the person with the Amber Parasite on them to remove the debuff or go invulnerable, whatever, or they will die. In which case, have a rebirth ready, since there's probably no saving them, since adding more heals on them will only make them tick larger and just die in 1 tick. When that happened on me, I did get saved by our shadow priest who did a HP swap at the last second so the final tick put me at 2% hp, but if your comp doesn't have a shadow priest...

How to pilot the construct: I decided to add this because apparently people get confused by the timers and what not. And since healers can get turned into one.... so our raid figured out that to keep the debuff on the big add without worrying about missing the cooldown for the Amber Explosion, just cast 1 whenever the big add casts something. So if it's casting Fling/stomp, whatever (it doesn't interrupt those but you get to refresh the debuff)... as long as you cast 1 then, your cooldown will be back up before the next attack/explosion. Ta-da.... less freaking out about dbm timers and only need to watch boss cast, your cast, and i guess the yellow energy bar.

Phase 3: Finally easy phase again, if you reach this phase, healers just heal people who aren't mutated. If you are mutated... well, just pilot the construct and it is great fun. Spam 1, interrupt yourself, drink pools, etc.

Btw, we cleared this boss with everyone mutated, so when the boss died, everyone died. Hilarious hilarious :D.