My Talent Build

My build is focused on maximizing my dps and mana regen. I will try to explain the points I took up and why.

BALANCE

Tier 1

Starlight Wrath - reduces the cast time of your Wrath and Starfire spells by 0.5 sec
* Every fraction of a second it takes for you to cast is a fraction of a second that the mob stays alive

Nature's Grasp - while active, any time an enemy strikes the caster they have a 35% chance to become afflicted by Entangling Roots.
* This is pretty much a pvp talent

Improved Nature's Grasp - increases the chance for your Nature's Grasp to entangle an enemy by x%
* Better chance to entangle somebody every 1 min = waste of points

Tier 2

Control of Nature - gives you a 100% chance to avoid interruption caused by damage while casting Entangling Roots and Cyclone
* A very useful talent when grinding as you can easily root a mob and move back.

Focused Starlight - increases the crit chance of Wrath and Starfire by 4%
* More crit = more damage

Improved Moonfire - increases the damage and crit chance of Moonfire by 10%
* Even if moonfire is mana inefficient, it's going to be part of your spell rotation. And it's very useful in pvp

Tier 3

Brambles - increase damage done by Thorns and Entangling Roots by x%
* Waste of talent points imo, thorns is a buff for the tank primarily, entangling roots isn't usable indoors and mobs break out of it after 1 or 2 ticks anyway

Insect Swarm - spell that decreases chance to hit by 2% and does 792 damage over 12 seconds
* This should always be up on the target as it's a very mana efficient spell and does a good amount of damage.

Nature's Reach - increases the range of balance spells by 20%
* Being able to stand farther is a good thing

Tier 4

Vengeance - increases crit damage bonus of spells by 100%
* More damage is always better

Celestial Focus - gives Starfire a 15% chance to stun target for 3 secs, avoid spell interruption of Wrath by 70%
* I wouldn't put any points in this. In an instance or raid, you shouldn't be getting hit by melee at all, if you are, cyclone and run back to your tank. When grinding, you should be using entangling roots to get away.

Tier 5

Lunar Guidance - increases spell damage and healing by 25% of total intellect
* Every bit of +spell damage helps

Nature's Grace - all spells that crit reduces your next cast time by 0.5 sec
* This is a double edge sword, it produces the most dps from chain critting, you can get around 6-7k damage in 3 secs (Wraths) or 9-11k damage in 7.5 secs (Starfire), but it would also draw so much threat and you're in danger of pulling aggro.

Moonglow - reduce mana costs of spells by 9%
* Our spells are not mana efficient, this would help us out a little bit

Tier 6

Moonfury - increase damage done by Starfire, Moonfire, Wrath by 10%
* More damage

Balance of Power - increases spell hit by 4%
* Every spell that gets resisted is mana wasted, you should get this

Tier 7

Dreamstate - regen mana equal to 10% of intellect every 5 sec.
* Every boomkin should have this if you dont want to be an oomkin.

Moonkin Form - increases armor by 400%, gives 5% spell crit party buff
* Owl dance. nuff said :)

Improved Faerie Fire - faerie fire spell increases chance to hit on target by 3%
* This is only useful if majority of your group is melee, since you are a caster this doesn't give you any benefit. And most if not all classes have a talent to increase hit %, and everyone should have gear that increases hit % anyway.

Tier 8

Wrath of Cenarius - Starfire get 20% and Wrath gets 10% more spell damage
* Again, every bit of spell damage helps your total dps

Tier 9

Force of Nature - summons 3 treants to attack the target for 30 sec
* These are very useful on bosses that don't have aoe. They die easily, but if they survive the full 30 secs. they do a lot of damage

RESTORATION

Tier 1

Improved Mark of the Wild - increases the effect of Mark of the Wild by 35%
* More stats is always better. And we're not going feral so Furor is basically useless

Tier 2

Naturalist - reduces cast time of Healing Touch by 0.5 sec
* You can skip this & go to Shapeshifter or Nature's Focus, only reason I took this is I like to be able to off-heal or main-heal on some fights and that 0.5 sec can prevent a dead tank

Tier 3

Intensity - allows 15% of mana regen to continue while casting
* As stated earlier, my build is focused on not being oom in a 7-8 min. fight. I have a good mix of +spell, INT, SPI to keep my damage and mana balanced. I use 2-3 mana pots depending on the fight & save my innervate for healers.

