Presents!

So just a quick present for everyone. It's a spreadsheet that lets you compare two pieces of gear for your balance druid. Put the levels of talents you have up top, and then fill in the numbers for the two pieces of gear. It will tell you how much total your stats will change - it calculates in things like the fact that intellect adds to spell crit, that you get a percentage of int to spell damage with the right talents, etc.

In the right hand column, it will display all the changes. Green means that switching to gear #2 will net you a gain, red is a loss.

For the record, it is a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. I made it in Excel 2007, but I saved it so it SHOULD work in earlier versions. If you have trouble viewing it though, grab the Excel 2007 compatibility pack from Microsoft here.

Heroic you!

Welcome back all. I apologize for the unexpected downtime. The hazards of being employed.

So, on the plate today: You've been level 70 for a while now. You've gotten to revered in all the fun little factions you need to get your Heroic keys. You've gotten pretty much all the gear you can outside of raid instances. Maybe even a couple pieces from Karazhan. What do you look for now?

The answer, of course, is heroics. There's a few dungeons you're really going to want to frequent. Mostly, I'm just going to point out the leather caster gear here - if you're wearing mostly cloth, there's plenty for you.

First of all, you're going to want your Lower City key to get into Auchindoun heroics. The first reason? Epic flight form, of course! But there's another treat in store for you if you do Heroic Sethekk now and again. Terokk's Shadowstaff drops from the last boss in there. Beautiful staff, although it lacks spell hit. It's not quite as good as the Staff of Infinite Mysteries, but it's arguably better for PvP because it has a ton of Spell crit in the place of Spell Hit.

Heroic Mana Tombs has a nice little chestpiece of the first boss: Starry Robes of the Crescent. This is the best leather chestpiece for casters before Tier 4. Again, though, it comes with Spell Crit instead of hit, which can be a concern for those of us who are PvE types.

Back over in Hellfire, Blood Furnace presents us with a conundrum in Moonchild Leggings. While it has great stats overall, it's 21 points lower in spell damage compared to the easily obtainable Kurenai Kilt. Doing the math, I think I'd probably go with the Moonchild, but keep my Kurenai Kilt around just in case I ever ran into a situation where I really, really needed every ounce of spell damage. It's hard to choose +21 dmg over +3 crit, +26 sta, +9 int, and +19 spirit.

We can also nab the Moon-Touched Bands from The Maker in Blood Furnace. These are fairly comparable to the Bracers of the White Stag from Attumen in Karazhan, just a very small step down.

Finally, there Grips of the Lunar Eclipse which drop off Leiutenant Drake in Old Hillsbrad. Honestly, I think these need a large buff. As is, they are MAYBE just barely better than the Starlight Gauntlets. Yes. that's right - the level 70 drop from a heroic dungeon is MAYBE better than the level 63 gauntlets from Underbog. Lame. Very, very lame. At the very least, throw a few sockets into the Grips, and then they'll be worth it.

So yes, that's about it. 4 pieces of leather caster gear in heroics. None of it epic, all blue. What's the point of this?

Moonkin need better itemization, that's what. I know, people always say "just wear cloth, it's ridiculous to expect Blizzard to make more than a couple pieces of gear for a single spec of a single class!" If that's the case, then why is there a plethora of healing plate out there? Only a single spec of a single class can utilize healing plate, but you don't see people telling Holy paladins "You shouldn't wear plate, just wear healing mail or leather or cloth!" Yes, some choose to, but the choice is there for them not to if they so desire.

So yeah, there's my rant. Grab what loots you can, and if people yell at you for rolling on purple cloth (unfortunately, I have the feeling I'll be heading that way myself as much as I try to avoid it), then tell them to yell at Blizzard's developers instead.

Stupid work, getting in the way of WOW

Apologies to all. I'm still trying to get a hang on this blogging thing. I promise more regular updates from now in, as soon as I'm not stuck building !@#*!$@ domains all day.

Synergy

So, I figured today I'd talk about synergy: in other words, how you fit in well with other classes as a Balance Druid. Now, we all know what we bring to the party - Crit aura, awesome buff, innervate, off-heals. Let's see what we can take advantage of based on who we group with.

1) Other Druids

Ironically, there's not a whole lot of synergy going on here. Sure, healing druids can benefit from your moonkin aura, and having more innervates to shuffle around is always nice, but there's not much more going on. If there's another balance druid in your group, it's usually best if one of you goes moonkin and the other one stays out just in case off-heals are needed: moonkin aura doesn't stack, so one of you in it works just fine.

