Posts filed under 'Druid'
I logged on Friday night and decided it was time for me to improve my gear.
After doing a bit of research I had found that the gear I was wearing (even the blues) really wasn’t that bad and so decided to invest in regemming, getting armour patches and enchants on everything, even adding some decent leg armour. I was concentrating mainly on Stamina as that was probably the stat I was lacking in most.
My health improved quite nicely going from just over 19k to over 22k in caster form, which put me at over 30k health in bear form unbuffed. My armour is about 30k, and my dodge chance is about 33%.
Our main tank was levelling an alt so the guild was quite happy for me to run as the tank to gain more experience.
We started with the
heroic of the day, the culling of stratholme.Quite a quick heroic and can be frenetic. We wiped twice, both times , through mistakes I made.
One was piling in to a bunch of mobs with feral charge, just putting me out of healing range.
The second wipe was just running out of rage when mobs spawned at either ends of a corridor in one of the buildings. No rage to try and gather the mobs together and they were running everywhere. Sadly I failed to get aggro back in time, end result was a dead healer and a wipe.
I did feel bad as we couldn’t remember the last time we wiped on this heroic. Still, I’ll ensure it doesn’t happen again.
It went smoothly after that and we beat the final boss (I won’t say downed him as he doesn’t die 
)
After much discussion we decided to do utgarde keep, and then follow that with the harder utgarde pinnacle.
Utgarde keep was a piece of cake. I’d tanked it easily the night before and noticed a huge difference from my gear upgrades (not to mention my gains in experience).
Utgarde pinnacle was another first time tanking experience. It has one very difficult fight in it. I’d only been in there once after being a fresh level 80, and we wiped tonnes on one particular boss.
However this time round it went pretty well. It’s a gauntlet type affair. When you run towards the boss, he mounts a dragon and flys off. One person picks up harpoons and when the boss is in range shoots him with the harpoon. In the mean time, loads of big vrykul fellas run down the hall towards you, and you have to pick them up and move on towards the end of the hall. The dragon occasionally flies down and does a frost breath down one side of the hall or other, so you have to move to avoid that. Wave after wave of these vrykuls come and you have to pick up the aggro on all of them – which can be quite difficult as a bear tank due to the longish cooldown on your roar.
Eventually the boss comes down and dismounts. He does a whirlwind type thing – going after one person at times , and you have to avoid it. ( I really must pay more attention to the bosses names).
I struggled grabbing the aggro fully on the waves the first time and we died after the boss got to the ground, however the second time went a lot better, thanks to the ret pally taunting off a mob that I had missed that decided it wanted to say hello to the healer, and the boss was dead.It was pretty easy after that. I did have one scary moment on a bad pull but recovered nicely.
It was still quite early and so it was off to do a heroic nexus run. Nobody really wanted to do it but our healer was after a mace from the end boss (called something like the mace of unrequited love) so we went there.
This one was an absolute cake walk. I’d learnt a lot from the tanking of the other instances and we burned through the place.
One boss we used to find hard when we first started doing heroics we breezed through (anomulus), one guildie Jude even commented that she thought this was the quickest we had ever downed him.
All other bosses are fairly simple. The end boss can be problematic if you don’t know what you are doing but now he is no problem at all.
At the end of it all I felt like a proper tank. I’ve got used to watching the other members of the team, and have recovered mobs that were going for the healer before the healer had to worry. My guildies warnings were coming after I spotted what was happening, so I’m happy with that.
I’ve got quicker on the growls and aoe taunts now, which makes a huge difference, when mobs can one or two shot your healer.
I’ve learnt some things to watch for when pulling as well.
And most importantly, I’m having fun too.
March 2nd, 2009
I mentioned to my guild master and the main guild tank (another feral druid) that I wouldn’t mind trying my hand at some tanking.
I’d only ever tried tanking once on my druid, around level 73 having just respecced from Moonkin to feral. I had no understanding of what I was doing and it was a mess. That put me off tanking for quite a while (I got some good natured ribbing from my guildies over my tanking abilities - or lack of them - for quite some time).
However, I figured with all i’ve learnt since then that it was time to try again.
My plan was to break myself in gently with a couple of normal instance runs just to get used to it and learn the ropes.
Instead our guild master suggest we try Utgarde keep heroic and see how it goes, and if I do well we can go on to try gun’drak, the heroic of the day.
