We are going to take a new spin on your Restoration Druid and we are going to walk you through how to build a great character for you Wow’ers to enjoy throughout your game play- The Resto Druid!

Creating the character is the easy part of building a great Resto Druid.  You can choose from four different characters.  For the horde you have the choice of a Troll or Tauren race, which both have benefits towards being a druid.  For the Alliance you can choose the Night Elf or the Worgen.  For this specific guide, I am leveling through the game with you to give the most up to date information with Retail World of Warcraft.

I personally like the Worgen starting area.  Therefore, we are going to start out with that character. Leveling in the start area is really fun if you enjoy shooting, hitting, kicking, or spell casting on werewolves.

Learning Skills

I spent a total of forty five minutes getting form level one to level seven.  You will be able to train up in two different locations within Gilneas before you are excited out to the small town of Duskhaven and then one more trainer is located in this town.  The following is what you will learn while you are in Gilneas City:

• Rejuvenation
• Moonfire
• Thorns

As you know you can arrange them on your action bars at the bottom in any sequence you wish.

Questing

There are a total of six starter quests located within Gilneas city in the Merchant Square.  These quests are pretty straightforward as they do not take much time to complete and are located within the area of the quest.  Once you reach the Military District in Gilneas city you will have eleven more quests to complete in order to be able to continue forward in the quest line.

One of the quests to point out would be where you are searching for the prison.  This is directly in front of King Greymane on his horse through the gates with all of the fighting men.  You will go directly through the left hand door when you walk through the gate and up the stairs to reach the prison quarters.  The rest of the quests in this area are self-explanatory.

Next area of quests to complete is in Greymane Court and Cathedral Quarter where you will find another four quests.  At the end of this last quest in Cathedral Quarter—Last Stand—you must kill off ten Frenzied Stalkers that appear inside the Cathedral once you accept the quest.  After you have completed this quest you will be teleported out to Duskhaven.

Because you have been bitten by a Worgen you will be transforming throughout the teleportation and receive four extra racial abilities:

• Aberration – This reduces the duration of curses by fifteen percent.
• Darkflight – This increases your movement speed by seventy percent for ten seconds.
• Flayer – This allows you to skin much faster and increases your skinning skill by fifteen.
• Viciousness – This will increase your critical strike change by one percent.

Once you have reached Duskhaven you will have access to a whole new line of quests that take you all over the land around Gilneas City.  After learning your new skills, you are ready to begin the fight to the next quest area.  You can also find professional trainers in Duskhaven.  As you play, be sure to save up money for training and professions.

Stay tuned for updates!

I’m afraid there is no easy answer, only a set of goals you can strive for… the numbers below assume a 5% haste buff from someone in your raid since even most 10 mans have this now.

Below you can see how much haste is needed to add an additional tick to each of our HoTs.  Some of these numbers aren’t very achievable at the moment.  My current goal (which I have not yet met) is 2004 haste to buff my wildgrowth.  You can set your own goals based on the information below.  The number in the (parenthesis) assumes you have Dark Intent.

Rejuvenation:
4 ticks by default
5 ticks — 12.5%  = 915 haste (516)
6 ticks — 37.5% = 3964 haste (3476)

Wild Growth:
7 ticks by default
8 ticks 7.1%  = 262 haste
9 ticks 21.4%  = 2004 haste (1573)
10 ticks 35.7%  = 3746 haste (3264)

Regrowth:
3 ticks by default
4 ticks 16.6%  = 1423 haste (1009)

Lifebloom:
10 ticks by default
11 ticks 5% = 0 haste
12 ticks 15%  = 1220 haste (812)
13 ticks 25% = 2440 haste (1996)
14 ticks 35% = 3659 haste (3180)

(numbers from naperken, thanks)

1.) Don’t blanket the raid.  Yeah, it seems to go against years of brain programming, but don’t!

2.) Use nourish, all the time, all the freaking time.  Nourish is cheap as hell and it refreshes lifebloom on the tank (or whomever.)  Yeah it’s small, and slow, but it’s sadly our new bread and butter spell.

3.) Did I mention not to blanket the raid, this is really importaint

4.) Intellect, Spirit….. haste….. and then spell power.

5.) And finally, last but not least, don’t blanket the raid!  I’m serious, you’ll be OOM in no time if you do

Also, I know your DPS doesn’t wanna hear it, but they need to be responsible for their own health.  Health stones, bandages, and most importantly being very raid aware of incoming damage and avoiding everything you can.  The old “it’s not that much damage” attitude won’t cut it, it all adds up!

Also, did I mention, don’t blanket the raid?

You know, I’m just not happy with being a druid anymore  Now that I want to change to something else, I just hate how homogenized things are.  I liked HoTs, and healing on the run, and being different from the other classes.  I know they had their reasons… but I don’t like it.  I want druid healers to be druid healers… not a slightly modified priest.

Ah well… if I don’t post again, Merry Christmas!