2) Rogues

Again, not a whole lot going on. Your faerie fire/insect swarm can help a Rogue out, but no more so than any other melee class. Similarly, there's not a lot a rogue can do that directly helps you other than helping to down the mobs quicker.

3) Warrior

Apart from the warrior holding aggro if he's tanking, there's not a lot going on here either.

4) Priests

Now we get into some interesting stuff. Discipline and Holy priests (or rather, the discipline/holy hybrid that passes for a holy priest with the sucky talents they gave late holy) often have Improved Divine spirit. Each rank of this 2pt talent adds 5% of your spirit to spell damage and healing. Given the multiple boosts balance druids get to spell damage, this is great. Plus, the spell drops an extra 50 spirit on you as well, which helps for both mana regen and yet more spell damage. If you end up with a pure Discipline priest, they may have mana infusion too, which adds 20% to spell damage and healing for 15 seconds. On a side note, priests are normally your best target for an innervate, as they will get the most benefit.

Shadow priests have the lovely, wonderful ability to give their party back mana. If you are lucky enough to be in a party with one, love them, hug them, and call them George. Over a long fight, this can mean the difference between going OOM and plowing through the enemy.

5) Hunters

Not a whole lot here, but there's a BM Hunter ability that increases party damage of all types by 10% after a pet critical hit. The name escapes me right now, unfortunately.

6) Paladins

First off, Blessings rule. My personal preference for blessings is Salvation > Kings > Wisdom. Salvation first, because at least with me, it often means the difference between riding the edge with my aggro and just being able to full-out unleash everything I've got. Kings, because it translates into additional mana, hp, spell damage, and combat mana regen. Wisdom is just the mana regen, but it's still quite nice. Auras, while nice, don't particularly benefit us more than any other class.

If your pally friend is healing, your extra crit % = more Illumination procs for him = greater mana efficiency. Yay!

7) Shamans

Depending on the spec of the Shammy, you've got a couple different things going on.

First off, regardless of spec, Heroism/Bloodlust is great. Make sure that when you get the 30% speed increase, you start using your higher-cast time Starfire, as Wrath cannot benefit from it completely due to the global cooldown, especially if your nature's grace starts proccing too. Wrath of Air totem adds about 100 spell damage, which is great once again because of our added bonuses to received spell damage.

Elemental Shamans can provide the quite nice Totem of Wrath - +3% Spell Hit & Crit. Never something to sneeze at.

Enhancement Shamans have an interesting ability - Stormstrike. This increases the next 2 sources of nature damage dealt to the target by 20%. If there's a shaman thwacking the enemy with this, take advantage of it and start using Wrath more than Starfire if possible.

Resto shamans are great. The best thing about them is Mana tide. This totem is on a 5 minute cooldown and regenerates 24% of the affected party members' mana over 12 seconds. A great save, and in long boss fights it's sometimes possible to pull it out twice, if it is used early and then saved for the very end.

8) Mages

Mages have probably the single best buff for us - Arcane Brilliance. There isn't a whole lot of synergy otherwise, but that more than makes up for it.

9) Warlocks

Not a whole lot here, but watch for Curse of Shadow. This increases Shadow and Arcane damage dealt to the target by 10%, so start using Starfire/Moonfire more.

I'm sure I've probably missed a couple things. Anyone have anything to add?

Apologies

Had the in-laws over this weekend, and at work I've been on the road for the past few days, so haven't had time to update. I'll be sure to do something by tomorrow at the latest. :)

Uber Leetness and You: Your Epic Flight Form

So, you've decided that you want to join the uber-leet squad of people who hang around outside banks and auction houses showing of their mounts in a bizarre online corollary to such social phenomena as "Pimp my Ride." Well, I have only one thing to say to such people.

Good for you! :)

So I'll start at the very beginning. The first thing you need to do is to collect 5000g to train your artisan riding skill. Ouch. Five grand. Obviously, this is going to be very dependent on your character professions and spec, so I'll just give some info that can help anyone - the basics of playing the AH.

First, if you don't use it already, get Auctioneer. Wonderful addon. Basically, every now and then you just need to sit at the auction house for fifteen or twenty minutes, and this addon scans every single item on there and starts building a database. I normally scan once every few days, but when I was making my gold, I'd try to make sure to do it at least once every 24 hours.

Soon, you'll find yourself with a nice database showing average prices for items, etc. Here's where the fun comes in. Immediately after you complete a scan, click on the tab at the bottom that says "Scan auctions" (In the AH window). Change the selection on the left from "Bid" to "Buyout," and set the minimum profit to 5 gold. Hit search.

