Filed under: Druid

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat , bear , restoration and balance druids. It's time again folks! A new expansion is on its way, and I want all of the cool shots you can snag of your balance druid living the life in the new world. Send anything you like to tyler@wow.com!

Welcome, balance druids! It's the week before Cataclysm, and all of the WoW internet is abuzz with excitement. This is the week of leveling guides; what zones are the best to quest in, which quests to avoid, which are a must, what spec and glyphs you should use to maximize your damage and uptime -- all that good stuff. If you are looking for such information in this week's Shifting Perspectives, then I'm sadly going to disappoint you this time. Fortunately for me, I've grown a thick skin that can withstand anyone's stare of disapproval, and I've got the Rent soundtrack blaring, so everything is splenda.

Instead of focusing on the leveling experience that everyone will soon get to enjoy, I want to talk about those quirky little things about balance druids that have become a bit of a topic as of late. A few of these issues are things that were brought up during the beta process; some of them are issues that only developed on live servers. A lot of things have changed recently, and the new WoW forums are all a-twitter with concerns both from and about balance druids. Will we "suffer" -- though I doubt anyone who's been playing a balance druid since release would call Wrath "suffering" -- another expansion with faulty mechanics? Not likely at this point, but there are always things worth improving and looking into.

Patch 4.0.3a Hotfixes

• Players can no longer skin Crushcog Sentry-Bots or Crushcog Battle Suits in Dun Morogh... because they don't have skin.
• Stats on the Weather-Beaten Fishing Hat have been reduced, as it can currently be equipped by players of all levels.
• Crafty players again found a way to catch Cataclysm fish. Crafty designers have made this impossible without a Cataclysm key attached to a player's account.

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There's a lot more than fishing issues to discuss, of course. But I thought those were the most amusing.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This week, we write ourselves a cheat sheet to haul ass to level 85.

Last week, I promised I'd take a look at individual articles' popularity after the "Why (or why not) to play a druid" series finished, and here it is. In order of most to least popular:

1. Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a worgen druid
2. Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a night elf druid
3. Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a tauren druid
4. Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a troll druid

I'll look at the numbers again a few months to see if they steady a bit; the troll article hasn't been up for as long as its night elf counterpart, so I wouldn't have expected it to be competitive regardless. I will say that the Alliance druids enjoy a significant pageview advantage over their Horde counterparts, and that doesn't give me hope that future population numbers will equalize.

I wrote a lot of today's article because I'm lazy as sin and wanted a quick reference guide available. Past the cut you'll find information for bear and cat druids on hit caps, reputation grinds, the numbers you should have before stepping into heroics, reforging, and a host of other things that would otherwise have required me to get off my butt and Google something. Resto players, I haven't forgotten about you! Your version will go live later this week.

By the way, the above video is a quick look at healing one of the earliest pulls in heroic Grim Batol. I was sorting through my beta videos and realized I'd forgotten to upload it for the worgen lore article.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat , bear , restoration and balance druids. This week, I am recovering from the after-effects of indulging in far too much food and reflecting on the changes to come -- oh, and getting some ever important Thanksgiving achievements done!

What a wonderful world we have entered. Thanksgiving has come and gone -- or just happening for some of us -- and the world of Azeroth has been shattered completely by the coming of Deathwing. Aside from the fires, destruction, earthquakes, and other destructive forces wrecking havoc across the land, everything seems to be going rather well. One of the biggest things to do at this point in the game is collect the new pets made available or level a new alt to check out new class/race combinations and the new quests that have appeared. Content for level 80s is a little bit dry at this point. Still, everything else aside, there are plenty of other issues to deal with.

Even though 4.0 has been out for a long while, there is still quite a bit of misinformation and questions out there that need to be addressed. I know that some of this is going to be a re-hash of "old" information, but please indulge me just this once on the matter. My concern, and the focus of this piece, is to bring to light issues that we're facing as well as to present options that we can use to work around those problems. Some of it is a little fluff, some of it may not seem exclusively balance-related, but all of it is important in the long run; trust me on that.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This week, we complete our lore series with the Darkspear trolls.

The troll article's been the most requested among the lore articles I've been writing. Trolls are such an infrequently played race that I'm at a loss to understand this phenomenon. The only plausible explanations are that existing troll players are among the most fanatical in the game, or that there's a large and eager population of people who've been dying for the chance to have a troll druid while refusing to play a troll of any other class.

By the way, if you're at all interested in how this series has done so far in terms of popularity for the individual races, I'll have a quick look at that next week, before getting into the 4.0.3a guide. As of now, the worgen article has been the most popular, followed closely by the night elves. Tauren are dead last, by a margin of several thousand hits. I'm madly curious to see how the troll article's going to do.