Subtlety - reduces threat generated by spells by 16% (4/5)
* You can have 0 points & never pull from a good tank or 5 points and always pull from a bad tank. You can have more or less depending on your tank, a good minimum is 3 points.

Thorns

Thorns
400 mana 30 yd range
Instant cast
Thorns sprout from the friendly target causing 25 Nature damage to attackers when hit. Lasts 10 min.

What is this skill useful for? It is best applied on the tank, It does free damage & threat everytime the tank gets hit. Now you can spend 3 pts in the balance tree to increase the damage by 75% which brings it to 43 damage, but that would be a waste of points since there are better places to spend points at.

What I want to see is this talent removed and replaced with something better and make thorns scale with gear like say 2% of spell damage, so if you have +1000 spell damage you get 20 damage which would make it 45 damage.

This is just me ranting with nothing to talk about.

Karazhan - Day 2

Big Bad Wolf is DOWN!!!

It was really nice that we were able to start on time last night with everybody from the other night's group. Our goal for the night was to kill Maiden and Curator.

I dunno why our tank was noobing it up last night but he was calling the wrong cc, banish for undead & shackle for demon. But everything goes well and we get to Maiden's room.

While explaining where people are gonna be standing, one of the first-timers didn't hug the wall and pulled Maiden which caused a wipe. We all get back in, get in position, tank pulls, first repentance, tank dies, party wipes. At this point people start mentioning that they need repairs because their armor is busted. Now this I don't get, I died 7 times and none of my armor was yellow.

Reminder for people going to a raid:
1. BE ON TIME. Nobody likes waiting for that last special person to make an appearance.
2. Armor should be at 100% when you start.
3. Bring your OWN water and food supply (unless you know a mage ^_^).
4. A stack of Heavy Netherweave Bandages.
5. Potions. Casters at least 10 mana pots, Melee at least 15 health pots (A healer's primary target is the tank, not you)
6. Now, this is very important, if you know your gear sucks make it a point to have elixirs, wizard oils, food buffs, anything to make yourself more useful to the raid.

Now back to Maiden, we explain the fight again but the execution was still poorly done and we wipe again. So the GM steps in and re-explains the fight and ooooo aaaahhh, suddenly everyone gets it when the GM just repeated what was already been said twice. Now, if you were given a very important job (heal main tank or dispell) and that will be the only thing you'll be doing the entire fight, we expect you to be on top of it. Now, if the group healer ends up having to heal the group, dispell and heal the main tank, then this is something worth pointing out. We kill Maiden and nobody's dead, woot!

Now, on to the opera. On the part where you need to get the stagehand out of the spotlight, I told everyone to stay at the bottom of the hallway while the tank stays near the top. But nobody wants to listen to me and they decide to fight in the very small box at the top of the hallway. So they pull 3 instead of 2 and it's another wipe. We went back in, they did the same strategy but got only 2 this time, what happens when casters are not at max range? It goes to them of course (dead squishies). And since the area we were fighting in was so small, the tanks couldn't move them out of the spotlights, luckily with a good tank & good healer & good dps, we were able to clear them.

On the Opera event we got the Big Bad Wolf (BBW)
We had 2 straight unlucky pulls where the main tank was turned into Red Riding Hood (RRH) which caused the wipe. Now, the strategy for this fight is to stand in a straight line from where the bbw is being tanked. In a perfect scenario where the tank has him at the NW corner of the room, everyone else should be standing SW. Now, after the bbw runs after rrh or fears, he's not gonna end up standing on the same spot, this is where it becomes complicated, people have to actually move around the room to position themselves in a straight line from BBW where they can actually run away when they become RRH, but for some reason people become fixated on one spot. And run away means run away!!! NOT run toward bbw & die.

On the last try, with a couple of people dead including the good healer because he was turned into rrh, bbw's health read 16.7k remaining and 14 secs before next rrh. I sent out my trees and went crazy with wraths hoping to crit one after the other and luckily i got 6 crits out of 10 & down he goes. WOOT!!!

Short end of the stick?

Our guild, for the first time, ran two groups to Karazhan last night. I don't know if this was just a coincidence but Group 1 was filled with officers and people that have good gear (including 2 of the top 3 dps in the guild).

I was assigned to Group 2, consisting of 2 guys that have never been to kara, and guys that were still in greens.

