Bear Nerf Bat

Some Bears are reporting a major bit of avoidance loss on the PTR, this has a lot to do with the fact that Blizzard has said that they don’t like where Tanking Avoidance is [apparently mitigation is fine, and if 25 man Kolo and ignis are any indication I’m inclined to agree]. They don’t like the fact that tanks can avoid nearly 50% of the bosses incoming attacks and therefore 50% of what the boss throws at tank are just ignored anyway. So as a way to start to cut away at this, Blizzard has decided to re-work the formula that they use to handle how dodge is calculated [I can already feel the rogue tears]. In fact they think dodge is currently OP.

A druid Comic

I was bored last night, and I manged to get my copy of Photoshop cs2 Reinstalled, needless to say I took the opportunity to play around with some artsy related things. One of which being a comic [which I wish I was better at]. For the most part its just me playing around with Photoshop, Using My Paladin to take pictures of the landscape, and than adding them all as layers to a PSD the following is the result I hope you guys like it 😀

For Druids by Druids

Feel free to let me know what you think or what I can fix

Tier 9 Set Bonuses

The Daily Druid has managed to get a hold of the datamined info for what will be the new tier 9 bonuses with all the related sets.

• Feral
• Druid T9 Feral 2P Bonus – Decreases the cooldown on your Growl ability by -2.0 sec and increases the duration of your Rake ability by 3.0 sec.
• Druid T9 Feral 4P Bonus – Increases the damage reduction granted by Barkskin by 10% and increases the critical strike chance of Rip and Ferocious Bite by 5%.
• Balance
• Druid T9 Balance 2P Bonus (Moonfire) – Your Moonfire ability now has a chance for its periodic damage to be critical strikes.
• Druid T9 Balance 4P Bonus (Starfire) – Increases the critical strike chance of your Starfire spell by 5%.
• Restoration:
• Druid T9 Restoration 2P Bonus (Nourish) – Increases the critical strike chance of your Nourish spell by 5%.
• Druid T9 Restoration 4P Bonus (Rejuvenation) – Your Rejuvenation ability now has a chance for its healing to be critical strikes.

Solo Ahune

About 3 post back, when the whole “Mid Summer Fire Festival” thing started, I said that I would take a shot at actually solo’ing Ahune, this is so you guys out there can get the achievement and not worry about having to find a group to do it in. I assumed it would be easy to do given the whole nature of the Druid class, and in addition to that we can nearly solo every opening Northrend Instance that is out there. I should note that while I wasn’t able to get Ahune down in a single surfacing, that it was a pretty easy fight overall, and for most druids this shouldn’t be anything to worry about. Thanks to our “Leader of the Pack” and “Savage Defence” ability with bear form, this is a pretty easy fight. I would note that while I don’t advice it in resto [that would take forever], that doing it in Feral as DPS spec was easy enough.

I know I'm a clicker =(

New Idol with the 3.2 Patch for Resto

There are several idols for Druids out there, and most are aimed at 3 of our 4 possible job rolls [there are 3 trinkets, 1 for each level (ie 7.0, 7.5, 8.5… 8.0 went missing as it needed to cry). The newest set appears to be coming out with the tier 9 gear and may or may not be part of the Colosseum [It looks like it was data mined, and not found on the PTR yet, so I’m not sure where it is actually at]

[The Idol of Flaring Growth]

The idol is interesting for several reasons, the first of course that it seems that Blizzard would like to make it quite clear what direction they are pointing us. Somewhere like this:

This is your new bar, and you'll like it

Healing in Ulduar

I see a lot of guides on line about how to tank, or how to DPS a boss in Ulduar, and while this helpful for the DPS and tank, it doesn’t do much to let you know about the kind of damage that you can expect from a boss. I also have a lot of druids that I’ve seen ask for what the approximate level of spellpower you need before you can step into an instance.

The following is a start of a series to provide a handy guide to both, and hopefully someone will take interest and I can answer some questions for druids out there.

Northrend Fires

Sorry for the poor craftsmen ship on that map rework, I’m still working on getting Photoshop CS3 back on my computer, I just can’t find the copy I own right now [its buried somewhere in a pile of system software]. That aside, despite the fact that there are no achievements for it, there are actually Bonfires all across Northrend. They’re in rather predictable spots once your realize they are there [Save Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord]. You can start at Fizzlecrank Airport and work from there to make kind of a stretch around Northrend before finally ending in The large horde base in Dragonblight.

This map purposely avoids flying over Wintersgrasp for the pure and simple fact that right now, you can’t without paying for a gryphon ride, and let’s be honest here folks, who in their right mind [save being lazy or fetching a burger] has actually talked to those Northrend gryphon masters since level 77?