I was nervous and headed off to respecc. A straight 60 points in feral and 11 in resto later and it was back to Dalaran. I swapped out a couple of glyphs for more bear form suitable ones, settling for growl, mangle and maul (if i remember rightly).
My hp felt a bit low. I had only 25-26k when I was in the instance. I’ve hit as much as 30k with buffs but not in last nights group which consisted of a fire mage, ret pally, rogue, resto druid and of course myself.
I was pleasantly surprised when we completed Utgarde keep with no wipes whatsoever. I was nervous approaching each boss – especially the last, but it all went well.
My aggro generation was fine and the healer was able to keep me topped up so the guild was quite happy for me to tank Gun’Drak.
(We had been in there the night before with our main tank and struggled with the Snake boss. Without much AOE the snakes wrapped key players up until we got it all worked out).
So I pull the snake boss the first time and run for it. I get poison bolted a couple of times on the way up and was low on health by the time I get up the stairs. The healer pulls aggro healing me and we wipe. It did not bode well.
I pull the boss the second time, manage to run up the stairs with no major health loss, and get aggro on the boss at the top.
We have the extra aoe of a mage in the group this time, so when the snake adds arrive they are no problem, nobody gets wrapped up and the boss dies really quickly. Pleasantly surprised, I was now certain we could cope with the other
bosses.
I wiped once on the elemental boss – he’s a big stone statue with elementals round him. When you start the fight the elementals all go in to him.
It’s a tank and spank for a while. At certain points he becomes immune and a large elemental comes out of him and you have to taunt it, and then kite it round to
avoid these pools of purple water that do shed loads of damage. At certain points he drops aggro and Surges on to one
of the group. The first time I failed to taunt on every surge (thinking he would charge them, then return) , the healer died, then a dps and we wiped.
The second time I knew to taunt and it all went perfectly and the boss died.
I didn’t have any problems with the next boss Eck (That is one ugly brute).
No problems on the boss that turns into a mammoth. We did try interrupting the transform but he snuck one in towards the end.
We wiped once on the last boss, after he wiped out our healer in one hit, but downed him the second time.
There was one near wipe that I directly attribute to my lack of experience pulling groups, but I learnt from it and will try not to make the same mistake again.
So all in all I’m quite pleased with my performance. I need to improve stamina wise, but as it was only my second attempt at druid tanking ever,
my first attempt at tanking at max level and with it being heroics as well, I feel I did alright (I had envisaged a horrible wipe fest and being banned from tanking ever again )
Most importantly, it was fun and I’ll be looking forward to tanking in the future.
February 26th, 2009
Ever since patch 3.08 hit I’ve been meaning to go and train Feral Cat Swipe. It was on my todo list and yet I never seemed to bother, I questioned whether I would ever really use it, and wondered if it would make any difference.
I’ve been doing pretty well on the damage meter in the guild heroic runs but as just about everyone has some kind of AOE I tend to fall behind on trash and pick up a lot of damage on bosses.
So on Friday night I decided to train swipe and get summoned back for our Heroic Nexus run.
A wonderful thing happened. I jumped up to 1st place on the damage meter for a while. For the rest of the run the 1st-4th positions were changing constantly.
The end run had my damage meter reporting me in 2nd place and someone elses reporting them in 2nd place.
A further run through heroic violet hold saw me in 1st place
I particularly love it when I’ve got berserk up.
I pick one of the mobs, put a bleed effect on and a mangle, then savage roar with the combo points. I might do one swipe if i have enough energy left, then hit berserk and spam swipe for all it’s worth.
What a great ability, great ability. I ‘ll be trying it when I boost alts through scarlet monastery.
February 4th, 2009
Whilst I love the play style of a feral druid I came to a startling realisation yesterday.
As a feral druid I suck. I’ve failed as a tank in the past (despite tanking successfully on a pally and a deathknight) and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not that good in cat form either.
I’ve recently hit 80 and I’m starting to gear up. Initially on guild runs I was looking at the damage meter and I’m always in 4th place.
I’ve never been consistently in 4th place on any other character.
At first I thought it was because my guildies have all been 80 longer, have geared up a bit more. I put a lot of the damage difference to them all having AOE abilities. However as I’ve geared up I’ve not seen a big jump in my DPS.
Last night I finally faced the fact that It’s not mine or others gear that’s the issue, it’s more the fact that I am very much sub par as a feral druid.
It’s time for this to change!