Anyway good news!  You can still get collector’s at Best Buy! The down side is you have to pay for it all upfront, but the up-side is that most Best Buys are doing midnight release.  You’ll have to call your specific store to know for sure.  So basically, buy it online, choose in-store pickup, show up at midnight (or the next morning) and you’re good to go

Ok, let’s start off with a bit of a nerf, cuz hey, that’s always fun.  They are nerfing revitalize

Revitalize is now a 2 Ranks talent, down from 3 Ranks. Now has a 20% chance to proc at all ranks, now regenerates 1/2% of your total mana (down from 3%) and cannot occur more than once every 12 sec (up from 6 sec).

So, I guess we’ll get an extra talent click to burn somewhere but, that’s significantly less mana return… 3% per 6 seconds as opposed to 2% per 12 seconds.  It saddens me

Here is the skin for our PVP set if you’re interested:

They also released a lot of Cataclysm loot, which I’ll be combing through and posting about later in the week.  I’m getting pretty excited for Cataclysm!

Brez me!

Yeah, that got sorta… I guess nerfed.  You can read the blue posts for yourself here.  Basically, you can use one battle resurrection or soul stone per fight on ten man, and three on 25 man.  So having 2 druids and a lock in 10 man doesn’t give you three screw-ups.  I don’t like it but I’m sure we’ll all cope

RAF?

So, as one of the things to pass the time between now and cataclysm, I recruited-a-friend two of my guildies for some super fast leveling fun.  Holy crap is it fast, and in turn fun!  The 300% experience is amazing, and for ever 60 we do, between the two of them, they can grant me another level 60.  Here is us doing a trio of druids:

This of course means I wont be able to tap into 3/3 Moonglow which saddens me a little.  I like making my spells cheeper

I haven’t made any changes just yet, since mana really isn’t an issue at 80.  But as we look towards 85, you may see me making this adjustment

http://restorationdruid.com/2011/01/24/haste-in-cataclysm/

for updated information!!

Haste:

In WotLK haste didn’t effect our heal over time spells (HoTs), unless you glyphed to have it work on your rejuvenation.  If you made this choice (which I didn’t) it would make your heals tick faster, but they would in turn be shorter as a consequence.  Now however, they don’t necessarily get shorter.  At certain haste points your HoT is ticking fast enough to actually get another tick added on.  This determines what haste we are aiming for.

The haste points at which we gain another tick on Rejuvenation are 12.5%, 37.5% and 62.5% haste (see reference).  With Regrowth it’s 16.66%, 50%, and 83.33%, and with Lifebloom it’s 5%, 15%, 25%, 35%, 45%, 55%, 65%, 75%, 85% and 95%.  Since we want as many ticks as possible we should be aiming for as many of these benchmarks as possible.

So What do I need?? So, if you were to set a goal for haste, 1016 haste with raid buffs gives you that 37.5% you need for the extra tick of Rejuvenation.  With Nourish being so slow, Healing Touch being viable, and Lifebloom adding ticks so quickly, if you can go above this haste point it’s not a bad thing, but defiantly try to hit it as a minimum.

Critical Strike

Prior to 4.0.1 a druid’s HoTs were unable to crit, with the exception of rejuvenation if you were using your tier nine 4-piece bonus.  That is no longer the case, now every tick of every HoT has the ability to crit.

My Thoughts on this: I feel like crit is a far better stat for a DPS than it is for us.  On a boss, every time you crit and deal extra damage, its simply that, extra damage.  As a healer, when you crit there is always a good chance that it goes to overheal.  Plus, I don’t like relying on a “chance” to crit.  That being said, of course crit isn’t bad for us, and sure it’s nice when things do crit.  I just think that it’s still not going to be a stat I focus on, rather it will be a stat that tags along on my gear that is no longer worthless.

No more rebirthing every attempt, unless you run back reeeeeeeeeaaaaaaallllllllllllllyyyyyyyy slow, the CD is back up to 30 mins.  That’s a shame, I liked it at 10.

MOTW is now the same spell as Blessing of Kings.  It doesn’t take a reagent, so you can keep buffing over the paladin a minimal cost to yourself  Also GOTW is gone, it’s the same spell now.

Resto Deeeeeeeps

I made my off-spec a Resto-DPS spec!  Fury of Stormrage is just tooooo fun to not play with, even if I don’t see it as part of a regular raiding build.  I even use some DPS glyphs in this spec.  Played around with it last night and when procs were good and I kept up Moonfire and Insect Swarm I was hitting 4k DPS unbuffed on a dummy, and that spikes up when I go into tree form.  Ok, so I’m not “real” dps, but it’s still fun!  But tree form to DPS not only looks weird but feels weird.  I’m sure we’ll get useto it!

New Tree Form:

Is it just me or does the face of that tree look very Taunka like?  And is that a soul patch?  I’m sorry but this is a BOY tree, give me a GIRL tree form please.  I’ve heard there we’ll be a minor glyph to retain the old tree form.

Reforging

I reforged my crit into haste  I like it, its kinda neet.  Since it only reforges 40% of the stat it’s still better to get the stat you want initially if you can, but when you just can’t… this helps!

Palidruid?

With all my spell power going into intellect my mana pool is HUGE!  Anyone else feel like a paladin?

Wowtal.com is bugging for me this morning but I’ll try to update my spec post when I get home from work today