If you're looking for the rest of the articles in our series, here they are:

• Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a night elf druid
• Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a tauren druid
• Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a worgen druid
• And today's article, Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a troll druid

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat , bear , restoration and balance druids. This week is all about questions, and whether or not moonkin are too fat to fly. Hey, if you can dream it, then anything is possible, right?

Cataclysm is coming out soon, The Shattering is just around the corner, and the entire world is in chaos. Life certainly is grand, isn't it? During these troubling times, players have many questions about the changes that are occurring and that have already occurred -- questions about rotations, specs, glyphs, questing, leveling, dungeoning, and raiding. I like questions, and I like answering them even more; however, there is nothing so pure as a question. Questions are a beautiful thing, and that is what I would like to focus on in this article.

People (myself included) seem to have a love of asking questions, but the sad thing is that their sole focus also seems to be on the answers, never the question itself. That's a vital flaw; it is never about the answer, but it is always about the question. Asking the right questions can sometimes be far more important than getting the answers -- which is why I want to know your questions.

What is is about balance druids -- anything about balance druids -- that you would like to know? What are your dreams for balance druids? If your balance druid could do anything, anything at all, what would you like it to be? As for myself, I have plenty of questions.

Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand pooh-bah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a WoW blog for all things UI-, macro- and addon-related. If you're looking for more healing advice, check out the Plus Heal community.

I've been receiving a steady amount of email and questions in regards to healing for the expansion. Rather than coming up with something boring, I decided to gather up what I had and answer them all here. In my classes, I know that when one person asks a question, a good number of the students are thinking the same thing. It just so happens that the one guy who raised his hand has more guts than everyone else (although personally, there have been times where I wished that one guy would just keep his hand down so we could all leave class on time -- but I digress).

The answers I'm issuing here are based on personal experience and a fairly small sample size. Take it with some salt (or if you're like me, soya sauce).

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This week, you might want to get that bite looked at.

Today, we're going to tackle the subject of worgen druids, whose lore is an even bigger rat's nest than the contentious subject we discussed last week. As a note on that, I feel obligated to stick to the official line, which is that night elves were the first druids. Read Xarantaur's flavor text again. Not only does he skirt the issue, but his own story is an oblique confirmation that he probably wasn't among the first druids if the Warcraft RPG's information on racial lifespans is still canon.

Malfurion Stormrage is a young adult by the War of the Ancients. Xarantaur references the War, the Sundering, and a lengthy period spent traveling Kalimdor in search of stories. He was about to die when he was gifted with immortality by Nozdormu, so it's probable that he, too, was a young adult when the War began. By night elf reckoning, a "young adult" (even before the immortality granted by the World Tree) is between 100 and 300 years old; a tauren with a vastly shorter natural lifespan would be between 30 and 50. Even allowing for the smallest natural age gap, Malfurion predates Xarantaur by at least 50 years, and probably a lot more, given that he and a host of other night elf druids enter Ysera's service in the Emerald Dream after the Sundering. While it's likely that the tauren weren't taught druidism long after the night elves, Blizzard's official line is that night elves were the first druids. They may retcon this in the future or at the very least clarify (and I hope they do), but Xarantaur's existence doesn't conflict with the idea of night elves being first.

Anyway, if you're looking for the rest of the articles in our series, here they are:

• Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a night elf druid
• Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a tauren druid

Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand pooh-bah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a WoW blog for all things UI-, macro- and addon-related. If you're looking for more healing advice, check out the Plus Heal community.

I've been having a blast lately on the Cataclysm beta. I managed to sneak into a few raids on both 10- and 25-player raids. Even better? I got to do it as holy! While I was interested in seeing how I could cope with the new healing mechanics, my primary purpose was to evaluate what the overall healing game would be like in a raiding environment. It isn't enough for me to see the posts and see the numbers or the discussion. I myself need to be in there and do it. I figured while I was at it, I could record a video of a few encounters and do direct comparisons between 10s and 25s, along with detailing the challenges with both.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat , bear , restoration and balance druids. This week we are going in the darkest, smelliest, most fantastical places around Azeroth in search of epic loot, epic encounters, and hopefully being able to come out alive by more than the skin of our teeth.

It seems that my fellow Shifting Perspectives cohort Allison Robert miffed a few people in her latest installment in regards to druidic lore, so I'm going to add a bit of clarification -- because I'm that much of a nice guy. The tauren were not the first druids; the night elves were the first druids. In fact, the first druids were clearly the blood elves -- who captured the Naaru Elune, sapped her nature-ness and used her holy powers to create a race of super-druids that then spread chaos across Azeroth. Their destruction was so terrible that they were banished to Outland, where they constructed Botanica, an interdimensional spaceship, in an effort to grow their own world tree and conquer the universe as we know it. This conquest was only thwarted by Rhonin going back in time to slay the blood elf druid leader, High Botanist Freywinn, before their project could be completed, leaving the blood elf druids stranded in Botanica until wayward adventurers butchered them all as they made their way toward Kael'thas Sunstrider.