And blam, like magic the addon looks through its most recent scan, compares the prices of items to what it has established as an "average," and shows you what you could buy for cheap. Example: I've been scanning for about 2 weeks steady, so I'm pretty sure my database is fairly accurate as far as staple items go (herbs, potions, primals, etc). Auctioneer is telling me that the average price for Primal Water is 20g. But some guy just posted an auction of 10 primal waters for 100g. When I do my search, Auctioneer will automatically tag it and tell me that there is an item I could potentially sell for profit.

Now of course, there are potential errors. First, if you haven't seen an item very often, it the price may not be accurate. The addon will tell you in the tooltip for the item how many times it has been scanned. So if the Magical Fez of the Mauve Eyed Barber is a purple, and you've only seen it once on the AH for 8000 gold, the addon is going to tell you the average price is 8000 gold even if it really is worth only 1000g or so. Second, it will not necessarily account for market spikes in either direction, so if you're not absolutely sure you can turn a profit make sure you look at what is on the AH currently. For example, say it's revealed that for some reason, using Shadow Oil on Gruul kills him within 10 seconds. For the 24 hours or so before it is hotfixed, Shadow Oil will be selling for enormous amounts. Your scans will see that, but they will average the new cost with the old ones, and you may end up selling for far less than you could. So do a bit of manual checking now and again.

So, you've gotten your 5000g. You've spent five minutes at the prompt trying to click the button, because OH DEAR GOD I'M ABOUT TO SPEND 5000 GOLD! You've clicked and promptly felt a pit open in your stomach. You drop an extra two hundred gold on an epic mount without thinking about it, because if you do you're going to gouge your brain out by way of your ear while babbling about having to get rid of everything grey after farming. And then you mount up...and epic flight is bliss. If you're a gatherer of any sort, this will improve your outland farming by an incredible amount. If you're not, well, it still rocks.

So, now that you've got that out of the way, what now? Head to the Druid trainer in Moonglade. If you don't know where he is, shame on you! (Pssst...he's in front of the building that overlooks the lake, to the left of the entrance). The quests are fairly self explanatory, but I will make a small note: there are three quests where you have to fight skettis "guardians" holding bird spirits hostage (Hawk, Eagle, Falcon). Each of these is meant to be done in a different form - Bear (Eagle), Cat (Falcon), and Caster/Moonkin (Hawk). As long as you have some decent gear for your off-spec, you should be able to solo them with only minor difficulty.

Now, when I say "meant to," what I really mean is "there is no freaking way you are doing this in any other form." I grouped with a feral druid to try this. Against the first two guys, my normally 3.2k starfire crits (at the time) were doing around 500(!) damage. And they had upwards of 100k HP. I switched to the appropriate forms, and my normal 200ish damage per hit in feral forms was all of a sudden doing like 1000. When we got to the caster vulnerable one, my feral druid friend reported doing about 100-150 damage per hit. On the other hand, I had two 10k (yes, that's 10,000) wrath crits and a 23k starfire crit. So do yourself a favor and do the fights in the appropriate form. :)

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So, the last quest is to defeat the Raven God, in heroic Sethekk Halls. First, a note on gear. You should be, at minimum, in gear that is sufficient for Karazhan. Heroics are not forgiving. Sethekk seemed to be a bit more forgiving than some I've been in, but still...very nasty at points. You're going to want at least two forms of crowd control besides your hibernate (which will indeed get used here). We did it with a shackle and a sheep, you can probably replace either one of those with a hunter who is good at chain trapping. Finally, the pairs of ravenguards that stand to either side of each doorway are now immune to crowd control, even cyclone. Watch your aggro. Even in moonkin I could have been 3 shotted. Chances are, your moonkin opportunities will be limited, because you're mostly bringing off-heals rather than crowd control to the table in this instance.

The first boss of Sethekk is pretty much the same as before, except tougher. No real new abilities, although his elementals seem to spam their respective "X Buffet" abilities much more. You clear some more, and then you clear the room before the final boss. We pulled the last pull before the final boss too, just in case.

Now, before you start the fight by clicking on the stand in the middle, be aware of two things. First, let your tank know that the event takes about 45 seconds to start, so he shouldn't enrage right away before you start the event. Second, there are three statues that are going to be spawned, called Hawk Spirit, Falcon Spirit, and Eagle Spirit. These three things are going to be your main duty throughout the fight.