That aside, the Red Dots on the Map are actual Flames, I made a twist in Icecrown, but there are no fires [that I am aware of, looked for a while] that are actually up there. This is great because each Alliance fire is worth 5g some change, and each horde flame is worth 13g and some change. This is an easy way to replace a round of dailies [or add to it]. Also if you were having catching up on Flowers, this should put you much closer. I had 150 after buying the entire Outfit [400 Flowers in all] to do the pole dance achievement. This should put you back up around 250-275 so that it will be much easier to do the dailies and get enough flowers to buy your scorchling or Flame Brazier. And as Blizzard Stated, they are working on trying to get the fires in the old world working again.

Also, because I’m so very happy with myself, here is that new Netherdrake that I worked for 2 weeks to get a hold of
That aside, as a note to druids, if you want to play it safe, I’d do this series in Flight form, with the horde quest flagging you, you will be able to put out the fire without ever actually touching the ground [vs. a 3sec mount time for everyone else]. If you’re on a PvP server you should know very well already that if you have an excuse to use flight form to avoid combat, than you should.

I’m going to take a shot at Solo’ing Ahune on Normal [my theory is that this shouldn’t be difficult, but you never really know]. I should have the results of that tomorrow.

As a side note, when you are doing the catch 10 torch quest, I highly suggest finding some place quiet, I tried doing it in Darnassus only to discover there were way to many people and torches in the air. I found that Exodar works well, no one likes the place, and it’s got a pretty stable floor color so you can track the shadow.

Flame Warden Event

The Flame Warden event started last night, which is rather enjoyable, because it is easy money to walk around the continent for new characters, or those who didn’t do it last year. The Achievements aren’t all that bad either, so adding it to your collection shouldn’t be to tough as long as you can get the set of clothes or had the set of clothes at some point. That being said, the really tough part of this whole thing is the silly daily the involves chucking 10 torches / hitting 25 braziers. The 10 torches one I found could be solved if I went to travel form, and set my camera something like what is pictured to the left there. That having been said, that’s really the only tough part of this meta achievement, much like the Elders, this one just involves a lot of walking to get all the spots on the map.

Although I did find it kind of hard to believe that they would let me do the Ribbon Poll dance in tree form, something just didn’t seem quite right about that when they wouldn’t let me do the same dance in cat form. but all things aside, I suppose that isn’t to much of a big deal, and it is quite funny to think of tree form voluntarily lighting itself on fire for amusement. The great thing about this festival is you’re going to be in all the old zones, so take the time to set your old quest tracker on if you’re going for Loremaster.

All and all its just another achievement towards getting that violet proto Drake [I messed up and won’t be getting mine till what looks like next “Love is in the Air”], and should be a fun time for all, gather a group of friends and make your way around the old continent. A fair warning to you folks leveling on PvP servers, all the 80’s especially those who usually are busy just raiding northrend are back in town and will be all over the place.

Take That Feral Druids

These are some of the new patch notes that are coming with 3.2, we already knew about the changes to our forms with the whole Bedazzled cat, but I figured that while they were at it, they are going to take a nerf bat to feral druids to make them pay for doing DPS on fights where the player is simply good and following their rotation. And even though we were technically 8th or so in the actual DPS meters according to most Boss tracking meters [thanks to movement, etc] to many of your fellow DPS was complaining that on fights like XT-002 where we can stand still and get almost our entire rotation out [assuming no light or gravity bombs] and put out close to 6-7k DPS if they are really pushing it. Because of this Blizzard has made it know that almost every single cat ability is being scaled back in damage

Here are the full patch notes:

Getting Reputaion with the Netherwing

Ever since they were introduced into the Burning Crusade, it was pretty much the one thing that I wanted out of a flying mount, and now even with the Proto Drakes in the WoTLK expansion pack, this drake still has more appeal to me in terms of just looking nifty and being something cool to fly around on. That said, given that lynxchan is a relativly new character, which I created back in October just before the 3.0 patch came out, she never really had a chance to get in on the race for the Netherwing when it was still all the rage in Burning Crusade, and my hunter at the time [who was level 70] was so uninteresting to play that I don’t think I’d even looked at him since July, I was just to busy goofing around with the Warhammer Online Beta or various alts to try and find a new class to play. I had a druid around level 35 on Gilneas, but I had always wanted to see what it was like to roll around on a PvP server since folks seemed to talk about the difficulty of it all. I guess given that I showed up during 3.0 rather than say the early stages of the game when everyone and their mother wasn’t on a different continent or planet it would have been more competitive. Anyway not to drift off into another topic, the reason Lynxchan didn’t have Netherwing rep, or really any outlands rep is because by the time she hit 70, WoTLK had just come out [by a 2-3 week time frame I think, because I was in Winterspring when they were getting all the server first].