Whilst levelling I would pretty much do the following.
Run up to mob, mangle,mangle,mangle,mangle and put on a finishing bleed or mangle again. (I used to FB but it tended to be overkill). End result was mob was dead and very quickly at that.
However the clueless little druid that I am I carried that behaviour over into instances.
After a heroic last night, and very much dissatisfied with my damage) I started to read up a bit on ElitistJerks. A lot of what I was reading was related to raiding, but it certainly is applicable to boss fights and will help on trash too to a lesser extent.
I went on another heroic and my guildies were a bit bemused when I was expressing my concerns at my DPS. They’ve always considered me a good capable player. Actually saving the day on some occassions. However I felt like I was being carried.
So I got the damage meter reset and started trying a few new things. I saw an increase but nothing startling (about 1% after a few trash fights, but not anything conclusive).
My guildies said not to worry - we were killing trash - but wait till we get to the end boss and they’ll reset the meter and see how my damage was.
So that’s what we did. I tried a few more of the things I wanted to do, and was 2nd on the damage meter for that boss.
This was still with a sub par rotation, far too much mindless button mashing but I’ve been researching more today and have a load to try for my next session.
I must use Savage roar - I’ve always viewed this as a finisher (and always considered other finishers better). Well when you have an ability that ups your Attack Power by 40% that’s something you want to keep up at all times. This alone would put my damage up through the roof.
I should also be doing rip when I have 5 combo points up, and keeping the mangle and rake debuffs on at all times.
I should fit shreds in when I can, and I guess I should try and keep faerie fire up on bosses too.
I’ve always used tiger fury corectly apparently (at least I was doing one thing right ).
I’m going to grab a dot timer add on (dotimer probably) and make sure I can see clearly exactly how long each of my effects and debuffs have left to run - this is vital.
I really have to play the cat druid more like I used to play my affliction lock. Getting those dots (bleeds) and debuffs up and refreshing them in as efficient a manner as possible. The cat seems more complicated (I played my lock at 70), but I’m at least familiar with what I need to do.
I’ll maybe start using an addon like recount and try some practise dummy action to try and get my rotations down.
This druid is going to improve.
January 8th, 2009
So my guild decided to have another little run through Karazhan last night, and everything was going well.
Myself and another Balance druid were having a wail of a time using the wonderful AOE abilities that patch 3.0 beefed up to burn down big groups of trash, and were pretty much competing against one another for DPS.
Firstly - If I was in a raiding guild I would NEVER,EVER,EVER Aoe like crazy with little thought of the consequences, but this is the new easy mode Karazhan, with a bunch of guildies for whom fun is the most important thing.
All in all it was a great fun run. I had a dumb moment where I wandered too close to maiden and pulled her before everyone was ready. We had just wiped on her (only the 6 of us) and I got that bit too close. Ironically we downed her more easily than the first attempt (and that was after one of us died almost instantly thanks to my stupid pull).
So we get to the opera event and it’s big bad wolf. I love that one. However I decide to try and get the most out of my dps and open with a starfall. All is going well but a short time in to the fight I look over and see loads of of mobs running on to the stage. Who then proceed to mop the floors with us. You guessed it - The insane radius of Starfall had successfully aggroed one of the spectators, who then brought a load of friends.
I got a lot of leg pulling from my guildies as a result - but we smoothly downed the big bad wolf the second time.
Still - that druid AOE is powerfully addictive stuff.
November 6th, 2008
So my guild decided to have another little run through Karazhan last night, and everything was going well.
Myself and another Balance druid were having a wail of a time using the wonderful AOE abilities that patch 3.0 beefed up to burn down big groups of trash, and were pretty much competing against one another for DPS.
Firstly - If I was in a raiding guild I would NEVER,EVER,EVER Aoe like crazy with little thought of the consequences, but this is the new easy mode Karazhan, with a bunch of guildies for whom fun is the most important thing.
All in all it was a great fun run. I had a dumb moment where I wandered too close to maiden and pulled her before everyone was ready. We had just wiped on her (only the 6 of us) and I got that bit too close. Ironically we downed her more easily than the first attempt (and that was after one of us died almost instantly thanks to my stupid pull).
So we get to the opera event and it’s big bad wolf. I love that one. However I decide to try and get the most out of my dps and open with a starfall. All is going well but a short time in to the fight I look over and see loads of of mobs running on to the stage. Who then proceed to mop the floors with us. You guessed it - The insane radius of Starfall had successfully aggroed one of the spectators, who then brought a load of friends.