These statue come to life while a druid Heal over Time spell is active upon them. Each buffs your group/hurts the enemy in some way. Hawk reduces damage taken by 500 (before armor). Falcon increases movement, attack, and casting speed by 25%. Eagle does a 300DPS AoE that affects the entire room (enemies only). Now, to take full advantage of this, ponder a simple fact: Rank 1 HoTs have the same duration as full rank.

I set up a macro for each of the statues. The format is as follows

/target Hawk Spirit
/cast Rejuvenation(Rank 1)
/targetlasttarget

Replace "Hawk" with "Eagle" and "Falcon" as appropriate. Now you can simply click on a button during the fight, and you will instantly activate one of the statues for less than 30 mana. Convenient!

The fight has two different "modes." Anzu will spawn, and it will be a tank and spank for the most part. The one thing to watch out for is a curse that Anzu throws on any casters in the group periodically. This curse does about 1k damage and mana burns you for 2k if you cast any spell while it is on you. It can be dispelled as long as you don't try to remove it from yourself. Also, Anzu will whisper to the person he curses, so watch for it on yourself, and remove it from healers especially. I suggest keeping the Hawk and Falcon statues active here. Eagle is not as necessary.

After being beaten down to about 66%, Anzu will summon a bunch of adds (birds) and banish himself. As soon as he emotes the summoning, have everyone run to the center of the room. Now is when you should activate the eagle statue. Keep the Hawk statue up. If you're inclined, keep the falcon up too, but that's not necessary. After all the adds are killed, or after 1 minute (this shouldn't be an issue - the eagle statue alone should kill the adds in 1 minute), Anzu reappears. Lather, rinse, repeat. He does another summon at 33%, and after that it's just spankage.

Congratulations, you now turn into a kick-ass looking bird. Well, at least if you're a Night Elf. My Tauren moonkin brothers, I humbly apologize for the epic flight form granted to you. I don't know why Blizzard saw fit to make your epic flight form look like a roadkill bird that some kid tried to turn into a kite with some leather, a few sticks, twine, and a sewing needle. Don't get me wrong, I like the whole "Tauren/rugged/horned" theme that permeates Tauren forms and architecture, it has its own appeal. But in my opinion, the Epic Tauren bird needs, at the very least, a more varied color palette to really look cool.

When you turn in the quest, at Cenarion in Zangarmarsh, don't forget to talk to the guy again. He'll give you back the summoning item so that you can summon Anzu whenever you feel like smacking him around.

So, in conclusion, I have only one question about my newly beloved epic flight form:

Where's my Dual Plasma Cannons?!

On Scaling

This is just a brief stop for the morning, more coming later. But someone asked me what I meant in the last post by "scales well" and "scaling."

Basically, what it boils down to is that there's a lot of processing going on with Balance druids. Let's take a fairly simple situation: I cast a single Wrath. My spell damage (from gear) is +200, my int is 300. Here's what has to happen.

1) Add 25% of int to spell damage. Spell damage is now 275.
2) If I'm 5/5 Wrath of Cenarius, I add 10% of my bonus spell damage to wrath. That brings it to 302 spell damage.
3) The damage coefficient for wrath (i.e., how much of your total bonus damage is applied to the spell) is 57%, so that means about 172 of the damage will actually be added to the wrath.
4) Top-rank wrath does an average of about 405 damage, so the total damage goes to 577.
5) If I have 5/5 moonfury, Wrath does 10% more damage, so that brings me to a total of around 635 damage from a wrath.

Spell damage has an interesting relationship throughout this process. Look at Wrath of Cenarius and Moonfury, particularly.

If I only have 100 spell damage, Wrath of Cenarius is only going to be giving me another 10 spell damage on wraths, 20 on starfires. Not horrible, but come on, there are potions that give you 24 spell damage + 24 spell crit. However, if I have 500 spell damage, Wrath of Cenarius is giving me 50 spell damage. Much better. And the higher you go, the more bang you get for your buck. Moonfury takes that bonus damage and magnifies it.

Now, look at this in terms of total damage of the spell. I'll use starfire this time to make the math simpler.

Starfire's average damage at max level is about 588. I have 100 bonus spell damage. The damage coefficient is 100%, so that means the starfire will be 688 on average. If I factor in talents, you're looking at the following:

(588 + (100*1.2))*1.1 = 778.9

That means your talents are granting you about 91 damage, or roughly 13% damage from baseline (no talents). Now let's look at it with a higher bonus damage, say, 600. Baseline damage without talents is 1188.

(588+(600*1.2))*1.1 = 1438.8

Now your talents are granting you about 250 damage, or about 21% damage from baseline. As you can see, you get proportionally greater returns the higher you go in spell damage.