The gangs getting back together

Well after a quiet few weeks it appears people are coming back out of the woodwork for the ramp up for Cataclysm. At the moment our Cataclysm raiding roster includes 15 players for our 10 man team including the return of some old friends from our old guild. The most exiting thing is the amount of people we have who are prepared to do healer and tank roles so we should have a bit of varied rotation going on for raids rather than just the DPS being subbed our or raids being binned because one of our healers cant make a raid.

On the highlight front recently we finally managed to get all the raiders their 10 man ICC drakes including our returning friend Tess from http://www.reflectionsfromthepond.com/ who pitched in with her Shammy to show us how the healing was done :).

Also we ran one of our casual members through Lich King 10 man to get the title and see what all the fuss was about. This looked like it was going to fail as one of our raider had to drop for an emergency. So we decided to 9 man it and at the end of it despite a tank dieing (get in there battle rez and damn your new cooldown!) we added another member to the Kingslayer club.

THE GUILD WITH THEIR DRAKES




Despite my future Boomkin plans I healed both runs due to gearing issues for the people who are planning to change roles in Cataclysm (obviously as one of the two raiding druids in the guild I have a set of about everything from ICC so don't have this issue and it would only have gone to waste otherwise).

Overall I found druid healing hasn't changed much at the moment from pre the patch. The hots are shorter so you tend to use direct healing spells more and Nourish is a bit pointless at the moment (I suspect it will be more useful during Cata). Other than that and the fact tranquility is a lot more useful now it was the same old same old for me and I fell back into healing with little issue. I think this is probably because doing 10 mans with a Shammy and Disco priest as my healing buddies I tended to use every spell in arsenal as my role varied a lot during ICC fights (especially if we lost a healer part way through the fight).
I know I will probably annoy a few other tree bloggers over this but new tree of life cooldown is AWESOME and really powerful. For example on the phase changes on Professor Putricide Heroic when damage is flying about all over the place being able to hit loads of people with wild growth and bomb heal on the move with regrowth really helped. Also with the cooldown at 3 mins I was able to use it for both phase changes. I can see this being really useful for spike damage phases in fight in cataclysm.

Overall though I think this is probably the end of ICC serious raiding now and going forward it will be more fun runs to gear alts/ try out new roles. Bring on Cataclysm!


Zetter

Boomkin!

Well what a week of changes 4.0 hit and after about 2 hours of downloads, extra patches,add ons not working and my video driver deciding they were too old to display the new water I finally got on line.

The guild decided that rather than raiding on Wednesday (which seemed a bit pointless with half the guild not being able to get on till 10pm) we would hold a guild meeting to discuss who is doing what in Cataclysm. A few people as I mentioned previously have definitely decided to switch roles already and it was a good time to see if we had all the spots filled for a raid team.

Well after a bit of discussion we got most people sorted out for the roles they wanted to do.

Which left me and my resto shammy mate as people who could go any way. I was happy to fill any role but one thing I didn't want to do was be a tank/ healer again as I found that trying to keep up with both roles in terms of addons and gear was too much hard work. So after we had filled the tanks spots and the healer spots I find myself in the unlikely role of Boomer Main spec with a healing offspec.

This should be an interesting challenge as I have never played DPS in my whole WOW playing experience. I have always been a healer or a tank so I am looking forward to the challenge of chasing big numbers for a change rather than playing whack a mole with grid (disclaimer I am still healing offspec so we can cover real life issues in our raid, I am not abandoning the trees completely).

After setting myself up with a few addons to help me out such as power auras and some dot timers I realise that I still have a lot to learn about Moonkin DPS so if anyone can give me some pointers it would be much appreciated.

Zetter