I got a lot of leg pulling from my guildies as a result - but we smoothly downed the big bad wolf the second time.
Still - that druid AOE is powerfully addictive stuff.
November 6th, 2008
I dinged 70 last night, and decided to have a little dabble in Battlegrounds. So stepped in to my first Alterac valley.
I didn’t have high expectations - I had a grand total of 51 resilience, about 7k health and 6-7k of mana but I was pleasantly surprised.
A bit of background - I’ve battlegrounds extensively on a horde Warlock, hunter and shaman at 70. I’m not incredible at pvp, but get to know how to play the class well enough that I’m a handful. I do alright despite mediocre gear. In the past I found I went through the following stages.
Stage 1.
Nervous and useless. I actually used to get Buterflies the first time I pvped on my characters. It was worse with the warlock (the first) but I still got it on my shaman. In this one I would basically die quickly. I mash buttons, never quite sure of what I’m doing. I seem to get a mindfreeze that locks me out of doing anything useful until after I’m dead. This is probably the steepest part of the learning curve for me.
Stage 2.
No longer nervous, slightly better than useless. This is where I start to figure out what on earth I’m doing. I start working out approaches against different classes. My action bars have my main assault spells keybound and all extra abillities I require accessible.
I’ve worked out which is my spammable spell (This is the one that does decent damage, doesn’t use excessive mana and has a short cast time). I’m starting to get to the point where I know what to do, but gear issues results in lots of deaths despite doing things right.
Stage 3.
Competent. At this point my casting and approaches to different classes are second nature and my gear is starting to improve so that I am harder to kill and I get some great fights.
With the druid I went straight to stage 2. No nerves and I was at least able to try to make a fight of it. However I made a ton of noob mistakes.
1. Starfire. Great opener from stealth, or from distance or when the opponent is focused on someone else, but this is not the spammable spell I was treating it as. It has a whopping huge cast time, which leaves me open for stuns, silences, counterspells and spell locks. Silly me.
2. Cyclone. This is a great spell - now I just must remember to use it. crowd controlling a target even for just 6 seconds can be vital. I didn’t cast this once, and should have been using it .
3. Entangling roots and natures grasp. I was having trouble with two warlocks yesterday mainly due to the pesky felhunters. One warlock was correctly spell locking me , the other wasn’t so good. I should at the very least have rooted the felhunter outside of spell lock range or whacked on natures grasp, so when he hit me he would be rooted in place.
4. Multiple forms and mobility. I love moonkin form - unfortunately a bit too much. I have a number of forms at my disposal and should use them effectively. For example, against casters such as the affliction locks I faced I should really stick in caster form. Keep heal over times up on myself whilst dealing damage. I made the mistake of figuring I could pop out and heal when needed, but forgot to factor in fear. Without any pvp trinket I ran around like a headless chicken and the dots were ticking away. If only I had rejuvination and lifebloom mitigating some of that damage. I should also have used cheetah form a bit more. Swap to cheetah, run off out of range, pop a big heal and some HoTs and run back in to battle.
I don’t mind making mistakes - it’s a way of learning, and I feel I’ve learnt a shed load in just 1 little battleground.
I’ll do a bit of pvp - but I’m not even bothering to farm honour for gear, as WotLK is just around the corner and the level to 80. I’ll save what honour I get.
However if I was to pvp more I’d definitely swap a load of points about - certainly getting moonkin frenzy.
October 28th, 2008
My realm was up and down like a yo-yo yesterday, and in some of my downtime a couple of my guildie friends were trying to come up with a balance druid build for patch 3 and to take us up to the level 80 cap when Wotlk comes out.
After much too-ing and froing this is what we settled on…
Balance (57 points)
5/5 Starlight Wrath
3/3 Moonglow
2/2 Nature’s Majesty
2/2 Improved Moonfire
3/3 Brambles
3/3 Nature’s Grace
1/1 Nature’s Splendor
2/2 Nature’s Reach
5/5 Vengeance
3/3 Lunar Guidance
1/1 Insect Swarm
3/3 Dreamstate
5/5 Moonfury
2/2 Balance of Power
1/1 Moonkin Form
3/3 Improved Moonkin Form
5/5 Wrath of Cenarius
1/1 Typhoon
1/1 Force of Nature
5/5 Earth and Moon
1/1 Starfall
Feral Combat (0 points)
Restoration (14 points)
2/2 Improved Mark of the Wild
3/3 Nature’s Focus
5/5 Furor
3/3 Intensity
1/1 Omen of Clarity
So that would be our 80 build…. for a 70 build we would take out 5 points from Wrath of Cenarius and probably 5 points from the resto tree.