Me and my friends were at the gate early for the 8pm time that was set for the raid. 8pm came and the ONLY officer assigned to our group was going to be late and nobody knew what time he's getting on and the hunter who signed up was a no-show. At 8:15pm our group took it upon themselves to go ask the guild for replacements. Fortunately, one of the officers got his plans cancelled for the night and was able to go with us, we were able to start clearing at 8:30pm.

On one of the pulls, our shadow priest got so excited and went ahead of the tank and accidentally pulled the mobs while we were still marking, I started hitting main target but unfortunately the tank was still busy trying to get control of the loose mobs that weren't marked so I died.

On attumen, the moment he spawned, I accidentally grabbed aggro, probably a chain crit from my starfires. Our healers tried to overheal me while the OT tried to pick him back up, but after 6-8 secs of just standing there, I took more dmg than the healers could heal so I died. So I waited for 4-5 minutes for my group to kill him. woot!

First try on Moroes, I got silenced right as the tank pulled even though I was way at the back. So for 10 secs I couldn't do anything and the other dps couldn't take down the holy priest fast enough and this turned ugly, our tank died and we had to reset. Our second try went so smooth that our group looked like we have been playing together for a long time.

The only reason our group was successful is we had the best tank (Brigin) & best healer (Grazen) in the guild. I was expected to top the dps but because of untimely deaths, I ended up 2nd on the list.

Hopefully tonight we can get 10 people to continue thru Maiden & Opera.

Crowd Control ??

It's funny how some people would not even attempt a heroic instance if they didn't have a mage/warlock in the group. We've finished heroic mech & bot without either and no wipes.

Our group relies only on two forms of cc, a rogue sap & hunter trap. My point is, group coordination is the most important part of doing a heroic run successfully, not re-castable cc. On mobs of 3, we have enough dps to burn down the main tank's target, then onto the trapped target and have enough time before sap wears off. On mobs of 4, we do the same for the 3 mobs but have a blind, gouge, cyclone on 4th mob. You also need a very good tank to hold aggro on groups that you can't cc, we have a tank that does at least 30% more threat than any of the dps can generate.

I just laugh at people who says this or that can't be done without a specific group or gear. You just have to know the strengths and weaknesses of your group and adjust accordingly.

Blog Problems

For some reason, my blog won't refresh by itself, if you want to see if it's getting updated try adding "?" and some letter like http://thenegativedruid.blogspot.com/?a

What really grinds my gears..

Prot warriors that brag all day about how much HP, defense and armor they have, yet couldn't hold aggro on anything even if their life depended on it.

Let me tell you about my spell cycle to give you a better picture. Tank has a sunder on, I cast Insect Swarm ... wait 12 secs for Insect Swarm to fade, cast another Insect Swarm, now let me cast my 3 sec Starfire ... BOOM!!! from #10 on the threat list I'm now #2 with 80% threat, I give tank a benefit of a doubt that he can get more aggro before my 2nd Starfire hits target. Starfire hits, I reach 130% + threat , mob aggros on to me, I die. My bad, I gave tank too much credit.

This has been the scenario for a few runs now, so last night I came up with the best way to not pull aggro and it actually works :) I downranked all my spells by 2, I still have to watch my crits from time to time but hey, I wasn't pulling aggro and that's all that matters.

By the time we reached curator, I was #6 on the damage meters. Pathetic yeah, but that's what I have to deal with. Since I didn't have to worry about aggro on this fight I went all out, and at the end of the fight I shot up to #2 in damage meters and I believe that's saying something.

The worst thing about this is the real warrior who generates 2-3x more threat than this guy isn't given a spot in the raid because he's not an officer.

I like and support the idea of letting people spec the way they want to but come on! I saw a prot warrior in our guild with 0/3 pts in defiance. What the hell ?!?

Edit: According to my friends who grouped with the warrior with 0/3 defiance, they found him really good because he never lost aggro. So I guess defiance isn't necessary anymore, it becomes more of a luxury when you have a good player.

Caving in to fear of the DCOE

Disclaimer: The sole purpose of this blog is to vent out my frustrations on the game World Of Warcraft. Don't get me wrong, I love this game, I just hate drama & putting up with noobs who think they're good.

I play a level 70 NE Druid and claim NO expertise on this game. I play on a PVE server because that's what I want, if I wanted to do PVP I would've just continued playing guildwars.

I have yet to find better 5-man group than ours, there hasn't been an instance that we cannot do. We used to do 45 min. baron runs with a warrior, 2 rogues, mage, pally and none of us had anything better than tier 0.5

Don't expect much of this blog. I will only update it when I feel like it.