They said it couldn’t be done, but I did it. I got my druid to level 80 on New Year’s Eve. Pretty appropriate, eh? I dinged while doing the Sons of Hodir questline in Storm Peaks, specifically when turning in the quest that opened up Nifflehelm as a new town with dailies and such.
I see rep grinding in my future.
Anyhow, at that point it was time for me to log, but the next night I went ahead with the respec to Resto. I pulled out all my old healing gear, along with one or two quest rewards I had picked up, and a couple of crafted pieces. It put me around 1250 healing or so in Tree form. It’s funny how at one time that was a REALLY good number, and now it was iffy for most heroics.
Anyhow, I wanted to hit the ground running, and put out a call in guild chat for a heroic run, preferably an "easy" one, like UK or Nexus. A couple of people wanted to do Heroic VH, and I said what the heck. I feel fairly confident in my skill, and figured it to make up for any real gear deficiencies.
So there I was, my first heroic Wrath instance, Violet Hold. The first boss we got? The stinking Voidwalker.
Ouch babe, very ouch.
He is one tough cookie. As the fight wears on, it just gets tougher and tougher. Though I have the use of Wild Growth for group healing, it can’t keep up with the kind of damage that guy puts out once he has a few of his adds spawned. We managed to kill him on the first try, but I died, the only rezzer. We reset and tried again, and the same thing happened. On the third try, I basically ignored everyone else about 3/4s of the way through the fight to concentrate on keeping myself alive.
That worked. Only the tank and myself survived, but we had time to rez up and continue.
The second boss was the Consortium dude you have to kite around the room. Our tank had experience with that, so we plowed through him on the first try. The last boss was also fairly easy, and we got it done.
All in all, I’m glad I had a tough job for my first heroic, it knocked the old rust off the leaves a bit.
This was also my first time really playing with some of the Druid’s new tools. Wild Growth is helpful, but not overpowered or anything like that. I found I was using a similar healing rotation from before 3.02. The only real difference is I was keeping Regrowth up more often due to the nifty glyph. I also found that my mana regen isn’t what it used to be, but I can keep up fairly easily with an occasional Innervate.
There is one spell, though, that is essentially useless in my early estimation. Nourish. I threw it in a few rotations to see what it could do. it’s basically a fast, low return heal. I get better numbers from Regrowth, and it has the added benefit of a lot of crits, the glyphed bonus, and the HOT portion. Right now I don’t see a real use for Nourish. If I need an emergency, fast heal, I’m using Swiftmend or NS+HT. Nourish just doesn’t do enough healing to be effective, IMO.
Still, healing with a druid is just as fun, and I can see myself enjoying many more heroic runs and doing well on the healing meters in raid situations as well.
Since then I’ve also healed Heroic Nexus, which was a fairly smooth run minus a wipe on one of the four pulls in the flower area. I also got a nice neckpiece off of Anomalus. I also did a run of Heroic Azjol Nerub last night. I had heard that this one was VERY tough, but I joined up with a very powerful PUG that was desperate for a healer. The four DPSers (the tank included) averaged 2200, 2100, 1900 and 1700 DPS. We blew a frigging hole in that place. From what those guys told me, having a shammy along made it easy. The poison cleansing totem is the bee’s knees on the first two bosses.
So there you have it. I have my first 11 badges, I’ve now crafted my first two epic LW pieces, the Earthgiving Boots and Earthgiving Legguards, and I’m sitting at around 1450 healing, and rising fast. I should be in the 1600 range fairly quickly, as I have my eye on a bunch of easy upgrades. Overall, I’m having a great time in game, and I’m happy to be back where I belong, max level and preparing to raid. Thanks for reading!
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Glade to see that you made it back into the healing ring without too much trouble. I’m pretty much split between feral and resto. I’ve built a great tanking set and heroic healing set and am dying for duel spec to get to the game. I’ve easily spent over 1k gold on respec post expansion.
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Welcome back to end-game. Glad you revived your tree.
If memory serves, that void boss summons some nice little adds, and party members who receive a debuff need to kill those adds. Quite a nice change for trees, since we’ll of course have to drop tree form so we can moonfire those buggers down. There is an achievement for not killing those adds, but it’s tricky to heal through in the early days.
Incidentally, what did you think of the Sons of Hodir questline, and the dwarf stuff? I thought it was stunning, and really well put together. I’m very impressed by the way that the stories from various zones lead in to each other, such as the curse of flesh theme in Tundra being a build-up to later zones such as Storm Peaks.