Some caveats about this build - it’s very much a build for PVE, and also works from the principle that a lot of time will be spent in instances with guildies.
I think it is very viable solo.
October 17th, 2008
After much anticipation (and much downloading of huge files) I logged in to my freshly patched Warcraft.
The log in screen has changed completely, to reflect wrath of the lich king theming,
and has a wonderful skeletal dragon fly in roar then fly off again.
The first thing I wanted to do was confirm that the XP required to level from 60-70 has been nerfed.
So i hope on my druid, who had between half and three quarters of a bar of XP pre patch.
Hurrah!!! He was now sitting with a full XP bar, and only requiring 1 xp to level to 63.
So I handed in a quest I had completed pre patch and dinged 63. The amount of xp required to level to 64 was
way down than pre patch levels.
I then decided to respec the druid (as talents have all been reset). Thankfully I decided to try a sample build using
an online talent build. I was about 3/4 of the way through the tree when I realised I would have run out of points.
The balance tree is just jam packed with wonderful talents, a lot of which I’m not sure what I need.
I was overwhelmed. I decided to rethink, and decided I would travel down the tree to get the end talent then flesh out
some abilities as I level.
I’m pretty sure my future will involve a lot of respeccing in the near future, but for the time being I just wanted to
get something workable.
I went off to the trainer and spent about 30-40 gold training up abilities. It’s well worth it though.
I decided to quest for a bit and try out the build. All I can say is WoW. The mana efficiency of my druid
seemed a lot better. I was seeing bigger number crits from star fire. If I got a crit on my opening starfire I was
pretty much 3 shotting mobs my level. There was a variation in kill speed though. Some would get 3 shotted, if i
didn’t get crits I would be firing off a fair few wraths. Survivability didn’t seem to have been affected.
A couple of guildies decided that we would try to do hellfire ramparts to get used to our new abilities.
We were four manning it. I was in there with a 61 hunter, 62 holy priest, 62 warrior tank, so we certainly didn’t
outlevel the instance.
We absolutely ripped the place apart. Entangling roots can now be cast indoors. Net result is that a druid can now
perform crowd control really well, especially if you have a beast in the group as you can hibernate one, root another.
This talent alone is a huge, huge boost.
Another thing I noticed was that nature’s grasp is avaiable to all druids (I think - i’m sure I didn’t spec it).
This is a great emergency button. You’ve pulled aggro, pop natures grasp, get hit and step back now that the mob is
rooted.
With some buffs on I saw starfire crits of 3.4k which wasn’t too bad at all.
Now - it’s not just the druid that has been severely buffed.
The 61 hunter pet was pretty much able to offtank. Bearing in mind it wasn’t specced to be a tank, the ravager was able
to hold aggro on a mob (and if it was a caster may actually have killed it).
Tanks I’m pretty sure are doing sizeable damage themselves.
The most telling evidence of everyones new found power was when we took down the last boss. We’ve had to pull in a 70
paladin in the past to tank it. Even then it took a while. Well as of last night we ripped the boss to shreds.
Part of me feels good about this ability, but another part was wondering if it all was a bit too easy.
So a positive patch from my viewpoint.
One negative - I now need to figure out specs for my 70 lock, hunter and shaman, and specs for my multibox teams.
Then again I do think i’ll enjoy their respective new found abilties too.
October 16th, 2008
So having respecced my druid to Balance I’ve got to say I love my druid even more than I did before.
My gear has started to improve - I’ve got more caster pieces than feral now and I’m seeing some big crits as a result.
Myself and 3 guildies were able to 4 man Blood furnace, with only a couple of wipes.
The group composition was me (Balance druid), a frost mage, a holy priest and a protection warrior. There was very little drama - one wipe on trash and one wipe on a boss event (The one where the cages open one by one releasing 4 or 5 prisoners - mana was a huge issue, so we died the first time, but managed to clear it on our second attempt). None of us outlevelled the instance - I dinged 62 in there and the others were 60.
It looks like I’m probably going to concentrate on solo-ing this fella.
October 8th, 2008
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