And now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

Now that we all have our facts straight, I want to get down to the business of talking about dungeon diving as it will be in Cataclysm. It's common knowledge by now that future dungeons are nothing akin to what we have seen in Wrath; mobs hit really flippin' hard, so hard that tanking an entire pack solo is entirely out of the question. Using CC is a requirement of the new dungeons, and it's not the only change that players need to be prepared for. Focusing on the tank's target, avoiding incoming damage, and possibly even healing yourself in times of trouble also need to be considered. Dungeons, particularly the heroics, can be very dangerous, and you should be as prepared for them as you possibly can.

A lot of people seem somewhat terrified of the new Vengeance mechanic and how it might play in PvP. People are always leery of tanking specs in PvP, due to the general tendency of people playing in arenas and BGs to want to, you know, kill the other guys. Tanks are generally designed to be harder to kill, which tends to make people nervous, especially when tanking specs saw increased damage output in Wrath of the Lich King and went from "Hey, guys, look, it's a free kill!" to "Wait, you mean trying to burn down the dude specced and geared to not die is a bad idea?"

The forums seem to be rampant with terror that Vengeance will rule them all. I personally don't see the concern. Vengeance doesn't stack up terribly fast and it falls off fairly quickly; you'd need to focus fire a tank for significant levels of damage while he was being focus healed (and you'd need to completely ignore his or her healers) in order for Vengeance to really be a concern.

But don't take my word for it -- just ask Ghostcrawler. Not only do the developers not think Vengeance will be an issue in PvP, if it turns out to be, they'll just turn it off.

Ghostcrawler - Re: So Vengeance... am I doing this wrong?

Q u o t e:

In group PvP, there is an answer to vengeance. Don't attack the tank. Vengeance is a really good idea imo. If you are sitting on a tank and stacking that buff up, why shouldn't they do comparable damage? And from my experience, even with a max stacked vengeance, the coils between blood and unholy are relatively the same. Also, there is more to DPS between the two specs than Deathcoil. Even if someone is sitting on my blood DK I can assuredly say Unholy and Frost do more overall DPS, in pvp.

If a couple of people are beating on a tank, Vengeance isn't likely to stack very high. You need to take damage that is a big chunk of your whole health pool, which typically only bosses are available to provide.

Now if you have several folks beating on a tank flag carrier, then Vengeance may stack up, but once you have several people, you almost certainly have a way to dispel the Vengeance or just CC the tank.

If Vengeance ever gets to be a problem in PvP, we'll just remove it, plain and simple. The mechanic is only there to help with raid gear scaling, not to give tanks a fun toy for PvP.

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Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This week, welcome to Thunder Bluff.

This week, we're continuing our series on why (or why not) to play a particular druidic race in Cataclysm, and today we'll continue with the tauren. Fair warning: We tread on some expansion spoilers in this article.

If you're looking for the first article in the series, you'll find it here: Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a night elf druid. I may expand that article a bit with the benefit of more experience with the revamped night elven questing areas in Cataclysm, and I'll drop a note in a future column if and when that occurs.

Yet again, a forum discussion of a singular topic (blood DK tanks and their diseaseless rotation, as discussed by our own Daniel Whitcomb last week) has led to some really fascinating perspectives on how the game is designed, how "intended" rotations were and will be discovered, and how much room there is to allow or discourage variant builds and rotations. Poster Deathsaint opened the discussion with the subject of relearning rotations, something we discussed last week in terms of DPS spec design. Things got interesting fast.

Ghostcrawler - Re: GC: Blood Tanking Instructions?

You are missing the point of that quote. It is not "players shouldn't have choices," as many of you are inferring. It's that "there should be more thought on the part of the designers for how various abilities are supposed to be used and those roles should be more apparent to players."

There has never really been a time in the game when you could just do whatever you wanted with your class and be equally effective. Then, as now, smart players doing a lot of homework would figure out the most optimized way to play. You can choose to follow their recommendations, try to find an even more optimized way to play, or just do your own thing because that's more enjoyable for you, knowing that you may pay the price of being less optimized.

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What's interesting here is the change in emphasis.

Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand pooh-bah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a WoW blog for all things UI-, macro- and addon-related. If you're looking for more healing advice, check out the Plus Heal community.

I can just feel my mana regeneration draining away. Have you seen some of the healing notes on the recent beta patch? Discipline priests and restoration druids had some adjustments made to their mana talents. As holy priest, my mana feels fairly tight as it is.

But not everything is as it seems. I stressed it before, but mana regeneration is one side of the equation. Unavoidable damage and avoidable damage are aspects that need to be taken into account. The feeling that I get when I look around the community is that each respective class got nerfed. But here's a thought: If every class gets nerfed, is it really a nerf? I mean, we're still relatively equal to each other.