I'm Official!

So, my good buddy eric over at WoW-Pro.com just pointed out that my leatherworking guide is on the official WoW website! While it's not my best guide, it's pretty cool to see it up there. I'll have to update it more often now!

Tree Changes in 3.3

I'm going to take a moment to talk about some upcoming changes for tree healing. So for you readers who don't play trees, just bear with me for a bit.

Blizzard is really keeping trees guessing about the next patch. There are several very big changes in store for us.


Gift of the Earthmother Nerfed

First, Gift of the Earthmother will be changing. The current PTR build reads thusly: "Increases your total spell haste by 10%." This is a huge nerf from the effective 30% haste that Gift of the Earthmother is currently worth for instant cast spells. Now, this is the PTR and things are subject to change. A recent update to the PTR shows Blizzard is toying with the possibility of an additional 10% GCD reduction for only Lifebloom. This would still be a pretty bad nerf considering the heaviest used spell in PvE these days is Rejuvenation, but it would be a bit better and may encourage more Lifebloom use. All in all, this change seems to indicate that we will need to stack more haste after 3.3.


Rejuvenation Nerf Reversed

In a recent post post, Ghostcrawler indicated that Rejuvenation will be returning to it's 15 second duration. The spell scheduled to be nerfed, but Blizzard felt like hitting druids with two hard nerfs back to back was too much, so they are reversing this decision in favor of the Gift of the Earthmother nerf. What does this mean for druids? Well, it means that the new glyph may be a more viable option. Which brings me to...


New Tree Glyph: Rapid Rejuvenation

Patch 3.3 will introduce a new tree glyph: [Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation]. This glyph will cause our haste to make our Rejuvenation tick faster. This means more HPS, but it also means we will have to refresh our Rejuvenation more often. I think the choice of whether to pick this up or not depends largely on the individual druid. I mainly heal 10-mans, and I'm usually raid healing, which means blanketing the entire raid with Rejuvenation. Usually it's fairly easy to keep HoTs up on everyone, especially if I don't have to worry about the tanks. With the return to an 18 second duration, I am definitely going to pick up this glyph and try it out.



Tell me trees - what are your thoughts on these changes? Will you be picking up the new glyph?

A Return to Blogging

Hello blog readers!

I have been away from my blog for a while now. This has been due to starting my graduate program. Now that things have settled down and I have classwork under control, I am returning to my blog.

I'll kick off my return by announcing an update that should be done this weekend to my Tree Healing Guide. I'll be completely changing the gearing section - instead of a big, unwieldly, and often out of date list, we'll have several links to useful tools such as Rawr, MaxDPS, and WoWhead. I will explain how to use these tools to choose the best gear for your tree, based on your current gear and your personal healing style. This is *much* more useful than a static list, because a static list does not reflect the various differences in healing style and the current stats on your gear.

Additionally, this weekend I will be getting together (online) with Jame from to set up a new release of his leveling addon. This will fix the issue of the addon reading as "out of date" and generally clean up the addon work in progress page over on WoW-Pro.

I'm hoping to start work on a guide for the next major holiday (the WoW equivalent of Thanksgiving) soon.

I'm going to try to post at least a "food for thought" post every few days over here. Hope you all enjoy!