Something that makes my raiding life smooth and peachy is being able to keep two resto specs. I do not care for dailies (I think I’ve said this before) and so far the officers of IC have never asked me to go boomkin. I know that this is a sore point for many fellow trees, especially those in progress-oriented guilds. I am not gloating, just putting things in perspective – you can wait until I get to the point of this post, THEN you will really want to throw large painful objects at me.
Anyhow, having two specs dedicated to the same healing tree also means I am free to experiment with wacky builds to my heart’s content. A few days ago I was staring unhappily at my talents – my intent usually is to have a “safe” build focusing on mana regen for farm bosses, and a maxed output build for bosses where I have to go crazy with my heals; none of my specs seemed to do the job they were designed for, also I had Nature’s Cure only in my output build, which didn’t make a whole lot of sense.
I tinkered a bit with talents before the start of the raid and happily settled on this for one of my specs (the other one was very similar, only with less output and 3/3 Moonglow):
The experienced eye will probably spot the obvious, glaring mistake at a glance…. but I didn’t. Yes, I totally forgot to take 2/2 Malfurion’s Gift. Yeah, I’m THAT bad. I prefer the term “light-headed”, but I can understand if you were thinking something along the line of “s#@t for brains”. Of course I made the same mistake with the other spec.
So, blissfully proud of my ingenuity, I made my way to Dragon Soul where we managed to down Ultraxion (we had cleared up to 4/8 the raid night before). My personal tactics for that boss are as follows, briefly told: pre-pot with Volcanic Potion, pop Tree of Life and Nature’s Grace at the start for massive Wrath spam while we don’t have to click any large button in the middle of the screen. We run with three healers so I feel like I have to contribute to le pew-pew, and it actually makes a difference; the other two healers can easily deal with the low damage for the first 30 seconds of the fight. Then AOE heal the rest of the fight and save the next Tree of Life and a lone Tranquility for the end of the fight where we have to deal with heavy raid-wide damage.
How is my Ultraxion course of action relevant? Well, popping Tranquility only once in the fight means I didn’t notice the eight-minutes cooldown, and while in tree form I was mostly saving my GCDs for Rejuvenation and Wild Growth rather than Lifebloom. My feeble mind probably noticed how few OOC procs I seemed to get (actually none obviously) but failed to connect the hots, wait I mean dots.
Even without the free Regrowths, I didn’t have mana issues due to how easily you can control damage – even if it’s heavy towards the end – and thanks to the amazing Efflorescence.
After Ultraxion we had a few wipes on Blackhorn but I was too busy jumping around, dealing with seemingly random damage, to notice anything. Reality finally smacked me on the head the next raid night in the form of a depleted mana bar and zero OOC procs, at which point I had no choice but notice the “zero” under the familiar flower-like icon. I managed to make it to the end of the Blackhorn encounter anyway and then moved on to unsuccessfully fight tentacles on Deathwing’s back.
Is there something to be learned here? Unlikely. If anything, it’s a reminder of how much mana is saved by spamming Lifebloom and free Regrowths under a timely Tree of Life. Playful self-deprecating aside, I thought I might as well make a bit of fun out of a blatant fail – and show how you can make a blog post out of pretty much anything!
The Lazy Tree 